Immediately after watching John Maclean’s feature film debut, Slow West, I had a nagging feeling that his film style reminded me of another director. I couldn’t nail down his exact style, which is bright but gruesome, gritty but aesthetically pleasing, serious but absolutely hilarious. It didn’t hit me until after some serious thought who the best director to compare him to is. I hesitate to say it, given the high profile comparison, but Maclean has an approach that feels very similar to Wes Anderson. They both take characters that could be easy to simply laugh at, but whose heartfelt conviction is too winning to deny. They both pay close attention to the details of art direction. Heck, there is even a random moment of French-speaking, poetic love-pondering among strangers—very Anderson-esque. Both Anderson and Maclean have a level of self-awareness that adds an intriguing edge and humor. In the case of Slow West, this self-awareness lifts the film up beyond what, on the surface, could have been a run of the mill western with off-beat characters. Instead, what Maclean presents is a campfire tale just bizarre enough to believe and beautiful enough to entrance.

Young, Scottish, and totally out of his element, Jay Cavendish (Kodi Smit-McPhee) is making his way across turn of the century wild Colorado, heading west in pursuit of his love, Rose Ross (Caren Pistorius). A wonder that he’s survived as long as he has, Jay happens upon Silas Selleck (Michael Fassbender) as Silas holds up a Native-killing ex-soldier in the woods. Silas convinces Jay he’ll never make it to his true love alone and offers to take him for a fee. Jay, shaken by this recent encounter, sees his logic and agrees. They take off together, Jay trying to get to know his new trail partner, Silas making it clear he’s a loner.

Their first stop, at a tiny supply depot, turns unexpectedly violent when a poor immigrant family attempts to hold the general store up to steal money. Things escalate, in this brilliantly directed scene, to a bloody end. But this is life in the Wild West, death is all too common. Jay leaves the situation shaken, but stronger. Silas’s obvious lack of conscience, however, troubles Jay. Jay attempts to go out on his own, running into a kindly German writing a book on the diminishing Native American culture and population. “Theft,” he claims. Jay’s faith in the goodness of people seems momentarily renewed. Until he wakes up alone on the ground, all of his things stolen. Not the only example of humorous irony in Slow West. It’s used in abundance throughout, always with a subtle cleverness that makes for unexpected laughs at unassuming moments.

Unbeknownst to Jay, Rose and her father John (Game of Thrones’ Rory McCann aka The Hound) have a price on their heads, and Silas is actually a bounty hunter. Jay is leading Silas right to her. He isn’t the only outlaw interested in the high reward, however. As the paths of these lawless men cross, more about Silas’s past comes out, and his evolving personal integrity. To Silas, Jay’s undying love, (though it may be misplaced), and virtue are signs of the possibility of decent humanity in the West.

As the various bounty hunters descend upon Rose and her father—one a priestly-looking silent type with a sniper-looking rifle, the other Silas’s old mentor, the fur-coated Payne (Ben Mendelsohn)—it becomes an all out shoot out between the competing parties, as Jay rushes to defend his love.

The film is maybe less fairy tale and more cautionary tale, but the storytelling presented in the film is excellent. Not to mention peppered with Tarantino-quality fighting and deaths. But where Tarantino makes us laugh as reaction to his choreographed gore, Maclean’s humor is a bit higher brow. And the entire thing is infused with an honest and hefty measure of heart. It’s a difficult balance of emotions, and masterfully executed.

Fassbender, while never disappointing when presenting as cold and curt, turns out to have some decent comedic timing. Smit-McPhee takes the cake. His baby-face certainly makes his naive boy-in-love believable, but he adds a wise-beyond-his-years soulfulness that takes Jay beyond pathetic and upward to sweet and charming. The one most likely to be buzzed about after the film releases is newcomer Caren Pistorius as Rose, who holds very little screen-time but owns it when she has it.

Everyone’s on their A-game, including Jed Kurzel and his score (whose abilities to enhance ho-hum genre music we’ve most recently enjoyed in The Babadook). Slow West is the perfect example of a first time filmmaker who knows what he wants and how to invoke talent, making for a visionary and excellently finessed film. With a literal body count at the end, Maclean ties all his loose ends in the satisfying way of most parables. But, like he does throughout his film, what makes it ultimately so entertaining is how much the film goes against expectations, and for a Western—a genre filled with expectation—that’s no small feat.

A version of this review first appeared as part of our Tribeca 2015 coverage. 

The styles of post-apocalyptic sci-fi and dustbowl Western collide in Jake Paltrow’s Young Ones, a tragic, imaginative story of a family struggling to survive in a dry world where water is as hard to find as virtue. Michael Shannon stars as Earnest Holm, a survivor and a farmer doing his best to raise his children Jerome (Kodi Smit-McPhee) and Mary (Elle Fanning) the right way, though a handsome scoundrel named Flem (Nicholas Hoult) threatens to take everything Earnest has left.

In our chat with Jake we discuss the myriad inspirations he took for the film, bringing robot dogs to life, how the film isn’t technically post-apocalyptic, the great Michael Shannon, and much more.

How long has the idea for this film been in your head? It’s pretty unique.
Jake: Oh gosh, a long time. It’s been, like, five years from beginning to now. Initially, it really started with the father-son love story and wanting to explore that. There’s a lot of my dad in the Earnest character. He died young, and I hadn’t written anything about him. I wanted to see what that would feel like. It felt sort of sweet and nice, but also dark and tragic. It started there. I reread the S.E. Hinton books–The Outsiders, Rumble Fish–and I really wanted to do a story about kids in an environment like this, sort of imagining what a science fiction book written like her would be like. I approached it like an adaptation of an S.E. Hinton science fiction story. Those don’t exist, but I was imagining that. I wanted to keep those literary devices in the movie so that it wouldn’t feel realistic, in a funny way. I feel like I was trying to find the fine line between making it naturalistic but not realistic.

There’s a fun mixture of sci-fi post-apocalypse and Western in the film that works very well.
Jake: To me, the film isn’t post-apocalyptic at all. It’s an environmental disaster, a man-made thing. It’s an extrapolation of something we’re dealing with right now in California. When you bring the politics of how we got here into it, it’s not that implausible that we could end up in a situation like that. It’s not like the entire world is in drought, it’s just this area. In the urban cities in this movie, people are falling in love with their operating systems and have perfectly functioning lives. But the people who don’t have a lot of money and are suffering the worst of these environmental calamities are the people we’re focusing on in this movie.

I love independent sci-fi movies because it forces filmmakers to be disciplined about their special effects. I love the way you implemented yours.
Jake: Thank you. We really had to prepare to ensure we could get this finished with a very low budget. At the same time, I wanted to have ILM-level visual effects, which I think we achieved.

Talk about that robot. It’s an incredibly convincing creation.
Jake: It was inspired by the Boston Dynamics robot Big Dog. When I first got the idea for the movie, I saw that video, and it had such an emotional quality without being alive. There was something about it…I couldn’t put my finger on it, but it was very emotional. I got really excited about putting it in the movie, and I spent time with people at Boston Dynamics. We really did try to make it work so that Big Dog was in the movie, but they had a lot going on, so it wasn’t really possible at the time. The way we did it was, it was part puppetry and part CGI. The thing that I really wanted to achieve most was the effect where the actors could really put their hands on it and it wouldn’t all feel like it was just an animated foreground effect. We were able to do that.

It was bugging me. I kept trying to figure out whether what I was seeing was practical or CG, and it was pretty much impossible.
Jake: Thank you.

Michael Shannon and Kodi Smit-McPhee are great together.
Jake: My favorite scene is when they’re taking apart the defunct water well and they start play fighting, which is sort of very rough. That’s something that comes from my dad, and I really liked that. It’s a personal thing, and they did it so perfectly. Kodi shows how scrappy that character is, and Mike is so good at playing this compassionate tough guy. That’s probably my favorite moment between them.

I was impressed with Nicholas Hoult because he’s such a likable guy when you see him, but he plays a great villain in your film.
Jake: The character is so complex, and I think that’s a great testament to Nick. I think he made Flem infinitely more complex than he was on the page. Flem was written as a more traditional bad guy, and as we tailored it to him, he brought a complexity to it that made it much better.

You said that this film is a very personal one, a lot of it inspired by your late father. Is that a comfortable thing to do?
Jake: There’s a difference between personal and autobiographical. There’s nothing in the movie that’s autobiographical at all. But there are moments and emotions that I feel close to. When you’re making a movie, there is an element that should be personal and should be confessional. I’ve always gravitated toward those kinds of films as a fan. I just do that intuitively as a filmmaker I guess.

Young Ones is for fans of…what? Who would you recommend it to?
Jake: I like lots of different things. I wouldn’t limit it to film fans. A big part of what I built this movie from is my love of anime and manga comics. Neon Genesis Evangelion was one that always meant a lot to me. A lot of inspiration for Jerome and Ears, the girl across the border is His and Her Circumstances, which is a great anime that I really like. There are a lot of people out there that like sci-fi movies, but also find themselves surprised by these character-based things. I think our film falls into this place where you can have the experience of a genre picture, but at its core, it deals with some larger, interpersonal family issues, and not in a pandering or sentimental way at all.

Speaking of not pandering, you leave a lot to the imagination and make us work a bit as an audience.
Jake: I feel like there are certain things we rely on in certain kinds of movies that move away from authenticity. For me, as an audience member, when I see those things, it loses me on the things I do love about it. An example in this movie would be that the end of the movie isn’t Jerome and Ears getting together. That romantic experience of going across the border and meeting the girl that his father mentioned…that’s enough. It always makes me think of Citizen Kane. At the beginning, he says, “I saw a woman through the window of a subway 50 years ago, and not a month in my life goes by that I don’t think about her.” Those moments in our lives are so monumental that it doesn’t need to culminate in marriage or sex. It can just be a meeting or flirtation that stays with you for the rest of your life. For me, that has an emotional relevance that means something to me. In most movies, the reward for this boy going through all this hardship would be for him to get the girl. That’s stuff that I don’t really gravitate toward.

There’s a great visual arc to the film. At first, we’re in a dry, sun-drenched desert, but later in the movie we see an urban environment that feels like a new world.
Jake: Yes, that urban environment is to show that there’s this commercial prosperity in the state next door, that they’re not suffering the way the Holm family is. We talked about the stages of hydration within the environment. Obviously everybody is really suffering at the beginning of the film and sort of dehydrated, and that adds to this heightened emotional state. The idea is, the first stage of the water pumping is this artificial stage where one of these aqueducts has been run toward the farm, so there’s water to irrigate a small portion of the land. There’s water to bathe and water to drink, so we start to see a vibrancy in the skin and in the land they live on. But when the rain starts falling, we can start brining reed clothes into it. We follow an organic way to bring a lushness into the film.

I look forward to your next feature, but I hope we don’t have to wait so long in between!
Jake: Me too. This one took much too long. I definitely won’t be letting that happen again. I’m working on my next project now, and it’s in this same vein, but in a more urban environment. It’s around a similar time frame and has a science fiction element to it. It’s maybe in some ways even more ambitious. I hope to have it finished as soon as possible.

A tragic tale of a farmer, his children, a swindler, and a robot donkey…thing, Jake Paltrow’s Young Ones is a unique film that’ll make you smile with its inventive mixture of sci-fi, post-apocalyptic, and western milieus, though its characters and their melodramatic lives aren’t quite as compelling. You get the sense that Paltrow really opened his creative floodgates and poured all of the things he geeks out about onto the screen, from anime to Bergman to John Ford, a beautiful approach more filmmakers would be smart to adopt, quite frankly. Had there just been a little more discipline in the writing, the film would have been a more noteworthy work, though cult status could very well be in Young Ones‘ future.

The film is set sometime in the near future where the earth has balanced our leaps forward in technology with a crippling drought that’s rendered much of the world a veritable wasteland where starving nomads kill for jugs of water. Though the setting isn’t technically post-apocalyptic (there are thriving, lit-up cities dotting the arid landscape) our story (mostly) operates within the post-apocalyptic rubric. Top-billed star Michael Shannon plays Earnest Holm, who raises his children Jerome (Kodi Smit-McPhee) and Mary (Elle Fanning) on a farm that’s barely fit to keep them alive and fed, let alone turn a profit. Their mouths and wallets are parched, and the’ve just lost the family donkey, which they used to transport bottles of booze Earnest brews and sells to keep the family afloat.

It’s dark days for the Holm family, not just because they’re scraping by, but because they’re a house divided. Earnest has a strong bond with Jerome, who soaks up his dad’s life lessons like a sponge, but Mary is staunchly defiant, her disdain for her father stemming from his sordid past. Years ago, Earnest got drunk and crashed his car, paralyzing Mary and Jerome’s mother (Aimee Mullins), who can now only walk with the assistance of a bionic spine and lives at a rehabilitation center. Though Earnest has a reputation as a good man, all Mary sees is the drunk who tore their family apart. To Earnest’s chagrin, Mary dates a handsome, motorcycle-riding scoundrel named Flem (Nicholas Hoult), who through small deceptions weasels his way into the Holm family and threatens to take everything Earnest has worked so hard to protect.

Had the film been made to stand solely on its narrative legs it would topple over in a quick minute. Though the backstabbing, secrets, and underhanded maneuvering harkens back to old-school Western melodramas, the story feels more rudimentary than classic. What gives Young Ones its real value is its style, which has cinematographer Giles Nuttgens capturing the cruel beauty of the outstretched, dry landscapes. Special effects are used sparingly and tastefully, with the Holms’ replacement for their donkey, a load-carrying robot with four long metal legs, being the most pervading visual flourish. It’s genuinely difficult to discern shot to shot whether the robot is physically there or rendered by computers (when you think it’s CGI, someone will place their hand on it), which is makes it the best kind of visual trick.

The four-legged hunk of metal is also surprisingly one of the film’s key characters. It plays an important role in the film’s most pivotal scene, but there’s more to it than that. Much like the titular donkey in Robert Bresson’s Au Hasard Balthazar, the robot has no inner thoughts to speak of, and is there only as an innocent, silent witness to the evils of human nature. There’s an inherent sympathy that comes with its dog-like appearance and mannerisms, especially as we see its legs buckle as it’s kicked and beaten by its owners. But unlike Balthazar, the robot gets a measure of revenge on its prime abuser (its built-in, always-on camera comes into play), though to say a thoughtless work-bot is capable of vengeance is a bit of a stretch. We may project the revenge storyline ourselves, but it’s no less satisfying.

The performances are generally very good, with Shannon anchoring the film with his stripped-down, nuanced turn as the Holms’ patriarch. He plays the gun-toting former drunk like a dormant volcano that could erupt at any moment, and while he isn’t afraid to take a life for his family (a toughness we see on full display in the film’s grisly opening moments), he also has a tender rapport with the scrappy Jerome. Smit-Mcphee, who’s subtle yet deceptively emotive, has great chemistry with Hoult, who’s a great villain despite being known to play more likable characters very well. Fanning is a fine young actress, but she isn’t done justice with the role of Mary, who feels one-dimensional and slightly objectified.

What’s most enjoyable and impressive about Paltrow’s sophomore effort is how well he blends his homages to other films into a cohesive vision. From on-screen titles dividing the film into three chapters; to the actors posing in front of a curtain and looking straight into the camera for the closing credits; to the brief glimpse of a futuristic city that recalls the kookier side of mainstream sci-fi, we see countless influences, old-fashioned and contemporary, and they’re all a treat for the eyes and ears. If the characters’ journeys were as innovative as the aesthetics, Paltrow would have had a career-defining masterpiece on his hands.

Young Ones trailer

Check out the official poster (courtesy of EW.com) and trailer for Ari Folman‘s upcoming film The Congress, starring Robin Wright. In the film, Wright plays a version of herself, who sells her digital likeness to Hollywood producers in order to help care for her sick son.

Folman’s previous film, Waltz with Bashir, was an intriguing blend of documentary and animation — The Congress looks to blend the lines between reality and art in similarly interesting ways.

The film premiered way back when at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival where we had a chance to see it (read our review), and after a long line of festival showcases, is set to be released by Drafthouse Films and On Demand starting July 24, 2014.

Watch the trailer for The Congress

The Congress movie poster

Let Me In is an American remake of the Swedish original called Let the Right One In. The film restores faith to those who thought an American vampire film done well was impossible. I must confess that I am not a huge fan of vampire films nor have I seen the original Swedish version, which in return makes it all the more impressive that I found it so entertaining.

Let Me In had a lot going against it from the start. First of all, any time you do a remake you already have an unfair disadvantage, a classic damned if you do damned if you don’t scenario. If you do not change enough from the original, people will argue that the film is too similar. If you change too much, people will think you destroyed the original vision. Most of the time you cannot win and the original is almost always better.

The second thing Let Me In had going against it, is that not only is it a remake, it is an American made remake. Modern day American horror cinema is not exactly looked highly upon by horror film buffs. Lastly, the vampire genre has hit mainstream audiences with cheesy teenage romance films like Twilight, making vampire based films hard to take serious.

Even with all of the above setbacks, Let Me In overcomes each one with relative ease. It proves that Hollywood can produce a solid horror film. Although, some might not even call it a horror film but rather a thriller or even a romance film. In reality, it is a combination of all of those.

Let Me In takes place in Los Alamos, New Mexico in the winter of 1983. 12-year-old Owen (Kodi Smit-McPhee) is raised by his divorcee mother, does not have any friends, enjoys playing with his Rubik’s Cube and eating Now ‘n’ Laters. His school life is not much better, he is constantly bullied for not fitting in. So when a girl named Abby (Chloe Moretz) moves in to the apartment next door, it is his first chance at making a friend.

Although, his luck does not seem to be getting any better as she tells him right away, “I can never be your friend.” Owen is quick to notice that Abby is not a normal girl. Even though it is winter and there is snow on the ground, she is shoeless. Also she has never heard of nor played with a Rubik’s Cube. When he asks her how old she is, she replies, “12 –years-old more or less.”

Owen does not know it yet, but Abby is a vampire. Like any vampire she needs blood in order to survive and she relies on her so-called father (Richard Jenkins) to get it for her. Validating what Owen suspects that she is not normal and also alluding that she is a vampire, she tells Owen, “I’m not a girl. I’m nothing.”

There was not a lot of CGI in Let Me In, which is a good thing. Because most of the CGI in the film was over-the-top, which hurt it more than it helped it. However, the area that it excelled most in was the cinematography. It was magnificently done. The chilly tone was captured perfectly as we often saw with frosted breath and pale faces.

Dramatic irony, showing the audience the killer before the character sees him, is a technique many older horror films used to create fear and suspense. Many modern day horror films often opt for “cheap scares” by turning down the score and all of a sudden have something jump into the screen. Thankfully, this film went with the former. I also found it interesting that we never see Owen’s mother’s face, she is almost never shown on the screen even if she is in the scene.

Let Me In deserves to be in the list of Top Horror Films of 2010. You must go into it knowing that it is not necessarily scary as it is eerie. Also, it is not very fast paced so be prepared to give it some patience. Being that it is a remake and still quite delightful to watch makes me all the more anxious to watch the original.