If you’re a regular visitor to this tiny little corner of the internet, you might have noticed that I’ve been a bit spotty as of late in getting reviews published. (Note, I’m not saying that you care, I’m only saying that you might have noticed.) I don’t want to get too deep into the weeds as to why at this moment. I plan on doing that in the essay that precedes my annual top ten of the year list, which you can expect to see in a month or so.
For now, I’ll leave it at this: the recent events of the world have been devastating to my mental health. In truth, that’s been the case for the last seven years or so, but 2023 has made things acutely worse.
I set Saturday mornings aside as my time to write and (usually) get a complete first draft of a review done. Saturday mornings are for uninterrupted focus. For four hours or so once a week, my phone goes into airplane mode, and I usually leave Rae and Coop sawing logs in the bedroom while I write.
For the last six months, it’s been a struggle to follow my little ritual. More often than not, I wake up on Saturday mornings – like most other mornings – to a profound sense of grief and melancholy. No matter what I do or how I try to prepare, when that sensation is too overwhelming, I can’t make myself sit down to write.
The same is true of my running habit. Getting out the door each morning to get a run in has become an (increasingly) insurmountable task.
My movie consumption hasn’t dropped off in the slightest. I still have an unquenchable desire to watch movies – which is good, because there are sooooo many to see – but when it comes time for me to formalize my thoughts about them into a proper review, I’m simply too mentally under the weather to care about getting it done.
So, I’m publishing my first ever review round-up of recent releases. This is a chance for me to get on the record concerning titles that I’m excited to wrestle with, but in short-form capsule reviews, so I can cover as many as possible. To make a long story short (too late!), here are some brief thoughts on four winter 2023 releases:
Dream Scenario
Dream Scenario, written and directed by Norwegian filmmaker Kristoffer Borgli, is a serendipitous marriage of story and performer. Starring Nicolas Cage – in a career-high performance (and that’s saying something, considering Cage’s many inspired turns in front of the camera) – this quirky dramedy seems like it has to have been written specifically for the actor. But that’s not the case, as Adam Sandler was reportedly involved in early discussions to play the role of milquetoast evolutionary biologist professor Paul Matthews.
It seems unbelievable that Cage wasn’t the first person Borgli approached for the role. That’s because the actor’s real life and the bizarre circumstances surrounding his character in the film are spiritually linked, if nothing else. The mild-mannered dork Matthews goes viral when, inexplicably, people all over the world begin seeing the professor in their dreams.
At first, Paul enjoys the celebrity-adjacent notoriety. (One of the best jokes in the movie comes when the head of an advertising agency – played by Michael Cera in a sendup of the most obnoxious marketing executive you could possibly imagine – tells Paul that his firm specializes in “non-traditional celebrities.”) Things turn sour when the Paul of people’s dreams begins to violently attack and even kill them in what have become nightmares. He is effectively canceled when people, including his own students, become traumatized by his mere presence.
The unwanted celebrity is akin to the struggles Cage has wrestled with after being transformed by internet admirers – or haters, depending on your point of view – into a ubiquitous series of memes and videos featuring his most outrageous onscreen meltdowns.
As Cage said in a recent publicity interview for Dream Scenario, he didn’t get into acting to become a meme. Reading the article made me a little sad that I myself have enjoyed internet ephemera like a supercut video of his most unhinged moments in movies. Stripped of all context, these moments become fodder for laughter and mocking. Still, I can’t help but smile when I think of Nic Cage and bees.
As much as I enjoyed Dream Scenario – its wacky premise and dark humor bring Being John Malkovich instantly to mind – I couldn’t help notice a reactionary thread running throughout Borgli’s script. I feel for Paul, a man who is forced to sit out his young daughter’s first role in a school play because almost no one in the audience wants him there, but, at various points throughout the film, he calls trauma a “fad,” and derides “cancel culture” as nonsense.
Those reservations aside, the film features a bonkers premise, some fantastic dream sequences, a meditation on how fame is abuse, and a Nicolas Cage performance that is as idiosyncratic as it is touching.
The Killer
Right from the lighting-quick, sleek opening credits sequence, it’s clear that director David Fincher’s The Killer will be an exercise in stripped-down, brutal filmmaking. The film’s ethos is of a piece with the main character. Referred to in the closing credits simply as “The Killer,” this contract hitman is laser focused on each job, lest he make a mistake that could cost him his life.
British actor Michael Fassbender puts on a distinctly flat, emotionless American accent, and his voiceover narration – which I assume is mostly culled from the French graphic novel source material – offers a glimpse into the mind of a ruthless, pitiless killer. Stripped-down is an apt descriptor not only for Fincher’s film, but for both the character Fassbender portrays as well as the actor himself.
There is a sinewy deadliness to Fassbender’s physique in The Killer. The character is so determined to avoid any extraneous distractions that when he orders food from a local McDonald’s during preparation for a hit – he informs us that, as the biggest fast-food chain in the world, it’s safest to eat at McDonald’s for its guaranteed anonymity – he strips the unnecessary bun from his breakfast sandwich in favor of eating only the protein contained within it.
There is no detail too small to escape his consideration; the only luxury he allows himself is the full discography of The Smiths, which allows for some great needle-drop moments in the film.
When a hit in Paris goes terribly wrong – an unpredictable S&M dominatrix causes the sniper’s bullet to miss its intended target – The Killer must make a hasty retreat before discovering that his employer, played with a no-nonsense bluntness by character actor Charles Parnell, has put out a hit on him in an effort to clean up the mess of the botched murder.
Screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker – working with Fincher for only the second time in 30 years, after penning the script for Fincher’s brutal cat-and-mouse serial killer yarn Se7en – divides The Killer into six neat chapters detailing our hero’s attempt to hunt down the contract killers assigned to his own murder. He wasn’t home when they made their house call, but they severely wounded someone their target cares for very deeply. Payback, as they say, is a bitch.
With a creepy, minimalist score from frequent Fincher collaborators Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, the only sticking point I had with The Killer was a darkly lit hand-to-hand fight sequence which looks like it was aided by (not entirely convincing) CGI trickery. Tilda Swinton turns up for a taut, but quietly unsettling, conversation with The Killer that involves a flight of whiskey. It was a pleasure to see Arliss Howard – who portrayed Hollywood mogul Louis B. Mayer in Mank, Fincher’s 2020 tribute to the writing of Citizen Kane – in a brief cameo appearance as someone The Killer is interested in visiting.
The Killer is David Fincher back in Se7en mode, and he proves he hasn’t lost a step when crafting taut, gruesome thrillers.
Saltburn
I’ve seen Saltburn twice, and, I’ll be honest, I still don’t quite know what to make of it. The new film from actor and director Emerald Fennell – who knocked me out with her 2020 debut feature, Promising Young Woman – has made a perplexing and, ultimately, very angry film in Saltburn. That’s very much on brand considering her debut.
It’s hard to write about Fennell’s new film without divulging too much information. In that regard – and no other – this eat-the-rich tale can most easily be likened to the work of M. Night Shyamalan, who often delights in blindsiding his audience with a twist in the final act. There is a reveal that comes in the last five or ten minutes of Saltburn that makes you see everything that’s come before it in a completely different light.
Set in 2006, the story focuses on Oliver Quick, a fresh-faced new admission to upper crust Oxford University. Oliver doesn’t come from money, and he struggles to adapt to Oxford’s elite student body. When he does make some friends – most notably Felix Catton, whom Oliver confesses to us of being madly in love with during an opening minutes monolog – his new mates, one in particular, won’t let the young man forget that he doesn’t belong.
After divulging that he doesn’t particularly want to return home for the summer break, due to his unstable parents, Oliver accepts an invitation from Felix to spend his summer hiatus at Saltburn, the sprawling and (for ease of describing to an American audience) Downton Abbey-like estate and manor house.
Felix comes from obscene wealth. It’s the kind of wealth that allows its owners to not lift a finger. They don’t need to work; their money makes more money for them.
So, you know, the kind of people I hate.
As Oliver insinuates himself into the lives of Felix, his sister Venetia, their parents, and Farleigh Start, Felix and Venetia’s American cousin, pandemonium ensues. First there’s a midnight tryst between Oliver and Venetia, which involves Oliver performing oral sex on the young woman while she’s menstruating. Later, Oliver strips down naked to fornicate with the fresh earth that’s been used to fill a grave. I can’t be any more specific, lest I spoil one of the most incendiary film sequences of the year.
I got the distinct feeling that Fennell is trying her hardest to be transgressive here, and, while that might take some of the bite out of it (nobody likes a try-hard), she does succeed at her goal. I haven’t even mentioned the bathwater scene, which one Letterboxd user summed up cheekily as doing for the bathtub what Call Me by Your Name did for peaches.
Barry Keoghan, a sinister presence in films like The Killing of a Sacred Deer and The Green Knight, amps this disturbing aura up to eleven as Oliver. This is Keoghan’s fist real bite at a leading role, and he delivers a chilling, mystifying performance as Oliver.
The rest of the cast are equally mesmerizing. Rosamund Pike, whom I first discovered in David Fincher’s Gone Girl, is comically out-of-touch as Felix’s mother, Lady Elspeth. The great Richard E. Grant, last seen taking a swim through the MCU in the Disney+ series Loki, performs a masterful send up of a befuddled English lord. Carey Mulligan also turns up briefly as “Poor Dear” Pamela, Elspeth’s wayward friend, whom, as soon as she’s out of earshot, Elspeth bemoans as being more of a nuisance than she’s worth.
The tragedies that befall this morbidly rich cast of characters should be something in which I take great delight. Still, what sets these tragedies in motion gave me pause. (It’s frustrating that I can’t be more explicit without spoiling the experience for anyone who hasn’t seen it.) Fennell has made a nasty little morality tale in Saltburn, one I’ll likely be turning over in my mind for months to come.
Anatomy of a Fall
Distractingly loud music. A canceled interview. A long walk. A fall.
The MCU takeover of Hollywood has turned almost every outing to the cinema into a battle for the survival of all humanity, if not the entire multiverse. French filmmaker Justine Triet has turned down the temperature on the mechanics of dramatic storytelling without losing a bit of heat when it comes to the stakes of her courtroom drama.
Over the course of 152 minutes, Triet – who cowrote the screenplay with her romantic and professional partner, Arthur Harari – expertly guides us through the intricate layers of a marriage in the aftermath of a terrible accident that, in hindsight, might not have been so accidental.
Anatomy of a Fall begins with Sandra, a successful novelist, being interviewed in her home by an admiring university literature student for a class project. Sandra’s husband, Samuel, is upstairs working, but he soon starts blasting music. It’s so loud, the two women must cut the interview short. The couple’s son, Daniel, who is partially blind due to an accident years ago, goes for a walk with his guide dog, Snoop. When he returns, he finds the body of his father who apparently fell from a third-story window.
I’m a little glad that I’m writing a condensed review for this film, so that I can avoid the intricacies of what the plot reveals over the course of its two-and-a-half hours. Each time we think we have a handle on the people involved, Triet doles out one more detail about them that completely changes the context of their relationship to one another.
For example: there are recriminations about the pilfering of ideas between the two writers. There is the fact of Daniel’s accident, and who might have been responsible for it. Even the loud music shutting down the interview is a result of this couple’s complicated history. German actor Sandra Hüller, who carries almost the whole of the movie on her back, is simply fantastic as Sandra.
The film, which, because of the title, one can’t help but compare to the extraordinary 1959 Otto Preminger courtroom drama Anatomy of a Murder, doesn’t show us the moment at the heart of its story. Triet leaves plenty of room for speculation and doubt about what has occurred: an accident, a suicide, or a murder. Anatomy of a Fall is beautifully shot and offers up enough ambiguity that you continue to puzzle over the particulars long after its final frame.
