The Witch
by Hope Madden, MaddWolf.com
The unerring authenticity of The Witch makes it the most unnerving horror film in years.
Ideas of gender inequality, sexual awakening, slavish devotion to dogma, and isolationism roil beneath the surface of the film, yet the tale itself is deceptively simple. One family, fresh off the boat from England in 1630 and expelled from their puritanical village, sets up house and farm in a clearing near a wood.
There, William (Ralph Ineson) and Katherine (Kate Dickie) will raise their five children: the infant Samuel, young twins Mercy (Ellie Grainger) and Jonas (Lucas Dawson), nearly adolescent Caleb (Harvey Scrimshaw), and the eldest, Tomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy), nearly a woman now.
Each performance is remarkable. The twins are enormously creepy and both parents are flawed in the most necessary and compelling ways. Young Scrimshaw offers layers and tenderness galore, leading to an astonishing scene it’s hard to imagine a child managing.
Still, it’s Taylor-Joy who not only anchors the film but gives it its vulnerable, burgeoning, ripening soul. She is flawless.
As a series of grim catastrophes befalls the family, members turn on members with ever-heightening hysteria. The Witch creates an atmosphere of the most intimate and unpleasant tension, a sense of anxiety that builds relentlessly and traps you along with this helpless, miserable family.
Every opportunity writer/director Roger Eggers has to make an obvious choice he discards, though not a single move feels inauthentic. Rather, every detail – whether lurid or mundane – feels peculiarly at home here. Even the most supernatural elements in the film feel appallingly true because of the reality of this world, much of which is owed to journals and documents of the time, from which Eggers pulled complete sections of dialog.
Though The Witch is Eggers’s first feature as filmmaker, his long career in art direction, production and costume design are evident in this flawlessly imagined and recreated period piece.
Equally important is the work of Eggers’s collaborators Mark Kovan, whose haunting score keeps you unnerved throughout, and cinematographer Jarin Blaschke. From frigid exteriors to candle-lit interiors, the debilitating isolation and oppressive intimacy created by Blaschke’s camera feed an atmosphere ripe for tragedy and for horror.
As frenzy and paranoia feed on ignorance and helplessness, tensions balloon to bursting. You are trapped as they are trapped in this inescapable mess, where man’s overanxious attempt to purge himself absolutely of his capacity for sin only opens him up to the true evil lurking, as it always is, in the woods.
Race
by George Wolf, MaddWolf.com
Make way for the cliche train, here comes another sports biopic….well, not so fast. Race manages to break convention in subtle but important ways, bringing a graceful spotlight to the heroic story of Jesse Owens, perhaps the greatest track and field athlete in history.
Stephan Janes (John Lewis in Selma) delivers a breakout lead performance as Owens, who won four gold medals at the 1936 Olympic games in Berlin. Transcending the games, Owens personified the folly of Nazi delusion as the Fuhrer himself looked on. This convergence of sport and history makes Owens’s story fertile ground for hyperbolic melodrama, but Race works best when it presses least.
Director Stephan Hopkins (Predator 2, The Reaping) seems properly motivated by the inevitable comparisons to similar biopics, specifically 42. He effectively differentiates Race at critical junctures, none better than the moment Owens’s track coach at Ohio State, Larry Snyder (Jason Sudeikis), is lecturing him on the need to ignore the hateful racial catcalls.
Rather than the manufactured wisdom of another locker room sermon barked from teacher to pupil, Hopkins frames the scene as an active choice by Owens himself, and the result is all the more human and satisfying. Though not every exchange works quite as well, screenwriters Joe Shrapnel and Anna Waterhouse keep the “white savior” leanings from overtaking Snyder’s character, and a fine dramatic debut from Sudeikis doesn’t hurt.
Hopkins delivers athletic sequences that are often thrilling (the wonderfully panoramic set piece when Owens enters Berlin stadium may elicit goosebumps), but Race doesn’t shrink from the responsibilities implicit in its title.
The pressure Owens felt to boycott the games, and the racism impervious to gold medals both reach you without undue manipulation. Even more impressive is the nuance the film brings to the cozy relationship between nationalism, hypocrisy and oppression.
Though historians may quibble with the details, an engaging support narrative emerges as Olympic Committee advisor Avery Brundage (Jeremy Irons), Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels (Barnaby Metschurant) and German filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl (Carice van Houten) dance around contrasting personal agendas. All three actors are stellar, fleshing out another reminder of the watershed nature of the period.
The life of Jesse Owens was marked by courage and achievement at a crossroads of world history. Weaving those elements together in an effective dramatic context is a tricky endeavor, but one that Race gets mostly right.
Son of Saul
by Hope Madden, MaddWolf.com
When Son of Saul, Laszlo Nemes’s blistering Holocaust drama, opens, you will think the film is out of focus. Hold tight, because Nemes has made a conscious decision here and this is just the first of many moments that will alter the way you look at a film.
The director’s breathlessly confident feature debut, which the Academy has nominated for best foreign language film, closely follows one Auschwitz inmate over a particularly tumultuous 36 hour period of his confinement. If you think you’ve seen everything there is to see about the Holocaust, well, the director will surprise you there as well.
Saul (a phenomenal Geza Rohrig) is a sonderkommando, or “bearer of secrets.” He is among the prisoners used by the Nazis to grease the machinery of extermination: rifling through clothing for valuables, removing victims from gas chambers, burning bodies, scrubbing floors in preparation for the next batch being hustled to the “showers.”
Nemes and cinematographer Matyas Erdely keep Saul in shallow focus so that the horror around him is all only glimpsed peripherally. We are focused, as Saul is focused, on just one thing – and yet we are, as he is, saturated in the hell of this existence.
When Saul spies the body of a young boy he deems his son, an idea seizes him. He becomes possessed to save the corpse from the knife, find a rabbi to perform a Kaddish (prayer for the dead), and give the child a proper burial.
The counterproductive, myopic insanity of this act and the controlled lunacy of Saul’s determination become almost reasonable in the context of the mechanized dehumanization around him – a horror that is immersive thanks to Nemes singular vision and Tamas Zanyi’s suffocating sound design.
Much remains ambiguous as the relatively simple story unfolds, but that simplicity allows for the director’s unrelenting focus. It mirrors Saul’s necessary focus, and the moans, screams, beatings, death, and misery that surround him and us – because it is not neatly packaged or clearly articulated – may offer the most realistic picture of the incomprehensible events that any filmmaker could hope to achieve.
Son of Saul is a deeply human film about man’s inhumanity to man and Laszlo Nemes is an artistic phenomenon.
Risen
by George Wolf. MaddWolf.com
It’s not quite the Talladega Nights of Jesus in a tuxedo t-shirt singing lead for Lynyrd Skynyrd, but Risen casts the Biblical story of the resurrection as a political thriller.
Director/co-writer Kevin Reynolds (Waterworld) clearly has his eye on more than just the “faith-based” demographic. There’s good business in that audience, to be sure, but Risen is geared toward attracting more mainstream moviegoing tastes as well.
The film establishes a “non-believer” point of view at the outset, shortly after Pilate (Peter Firth) informs his trusted tribute Clavius (Joseph Fiennes in fine form) of the order to crucify “Yeshua” (Cliff Curtis). With a visit from the Emperor looming, Pilate charges Clavius with ensuring that the growing threat of Yeshua’s disciples dies with him.
Of course, the plot thickens once Yeshua’s body vanishes from the tomb. Clavius and his apprentice Lucius (Tom Felton) begin a desperate search for the body, or any body that might convince the masses their Messiah is dead.
It always seems awkward for Biblical characters to be speaking English, but here it fits the “B” movie feel of the narrative, as early political intrigue gives way to an all out manhunt. Regardless of what’s being spoken, Yeshua as portrayed by veteran supporting actor Curtis, a New Zealander with a Middle Eastern look, is a nice piece of casting.
A more familiar faith-based structure emerges in the film’s third act, as the doubting Clavius begins to see things he cannot explain, and the film’s worldview shifts to that of the converted.
That’s not an inherently bad thing, and the film gives the journey a welcome nuance. Though Reynolds overdoes the symbolism at times (Pilate washing his hands, Mary Magdalene bathed in sunbeans), Risen leans more on intelligence than obedience, and is ultimately more believable for it.
