BUFF 2022.05: "Inbetween Days", Neptune Frost, Medusa, and Hatching

Meet the team running things!

Once again, because this is the tightest-scheduled festival you will ever see and (presumably) because of covid concerns, there was no Q&A in the theater for the animation package, but if you've got questions, they put one online, and it's almost an hour long, so I imagine there's lots of good stuff in there.

I'll probably rush through this a bit, just because it's been three months and I'm trying to get this out before another festival swamps it. It should be noted that the feature component of the day was strong as heck; even if the three movies weren't always my exact thing, they were nifty genre movies with specific points of view, the sort that leave you excited to learn a little bit more about the situations that birthed them or which give you a chance to see something familiar from a somewhat different angle. Which is a big reason why I love genre film festivals - they often seem like an even more direct look at how different cultures are thinking of topics than the "classier" fests.

"Fulcrum"

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 27 March 2022 in the Brattle Theatre (BUFF 2022: Inbetween Days, digital)

"Fulcrum" is one of those animated shorts that starts out as a loose sort of narrative only to see that subverted to the joy of playing with shapes fairly quickly, but to its credit, seldom entirely loses the plot - or at least, you can at least generally find the characters filmmaker Timothy David Orme started with somewhere in the rapidly-filling screen. It's not just a case of something being a jumping-off point.

The end result is impressive; Orme duplicates and spirals out in recognizable Fibonacci sequences and other forms of mathematical precision but avoids the feel of cutting and pasting, with transitions that feel like they're exploiting the leverage of the film's title. Nine minutes isn't a huge running time for an animated short, but it's enough time for others following this general pattern to get lost, which doesn't happen here.

"In the Water's Wake"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 27 March 2022 in the Brattle Theatre (BUFF 2022: Inbetween Days, digital)

A short that feels like it could be the beginning of something, although if it were, filmmaker Sarah Kennedy would likely have to draw things out more if she were looking to tell an entire story as opposed to snippets of it. What is here is a nifty little piece, though; good-looking and trippy in its explorations of a beach town that may only exist in the castaway hero's mind.

"Johnny Crow"

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 27 March 2022 in the Brattle Theatre (BUFF 2022: Inbetween Days, digital)

Jesse Gouchey and Xstine Cook appear to have done something a little like this before, in terms of style, but it's a good one - live-action backgrounds in kind of run-down areas, mostly devoid of people, but the street art coming to life in response to the narration. It makes the moments when imagery breaks free even more powerful, and underlines the setting in interesting ways, a culture trying to thrive despite having to exist among that of its invaders.

It bolsters the story about a native man trying to find stability as he's in and out of prison, worrying about what his absence means for his family. There's a frustrating familiarity to it, but the filmmakers seem aware of this, balancing their frustration and anger without succumbing to resignation.

"PORT"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 27 March 2022 in the Brattle Theatre (BUFF 2022: Inbetween Days, digital)

Not a whole lot to say - it's two minutes and mostly has a neat look - but it's enough to say that I'd like to see what else director Andrew Lehman can do.

"Hakkori"

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 27 March 2022 in the Brattle Theatre (BUFF 2022: Inbetween Days, digital)

I had the weirdest feeling while watching "Hakkori", pretty sure I'd seen it as part of a shorts package with either Fantasia or Nightstream last year, but every once in a while having a reaction like "well, I'd have remembered that. The fact that most film buffs I know can apparently identify every movie they've ever seen from a single frame in one of those puzzle games is utterly foreign to me.

I was probably not entirely experiencing this again for the first time, but it's a fun one to do that with, following some cute yokai as they take the offerings from the local humans and frolic, bring it back to the boss, and the like. It's cute, drawn in a traditional cel-based style, or something that resembles it, the creatures inserted into live-action backgrounds that have a hint of the artificial to them because one isn't often looking at them from this close. The characters are wonderfully designed, getting a lot of emotion out of minimal features and expression, moving naturally but not in an overly-rotoscoped manner.

What strikes me most on this viewing where I am maybe a bit less in full "look at that!" mode is the way filmmakers Aya Yamasaki and Jason Brown approach nature and the yokai - one and the same, really - allowing them to be sort of alien and amoral, devouring each other, merging, splitting, executing these processes which are too chaotic to inevitably lead to renewal but tend to do so, letting the audience identify with the main guys they follow and be nervous that the world doesn't necessarily work by the terms humans will try to impose on it. It's a lesson that doesn't exactly feel like the point of the film even if it is a large part of what it's saying.

"Pottero"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 27 March 2022 in the Brattle Theatre (BUFF 2022: Inbetween Days, digital)

This one's a nifty little short that also has creatures who are not quite the personification of something more basic but which aren't entirely something else. Here, Lindsey Martin tells the story of a woman who encounters a monster from her backwoods town said to kill all that encounter it, escapes, tries to make something of herself, but cannot entirely escape the gravity of home, and must confront it.

It's simple, and told with animation that is not exactly pretty as it is in some cases, but Martin's got an eye for using ugliness with purpose, and is able to crank up tension even as he is sometimes able to treat a situation casually or dismissively. It's a reminder that people in simple or rough situations aren't stupid or lacking self-awareness, even though even the people from that sort of place can fall into the traps of believing in monsters and dismissing those who do simultaneously.

"Posted No Hunting"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 27 March 2022 in the Brattle Theatre (BUFF 2022: Inbetween Days, digital)

Stop-motion found-footage horror? Sure, why not? Director Alisa Stern and co-writer Scott Ampleford get right into it here, establishing an immediately creepy vibe with how the night-vision look makes models that should be cute something else even before things start to go seriously wrong and they're called on to contribute some annoyed and panicked voice acting.

A lot of folks doing live-action features would like to be able to do what they manage with three minutes and figures that look like they should be silly more than scary.

"Everybody Goes to the Hospital"

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 27 March 2022 in the Brattle Theatre (BUFF 2022: Inbetween Days, digital)

This one's a nightmare that will likely feel all too familiar - waiting what may be too long to take an ailing child to the hospital, where Little Mata is as confused as she is sick and the parents feel powerless. It probably plays for everyone.

Filmmaker Tiffany Kimmel does things that maybe other directors wouldn't. She never makes this hospital seem overly large and out of proportion to Little Mata; the world seems out of scale to kids anyway and this is not a special property of this time. Indeed, there's a sort of quiet acceptance and even trust in Lucia Hadley Wheeler's narration as the title character, like she's trembling but has been raised to listen and keep out of the adults' way. It can still seem an alien place, though, with exterior shots often depicting it as up in the air, with nothing nearby other than the winding road leading to it, like it exists outside the world Mata knows.

Visually, it's kind of a familiar sort of movie, characters not exactly stiff but having limited joints and papier-mache heads whose expressions are animated sparingly. It's the sort where the animators will often hold most of the image still so that they can zoom into a little hand movement or the like, boosting its import. It's a known technique but it works because one still tends to expect exaggeration with this medium, and that sort of focus becomes doubly effective.

"The Bum Family: Lilly goes to the Dogs"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 27 March 2022 in the Brattle Theatre (BUFF 2022: Inbetween Days, digital)

I must admit, I haven't exactly loved previous "Bum Family" shorts that have popped up in the BUFF comedy and animation packages - they've had the randomness of something a little kid was making up as they went along, but not necessarily the wild creativity, and they've juggled too many characters who are mostly interesting for their odd designs.

This one winds up working fairly well, though, probably in part because it by and large strips the group down to just Lilly and her pet Fluffle and lets them be chaos agents in a place that can probably use a little chaos like a dog show, with Lilly getting down on all fours and taking Fluffle's place while she leads a revolution among the dogs. It's a pair of absurdities that the filmmakers commit to utterly even as it gets more ridiculous by the second and makes one question where the whole thing started. It's madness, but madness that seems to know its target.

"Argus"

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 27 March 2022 in the Brattle Theatre (BUFF 2022: Inbetween Days, digital)

An impressively well-executed bit of dystopia, as one can have a difficult time telling whether something literally reality-warping is going on to the employee who comes in to do a menial, senseless task or whether it's just the sort of distorting job that creates such a feeling that this all could be a flight of fancy or a science-fictional premise that is inherently madness-inducing if real.

It's impressively executed, a nift combination of shabby and futuristic, nicely blurring the line between existential and science-fictional horror.

"O, What Rice! O, What Beans!"

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 27 March 2022 in the Brattle Theatre (BUFF 2022: Inbetween Days, digital)

Not really my thing, I've got to admit, as much as I like rice and beans myself. It's a rough thing to say about a short where the production appears to mostly be a one-man show, but its idiosyncratic style often works against it. The joke is that the main character is obsessive over something kind of bland and unexciting, and that mania being incongruous is where the comedy comes from, but if the whole world is weird and kind of grotesque, it doesn't work nearly as well, and neither does the gross-out humor.

"Pancake Panic!"

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 27 March 2022 in the Brattle Theatre (BUFF 2022: Inbetween Days, digital)

I've got enough notes for "Pancake Panic!" in my festival notebook to make some features blush; it's as tightly-plotted and cleverly-assembled a story as you'll find anywhere, and it's not exactly something with an elaborate look or even ten minutes long. Filmmaker David Filmore leans on deadpan humor so that the brutal slapstick can surprise, and pulls together seemingly random threads in really impressive fashion.

Neptune Frost

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 27 March 2022 in the Brattle Theatre (BUFF 2022, DCP)

Afrofuturism of this variety does not give a shit about whether my white North American self understands it, and that's kind of great. Even though there are a lot of Americans involved with this production, including writer/co-director Saul Williams, it feels like it comes from a different tradition with different assumed lines between reality and fantasy, let alone different genres, and no particular interest to explain things that a non-Rwandan audience might not get.

In a sense, that spark of discovery, whether it be an outsider learning a new culture or that culture seeing itself in a way they seldom had before, is the film's draw. The science fiction and adventure of it is kind of fuzzy and familiar - a government-corporate alliance oppressing the poor to exploit a vital resource and chosen ones rising to inspire a revolt, with "hacking" as a sort of magic. But what a spark, with a charismatic cast who all seem to have something defiant not far from the surface, computer and surveillance centers that opt for feeling like an art installation over a sleek but boring realism, a semi-magical sex change that manages to feel both like a trans person finding her true self and a man shedding his old life and ultimately feels like an act of evolution, and a willingness to dip into poetry and music when emotion charges the characters, but without it feeling like a not-literal representation.

At times, Neptune Frost seems to be trying to evolve new language, frantically trying to marry African culture to the technological world powered by its resources, and if it sometimes seems to be grasping, that's fine, because the discovery is exciting. It's a movie where I'm genuinely excited to dive into the eventual Blu-ray to see what I find on a second and third pass now that my mind is a little more attuned to whatever wavelength Williams and co-director/cinematographer Anisia Uzeyman were on.

Medusa

* * * (out of four)
Seen 27 March 2022 in the Brattle Theatre (BUFF 2022, DCP)

The politics of other countries can get flattened when you only hear of them occasionally, and such it has been for Brazil where I'm concerned (and I suspect for many other Americans) - it's easy to associate the whole country with what its leaders are doing as opposed to getting down into the guts of what people are dealing with. It's different all over, but a lot of the forces are the same, just interacting a bit differently.

So this film presents Michele (Lara Tremouroux) and Mariana (Mariana Oliveira), two best friends in their twenties who have been part of an evangelical church for some time, and often serve as the pretty faces it presents to the world. That cheery facade hides nightly acts of violence against sinners and, worse, those who would leave the church. One of these raids gets them in over their heads, with Mariana winding up scarred, and while she's supposed to be mentoring a new, mousy member of the group, she becomes obsessed with a woman who escaped the cult only to possibly wind up burned worse afterward, taking a job as a nurse at the coma center where she suspects this woman is a patient.

There's a lot going on - satire of the hypocritically pious chasing power and using the sex appeal to pull others in despite a fair amount of talk about virginal purity, a mystery, romance and jockeying for position. Amid all of that, I suspect that most viewers will respond to Mariana's honest, well-earned growth; there's intelligence and empathy to her which actress Mariana Oliveira seems to enjoy teasing out, and something hopeful about how someone can seem to slide out of a group like this as easily as they can slide in. It's all the better because few of these young characters seem cheaply brainwashed or knowingly hypocritical - "evangelical influencer" is a goofy character description but makes sense when you meet her. The neon lighting and pulsing beat of the soundtrack is a terrific set of choices, too; the characters' youth and wiring to be regular young women is never far off and never treated as weird or paradoxical.

It's an energetic romp through the heads of young evangelicals that initially benefits big time from treating them as complicated young adults and thus going in directions that will be unexpected given their usual portrayal. The finale is, admittedly, kind of all over the place, right on the border of doing the worst thing a movie with people shouting about demons despite being otherwise grounded can do. It earns its way there, though, offering more to chew on than just plot contrivances.

Pahanhautoja (Hatching)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 27 March 2022 in the Brattle Theatre (BUFF 2022, DCP)

Director Hanna Bergholm and co-writer Ilja Rautsi seem to have ideas for two fine horror movies with enough overlapping material that it probably made sense to combine the two, and if that's the case, they do so well enough that it would be hard to disentangle them. The two halves don't quite mesh, though - what starts out as a story about a kid who tries to protect a monster from her ingratiating but harsh mother but loses control when it tries too hard to protect her is a great, darkly funny scary story for kids, but where it ends seems to be heading in the other direction.

This works in large part because the young actress at the center, Siiri Solalinna, is great at playing a kid who is terrified of her own emotions, and Hatching is at its absolute best when it plays into that. In those moments, it's creating a constant relatable knot in the belly, not just because everyone who has been Tinja's age recognizes the feeling, but because of how those emotions are well worth being scared of, especially when directed at those Tinja knows meant no harm and don't deserve the horrible things her monster will do to them. It's the sort of thing that can drive a girl mad.

When the movie gets away from that in the last act... Well, there's an argument that it still makes sense, that dark sides are like this, but it still sort of "just" becomes a monster hunt and takes the most generic horror-movie way out, down to the last-minute twist that, whoops, the story has no time to deal with!

That said, there's a lot of other good stuff in here, darkly funny bits executed with tremendous precision, easy mommy-blogger jokes that get sharper as the movie goes on (you can feel the filmmakers honing their knives), and a cruel irony in how both of this family's kids physically resemble one parent but are much more like the other inside, even if those parents are blind to it. Bergholm has her eyes on the goal and a lot of good bits that fit into it, and still makes a cutting, smart, funny monster movie.

BUFF 2022.04: "Teenage Waterpolo", Watcher, Vortex, and Lux Æterna

More guests!

Did I get down who all these fine people were? No. It was a really quick introduction before the "Teenage Waterpolo" comedy shorts program, with the Q&A done virtually beforehand. It's available here, if you're curious.

So this was a pretty darn good afternoon to evening to early morning, and I think we can all get behind midnight movies being about 54 minutes long: The odds are pretty good that the Red Line will still be going, even better that there will be buses, and then there's more plentiful taxis.

Amusingly, with the evening ending on a double dose of Gaspar Noé in Vortex and Lux Æterna, the latter at midnight, the Coolidge was playing another one of the director's films, Enter the Void, as their midnight movie. Not great coordination, guys!

"Tea Time"

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 26 March 2022 in the Brattle Theatre (BUFF 2022: Teenage Waterpolo, digital)

I love how utterly straight Tara Price plays "Tea Time" even though the temptation to be a little more arch must have been fierce. It's a wonderfully goofy set-up to start with - sweet looking little girl (Kennedy Barrie) stops being cutesy playing with her dolls when nobody's looking, taking on the personality of a mafia don and terrifying both her kid brother and her toys. It's straight-on as heck but Price nails it and gets just what she needs from Barrie.

The thing that seems bold for how no-nonsense her choices are is the way these toys are basically just people, not big fancy rubber costumes or particularly goofy makeup, and there's no winking at the audience about it. Ballerina, Bunny, and Teddy just present their terror so directly that the comedy is dark rather than meta. It's kind of absurd and horrifying. It'd be easy to underline the joke too much, but instead it just works in earnest.

"Truck Dad"

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 26 March 2022 in the Brattle Theatre (BUFF 2022: Teenage Waterpolo, digital)

A lot of these comedy shorts aren't quite so focused, instead feeling more like riffing, which is kind of where "Truck Dad" lands - filmmakers Tamir Rawlings & Bradley Wilkinson appear to have come up with the sort of line which amuses in the moment ("My Dad was a truck - he just drove away!" said in a not-so-bright-sounding drawl) and sort of tried to top each other getting to that bit while spinning a yarn they'd later animate. That's probably not how it happened, but it's the feel of it, constantly trying to top itself but kind of going off the rails.

It's pretty funny at times, but the sort of funny where I start thinking it might be funnier at four minutes than five, even though that really doesn't seem like enough time to wear out its welcome or fall apart.

"They Used to Call Me Crazy"

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 26 March 2022 in the Brattle Theatre (BUFF 2022: Teenage Waterpolo, digital)

I kind of love shorts like this, with relatively limited animation as someone tells a story, especially when you can absolutely sense that it's an old family story so folks are getting ahead of themselves and laughing as they get to the good parts. In this case, it's a funny-horrible story about kids who've got no business driving swiping unattended cars while their owners are in church and joyriding. The visuals are fine, more than good enough, but it works in large part because the joke as been perfectly refined while still feeling spontaneous.

"Bliss"

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 26 March 2022 in the Brattle Theatre (BUFF 2022: Teenage Waterpolo, digital)

I'm not sure that "Bliss" is the first time I've seen someone try to drop a human into a sock-puppet world, but it feels surprisingly fresh, like filmmaker Sarah Gold has seen a whole mess of of comedy shorts with sock puppets and twisted it from "we can do this kind of simply, and even make that the joke" and instead decided to just commit like heck to the bit - how does this all work?

It ultimately works in large part due to Jared Gilman, who plays the human teenager who doesn't realize quite how different he is before it's pointed out to him. He's delightfully guileless, playing Toby like he's a character in a classic Disney movie, handling the physical comedy of a guy who never properly learned how to use his arms like it's second nature rather than something he's just figuring out. He's earnest and appealing and is able to play the guy pretty straight while also giving him a character beyond not fitting into the world.

It eventually gets to the point where it starts sort of spoofing conspiracy thrillers, and even with the built-in absurdity of it, it's a bit less fun - the movie's been played straight enough that it's kind of got to be taken seriously even when it's exaggerating - but it's still a fun high-concept short that doesn't really come close to wearing out its welcome.

"Meat Friend"

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 26 March 2022 in the Brattle Theatre (BUFF 2022: Teenage Waterpolo, digital)

Writer/director Izzy Lee's not exactly a close friend, but I like her and we're in enough of the same circles that it's a bit awkward to say that, yeah, we don't really have the same sense of humor at all. In this case, I suspect that we're just far enough off pop-culturally that a lot of what she's referencing in "Meat Friend" is kind of foreign to me (I've never seen an episode of Full House or the cottage industry it spawned), so it kind of feels like it's working hard to spoof something that only takes a little effort to lampoon.

I laughed a bit at times, but mostly just chalked this up as Not For Me.

"Johnny the Dime"

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 26 March 2022 in the Brattle Theatre (BUFF 2022: Teenage Waterpolo, digital)

Another short that seems to spring from something that made the filmmakers crack up - in this case, David Gazzo's skeezy title character who probably has very few issues with peeping at someone else's sister but is absolutely going to make it a thing when it's his. It's the sort of character that makes for a decent skit, especially played off of a good straight man. He's mostly on his own here, though, winding himself up amid cuts to him stumbling around ineffectually trying to defend his sister's honor.

It's fine, mostly. It feels like the start of something, an initial riff on the character that could be refined and put into a situation that could do more with it.

"The Blood of the Dinosaurs"

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 26 March 2022 in the Brattle Theatre (BUFF 2022: Teenage Waterpolo, digital)

Director Joe Badon and co-writer Jason Kruppa riff on some kind of obvious targets in "The Blood of the Dinosaurs" - public access TV, patronizing kids' programming, corporate-produced propaganda, that sort of stuff - and like a lot of these shorts, it's kind of amiably homemade but not exactly making new observations or coming from surprising angles. It does have the kind of busy look and attention to which angles Badon and cinematographer Daniel Waghorne are choosing that hints at more careful construction than just "well, it's supposed to look cheap, so let's kind of half-ass it ourselves".

Which helps a fair amount when reality starts breaking down, as it will; the jump-cuts and unnerving choices feel like they're driving to something rather than random. There's just enough something-isn't-right to the rest of the movie to keep that turn into chaos feel sharp rather than unmerited or desperate to finish.

"Take Him Down"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 26 March 2022 in the Brattle Theatre (BUFF 2022: Teenage Waterpolo, digital)

Joe Raasch built this 2-minute short in Unreal Engine and it's kind of crazy just how much animation can be done in close-to-real-time with sufficient prep these days, isn't it? And how the result kind of could be a video game or a movie.

At any rate - an amusingly goofy enough riff on that sort of sci-fi action finale.

"Shitty Shitty Bang Bang"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 26 March 2022 in the Brattle Theatre (BUFF 2022: Teenage Waterpolo, digital)

You see where this is going pretty much right away, but the directors (Neil Cicierega plus the search-unfriendly Kevin James and Ryan Murphy) know what their one joke is and zero right in on it. The short is kind of abrasively in-your-face while going about it, maybe going a little hard on the idea that this awful situation is funnier if the folks stuck in it are exactly the folks you'd enjoy watching get screwed over. These aren't exactly guys it's fun to spend five minutes with, after all.

I do kind of dig how the visual effects are kind of basic as heck, but not exactly campily so. The whole "magical flying car that runs out of gas" deal is silly, but it's a situation that works better as "I can't believe we're in this ridiculous and inescapable situation" and not "look how dumb and unbelievable this all is". There's shades of absurdity, and this one has about the right one.

"A Puff Before Dying"

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 26 March 2022 in the Brattle Theatre (BUFF 2022: Teenage Waterpolo, digital)

Was the "educational" film meant to caution students against drug use or dangerous driving with horror-movie levels of gore something that has been seen in schools lately, or is it just a thing that's been embedded into the culture to the point where people treat it as current even though it doesn't actually show up any more? We didn't have it when I was in high school some thirty-odd years ago, but my suburban Maine town was super-white bread and might have gotten the collective vapors at that. At any rate, that's what Michael Reich & Mike Pinkney are going for with "A Puff Before Dying", except with marionettes.

And, let's be honest, puppets make everything better, especially in a situation like this where the idea is that you're looking to amplify just how absurd and over-the-top those films were (are?). It's obviously exaggerated but it mostly captures the idea that these things were made with decent intentions despite being deeply overwrought before going completely, entertainingly over the top.

"Polybius"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 26 March 2022 in the Brattle Theatre (BUFF 2022: Teenage Waterpolo, digital)

Speaking of things I apparently completely missed despite it being something I should know about, I had no idea that "Polybius" was based on some sort of urban legend about a mysterious video game back when I would have been interested in such things. I honestly thought it was just a simple riff on the oddness of Tetris taking the world by storm amid the Cold War. But apparently there are multiple films, short and feature length, inspired by it right now.

This one's neat and taut, to the extent where I wonder what I'd think of it if it hadn't shown up in the comedy bloc. Writer/director Alex Rouleau kind of leans into how goofy combined paranoia parents of the era had about the Russians, games, and a few other things. In this setting, it plays as kind of absurd; elsewhere, I suspect it plays closer to honest pastiche. That's a neat trick.

"Toshie the Nihilist"

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 26 March 2022 in the Brattle Theatre (BUFF 2022: Teenage Waterpolo, digital)

Filmmaker Matthew Chozick is American, but he's based in Japan (he's been in a couple films directed by Eiji Uchida), and he goes for a strain of Japanese pop culture that's maybe not as well-known on this side of the Pacific as others, a sort of soft-spoken absurdity that I greatly enjoy at festivals like Fantasia and NYAFF but which doesn't seem to have quite the same reach outside the festival circuit of the manga-inspired action and over-the top horror on the one hand or the restrained art-house material on the other. I don't know how popular it actually is inside Japan, but I tend to presume "not very", just because it hasn't seemed to break through because a film's popularity can't be denied.

Anyway - "Toshie the Nihilist" has a lot of that, from its heroine played by Rino Higa who eventually breaks out of a frustrating, minimizing life to the eccentric supporting characters to a finale that on the face of it seems utterly absurd - folks swim to Hawaii! - but doesn't hit that way. Chozick manages the sort of slow build to where that seems believable in 15 minutes, partly with storybook narration and partly with impressively well-executed escalation.

This sort of thing can feel twee and patronizing in some hands, but works out nicely here.

Watcher

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 26 March 2022 in the Brattle Theatre (BUFF 2022, DCP)

I imagine director Chloe Okuno calling up the sound designer early on and saying, look, I know you've got a standard library of effects, but there's a moment or two at the finale where they really have to count. Like, these noises have to be as awesome and overwhelming as they are in real life.

That aside, an awfully well-built thriller that seems to know of what it speaks, taking great care to establish just how uncomfortable this situation is to someone like Julia, even for the men in the audience who haven't lived it, while building up the specific setting so that not many are waiting to catch up. Okuno does nice work pacing the film to stay unnerving even though there aren't many people among whom to spread suspicion in the mystery pieces. Okuno raises her game in nifty ways when she needs to create a little more tension, and "just a little better" in a few places can count for a lot.

It's nice to have Maika Monroe in just about every scene, too; she's been a rock-solid anchor for any sort of genre film ever since It Follows, and she's got a clenched, vigilant take on Julia that implies a history, and you can tell when she's genuinely loosening up and when she's putting on a show. She plays well off Madalina Anea as a neighbor, and there's a nice tension with Karl Glusman as her husband. Everyone involved knows how to play things with underlying tension even when the scene doesn't obviously call for that.

Vortex

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 26 March 2022 in the Brattle Theatre (BUFF 2022, DCP)

It's hard to argue against the craft or thought process that went into making this movie, but on the other hand, Gaspar Noé's choice to extend everything just a little (or a lot) longer, to make sure that a viewer doesn't just understand that something is awful but is awful in a way that never stops, can't help but wear on an audience. It's a movie that really doesn't need tangents but has them anyway. It's well over two hours long and the intent is to exhaust the audience.

On top of that, Dario Argento and Françoise Lebrun, playing an elderly couple whose simple life is being upended by the wife's encroaching dementia and the husband's slightly less obvious diminishment, don't exactly try to ingratiate themselves; they're bourgeois and unremarkable, making this a common tragedy rather than an exceptional, operatic one. It's sedate, quality work that grounds the film despite the fact that it's as formally tricky and elaborate as any of the more flashy things Noé has done in the past.

That's in large part because the film starts and spends a great deal of time in split screen, one camera following Argento's Leo and another Lebrun's Elle, often in long oners that must have taken a great deal of coordination. The idea behind using the split screen is fascinating: This is in many ways more an overlapping experience than a shared one; for all that the popular narrative about folks who have been married any length of time is that they become a team facing difficulties together, it almost certainly can't be that way at the end, and Noé never lets the audience lose track of that.

Vortex never feels less than honest. It's just a lot.

Lvx Æterna (Lux Æterna)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 26-27 March 2022 in the Brattle Theatre (BUFF 2022, DCP)

I suspect that a lot of folks will get to the end of Lux Æterna and have their main reaction be "...and then what happens?", especially if they're not seeing it as a midnight screening at the end of a long day (at a festival or otherwise) and feeling a bit wobbly.

What this movie does is a lot of fun, combining stories of what making old-school Eurosleaze was like versus the chaotic, oppressive nature of a modern film set with everybody looking toward their next project or glued to their phones, not able to just entirely be in this weird fantasyland that they maybe could have been in the 1970s. It's fun, at least until it starts to seem clear Noé has no idea where to go with it. There's a sort of oddity about how the things Noé does to indicate that maybe there's something supernatural and corrupting forcing its way onto the set is also just kind of Noé's style, and you can't exactly be sure what to read into it.

It's a classic case of a movie that stops rather than one that ends, with the good bits maybe hopefully being enough to make up for how completely it's tossed aside. On the other hand, more midnight movies should be 51 minutes long! And for as meta and art-house-y as this is, it's definitely a midnight in that environment.

BUFF 2022.02-03: Honeycomb, The Innocents and Nitram

Check it out - guests (with programmer Nicole McControversey)!

I think writer/director Avalon Fast (center) and co-star/etc.Henry Gillespie-Graham (left) were the only filmmakers for a feature to visit, and almost certainly the only non-local ones, arriving from British Columbia and hanging around the festival for a few days, and why wouldn't you? There's some talent here, but pulling everything together to actually get a movie shot and finished isn't necessarily something you can repeat easily, much less being accepted into festivals, so when that happens, you head over just in case you never get another chance.

Honeycomb was one of just two features on the schedule that really felt "underground", not that this festival has ever been strictly about the homemade stuff that won't ever get distribution; in fact, it was pretty loaded up on international genre movies that already had distributors' logos in front of it. I admit, I bailed on the other one Friday night - Hypochondriac looked like the sort of thing that gets me considering leaving early, and with the Brattle still doing some distancing, I wasn't going to claim a ticket that could go to someone really enthusiastic - but it made me wonder what sort of a wrench the pandemic threw into indie filmmaking. Was it a situation where the need for Covid protocols would hamper indie filmmakers more than studios, but not necessarily hobbyists? It certainly feels like there's that sort of hangover going on.

Honeycomb

Seen 24 March 2022 in the Brattle Theatre (BUFF 2022, DCP)

There are movies you expect to find on YouTube and others where you expect to be charged admission, and by and large they shouldn't both be on the same scale, which it's why some don't get star ratings. This falls squarely into the first category - rough as heck, sometimes interesting and showing potential, but you don't take someone who expects professional polish to this on a date.

It offers up a group of young women between school years finding an abandoned house well off the road and decide to make a commune there, with boyfriends only brought in blindfolded and a set of harsh but hopefully fair rules. Naturally, certain members of the hive attempt to emerge as queen, and stuff with guys inevitably becomes a problem. The cast is actually pretty capable, unpretentious and able to sell their harsher moments. The locations are fun and sell themselves. Both the earnestness and viciousness are matter-of-fact in a way one can believe. The downside is that it often feels like the filmmakers expected a lot more to emerge from the outline through improvisation, and that even with what they did get, there's not necessarily enough footage to stitch it together. Even at 70 minutes, it drags for the amount that actually happens of interest.

It's okay, the sort of thing that probably means more ro young women than me and more to the folks making it than random young women. It's probably not surprising that "appropriate revenge" doesn't work out that well, especially for relatively petty disagreements, and kind of ends just when it's starting to get interesting.

De uskyldige (The Innocents)



* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 24 March 2022 in the Brattle Theatre (BUFF 2022, DCP)

The Innocents isn't quite another attempt to reinvent the X-Men - you kind of need some sort of officials trying to take control of the young people with powers for that - but it's close enough to feel like one and maybe make me grumble a bit about the cynicism of it even as I'm admiring the craft. Superhero stories (or supervillain stories) are about bringing things into sharper relief by increasing the scale at their best, but just reveling in the amped-up violence at their worst, and this one doesn't always have enough to say to make the ugliness worth it.

It's one of those movies that seemingly has a hard time seeing kids learning the lines between right and wrong and what the consequences of their actions may be as much more than little sociopaths at times, and while there's some truth to that, it's also the sort of thing that is stark enough without being heightened, so you're kind of gilding the lily on the darkness here, and by exaggerating, the film loses a bit of what could kind of be interesting - how young Ida (Rakel Lenora Fløttum) is maybe drawn to the way Ben (Sam Ashraf) acts out because she resents having to look after her developmentally challenged older sister Anna (Alva Brynsmo Ramstad), who has a special connection with neighbor Aisha (Mina Yasmin Bremseth Asheim), and how each of Ben, Anna, and Aisha find their almost-trivial powers enhanced by the others. There's potentially layers here that could perhaps use a more delicate touch.

The execution is pretty darn good, though - filmmaker Eskil Vogt can grab a moment and milk it for all the tension he can find, and he knows how to deploy his young cast, especially Fløttum, who looks to be about eight or nine but can present his deep resentment but can also conjure a bit of uncertainty, where Ida starts to grasp the horror of the world needing her to be a moderating influence even though, like looking after her big sister, it's probably too much responsibility for that kid. I do like how the folks playing Ida's and Aisha' parents all seem the appropriate level of overwhelmed without it feeling like a too-convenient plot device.

The result is, almost inevitably, like a certain strain of comic book, the sort that seems to be pushing an envelope more to be seen pushing it than because there's something especially interesting on the fringes. It's well-executed but leaves me a bit colder than was intended.

Nitram

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 25 March 2022 in the Brattle Theatre (BUFF 2022, DCP)

I forget whether Nitram had a "based on a true story" tag on it at the start or not - I feel like it didn't - and not being familiar with the specifics of this incident makes me wonder if the film played with a greater sense of mounting dread for its local Australian audience that would likely immediately recognize it as a fictionalized version of the events leading up to the mass shooting that led to a change in the country's gun laws. Otherwise, it's got a sort of "this can't end well" vibe but not a lot of specific dread.

Which is fine. Interesting, even, as Caleb Landry Jones's "Nitram" (the reverse of Martin, the real-life gunman's nam) falls into a good-if-odd situation as a favorite of faded light Helen (Essie Davis) after being a source of frustration to his parents (Judy Davis & Anthony LaPaglia) for his entire life, and there's this broad sense of desperation, because none of these people really have the tools to make satisfying lives for themselves, and even when they're enabling each other, there's no sense that they're happy or in some sort of symbiotic situation. They're just getting fleeting moments of pleasure that in many cases are destructive of the world around them. The cast does well to make them seem mostly functional but not really capable of the sort of introspection necessary to decide to make their lives better, and off-kilter without it seeming fun. It's a low-key bad situation where one maybe doesn't necessarily see how close many are to falling apart until it starts happening.

I'm not sure whether it's a problem that the film jumps to Nitram buying a bunch of guns and getting into shooting without a lot of explanation. Part of the "problem" with this story, for those of us looking for a narrative, is that Nitram is not all there, and sometimes his brain forms connections that a healthy, intelligent person's don't, and if you're looking for an explanation or a through-line, or a counter to the common conservative line that the problem is poor mental health, well, you're not going to find it. You've just got to see that someone is going to occasionally make this jump and be horrified at the way the Australian society of the time was ready to let them do so with few questions asked. It's frustrating from both a real-life and storytelling perspective, but not just because one wants answers - the filmmakers capture how the randomness is part of what makes it terrible but I can't say I felt riveted by it - the back half of the movie got to "these things that make no sense happened and they're awful" for me but not "these terrible random things happened and you can't look away".

And that's why I'm not nearly as high on the movie as I feel I should be - I saw posts on social media the night it screened that the IFFBoston audience was stunned into silence, but I can't say that's how I felt, as opposed to just waiting for the movie to reach its inevitable destination. Not waiting impatiently, mind; just not having the visceral reaction that writer Shaun Grant and director Justin Kurzel were looking for.

BUFF 2022.01: You Won't Be Alone and The Nest

I've been trying not to jinx this for the past few weeks while also checking to see if the schedule had been announced, because I don't believe in jinxes but also don't see the point of talking about something that may not happen. Well…

Did they make that the opening night film of the festival as a sort of comment about how we've been doing these things in living rooms with maybe one or two others in the household who are into the sort of thing over the last couple years and it really hurts peculiar genre films i particular, or is it just a happy-ish coincidence? I don't know, but with BUFF being one of the first festivals canceled for Covid, it's really good to see it back.

I've mentioned before that even more than most film festivals, you've got to go into this one knowing a good chunk isn't going to be your thing, but it's kind of fun to note that they spent the first night looking at the two poles of modern horror with the classy art-house material of ou Won't Be Alone and the rather less-intellectual The Nest. I don't know that either really made a huge impression on me one way or the other; both flavors have either gone harder and been more precisely crafted (or, perhaps, more amusingly slipshod) but they still more or less do what they set out to do. The most interesting thing is that these two movies are more or less in the same genre but don't have a whole lot more in common than that.

Well, aside from the nasty fates the kitty-cats meet early on in both movies. They've got that in common.

You Won't Be Alone

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 23 March 2022 in the Brattle Theatre (BUFF 2022, DCP)

There's a part of me that wonders if it's a red flag that this movie was not released by A24 - it's the sort of thing they've had a good instinct for, but if they let it go to Focus/Universal, maybe it's lacking something. It's not really scary, but filmmaker Goran Stolevski doesn't entirely grab something more grand and universal.

It's kind of odd that a man made this movie, given the extent to which this film about a pair of shapeshifters often finds itself resolving into a mother/daughter story: It starts with a woman bargaining with a the "wolf-eateress" known as "Old Maid Maria" for the life of her daughter Nevena, said witch returning 16 years later to claim her prize, take the form of her mother, and make Nevena a witch capable of taking other forms herself, with later events focusing on motherhood and Nevena being tormented by Maria, who wanted a child of her own but is a terrible surrogate mother, alternating between sabotaging and abandoning Nevena.

The first thing she does, when Nevena is an infant, is maim her so that she cannot speak, which persists no matter what form she takes. There's an odd thing about this movie in that it doesn't seem to know what to do with her lack of a voice, like it was added as a folk-horror version of the need to keep people from using cell phones. There's this idea of how Nevena's isolated childhood left her with a strange inner voice and point of view even before she became a witch, and she had to learn what it means to be human by observing from outside and experiencing different points of view, and it's a good one, but there's seemingly not a whole lot of thought given to the woman she would become. It's a rich vein of material that winds up feeling kind of generic despite the interesting folklore it's built on. Nevena's female identities tend to run together - they're all the same physical type - and her narration disappears as "Bosilka" and "Biliana" integrate into their villages.

On the other hand, sometimes it's best to just let mythology be mythology, a bunch of jumbled larger forces that those who believe can't fully understand rather than a jigsaw puzzle made of parables that fit perfectly together. The world shown here isn't complex, whether in its fantastic elements or the more mundane ones. If anything, I suppose, it comes down to the idea that the world is often horrific and unfair, and you've got to decide whether you'll embrace it or demand it embrace you.

The Nest '87

* * (out of four)
Seen 23 March 2022 in the Brattle Theatre (BUFF 2022, DCP)

The Nest is surprisingly amiable, as Corman-produced junk goes. It's dumb and fairly unambitious, built out of horror movie spare parts, but the leads are pleasant and it's occasionally kooky rather than floundering. There's no money to spend, of course, but the filmmakers do a fairly decent job of working around that for a while. They keep the cast members who can contribute something front and center (and give credit to Terri Treas and Stephen Davies who know just how weird to make their secondary characters) they find locations that feel more expansive than maybe they are, and the bloody comes often enough to distract from how they really can't mount an actual killer-cockroach attack.

That's part of how the filmmakers bite off more than they can chew at the climax, though; the masses of roaches never seem like active super-roaches once it's time for them to be more than just something rustling the grass. Director Ternce Winkless is unable to make a ticking clock situation work, and the "boss" monsters that the special effects department whips up aren't good enough to splash across the screen because they're neither surprisingly cool or charmingly cheesy, but trying to shoot around them only highlights the problem.

With these decades-old b-movies, it's often worth looking to see what became of the folks involved, and a surprising number are still working. Heck, writer Robert King is doing some pretty darn good TV for CBS/Paramount - who'd've thought the guy who made this had The Good Wife/Fight and Evil in him?