Nightstream 2020.02: Come True and The Doorman

My plan with Nightstream was to try and watch as many of the movies I could close to when they went online, to try and simulate the festival experience in as close to real time as possible, which went out the window right away when I saw that The Doorman being scheduled for something like 11:15pm on Thursday night. At least one of the fests that united for Nightstream was on the West Coast, so it made sense to give them premieres that worked with Pacific time, but I was just not going for that after staying up for the Run premiere and Q&A.

It was an easy slide to Friday, though, as the only thing I'd selected from that date was Come True, something I hadn't snagged a Fantasia screener for but had been looking forward to. It made for a nifty little "hey, I liked their previous films" double feature even though I seems to have lost track of Come True being from the director of Our House and The Doorman being directed by Ryuhei Kitamura at least a couple of times. I'm sure that I noted these facts multiple times and had it figure into my decisions to select the movies, but it didn't stick until late. Weird, but the whole festival season has kind of been like that - without a physical program and schedule to flip through and mark up, more and more information is left in one's head, and maybe not as easily flipped to.

One of the other things that's been kind of strange about this whole digital festival season is watching things online. By and large, the quality has been pretty good, but streaming is almost never as reliable as a disc or an DCP "ingested" into a theater's projection system. Take Come True, for instance, where the deep blacks often had that effect where you could see the jagged borders between one shade of black/dark gray and the next. It's not really distracting until you notice it, and even then it doesn't really hurt the experience; it just serves as a reminder of what the limits on this delivery medium are. But here's the thing: The only scenes that are really dark enough for this to be an issue are the dream sequences, which the characters in the movie record and view using equipment that, if not explicitly analog, is kind of cobbled together and imperfect, which makes me wonder if this is a deliberate effect, playing on the fact that certain members of the audience will recognize this as a modern signal of lo-fi video recording where the actual analog artifacts that the apparently tape-based system would just scan as "old".

It's not really a big deal, but it's something that's kind of interesting to be as a streaming skeptic. I wouldn't be surprised if you could trace filmmakers using imitation of less-technically-advanced filmmaking for a purpose back to someone making flashbacks silent in a circa-1930 talkie, but it's usually been easy to identify where it's a deliberate choice and where it's just hitting technical limits, and I don't really know what it is in this case.

None of this is really a big deal, especially considering all the circumstances that have us doing film festivals in our living rooms, but I think both of these things are great examples of why I can't wait for life and moviegoing to get back to something resembling normal.

Come True

* * * (out of four)
Seen 9 October 2020 in Jay's Living Room (Nightstream, Eventive via Roku)

Come True has the look of an indie horror movie that aims to be more than spooky - the sort that, by dint of the exceptionally specific circumstances of its characters and somewhat vague sources of its scares, must be About Something Real. As it turns out, while there's a fair amount going on here, writer/director/cinematographer Anthony Scott Burns appears to primarily be interested in creeping viewers out, and he's got a pretty darn good handle on that.

It opens with Sarah (Julia Sarah Stone) having a weird dream and waking up, not in her home in a sleeping bag in a local park's playground. Why she's only running in and out of her family's house isn't said, but not getting proper sleep is starting to mess with her. Best friend Zoe (Tedra Rogers) is happy to let her stay over, but doing that too much causes trouble. Luckily, she finds a two-month sleep study that pays $12/hour, and for now, that looks like just what she needs, especially since the grad student she meets, Anita (Carlee Ryski), seems pretty nice and there are several subjects who have done it a few times, saying that it's not odd when the woman she shares the room with doesn't come back after a day or two, since sleeping in strange places is weird to a lot of people. When another patient has an episode, she realizes that the guy who followed her and Zoe earlier (Landon Liboiron) is one of the people doing the study, and she's having some very weird dreams. Plus, she's got no idea what this team is measuring.

If Come True were the sort of film I initially thought it was going to be, Burns would spend a fair amount of time digging into what's up with Sarah - that she's sleeping outside despite seemingly having a place to go suggests a rift that would be worth digging into, but it's approached obliquely at best, mostly serving to highlight how stubborn she can be, arguably well past the point where it makes any sense. For the most part, Sarah's circumstances are used to push her inevitably back to the sleep study, rather than make the movie about her, to the point where she spends much of the last act literally sleepwalking through the action.

It's a bit of a waste, because Julia Sarah Stone could carry a movie focused entirely on Sarah; for all that the audience is not given a lot of details about Sarah's life, she and Burns excel at convincing the audience that there is a consistent story behind all this and that it's slowly destroying her, with Stone excellent during the periods when she doesn't have anyone to work against. She's good the rest of the time, getting across how Sarah is often both smart and foolish. The way Burns eventually pairs her with Landon Liboiron's Jeremy is not always great story-wise, but it's fun to watch her teenage cockiness play off his junior mad scientist persona, where he's got a full dose of hubris but is still afraid of getting caught. It's nifty chemistry without coming off as cute for long enough to hobble Come True as a horror movie.

And when all is said and done, Burns and company do a great job of building up the creepiness from a good start to an exceptionally tense finale. Though set in the present, it often calls back to the sci-fi horror of the 1970s and 1980s, with fuzzy analog tech and bulky monitoring suits that scoff at modern, sleek design. There are eerie tracking shots through the caverns of Sarah's dreams that feel uncanny but not weightless the way virtual cameras often can be, with motifs that feel connected but aren't always decipherable and eerie presences that are dead simple in design but effective in use. Burns occasionally jostles the timeline just a bit to get the audience close to Sarah's confused, sleepless headspace, and spends the last act on a clever way to blur the line between the waking and dream worlds without doing the usual trippy thing.

That half of the movie is so impressively and meticulously executed that I look forward to seeing Come True again to see whether or not the pieces I wanted more from snap together better on a second go. Burns's previous film Our House aimed for and hit the same intersection of sci-fi, horror, and drama square, so it wouldn't be surprising even as he approaches it less directly.

Also at eFilmCritic

The Doorman

* ¾ (out of four)
Seen 9 October 2020 in Jay's Living Room (Nightstream, Eventive via Roku)

The Doorman was never going to be an all-time great movie within its genre - its ambitions just aren't that high - but it probably should have been a good one. The idea is familiar but solid, most of the cast has been good in something or other, and the director is not some anonymous worker bee. At worst, it should be an average bit of not-quite-theatrical action maybe brought down by some piece not being up to par, but instead, it's unimpressive all around, no single part being as good as it should.

It starts with soldier Ali Gorski (Ruby Rose) doing escort duty for the American ambassador in Bucharest, the sort of mission that leaves one with a great deal of regrets or PTSD. A year later, she's back home in New York City, discharged and at loose ends until her uncle Pat (Philip Whitchurch) hooks her up with a job as a doorman at the Carrington, a Manhattan residential building undergoing renovation. And it should be easy to start, since most all the tenants will be out of town over the Easter weekend for planned construction work. Well, almost everyone - one thing Uncle Pat didn't mention was that Ali's late sister's husband Jon (Rupert Evans) and his kids (Julian Feder & Kila Lord Cassidy) live there and are one of the two remaining. The others are an elderly couple whom superintendent Borz (Aksel Hennie) and recently-released criminal Victor Dubois (Jean Reno) are targeting.

The setup is Die Hard without the numbers completely filed off, but that's not exactly a bad thing; even as it aims to steal from the best, the story has some other stuff going on, although with four writers credited it's not surprising that somewhere along the way they couldn't really make the other things they're playing with stick. There's a script somewhere in there where all the secret passages, forgotten crimes, and people who have left old lives behind connect and resonate, but it feels like sheerly practical things like how to keep the action from spilling outside or how few characters they can get away with having without it seeming excessively unlikely than any of that. There's also a plot thread about Ali and Jon apparently having been a couple before he married her sister that is just completely useless, like screenwriters can't imagine writing not having a romantic subplot but can't be bothered to make it interesting.

Maybe something would come of it if anybody in the cast seemed to see this as a stepping-stone to bigger things rather than a job to fill time, but there's nobody in the cast who's really fun to watch. Ruby Rose has often been a solid part of an ensemble when she and they are able to challenge each other to raise their games, but she doesn't have that here and winds up fairly bland when not fighting. Rupert Evans is a big ol' nothing as her brother-in-law, and while Aksel Hennie kind of has a good detached-mercenary thing going, it doesn't exactly play off anything because nobody is heated enough to make his calm seem reassuringly professional until it's dangerous. The closest anyone gets to being fun to watch is Jean Reno, who has done dozens of these movies and probably knows what makes them work better than anyone else on the set, so even though he's not really trying to steal scenes (and in fact seems perfectly comfortable spending most of his time on screen in an action movie sitting in a chair directing underlings with nods), doing the minimum amount that works is more than the rest of the cast manages.

Rose, Hennie, and a generally capable group of goons on hand to slow Ali down (Louis Mandylor, David Dakurai, Hideaki Ito) do a fine enough job of running and shooting at each other, and generally don't look bad when they get into punching range, but for the amount of action there is, it's not very exciting. Lots of rounds get shot off, but it's almost always the sort of suppressing fire that keeps something interesting from happening rather than forces it to. The secret passages and hidden areas occasionally made for cool visuals when they're revealed, but are seldom exciting beyond that. Things only start to really cook in the final showdown, when a bit of unconventional camerawork and an impressively gross kill are a reminder that for a while, roughly from Versus to The Midnight Meat Train, director Ryuhei Kitamura was one of genre cinema's most distinct and exciting voices, even if the results were all over the place.

The Doorman could use the Kitamura who went for broke and wiped out half the time; it might at least make for a memorable disaster. Instead, he's just one more person among the many here who aren't living up to their full potential. Maybe it's one of those movies where everything from the script to the shoot to the editing is on tight deadlines and the filmmakers never had time to get something great once they had something usable, or maybe everybody was just collecting a paycheck in Romania between more interesting jobs. Either way, it makes for a B-movie that is neither good nor interesting enough to grab a viewer's attention in a sea of straight-to-video action.

Also at eFilmCritic

Nightstream 2020.01: Run

I'm not quite going to say that the scariest thing about this genre film festival was entering the data for it into the eFilmCritic database and pausing over whether to include "2020" in the title. Like, are we still going to be in a situation where we do this again next October, or maybe just looking to do a smaller one as things are getting back to normal in only a few early fests have had to be cancelled, or might this just be an annual thing where a bunch of festivals bring genre movies to the people who maybe don't live near one?

It's at least been a successful enough event that it could be the latter - the back-end went off without a hitch from what I've read and experienced, and running the whole thing through Eventive meant that my Roku handled it without issue, aside from needing to use the laptop for the Q&A things. Much smoother than NYAFF, at least, among the ones I've "attended", and it was scheduled pretty nicely - a few things (like Run) were only available at set times, and a few things (like the shorts packages) were online at the start, but the rollout of various films throughout the weekend created a bit of a feeling that we're watching it together and making schedules, especially for those who want to sync to the Q&As live, and while it's not perfectly flexible, there's a little something to trying to make this more than just a block of movies available for a limited time.

Speaking of Q&As, the one for Run was fun; the filmmakers talked about how doing these sort of small-scale thrillers was a good way to break into features, and how part of the challenge they were enjoying was finding new things to do within that niche every time, with the one they are working on now a heist movie. One thing that didn't particularly come up that I found was interesting is that star Kiera Allen uses a wheelchair to get around (based on what I've read online), and it's cool that they're not doing a victory lap on representation even though they're clearly making more of an effort than a lot of movies that don't even have the excuse of wanting to do flashbacks do. She's a fun young actor I hope to see more of, especially as she talked about how part of the audition video she sent it was showing how pumped she was for the stunt scene, and how it wound up being half her in a studio and half a stuntwoman on location. It was her first big production, so she was excited by doing stuff like that, or learning how the director would say to look at some counterintuitive point because just looking at her co-star wouldn't necessarily seem right on film. She also was really excited to work with Sarah Paulson, who I've liked since Jack & Jill and has seemed to attain "That Guy" status in recent years - in a lot, sometimes as the lead, but even then not really a star whose name casts a shadow on the production.

Anyway! It was fun, and I'm kind of sad that this wound up going to Hulu instead of theaters, especially since I figure it's the sort of thing theaters could use right now: Short, enough name recognition to get people's interest rather than just looking like opportunistic material, good enough to get good word of mouth and maybe keep playing for a few weeks. Maybe it will get some play - there is a lot of "what the heck, why not play the streaming stuff" at Landmark Kendall Square, after all - but it seems kind of funny that Searching did pretty darn okay in theaters when it was far more built for home screens than this!

Run (2020)

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 8 October 2020 in Jay's Living Room (Nightstream, Eventive via Roku)

A couple years ago, director Aneesh Chaganty and co-writer Sev Ohanian made what is probably the best of the recent group of movies presented entirely as what appears on various characters's screens in Searching, and for their follow-up, they don't necessarily entirely go the opposite way, but one of the more suspenseful scenes in Run is built around its heroine trying to do some pre-internet-style search. It's a nifty bit in a film that's got a few of them, packed into a tight little package.

Diane Sherman's baby was born premature with arrhythmia, asthma, diabetes, and lower-body paralysis, with the implication it was because she was a mess 18 years ago. Now, though, Diane (Sarah Paulson) has really gotten herself together, remarkably self-sufficient in her small-town Washington State home, occasionally subbing at the high school, and telling her home-schooling support group that she's excited for her smart, super-competent daughter Chloe (Kiera Allen) to go off to college, so they can both really get started on a real life. That acceptance letter from the university seems awfully slow in coming, though, and Chloe briefly spots that her new medication has her mother's name on the bottle, rather than hers.

One way to approach this thriller would be to play coy, choosing one's shots and moments to highlight how normal things seem, and the filmmakers do some clever sleight-of-hand in that regard; because Chloe is in a wheelchair, Chaganty spends a fair amount of the opening act getting the audience up to speed on things that non-disabled people might be familiar with. While noting that set of accomodations, some may be inclined to lump other things in with it, feeding the engine that makes everything function: Certain things aren't "normal" but there's not really any way for the people involved to notice that when it has always been that way.

The filmmakers do that, but they also realize that they can only string it along for so long and that a bunch of reversals which will later get reversed themselves will just make Chloe look foolish when taken altogether even if they seem individually sensible. So they start to tip their hand fairly early, counting on the audience's instincts to carry some weight (and maybe suggest a familiar alternate explanation) even as they build a set of increasingly gnarly situations for Chloe. They might not be showstoppers in other movies, but in this one, they're extremely effective because of how precisely they are deployed: Chloe's attempts to get information that might be otherwise much easier to come by highlight just how strictly parents can sometimes control a kid's life, on the one hand, and on the other, there's a terrific sequence where she's got to MacGyver her way through a house that is far less handicapped-accessible than it was. It feels like a big action scene even if it doesn't particularly suffer from the film losing its big-screen release because it's 2020.

They're all great showcases for Kiera Allen, who is good enough in her feature debut that other filmmakers will hopefully be rewriting characters not originally conceived as disabled to accommodate casting her. She's quickly able to establish Chloe as everything Diane brags about her being at the top but also dive into how she can be abrasive in her desperation and righteously angry. Something that both she and Sarah Paulson tap into that doesn't always come across is that most people aren't really practiced at lying or other forms of deception, and even the big ones tend to rely on people not questioning them. Diane has been lying to herself as well Chloe, and Paulson seldom plays it as clever or convincing as opposed to increasingly desperate.

This lets Chaganty and company go hard with the homestretch, which has a few nifty individual bits but isn't quite up to what came before, one of those cases where switching locations highlights a character's ability to think on her feet at the expense of her being surrounded by things with meaning to her and the audience. There aren't a lot of other missteps here, though, and I'm very excited to see what this group has up their sleeve for their next movie.

Also at eFilmCritic

Nightstream 2020.00: Pelican Blood

Well, technically, Day -04 of Nightstream, but let's not get too cute about this. The point is, one of the Nightstream movies was also a part of the Coolidge/Goethe-Institut series of German films, so I was able to get a head start on the festival and also find myself curious about how well it plays to each audience; they tend to draw from different groups of cinema fans. Obviously they intersect (see: me), but even taking that into account, this feels like a different movie if you approach it from one direction rather than the other, and one I definitely found less satisfying because of the way my preferences align, but which a more horror-friendly audience might really dig.

Anyway, it's always nice to have seen a film or three in a festival before the thing starts; these virtual substitutes don't have a lot of conflicts built in, but any flexibility helps at all. This is probably one I would have tried to include in the ten selections that my BUFF badge nets me, and since I'm not going to overload my weekend by paying for more (unless something catches my interest while the fest is going), I'm very happy to have a little extra space.

Pelikanblut (Pelican Blood)

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 3 October 2020 in Jay's Living Room (Goethe-Instiut German Film/Coolidge Corner Theatre Virtual Screening Room, internet)

If you live in the Boston area (and maybe others), Pelican Blood is available for streaming via two separate routes: The Nightstream streaming film festival, a cooperative effort between five genre-oriented fests canceled by the coronavirus pandemic, and the Coolidge Corner Theatre's partnership with Goethe-Institut to present noteworthy German-language films, which is generally material perceived as classier than that. I'm curious as to which group finds it more satisfying; it is by turns exceptionally earnest and deeply weird, and does a better job of moving between the two than being both at once.

Wiebke Landau (Nina Hoss) is a gifted equestrian, helping to train mounted police while raising foster daughter Nikolina (Adelia-Constance Giovanni Ocleppo). Things are going well - she's helping a policewoman bond with a reluctant animal; something seems to be passing between her and officer Benedikt (Murathan Muslu), who is getting close to silver-fox territory; and she's been approved to adopt another girl from a Bulgarian orphanage, Germany being reluctant to place girls with working single mothers. And while 5-year-old Raya (Katerina Lipovska) is adorable, she immediately starts not just testing the limits of Weibke's authority, but showing signs that the trauma of her early life has left an even greater mark upon her.

Nina Hoss and writer/director Katrin Gebbe are able to rapidly sketch out Wiebke as compassionate but not one for a lot of nonsense, the person you would want reassuring both skittish horses and children who might have abandonment issues, and a look around the house that she seems to be capably renovating as she and her girls discover a need fits in with how she's not particularly worried about finding a husband or the other things that society often declares as prerequisites to being a mother or business owner. As Raya reveals herself as being more than Wiebke had bargained for, Hoss has to show how Wiebke sees this as a threat to everything she is - her capability, her decency, and even her womanhood - without a whole lot of talk, because this is a person who explains things she knows well rather than asks for help, so it's all got to play out across her face.

That makes it in large part Hoss's show, and she's reliably excellent, but Gebbe and the rest of the cast do a very nice job of showing how her focus on Raya is causing the rest of her life to suffer, and what's especially smart is that the implication is not that Wiebke will bring everything around her crashing down but that the rest will cut her loose lest what's consuming her also swallows them. Murathan Muslu is there to play the love interest, but he plays Benedikt as clear-eyed and well-aware of just how much of his own stuff he has to worry about, while young Adelia-Constance Giovanni Ocleppo does a very nice job of showing Nikolina as having good instincts for someone her age without making her seem precocious or wise.

Gebbe takes the audience through some strange and unnerving territory on the way to where it's ultimately going - she makes damn sure that the audience can't dismiss Raya as just an extreme brat or doubt that Wiebke is going way beyond sensible or even unorthodox means of dealing with it - and it's fascinatingly transgressive without ever really treating that as a badge of honor. Even the detours into the more supernatural-adjacent material is interesting, circling back to the folktale that give the film its name and showing how a kid's inability to explain her own mind and an adult's desperation can meet. The last sequence or two seem to find her losing the plot, unfortunately - it's one thing to keep going after the film says, look, here's the lesson you've got to learn, because Wiebke may be just that stubborn, another to completely undercut everything the film has been building to, no matter how impressively staged that sequence might have been.

The thing is, that's the sequence that probably gets the movie booked at the genre festivals and seen at all outside German-speaking and foreign-film audiences, and there's certainly an audience that will appreciate the film coming from that direction. There's probably a clever way to make a film like Pelican Blood where the two halves being in conflict with each other creates interesting ambiguity, but this winds up closer to one diminishing the other.

Also at eFilmCritic