Echoes of 1980s indie film noir run deep throughout “Door Mouse,” a new, gritty mystery thriller starring Vancouver’s Hayley Law as a burlesque performer on a quest for justice.
Law is Mouse, a chain-smoking, part time comic book creator and full-time dancer at a seedy burlesque club run by the tough-as-nails Mama (Famke Janssen).
When some of her friends and fellow dancers go missing, one snatched from her home, another abducted, pushed into a limo never to be seen again, the police are apathetic, unable or unwilling to investigate the disappearance of “girls no one will miss.”
Looking for answers. Mouse recruits her friend Ugly (Keith Powers) to delve into the dark, sordid world of drug dealers, kidnapping and sex trafficking, where vulnerable women are sold to “rich and powerful monsters.”
“These are dangerous questions you’re asking Mouse,” warns a sleazy club owner. “If you don’t want to crash, stay in your lane.”
“Door Mouse” has style to burn. Actor-turned-director Avan Jogia wrings every dime out of his low budget, utilizing eye-catching camera angles, animation and an abrasive “wake ‘em up” soundtrack and music cues to create a film with comic book noir aesthetics, that owes a debt to 80s noirs like “Blood Simple” and cult hits like “Repo Man.”
The high style suits the story’s underworld backdrop, creating an uneasy atmosphere for Jogia’s morality play.
Populated by uneasy and often corrupt characters, “Door Mouse” boils down to a simple story of good vs. evil, of predators vs. prey. Jogia, who also wrote the script, belabors the point with dialogue that is often as melodramatic as the film is stylish. Lines like “You can only crawl on the ground so long before the dirt starts sticking to you,” sound ripped from an over-written soap opera script. Imagine the relish that Susan Lucci could have applied to those words. In this context, however, those dialogue flourishes feel unnecessarily theatrical.
“Door Mouse’s” stylized look at power dynamics, filtered through a genre lens, is compelling to a point, but bludgeons its central point, that its better to die with the sheep than eat sheep with the wolves, to the point of redundancy.
As you might imagine from a movie that begins with the voiceover, “In the history of mankind has there ever been a more obvious truth than the statement, ‘We’re all going to die?” and yet in our bones, how many of us can conceptualize that,” “All My Puny Sorrows” does not shy away from the delicate matter of death.
Struggling writer Yoli (Alison Pill) and concert pianist Elf (Sarah Gadon)—short for Elfrieda—are sisters who fled a strict, rural Mennonite upbringing to forge lives in the arts. A deep bond exists between the, even though their lives took very different paths.
Yoli is in the midst of a divorce after sixteen years of marriage. As daughter Nora (Amybeth McNulty) is lashes out, Yoli wonders aloud if she’s handling things correctly. “Ending sixteen years of monogamy with Dan has triggered some kind of weird animal reaction,” she says. “To be honest, the last few months have not been my proudest.”
Elf, though internationally successful and happily married, has lost her lust for life. When she attempts suicide for the second time, Yoli comes to her side, hoping to help her sister avoid the same fate as their father Jake (Donal Logue) who killed himself when they were children, but her pleas fall on deaf ears.
“Will you take me to Switzerland?” asks Elf.
“Yeah, we’ll get Swatches,” says Yoli.
But Elf wants to go to an assisted suicide clinic, “where dying is legal and you don’t have to die alone.”
Writer-director Michael McGowan, adapting the novel-of-the-same-name by Miriam Toews, tells a story all about grief and death that examines the purpose of life. McGowan sensitively shows how life’s decisions have echoes felt by everyone in the inner circle and beyond.
These themes are enhanced by the performances of Pill, Gadon and Mare Winningham as their beleaguered mother. The literary script often feels as though the characters are speaking in carefully constructed prose, but in the mouths of these performers love, frustration and acceptance of the situation is palpable. Pill and Gadon click as sisters, bringing to the screen a lifetime of love and petty squabbles.
“All My Puny Sorrows” is an emotional movie that embraces the totality of the situation, the exasperation, sorrow and even occasional humor.
Gamers will recognize Raccoon City as the name of the once prosperous home base of pharmaceutical giant Umbrella Corp. That we’re talking about it on this page can only mean one thing, a new “Resident Evil” movie. The seventh film in the series, “Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City,” now playing in theatres, reboots the videogame-inspired franchise, taking the story back to the beginning.
Raccoon City once thrived. A company town, from the 1960s to the late 90s the Midwestern city grew and prospered as pharmaceutical giant Umbrella set up shop there, and invested heavily in infrastructure and the townsfolk, who made up the bulk of their employees.
Everything changed in 1998 when a genetically-altered organism named Queen Leech attacked the facility, kicking off a series of events that left the city a desolate wasteland with a zombie problem.
It’s into this world director Johannes Roberts drops college student Claire Redfield (Kaya Scodelario) and rookie cop Leon S. Kennedy (Avan Jogia) on one terrifying night in Raccoon City. Claire has come to the dying city to locate her brother Chris (Robbie Amell). The T-virus, Umbrella’s top-secret biological weapon isn’t much of a secret anymore, and the infected residents of Raccoon City are now terrifying zombies. Over the course of one night Claire, Chris, and others from the video game series like Leon (Avan Jogia), Jill Valentine (Hannah John-Kamen) and Albert Wesker (Umbrella Academy’s Tom Hopper), fight to survive.
Adapted from the first and second “Resident Evil” games by Capcom, “Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City” returns the series to its video game roots. The previous films emphasized action over horror. This time around Roberts reverts to scary vibe of the videogames, paying homage to both the games and vintage John Carpenter for the atmosphere of dread that builds throughout. Stylistically, as a videogame tribute, that approach works quite well.
As a movie, however, it comes up lacking. Despite some good gooey and gory zombie action and some fun action scenes, it takes too long to get where it is going. While we wait for the going to get good, we’re subjected to dialogue straight out of the Handbook of Horror Clichés and too much exposition.
The opening feels long winded and the ending rushed, but, especially for gamers looking for Easter Eggs, “Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City” has enough moments in between to satisfy fans of the series.
