SYNOPSIS: In the unconventional “Cuckoo,” a bonkers new horror film now playing in theatres, “Euphoria’s” Hunter Schafer plays the rebellious 17-year-old Gretchen, a traumatized young woman living with her father Luis (Marton Csokas) and his new family in the German Alps. When her father’s business partner Herr König (“Downton Abbey’s” Dan Stevens) offers her a job on the front desk of his rural mountain resort, she jumps at the chance, despite some red flags. On site, she notices women mysteriously falling ill and when her step-sister becomes sick, Gretchen aims to discover the resort and König’s secrets.
CAST: Hunter Schafer, Jan Bluthardt, Marton Csokas, Jessica Henwick, Dan Stevens. Written and directed by Tilman Singer.
REVIEW: It’s not the end of the year yet, but I’m willing to bet the aptly named “Cuckoo” will be the strangest arthouse horror film of the year. A mix-and-match of body horror, otherworldly influences and slasher violence, it’s an unpredictable ride courtesy of director’s Tilman Singer’s unbridled imagination.
The off-kilter vibe is supported by the performances. Schafer is the guide, the most earthbound of all the characters, but even she seems engulfed by the film’s sensory overload.
Even more extreme is Stevens, who leaves “Downton Abbey” in the rear-view mirror with a performance so over-the-top it’s like a Bond villain on Adderall. His ever-changing pronunciation of Gretchen’s name is so bizarre, and so entertaining, it’s like it has been filtered through Google translate every time out.
After several mind-bending episodes, “Cuckoo” pays off in the third act as most of the story threads knit themselves up, and plot holes are filled. It will still likely polarize audiences looking for easy answers, but its sheer willingness to embrace its incomprehensibility is part of its eccentric charm.
Edgy and tense, “The Royal Hotel” is a slow burn story about sexual violence and intimidation, power dynamics and revenge, wrapped up in a story about two young women on a work/travel visit to Australia.
Julia Garner and Jessica Henwick play Hanna and Liv, American backpackers, who claim to be Canadian when asked—“Everybody loves Canadians,” Hannah says.—on a work and travel program in an Australian city. The free-spirited Liv has burned through her cash, forcing the pair to apply for work at a job agency.
They are placed as bartenders in a hotel pub, but the gig comes with words of caution.
“It’s good money,” they’re told, “the only thing that makes it bothersome is the remoteness of the location. It’s a mining town, so you’ll have to get used to the male attention.”
“Will there be kangaroos?” Liv asks naively.
There are kangaroos, but they’re in the minority. The anything-but-regal Royal Hotel offers up a mostly male clientele, unused to the niceties of polite society. Add to that a drunken, gruff owner (Hugo Weaving) who is more concerned with selling booze than policing the behavior of his customers. “If I banned everyone who does bad stuff,” he says, “I’d be out of business.”
Their first night behind the bar is marked by a sign out front that reads “Fresh Meat.” Inside, the bar is filled with predatory customers who make lewd remarks and repeatedly encourage the stern Hannah to lean in while she serves them and to “smile more.”
People are strange, when you’re a stranger.
The longer they stay, and the more drinks they serve, the worse their customers behave. Hannah wants out, but, despite the menace, the adventurous Liv wants to stay. “You’re strong,” Liv says to Hannah. “No, I’m not,” Hannah says. “I’m weak and I’m scared and I want to go home!”
“The Royal Hotel” isn’t a travelogue or a “Shirley Valentine”-style journey of self-discovery. What begins as a lark, an adventure in Australia, soon turns into a cabin-in-the-woods style horror movie, where the boogeyman is toxic male behavior.
Director Kitty Green expertly ratches up the tension, allowing the sense of unease to simmer for much of the film until reaching full boil. Something is going to happen, but we’re never quite sure what, and by the time Green stages her cathartic climax, it’s a welcome release from the pent up anxiety felt by Hanna and Liv and the audience.
Garner and Henwick are both great, both steely and vulnerable, but the real star here is Green, whose examination of gender politics is provocative and unsettling.
“Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery,” the sequel to the popular Daniel Craig detective movie “Knives Out, now playing in theatres before moving to Netflix in late December, is a satire of old school Agatha Christie with a modern sensibility.
Craig returns as detective Benoit Blanc, “The Last of the Gentlemen Sleuths.” He’s the American Poirot, with a honied Southern accent and a Jessica Fletcher-esque knack for being present when people are murdered.
In the new film he finds himself, post COVID lockdown, at a lavish private estate on a Greek island owned by billionaire Miles Bron (Edward Norton doing Elon Musk). Invited by a mysterious third party, it is just the tonic he needs to shake his post COVID lockdown blues.
“I lose it between cases,” he drawls. “I may be going insane. My brain is a fuelled up sportscar, with nowhere to go. I need a great case.”
Bron has invited “my dear disrupters, my closest inner circle,” like former business partner Andi Brand (Janelle Monáe), scientist Lionel Toussaint (Leslie Odom Jr.), man’s rights YouTube star Duke Cody (Dave Bautista), fashion designer and unapologetic loudmouth Birdie Jay (Kate Hudson) and politician Claire Debella (Kathryn Hahn) among other glamourous types, to play a very special game.
“I’ve invited you all to my island,” says Bron, “because tonight, a murder will be committed. My murder.”
With clues hidden all over the island, Bron encourages his guests to “closely observe each other. If anyone can name the killer, that person wins our game.”
It’s all fun and games until a real dead body shows up and everyone on the island is a suspect in the crime.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” says Blanc. “You expected a mystery. You expected a puzzle. But for at least one person on this island, this is not a game.”
Cue the whodunnit. The characters are all connected, and all have a motive for murder. “This is a case that has confounded me like no other,” Blanc says as he peels back the layers of the mystery.
There is a lot of talk of disrupters in “Glass Onion.” Each of the guests have caused radical change in their industries, a fact pointed out by Bron as the reason they are all friends. It also applies to writer/director Rian Johnson. He pays homage to a well-worn format, the Agatha Christie ensemble cast and elaborate crime reveal, but breathes new life into the tried-and-true format, updating and disrupting the structure.
Johnson uses all the same stylistic—flourishes, flashbacks, red herrings and diversionary tactics—as Christie did, in books and on screen, but adds a spark, juggling the story’s twists, turns and reveals with great aplomb and humour. The result is a swiftly paced thriller that is equal parts silly and suave.
It’s become trendy to skewer the rich and ridiculous in film. Recent movies like “Triangle of Sadness” and “The Menu” lay waste to entitlement and privilege, and “Glass Onion” is no different. Bron and his crew of influencers and desperadoes are presented as self-serving, uncaring and absurd—“What is reality?” shrieks Birdie Jay when the going gets rough—providing a juicy blast of raucous moral ambiguity as an undercurrent to the murder mystery.
As a sequel that improves on the original, “Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery,” is a rarity. It may follow a template formatted by Agatha Christie, but like the titular “Glass Onion” itself, Johnson is transparent in his desire to make the mystery deeper, the characters more extreme and the thrills more thrilling. As Blanc says in the in the film, “This is truly delightful.”
“The Gray Man,” a new shoot ‘em up starring Ryan Gosling, and now streaming on Netflix after a quick trip to theatres, overwhelms the senses with an underwhelming story.
The story begins in 2003 with convicted murderer Court Gentry (Gosling) accepting a job offer from a CIA operative named Donald Fitzroy (Billy Bob Thornton) to live in the “gray zone” in return for a commuted sentence. He will be part of the top-secret Sierra program, trained to be a “ghost,” live in the margins and assassinate people who need killing. He’ll be the kind of guy you send in when you can’t send anyone else in. “Take all the pain that got you here,” says Fitzroy, “turn it around, and make it useful.”
Cut to 18 years later. Gentry, now known simply as Six, because “077 was taken,” he deadpans, is on assignment in Bangkok. On the orders of CIA honcho Denny Carmichael (Regé-Jean Page), he’s there to assassinate an asset and retrieve an encrypted drive. When Six refuses to pull the trigger because there is a child in the way—he’s not all bad!—things quickly spiral out of control.
With the help of CIA agent Dani Miranda (Ana de Armas), Six gets the disc, but, in doing so, becomes a target himself. Turns out the disc contains info proof of unsanctioned bombings and assassinations ordered by Carmichael, in his bid to turn the CIA into his own personal army. Carmichael wants the disc destroyed and to eliminate any traces of the only people skilled enough to expose him, the Sierra program.
But how do you kill the CIA’s most deadly assassin? You hire morally compromised independent contractor Lloyd Hansen (Chris Evans) to “put a Grade A hit” on Six. To lure Six into his web, Lloyd kidnaps the closest thing Six has to family, Fitzroy and his young niece (Julia Butters). “You want to make an omelet,” says Lloyd, “you gotta kill some people.”
“The Gray Man” is a big-budget, globe-trotting adventure that makes up in exotic locations and gunplay what it lacks in intrigue and interesting characters. Filtered through the endlessly restless camera of Anthony and Joe Russo, the movie has all the elements normally associated with high end action movies. Fists fly. By times it is a bullet ballet. Things explode. There are tough guy one liners (“Are you OK?” Miranda asks after one city-block destroying action sequence. “My ego is a little bruised,” Six snorts.), double-dealing and death around every corner.
So why isn’t it more exciting?
The story is fairly simple. It’s the kind of superkiller on-the-run we’ve seen before in everything from “John Wick” and “Nobody” to almost any Jason Statham movie, but it isn’t the simplicity or familiarity that sinks “The Gray Man.” It’s the overkill. And I don’t just mean the unusually high body count. It’s the more-is-more Michael Bay by-way-of-the-“Bourne”-franchise approach that overwhelms. The story is constantly on the move, jumping from country to country, from time frame to time frame, never pausing long enough to allow us to get to know, or care, about the characters.
Six is meant to be an enigma, and while Gosling can convincingly pull off the action and deliver a line, but he’s basically unknowable, a stoic man with a number for a name. His relationship with Fitzroy’s niece gives him some humanity, but he remains a dour presence in the center of the film.
At least Evans, as the “trash ‘stached” sociopath, appears to be having a good time. Nobody else does. That could be because there are so many characters, most of which are underused or underdeveloped. No amount of fancy camerawork could make Carmichael interesting. As the big bad meanie at the heart of all the trouble, he’s a pantomime character with only one gear.
More interesting are Indian superstar Dhanush playing a killer who values honor over cash, in his striking debut in a Hollywood film, and de Armas who does what she can with an underwritten part.
“The Gray Man” is big, loud popcorn summer entertainment that spends much time setting itself up for a sequel, time that would have been better spent creating suspense.
Richard joins CTV NewsChannel and anchor Lois Lee to have a look at new movies coming to VOD, streaming services and theatres including the virtual reality of “The Martrix Resurrection,” the coming of age dramedy “Licorice Pizza” and Denzel Washington in “The Tragedy of Macbeth” and the jukebox musical “Sing 2.”
These days movies are regularly remade, rebooted, reimagined and regurgitated. But none of those terms capture how Warner Bros has brought back one of their most famous and ground breaking franchises.
The new Keanu Reeves movie isn’t simply a return to the Matrix, the simulated reality created by intelligent machines to pacify humans and steal their energy, it’s a resurrection. After eighteen years, Neo has been raised from the dead by Lana Wachowski in “The Matrix: Resurrections,” now playing in theatres.
The last time we saw Neo (Reeves) he made the ultimate sacrifice, giving himself to create peace between machines and mankind. His death would allow people to finally be free of the virtual world of the Matrix.
In “Resurrections” it’s twenty years later. Neo now goes by his real name, Thomas A. Anderson. He is the “greatest videogame designer of his generation,” with an ordinary life, save for the visions that plague him. “I’ve had dreams,” he says, “that weren’t just dreams.” His analyst (Neil Patrick Harris) has him on a steady diet of heavy therapy and blue pills, meant to quell the strange delusions.
Anderson’s regular life is turned upside down when his business partner Smith (Jonathan Groff) announces that their company will be making a sequel to their most popular game, “The Matrix.” As his team works on the new game—“It’s a mindbomb!”—his memories become more intense and soon he has trouble distinguishing fact from fiction.
Or is it all real?
When people from his past, like computer programmer and hacker Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss) and Morpheus (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), an alternate reality version of the heroic Matrix hovercraft captain who first believed Neo was “The One,” appear, Thomas fears he is losing his mind.
Things become clearer—Or do they?—when the new Morpheus offers Thomas/Neo a choice of pills. The blue ones will keep Thomas’ state of mind status quo. The red ones, however, will take him down the rabbit hole, into the heart of the Matrix. “Nothing comforts anxiety like a little nostalgia,” says Morpheus.
Pill popped, the simulated world opens up to reveal a dangerous place in need of a hero. Teaming with a group of rebels, Neo battles a new enemy and secrets are revealed. “The Matrix is the same or worse,” says Neo, “and I’m back where I started. It feels like none of it mattered.”
“The Matrix: Resurrections” may be the most self-aware movie of the year. No instalment of “The Matrix” will ever match the whiz bang excitement of the first film, and “Resurrections” knows it. It comments on itself and consistently winks at its legacy.
“This cannot be a retread, reboot or regurgitation,” says one of the “Matrix” videogame designers.
“Why not?” says another. “Reboots sell.”
Like the movie’s story, the film itself attempts to blur the line between the reality of the story and the very act of watching the movie. It is simultaneously self-depreciating and cynical. It’s OK to have a bit of good fun with the story, especially given the oh-so-serious tone of the previous “Matrix” movies, but by the time Thomas meets Trinity at the Simulatte Café, the jokes have worn thin.
The meat of the story, a search for truth, is the engine that keeps the movie motoring along, but the endless exposition, a torrent of words, seems to be the fuel that keeps things running. When a character says, “That’s the thing about stories, they never end,” it’s hard to disagree as the movie gets mired in mythology and world building.
It becomes a slog, without enough of the trademarked Wachowski action scenes to help pick up the pace. When the movie does dip into bullet time and the action that made the original so memorable, it feels like a pale comparison. There is nothing much new—“I still know Kung Fu,” says Neo—just frenetic action and nostalgia for a time when a slow-motion bullet made our eyeballs dance.
“The Matrix: Resurrections” does try to recontextualize the existing mythology. This time around the all-you-need-is-love-story between Neo and Trinity is amped up and there is some timely social commentary about control, whether it’s from the government or a virtual reality machine, but, and there is a big “but,” as much as I wanted to enjoy another trip to the Matrix, I found it too meta, too long and yet, not ambitious enough.
Who says the “Alien” franchise is dead? Ridley Scott may have exhausted the storytelling possibilities of the original franchise but don’t tell that to Kristen Stewart and the annoying T.J. Miller, stars of the new thriller “Underwater,” a.k.a. “Aquatic Alien,” new this week on VOD.
Stewart is Norah an engineer working on a rig at the bottom of the ocean. She and the crew of nautical scientists, (Vincent Cassel, Jessica Henwick, John Gallagher Jr., Mamoudou Athie, Gunner Wright and Miller) are at the mercy of the watery depths when an earthquake destroys their subterranean laboratory. As they fight for survival they discover they may have woken a fierce enemy. “This better not be some ‘20,000 Leagues Under the Sea’ crap,” says Paul (Miller).
On the ocean floor no one can hear you scream but we can hear lots of heavy breathing as the cast grunt their lines into their deep-sea diving suits.
“Underwater” is an ocean floor people in peril flick with loads of wet, claustrophobic atmosphere but little in the way of actual thrills. The earthquake happens in the opening minutes of the film, throwing the characters into danger right off the bat so we don’t get to know anything about them other than their “never say die” attitude and Norah’s wondrous ability to squeeze through very tight spaces before the bad stuff happens. There is no emotional connection, just characters navigating the murky depths with the occasional jump scare thrown in. The final showdown with the deep-sea beast has a certain majesty to it but by then echoes of better movies like “Alien,” “The Abyss” and ”Leviathan” have done in the film’s chances of making an impression.
Lots of movies have mined similar territory but the ones that stand out add something interesting to the mix. Unfortunately “Underwater” brings nothing new to the outer space/underwater monster genre.
