“The Righteous,” a new supernatural thriller written, directed and starring “City on a Hill’s” Mark O’Brien, is an unsettling slow burn on redemption and retribution that asks, “What is the price of sin?”
“Be careful what you wish for. But be certain what you pray for.”
Shot in lush black and white, and set in a remote home far from the closest neighbor, the quiet of the surroundings echoes the somber lives led by Frederic (Henry Czerny) and Ethel (Mimi Kuzyk) Mason, a married couple still stinging from the loss of their daughter.
Frederic is a pious man, a former priest who left the church, in scandal, after falling for Ethel. Their carefully calibrated lives are turned upside down when Aaron Smith (O’Brien), an injured man with good manners and a secret, shows up at their door. Lost, he needs help, aid Frederic is happy to oblige. “Where are you from?” “Everywhere,” he replies.
At first, he’s a welcome guest. Ethel warms to him, finding comfort in the presence of a young person to fill the hole in her heart. But late-night dinner table conversations between Frederic and Aaron change the nature of their relationship, leading to a combustible situation and a horrifying request.
“The Righteous” is a psychological thriller that takes its time, doling out the story’s inherent sense of menace slowly but surely. As the tension mounts, director O’Brien resists the temptation to up the action. Instead, he trusts the script and performances to bring the strange, powerful story of atonement to its conclusion.
The horror of the situation escalates courtesy of the battle of wills between Aaron and Frederic. It’s the struggle between good and evil, of faith and the secular life, propelled by a series of kitchen table conversations between Aaron and Frederic that are the jaundiced soul of this story. Beautifully performed, they are chamber pieces, enhanced by subtle but effective shifts in lighting that telegraph the changing mood, and spiritual angst, of the scenes.
A small film containing big ideas, “The Righteous” succeeds because of a clarity of direction—O’Brien knows what he wants to do in every scene—and the performances, from Czerny’s tortured gravitas and Kuzyk’s warmth to O’Brien’s enigmatic work.
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A unique and darkly engaging spiritual thriller, strikingly shot in black and white, The Righteous tells the story of Frederic (Henry Czerny) a grieving man struggling with his faith, who helps an injured young man, Aaron Smith (Mark O’Brien) who stumbles onto his property one night, claiming to be lost in the woods. Frederic and his wife (Mimi Kuzyk) invite the man to stay for the night, but Frederic soon begins to have doubts about this enigmatic stranger’s story – and his motives for being there. When Aaron asks Frederic to commit an unspeakable deed, it becomes clear that the man is not who he seems, and has been sent to test the very limits of Frederic’s existence.
THE RIGHTEOUS had its WORLD PREMIERE at the 2021 Fantasia International Film Festival, and is in select theatres, June 3! TADFF and Vortex Media want to send some of our fans (and their guests) to the advance screening at 7:00PM, Tuesday, May 31, 2022, at the Cineplex Scotiabank Theatre (259 Richmond St W, Toronto, ON M5V 3M6). The screening will be hosted by Canada’s favourite film critic, Richard Crouse.
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This week on the Richard Crouse Show we meet author Eugene Marten. His latest powerful new novel “Pure Life” is the sprawling story of the rise and fall of a former professional American Football player, Nineteen, who claws his way from a working-class background to wealth and fame before losing everything.
Then, we get to know Mark O’Brien. As an actor, Mark is one of the stars of Showtime’s “City on a Hill,” starring opposite Kevin Bacon and produced by Ben Affleck and Matt Damon. You’ve seen him on the Amazon series “The Last Tycoon” opposite Kelsey Grammar, and will soon see him in the recurring guest star role of ambitious Los Angeles Deputy District Attorney Thomas Milligan in the second season of HBOs popular “Perry Mason” reboot. Today we’ll talk about “The Righteous,” his debut as a feature film director… oh, and he also wrote it and stars as well as Aaron, a mysterious young man who turns the life of a former priest upside down.
Finally, director Sunnie McFadden-Curtis stops by to talk about “Broken Vows: Stories Of Separation,” a new documentary that takes you into the lives of women experiencing separation.
Each week on the nationally syndicated Richard Crouse Show, Canada’s most recognized movie critic brings together some of the most interesting and opinionated people from the movies, television and music to put a fresh spin on news from the world of lifestyle and pop-culture. Tune into this show to hear in-depth interviews with actors and directors, to find out what’s going on behind the scenes of your favourite shows and movies and get a new take on current trends. Recent guests include Ethan Hawke, director Brad Bird, comedian Gilbert Gottfried, Eric Roberts, Brian Henson, Jonathan Goldsmith a.k.a. “The most interesting man in the world,” and best selling author Linwood Barclay.
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“Blue Bayou,” a new immigration drama starring Justin Chon and Alicia Vikander, tells a fictional, but all-too-true, story that is sincere but heavy-handed.
Written, directed and starring Chon, the story takes place in the Louisiana bayou. Chon plays the Korean-born Antonio LeBlanc, adopted by an American family when he was three. Now married to Kathy (Vikander) he’s raising step-daughter Jessie (Sydney Kowalske) with another child on the way.
A loping Cajun twang disguises the anxiety he feels with a new baby coming but not enough money coming in. His two felonies make it tough to find extra work, and his job as a tattoo artist does not cover the bills. Still, the family is happy, even if Jessie is concerned Antonio, the self-proclaimed “fun” parent, won’t spend time with her when the new baby arrives.
A little spat between Kathy and Antonio in a grocery escalates when Ace, a cop and her ex-husband, and his violent partner (Emory Cohen) get involved. Antonio is arrested. When Kathy attempts to pay his bail, she’s told, matter-of-factly, “He’s not here anymore. ICE took him.”
Seems his adoptive parents didn’t follow the proper procedures to make him a citizen, and now, after thirty years in America he may have to return to a country he doesn’t remember.
“I understand your frustration,” says the lawyer (Vondie Curtis-Hall) the couple hire but can’t afford. “Depart voluntarily,” he continues, “and have a chance to get back in. You can fight, but if you lose, you can never come back.”
“I’m not leaving my family,” Antonio replies.
“Blue Bayou” has much going for it. Chon has a poetic eye for visuals and frames the hot button story nicely. There are enough details about the family to make us care about them and Antonio’s backstory adds some mystery to the proceedings. The chemistry between the core group—Antonio, Kathy and Jessie—feels genuine—Kowalske is a real find—and, as the immigration situation spins out of control, we’re along for the ride. But as the story gets heavier, so does the story-telling. Like leaden.
Chon’s characters are so compelling and much of the tale so heartfelt, that it’s a disappointment when the movie turns to melodrama in its final third. Nuance goes out the window and the quiet naturalism of the first half disappears. Add to that a villain in the form of Cohen’s bad cop character who seems to have wandered in from a British pantomime and you’re left with a case of the let-downs.
“Blue Bayou” details a very important, and for many people, very personal story, but falls victim to ham-fisted storytelling.
Check out episode thirty of Richard’s web series, “In Isolation With…” It’s the talk show where we make a connection without actually making contact! Today, broadcasting directly from Isolation Studios (a.k.a. my home office), we meet an actor who is having an incredible couple of years. With starring roles in “Ready or Not,” “The Frontrunner,” “Goalie,” “Marriage Story,” “Bad Times at the El Royale,” “City on a Hill” and a new indie called “Hammer,” now on VOD, Mark O’Brien is a very busy actor… and if that wasn’t enough, he also became a dad and wrote and directed his own movie The Righteous.
On a Zoom call from his home in Los Angeles we caught up… talking about working on post production for his film “The Righteous” while in isolation, the short films he made with his friends growing up in Newfoundland, doing the Happy Gilmour dance on a film set, auditioning for Al Pacino and, of course, his most recent film, “Hammer.”
It’s the story of O’Brien’s character Chris, who is having a very bad day. Estranged from his parents and deep in debt to some very bad people, he arranges a deal with an old associate. They arrange to meet on a rural road to exchange $200,000 in cash in return for drugs. The deal goes wrong, bullets are fired and Chris, covered in blood splatter, makes a getaway on a motorcycle with the drugs and money. As he speeds through town on his getaway, his father Stephen, played by Will Patton spots him and immediately knows something is wrong. Over the course of one day the situation escalates…
“Hammer” is an engaging and offbeat thriller that makes the most of its lead performances. O’Brien manages to make Chris almost likeable despite his constant foul-ups and Patton, as a father caught up in a breathless situation, is all strength and goodwill, even when he’s doing terrible things. Why this wasn’t released on Father’s Day I’ll never know. As it is, you can find it on VOD, right now.
Let’s get to know Mark O’Brien.
Watch the whole thing HERE on YouTube or HERE on ctvnews.ca!
“Hammer,” a new VOD thriller starring Will Patton, uses many of the genre’s puzzle pieces but rearranges them in a new and interesting way.
Chris (Mark O’Brien) is having a very bad day. Estranged from his parents and deep in debt to some very bad people, he arranges a deal with an old associate, Adams (Ben Cotton). They arrange to meet on a rural road to exchange $200,000 in cash in return for drugs. The deal goes wrong, bullets are fired. Adams (Ben Cotton) and his girlfriend Lori (Dayle McLeod) are wounded as Chris, covered in blood splatter, makes a getaway on a motorcycle with the drugs and money.
As he speeds through town his father Stephen (Will Patton), out doing errands, spots him and immediately knows something is wrong. The situation escalates as Adams, looking to find Chris and the stash, grabs Chris’ younger brother Jeremy (Connor Price) as a hostage. “You haven’t changed,” Stephen says as he and Chris drive toward an uncertain outcome. “You haven’t changed one bit.”
Just after everything goes sideways in Chris’ life director Christian Sparkes stages a scene in a cornfield that tells us everything we need to know about Chris in one potent image. Hidden among the plants is a snake devouring itself. It’s a quick shorthand for the cyclical nature of Chris’ self-destruction. He’s been in trouble before, and the imagery suggests the pattern will continue, even if he makes it out of this scrape alive. It’s details like this that elevate a standard crime drama, complete with crooked ex-colleagues, innocent family members and bad debts, from the same-old to something new.
But it is the father and son relationship that gives the movie its momentum. It asks, and mostly answers, big questions about unconditional love and how far a father will go to help his son. Sparkes builds tension all the way through the tight eighty-minute running time but never forgets to allow the relationship between the father and his ne’er do well son to slip from the forefront of the storytelling.
“Hammer” is an engaging and offbeat thriller that makes the most of its lead performances. O’Brien manages to make Chris almost likable despite his constant foul-ups and Patton, as a father caught up in a breathless situation, is all strength and goodwill, even when he’s doing terrible things. Why this wasn’t released on Father’s Day I’ll never know.
“Ready or Not” puts a darkly humorous spin on a childhood game but it isn’t the first horror film to use hide n’ seek as a plot device. The inventively titled short film “Hide & Shriek” sees a masked killer ruining the fun while “Emelie” features an evil babysitter who keeps the kids busy with a dangerous version of the game. The new film is a bloody satire with sly commentary about the lengths the 1% will do to keep their cash.
Upon marrying Alex (Mark O’Brien) Grace (Samara Weaving) becomes the newest member of the wealthy but weird Le Domas family. “You don’t belong in this family,” says drunk brother-in-law Daniel (Adam Brody). “I mean that as a complement.”
Her new in-laws, including disdainful father-in-law Tony (Henry Czerny), angry mother-in-law Becky (Andie MacDowell), coke-head sister-in-law sister Emilie (Melanie Scrofano) and her husband Fitch Bradley (Kristian Bruun), all heirs to a board game fortune, tell her the marriage won’t be complete until she partakes in a family ritual, a randomly selected midnight game. “It’s just something we do when someone new joins the family,” explains Alex.
The last time this tradition was carried out it took the form of a game of Old Maid. Unfortunately for Grace this time around the family chooses hide n’ seek. “You pulled up a bad card,” says Alex. “The truth is If they don’t kill you something very bad will happen.”
What begins as a lark turns lethal when Grace realizes that to ‘win’ she must first learn to navigate the Le Domas’s rambling old mansion, complete with trap doors and secret passageways. “When you marry into this family you have to play the game or you die. I know it sounds crazy but it’s true.”
“Ready or Not” is a well-executed lo-fi thriller with an unusual premise and lots of creepy characters straight out of a game of “Clue.” For the most part Weaving plays it straight, even as she uses her wedding dress as a tourniquet, while the Le Domas family amps up the antics with broad performances driven by the belief that something terrible will happen if they don’t find Grace by first light. They’re a motley bunch, pseudo-aristocrats with an interest in the occult who don’t appear to have much in common except for the bond of family and a desire to stay alive. As old-money members of the 1% they believe they are above the law, able to indulge in their game (even if they’re not very good at it) because of some old family legend. In other words, as Daniel says, “It’s true what they say. The rich really are different.”
The surprisingly nasty third act gives “Ready or Not” the feel of a future cult classic, a crowd-pleaser with some laughs and a giddily gory climax.
Winnipeg born Terry Sawchuk is one of the legends of the NHL, an Original Six era player and leader in wins by goaltenders. A new film, “Goalie,” starring Mark O’Brien, gives a blow-by-blow account of his rise to fame, literally. It begins with an autopsy detailing each and every war wound and how he earned them.
It’s a striking way to kick off the story of a man who was scarred physically and mentally from his many years in the net. We first meet him as a shy child with a beloved brother and abusive father. His brother’s death at seventeen carved a hole in his heart that was never filled, despite being married to Pat (Georgina Reilly) and fathering seven children. Booze (“I’m not drunk. I just forgot to eat,” he slurs.), hockey and the reflected glow of being in the NHL kept him going but the lifestyle—he earned 400 stitches on his face alone—took a toll and depression and erratic behaviour became his norm.
Sawchuk saw his share of triumph and trouble but “Goalie” is not a hagiography of one of the legends of the game. Instead it is more an elegy for a man who spent much of his career earning $25 a game, occasionally playing with broken bones for fear of being traded.
O’Brien does a nice job of portraying Sawchuk’s duality. From a young man full of hope and promise to the battle-scarred veteran of the ice who let the pressure of performance weigh him down, O’Brien subtly portrays his descent.
Not so subtle is Kevin Pollak as Detroit general manager Jack Adams. He’s a sports manager straight out of Central Casting, given to saying things like, “We both know the game is played between those blood red poles!”
His flowery language aside, director Adriana Maggs manages to insert some real poetry into the film. Interspersed into the action are snippets of “Night Work: The Sawchuk Poems” by the director’s father Randall Maggs. His words add to the elegiac feel of the film and are a nice antidote when the film falls into the occasional “ice is thicker than blood” cliché.
Like all good sports movies “Goalie” isn’t about scores or stats, it’s about what drives the players to push themselves, to be warriors or be worthless.
Six years ago writer/director Drew Goddard deconstructed the slasher movie genre with the whimsical and exhilarating “Cabin in the Woods.” A mash-up of horror and humour, of post-modern self-awareness and gruesome gags, it simultaneously adopted and challenged the conventions of the slasher genre. He returns to the big screen—his day job is writing, producing and directing TV shows like “Daredevil” and “The Good Place”—with “Bad Times at the El Royale,” an inversion of a 1990s broken timeline crime drama.
The El Royale is the kind of seedy hotel that dotted the highways and byways of 1960s America. Split down the middle by the California/Nevada border, it’s a perfect slice of mid-century kitsch, like the same guy who decked out Elvis’s rec room designed it. When we first lay eyes on it a shady character (Nick Offerman) with a bulging suitcase and a gun wrenches up the floorboards and hides a case of money before replacing the carpet and the furniture. It’s an act that establishes the El Royale as a home-away-from-home for transients and ne’er-do-wells and sets up much of the action to come.
As for the action to come, you’ll have to go see the film to find out what happens. I will tell you that the film takes place ten years after the suitcase was hidden in the hotel and begins with a disparate group of folks checking in well after the El Royale’s heyday. There’s slick talking vacuum cleaner salesman Laramie Seymour Sullivan (Jon Hamm), Reno-bound singer Darlene Sweet (Cynthia Erivo), Father Daniel Flynn (Jeff Bridges), a priest with tired eyes and hippie chick Emily Summerspring (Dakota Johnson). All three pay front desk manager Miles (Lewis Pullman) the $8 deposit and take to their rooms.
Secrets are revealed about the guests and the hotel as an aura of menace clouds the sunny California/Nevada border. “We’re in a bit of a pickle,” says Father Flynn in what may be the understatement of the year.
Goddard takes his time setting up the narrative drive of “Bad Times at the El Royale.” He bobs and weaves, playing with time, slowly revealing the intricacies of the story. For the patient—it runs two hours and 21 minutes—it’s a heck of a ride but may prove too opaque for casual viewers. Large conspiracies are hinted at, secrets are kept and no one is really who they seem to be. For those willing to submit to the grimly funny and admittedly indulgent proceedings, it’s a Tarantino-esque web of intrigue and unexpected violence that plays both as a crime drama and a metaphor for the decay of 1960s idealism.
“Bad Times at the El Royale” is a good movie filled with bad people. It asks you to care about people who do terrible things and by the end, thanks to inventive storytelling and good performances—Erivo is s standout—you just might.
