The long-term effects of abuse and control are detailed to vivid and violent effect in “Resurrection,” a new psychological thriller starring Rebecca Hall now playing in theatres.
Hall is biotech executive Margaret, a confident and mentor leader at work, a loving single mother to daughter Abbie (Grace Kaufman) at home. Her off hours are occupied by feverish physical training and a fling with married coworker Peter (Michael Esper).
Into her carefully constructed and compartmentalized life comes David (Tim Roth), an unwelcome visitor from the past. At first his presence exists only in the periphery. He attends a conference, almost unnoticed, sitting several rows in front of Margaret. Later, she sees him at a department store, and confronts him as he reads a newspaper in a park.
Turns out, David wants to rekindle their relationship, an abusive situation Margaret ended twenty-two years ago by fleeing, changing her name and rebooting her life. But, two decades later, the scars of their time together remain. Margaret is instantly flooded with memories of his physical punishments, which he paradoxically calls “kindnesses,” and the disappearance of their son Benjamin.
Fearing for Abbie’s safety, as well as her own, Margaret slowly unravels as David attempts to reassert his control over her.
“Resurrection” is a tough movie to describe without giving away salient plot points. It is the story of the lengths a person will go in defence of their loved ones and sanity. The more outlandish aspects of the story—no spoilers here!—only dig their hooks in because of the power of the performances.
Margaret’s turn from self-confidence to dazed-and-confused is expertly handled. From discipline to desperation, Hall’s change is complete. Her transformation is most effective in its subtlest moments, when her shifts in mind set are telegraphed by the twitch of an eye or a faint change in posture. A seven-minute monologue that reveals the nature of Margaret and David’s history is played out in one long, unedited close-up and is a master class in how to present exposition that hits all the right emotional notes.
Roth has less to do, but brings an air of menace to every frame of film he appears in.
“Resurrection” culminates with a horrifying scene that throws everything that came before into question. It confronts the audience with a gory scene that asks, How much of what we’ve just seen is real, and how much is fantasy? It is an unforgettable scene in the style of Ari Aster or David Cronenberg, but overpowers the film’s interesting look at female trauma, gaslighting and repression.
“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.
ENTER FOR YOUR CHANCE TO WIN: PASSES to the ADVANCE SCREENING of THE RIGHTEOUS!
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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Kindly email, contests@torontoafterdark.com, with THE RIGHTEOUS CONTEST (in the header) along with (in the body):
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Contest closes at 11:59PM on Sunday, May 29, 2022 so enter today. This contest is open to residents of Ontario, Canada, eighteen years and older. ONE ENTRY PER EMAIL PLEASE. Winners will be chosen at random and contacted accordingly.
In adapting “The Woman in the Window,” a new thriller starring Amy Adams, now streaming on Netflix, director Joe Wright borrows liberally from the Hitchcock playbook, paying visual tribute to everything from “Foreign Correspondent” and “Psycho” to “Vertigo” and, of course, “Rear Window.” There are so many Hitch lifts in the look of the movie it makes Brian DePalma’s myriad Hitchcock homages look like petty thievery.
Adams plays child psychologist Anna Fox who lives alone in a rambling brownstone on 124th Street in Manhattan. Agoraphobic, she gets panic attacks at the idea of going outside, let alone actually stepping over her front threshold to the big bad world. Her only regular contact with the outside comes with her weekly visit from her therapist (Tracy Letts) and a downstairs tenant (Wyatt Russell).
When her new neighbors from across the street drop by unexpectedly, she reluctantly lets teenager Ethan (Fred Hechinger) in for a get-to-know-you visit. A day or so later Jane (Julianne Moore) swings by to chat, ask nosy questions and have a glass of wine.
After the visits Anna becomes voyeuristically invested in their lives, watching them from the safety of her apartment as they go about their day to days lives, exposed by two large windows that showcase their living areas.
One night, after mixing wine with her anxiety medication, she witnesses what appears to be an ugly domestic dispute that turns fatal. Trouble is, no one believes the “drunken, pill popping, cat lady.”
Question is, did she really witness a murder or was it a hallucination?
Anna is a classic unreliable narrator, a character whose credibility is questioned at every step of the way. Adams keeps her interesting, bringing a human face to trauma, anxiety and grief. We’re never sure if what we’re seeing is filtered through a haze of medication or actually happening and while Wright finds flashy visual ways to portray this, it is Adams who connects emotionally.
There are moments of supercharged filmmaking in “The Woman in the Window” but the tonal shifts and pacing get in the way of making this edge of your seat viewing. Director Joe Wright brings his trademarked visual style to illustrate Anna’s anxiety. Unusual angles and lurid colours illustrate Anna’s disconnected moments, wide shots of her empty apartment represent her isolation. It’s effectively and inventively done, but the slack pacing sucks much of the energy out of the storytelling.
“The Woman in the Window” has moments that truly work but it is dulled by its deliberate pace, repetitive nature and typical confessional ending.
We will never know what Cesar Romero, the first actor to wear the Joker’s scary clown make up, would think about his old alter ego as interpreted by Joaquin Phoenix in “Joker,” but one thing is for sure, he wouldn’t recognize the nihilistic new take on the character.
Set in a rat-infested Gotham City, the story sees Arthur Fleck, an unstable man doing the best he can with state sponsored therapy and medication. By day he performs as a clown, dancing at children’s hospitals or holding “Going Out of Business” signs on Gotham’s mean streets. At night, when not day dreaming of becoming a stand-up comic, he’s tending to his infirm mother (Frances Conroy). Late at night they cozy up and watch their favorite TV show, a talk show hosted by Merv-Griffin-wannabe Murray Franklin (Robert De Niro). Sometimes Arthur even daydreams that Murray is a warm and loving father figure.
In the real-world things have a grimmer shade. Arthur is constantly harassed by co-workers and, worse, abused by complete strangers. On the day he is fired from his job he fights back, shooting and killing three businessmen who tried to beat him on his subway ride home. When news of the Clown Killer circulates, he becomes the anonymous figurehead of a populist resistance movement. Protestors riot in the streets, wearing clown masks and with signs emblazoned with slogans like We Are All Clowns and Down with Money.
Not that Arthur notices. “I’m not political,” he says. With no job, and, after his therapy program is cancelled, no medication, his extreme behavior escalates. “I’ve got nothing to lose,” he says. “Nothing can hurt me anymore.”
Although ripe with elements from older movies like “Death Wish,” the God’s lonely man favorites “Mean Streets” and Taxi Driver” and echoes from real-life forgotten names like Bernard Goetz, “Joker” is no period piece. It’s as timely as the yesterday’s headlines. A study of everything from alienation and disappointment to the failure of social safety nets and access to weapons, it’s a character study not just of the Joker but of a troubled time. “What do you get when you cross a mentally ill loner with a society who abandoned him?” Joker asks. “You get what you deserve.”
This isn’t a superhero film, there are links and connections to the Batman and Joker stories that came before but this is a horror movie, a look into what happens when the chaos in Arthur’s head becomes manifest. “For my whole life I didn’t know if I existed,” he says, “but now I know I do and people are noticing.” He’s the result of a broken system that turns their back on the mentally ill and underprivileged.
Phoenix, who dropped fifty-two pounds to play the role, displays not just a wasted body, but also spirit in a haunting performance that reinvents the character for a new generation. His take on Arthur finds its roots in marginalized people. “What do you get when you cross a mentally ill loaner with a society who abandoned him?” he asks. “You get what you deserve.” It is a harrowing performance, not always easy to watch, that almost generates sympathy for a broken man who becomes an agent of chaos and one of the DC canon’s greatest villains.
“Joker” drags in its middle section, unpleasantly luxuriating in Arthur’s grim collapse into anarchy, but is held afloat by Phoenix. It may not be a deep or realistic study of mental illness but it showcases Arthur’s weariness at being treated as the cigarette butt under society’s heel.
The message of finding control through vigilante violence is a disturbing one, but IRL it’s one that plays out on the news with disturbing frequency. “Is it just me or is it getting crazier out there?” Arthur asks.
Ghostbusting is supposed to make you feel good. If that’s true, why does Personal Shopper’s Maureen (played by Kristen Stewart) appear so miserable all the time? Perhaps it’s because the spirit she is trying to bust is that of her brother Lewis, a twin who died of a heart attack in a rambling, old Paris house.
In her second film with French director Olivier Assayas, the Twilight star gives a career topping performance, brittle yet calm in the face of mounting terror. There is a detached feel to the performance that recalls the remove Hitchcock’s leading ladies often projected as she navigates through personal tragedy and supernatural mystery.
“Kristen is the great actress of her generation,” says Assayas. “I feel very privileged to have this connection with her. It is miraculous to work with a young actress who realizes there is no end to what she can do. You tell her, ‘You can fly,’ and she doesn’t believe it and then she does it.
“I have always loved to work with young actors and actresses. You catch them at a moment when they are transforming and opening up. I think it is always interesting to work with actors when you can give them something. When you work with great actors who have done it all, it is very difficult because you give them something that they have already done better in another movie ten years before. “
Their previous collaboration, Clouds of Sils Maria, earned Stewart a rare honour. She was the first American actress to be nominated for and win a best supporting actress César award, the French equivalent of an Oscar.
“She is obsessed with breaking anything that could feel like routine,” he says. “She gives herself this rule of not doing what she would instinctively do. When you do a scene there is an obvious starting place. She never takes it. That’s what I love. As a writer I don’t want to see what I imagined, I want to see an actor who takes it, who appropriates it and does something else with it. That’s when it becomes real and human.”
“Usually I work with actors once, twice and after a while I realize we’ve gone all the way. With Kristen I think I could go on and on.”
Personal Shopper is a ghost story, so things take a strange turn when Maureen’s phone lights up with mysterious texts while she’s on a quick Chunnel trip to London. “R U real? R U alive or dead?” she writes, replying to the Unknown texter. “Tell me something you find unsettling,” comes the response, opening the door for Maureen to begin exploring her fears, phobias, digging deeper than she ever has.
“I don’t believe in the supernatural but I believe there is more to life than the material world. Science kind of proves it. There is so much going on that we can’t see because it is too small or too big or whatever. We have our own relationship with some invisible world. Each of us has his own version of it. You end up living with the departed. Each of us has an inner world which is much more complex than the material world. It’s much more fascinating in terms of cinema. I don’t think it is bizarre to try and connect with that.”
Ghostbusting is supposed to make you feel good. If that’s true, why does Maureen (Kristen Stewart) appear so miserable all the time? Perhaps it’s because the spirit she is trying to bust is that of her brother Lewis, a twin who died of a heart attack in a rambling, old Paris house.
Maureen is an American in Paris working as a personal shopper for pampered jet setter Kyra Hellman (Nora Von Waltstätten). Her job is to pick up and deliver Kyra’s glamorous clothes and jewellery from fashion houses all over the city. When she isn’t choosing filmy Chanel dresses or weighty Cartier necklaces for her boss Maureen spends time trying to contact her dead sibling. They had a deal, whoever died first would send the other a sign. Lewis was a medium, a person able to contact the dead. “I’m not a medium,” she says. “I have to give his spirit, whatever you call it,” she says, “a chance to prove he was right.”
This is a ghost story, so things take a strange turn when Maureen’s phone lights up with mysterious texts while she’s on a quick Chunnel trip to London. “R U real? R U alive or dead?” she writes, replying to the Unknown texter. “Tell me something you find unsettling,” comes the response, opening the door for Maureen to begin exploring her fears, phobias, digging deeper than she ever has.
Spines will be tingled during “Personal Shopper.” The computerized ghostly spirit that visits Maureen from time to time isn’t spooky, but the atmosphere director Olivier Assayas cultivates throughout sure is. Tension and unease build slowly as Maureen’s life slowly takes a turn to the surreal.
Stewart gives a career topping performance, brittle yet calm in the face of mounting terror. This isn’t a showy performance. Instead Stewart opts for naturalism, at least as natural as possible given the subject matter that highlights the deep sense of loneliness she feels in the wake of her brother’s passing. There is a detached feel to the performance that recalls the remove Hitchcock’s leading ladies often projected as she navigates through personal tragedy and supernatural mystery.
“Personal Shopper” doesn’t feel like a horror film. Assayas has made a moody psychological thriller that is about the absence of a loved one as much as it is about thrills and chills.
To call director Paul Verhoeven provocative is like suggesting the Atlantic Ocean merely contains some water. He’s the man who gave us Saved by the Bell sweetheart Elizabeth Berkley licking a stripper’s pole in Showgirls and the splatterfest of Starship Troopers. A cursory glance at any of his films suggests his Taste-O-Meter is permanently set at ‘garish’ but his movies beg—actually they sit up and demand—for more than a cursory look.
His new movie, Elle, based on French-Armenian writer Philippe Djian’s award-winning 2012 novel Oh…, is a complex and corrosive psychological thriller about a woman seeking revenge on the man who raped her.
“Sometimes you are in a Hitchcock thriller,” says star Isabelle Huppert of the film. “Sometimes you are in a psychological study. Sometimes you are in a comedy and at the end of the day you are in none of those; you are in a Paul Verhoeven film.”
Verhoeven’s originally planned to relocate the story from France to the United States but ran into roadblocks.
“He makes no secret of that,” Huppert laughs. “I like that. He was completely clear. He didn’t want me. He wanted an American movie star. He didn’t get her so finally he came to get me.”
The Paris, France-born actress was a natural choice to play Michelle. She is a complicated character. As the daughter of a notorious serial killer she has developed a hard shell. She’s blunt to the point of rude with everyone from her future daughter-in-law and ex-husband to her mother and son, who she refers to as “a big lout with nothing special about him.” She’s having an affair with her best friend’s husband and even deliberately runs into her ex’s car then blames the damage on someone else.
“I read the novel first and thought it could potentially be a great film because it is very visual and the character is very interesting,” she says. “Then eventually the writer Philippe Djian said he always had me in mind while he was writing the novel. No wonder I immediately felt connected to the role.”
Elle is a deeply polarizing movie—in Cannes it was equally lauded and condemned—that treads some very delicate territory. Not that this is a delicate film. The assault is first heard, then seen in increasingly graphic detail as the running time climbs to the closing credits. The movie has taken some heat because it’s a male director making a film about a female reaction to assault. Huppert rejects the criticism.
“He told me very little and let me take the role wherever I wanted,” she says of Verhoeven. “That might be so that at the end you don’t have to measure the extent of the [male gaze]. The role is not a man’s fantasy. I don’t think so. The way she is halfway between a victim and the usual James Bondish avenger. She is really in an in between space which I think is, essentially, very, very, feminine. It is the exploration of something in between which makes the character very interesting, That doesn’t make the character like it was the product of a man’s fantasy. Plus as an actress, all the way through, I felt completely protected by him. I never felt the smallest sense of danger or being manipulated.”
