Based on a true story, “Above Suspicion,” starring “Game of Thrones’” Emilia Clarke, now on VOD, is set in small Kentucky where there are only two ways to make money since the mine closed, “one is the drug business and the other is the funeral business.”
Clarke is Susan Smith, living hand-to-mouth in her Kentucky home town. She wants a better life but drug addiction and her abusive ex-husband’s (Johnny Knoxville) welfare scam has her tied down.
When the married, ambitious FBI agent Mark Putnam (Jack Huston) comes to town there appears to be opportunity for both. He sees her as a conduit of information, a snitch, she thinks he might be her way out. When their work relationship turns romantic, the dynamic changes but when he realizes the error of his ways, Susan becomes obsessed and vengeful.
There’s more but I won’t spoil it for you. The movie kind of does though in its opening minutes. (MILD SPOILER COURTESY OF THE MOVIE) “You know what’s the worst part about being dead?” Susan asks in the opening narration. “You get too much time to think.” It’s a film noir device that works well in “Sunset Boulevard,” but in this case sucks some of the life, literally, out of the storytelling.
A mish mash of drug busts, drawls, deception and clearly telegraphed Southern Gothic plot points, “Above Suspicion” settles on a true crime format instead of digging a little deeper to expose the often-troubled relationship between impoverished people and the folks who are meant to protect them. Instead, it feels like a greatest hits collection of opioid movie tropes tied together with outsized Kentucky accents.
Clarke and Knoxville dirty up real nice but the film’s investment in hard knock poverty porn over substance plays more like an episode of “Dateline” than a cinematic experience.
A quick title IMDB search reveals the name “Above Suspicion” has been used at least twelve times, dating back to 1943. This most recent addition to the ever-growing list of “Above Suspicion” titled movies is about as generic as the common name would imply.
Haunted houses and Halloween go hand in hand. Fairground ghost houses, with their flickering lights and carnies dressed in store bought costumes, have been making hearts race and teens scream for decades but a new movie, “His House,” now streaming on Netflix, brings those cheesy thrills into a terrifyingly real world.
Bol (Sope Dirisu) and Rial (Wunmi Mosaku) are refugees from war torn South Sudan. Their journey to freedom is fraught. They’re crammed into busses and pick-up trucks, then loaded on to a leaky boat in rough waters. At sea they lose their young daughter who drowns when the boat flips.
They survive and land in an English detention centre, living there until temporary permission to stay in the U.K. is granted. While they wait on their claim of asylum, they’re moved into a dilapidated community housing. “You will be sent to a home of our choosing,” they are told. “You must reside at this address. You must not move from this address. This is your home now.”
The filthy fixer-upper (to put it mildly) has holes in the walls, garbage piled out front and an evil secret, possibly a spirit from their former country. “There is a great beast in this house,” says Rial. “It followed us here. It is filling this house with ghosts to torment my husband.”
What follows is a classic haunted house film with a deep subtext that breathes new life into the genre’s desiccated old lungs. Set against a background of cultural displacement, survivors’ guilt, and the psychological wounds of a life spent in trauma, “His House” is no “Amityville Horror.” Sure, strange things happen in the home. Voices come from behind the drywall, a spirit appears and dreams manifest themselves in the most horrific of ways, but the context is different.
British writer-director Remi Weekes knows his way around a supernatural thrill but he also weaves in real life experiences of racism, otherness and genocidal suffering into the story, forming a rich tapestry of chills—some from beyond our mortal coil, some not—that move the tired old haunted house horror story to new, deeply felt places. It may drag in spots but “His House” is a thrilling rethink of what the genre can be.
“The Secrets We Keep,” a new revenge thriller starring Noomi Rapace and coming to digital and on-demand, is a riff on the claustrophobic revenge story of “Death and the Maiden.”
Set in 1960, Rapace plays Maja, a Romanian refugee and Holocaust survivor, now living in a small American town with her physician doctor Lewis (Chris Messina) and son Patrick (Jackson Vincent). One day at the park she hears a man whistle for his dog and a flood of memories come back. Following him home she gets a good look and her worst fears are confirmed. He is the SS officer who, near the end of the war, raped her and killed her sister as they fled a concentration camp.
Blinded by anger and horrific memories she kidnaps him, hitting him in the head with a hammer and shoving him in the trunk of her car. When Lewis gets home to find the man, who denies Maja’s charges and claims to be a Swiss citizen named Thomas (Joel Kinnaman, who, in real life went to high school with Rapace), tied up in the basement he is rightfully perplexed. Maja had never shared to the details of her ordeal with her husband but he trusts her and goes along with plan to get a confession, one way or another. “I’m not the man you think I am,” Thomas (or whatever his name is) says, begging to be let go. She is tortured by the memory of what happened and why her sister was shot and she wasn’t. “Help me remember,” she says to him. “It is your only way out of here.”
“The Secrets We Keep” raises questions of trust, survivor’s guilt and the corrosive nature of secrets. It’s a gritty, unsentimental movie that ratches up the tension with ideas, not action. How reliable is Maja’s memory? What amount of scepticism should Lewis bring to this situation? Is vengeance morally correct? Those questions and more hang heavy over the plot, confronting the viewer to assess their own feelings and biases. The story isn’t particularly tricky but it is carefully calibrated to make you wonder who is telling the truth, who is lying and even, who can trust their memories of long-ago events.
Rapace does her best work ever in an English film, bringing some nuance to a character who could have been played with a much harder, vengeful edge. Messina brings the sense of his character’s confusion to life—You said we were going to do things together,” he says supportively, “and you torture him while I’m not here?”—while Kinnaman remains a cypher, a person who may or may not be the man Maja thinks he is. Each performance fits in place, creating a mosaic of truths and lies that is as compelling as it is confounding.
A twisty-turny story of greed and family set in 1986, “The Nest,” now playing in theatres, sees stars Jude Law and Carrie Coon as a happy, well off couple who define the old saying that looks can be deceiving.
Law is Rory, a charming commodities broker whose ambition often outstrips his ability. When we first meet Rory, his wife Allison and two kids, Benjamin (Charlie Shotwell) and Samantha (Oona Roche), they’re living the high life in New York, but running short on cash. When Rory is offered his old job in his native London, England, he sees it as the chance to make some big bank. He uproots the family, moves then to a huge manor house outside of London and turns on the money taps. He spends lavishly, against the promise of a big windfall, buying fur coats, building a horse stable for Allison and enrolling his kids in tony, private schools. Trouble is, the promised windfall never arrives and as Rory bleeds money, cracks form in his carefully curated life.
“The Nest” is a slow burn of a movie that dances to its own beat. The small details that chip away at Rory and Allison’s relationship are revealed slowly as the rot sets in. It’s a study of greed and privilege as a cancer that clouds Rory’s ability to truly define what is important in his life.
Law is perfectly cast. His natural movie star charisma and charm shines through until the symbols of the wealth he craves become a weight around his neck, removing whatever goodwill we may have had for the character. Equally as strong is Coon, whose breakdown is played out in more measured tones until she loses it in a crescendo of bitterness and anger. The story allows them to the room to fully investigate why and how Rory and Allison behave as they do but director Sean Durkin, whose “Martha Marcy May Marlene” was an arthouse hit in 2011, never completely gives away the game.
“The Nest” features textured storytelling and an open-ended finale that will likely inspire heated post viewing conversation.
“Unhinged” is the kind of b-movie that normally would have gone straight to DVD or streaming but in our topsy-turvy pandemic world, where the rules are being constantly rewritten, the new Russell Crowe psychothriller is playing only in theatres this weekend.
Hairdresser Rachel (Caren Pistorius) is having a rough time. The young mom is in the midst of a brutal divorce and her brother and his girlfriend are unwelcome guests at her home.
Today she’s stuck in traffic and if things don’t get moving, she’ll be late for both an appointment with a client and dropping her son (Gabriel Bateman) at school. Pulling her Volvo tight behind an idling truck belonging to Tom Cooper (Crowe), she honks her horn and triggers an epic fit of road rage. “I need you to learn what a bad day is,” he says, “and I need you to learn how to say sorry.”
Subtlety, thy name is not “Unhinged.” From Crowe’s snarling, sweating psychopath and a bloody “courtesy tap” to emasculation and car crashes, the movie delivers a buffet of b-movie pleasures. Crowe spits out lines like, “I’ll make my contribution this day with violence and retribution,” and amps up the angry but like the movie itself, he’s one, loud note.
Director Derrick Borte begins the film with context, a long montage of current world ills, suggesting that things are falling to pieces because we lack civility, but then forgoes any kind of social commentary in a story that relies on shock and awe to fill the screen with violent images. At one point Cooper talks about being an “invisible” man and, after a diner scene, it’s clear he has no love for divorce lawyers, but that’s it for character development. He is simply a dangerous man who has been cut loose of the bonds of polite society.
In the relatively small sub-genre of Crazed Driver Movies—“Duel” and “The Hitcher” come to mind—“Unhinged” distinguishes itself by keeping the pedal to the metal without providing anything new in the way of thrills. As a study of an emasculated man seeking revenge it brings to mind “Falling Down,” Michael Douglas’ 1993 black comedy, except “Unhinged” is all darkness and no comedy.
Ambition and art mix and match in “The Burnt Orange Heresy.” A coolly elegant crime thriller, based on Charles Willeford’s 1971 novel of the same name, the film peels back the art world’s veneer to reveal a dark underbelly.
“The Square’s” Claes Bang is James Figueras, a once internationally famous art critic now reduced to lecturing American tourists in Milan. After one of his talks he meets Berenice Hollis (Elizabeth Debicki), a willowy art aficionado from Duluth, Minnesota. They hit it off, and have what she assumes is a one-night stand until he invites her to spend the weekend at the Lake Como estate of enigmatic art collector Joseph Cassidy (Mick Jagger).
James’s expectations of being offered the job of cataloguing Cassidy’s massive private collection are flipped when the collector asks him to do a task that could bring the disgraced critic back to prominence. Cassidy, sensing that James will do anything to get back in the public eye, asks him to steal a painting from hermetic artist Jerome Debney (Donald Sutherland). Debney is a legend and his work so rare, that just one painting could gather world attention. Question is, how far will James go to finish the job?
Like the painting that gives the movie its name, nothing in “The Burnt Orange Heresy” is not quite as it seems. Using noir tropes—the anti-hero, the femme fatale, a villain protagonist, a double cross— director Giuseppe Capotondi keeps things interesting after an unhurried start. What begins as a sun dappled caper takes a very dark turn as the director completes his portrait of ambition and desperation in the film’s final third.
As Figueras, Bang oozes a sketchy appeal. He’s desperate and dangerous, but his worst qualities are hidden behind a suave exterior. He’s the central character but is overshadowed by the chemistry that sparks every time Debicki and Sutherland share the screen. She is charismatic in an underwritten role, but it is her scenes with the eccentric and kindly Debney that shine. That there are questions as to everyone’s motives—except for the Machiavellian Cassidy, wonderfully played by Jagger—adds intrigue to the tale.
“The Burnt Orange Heresy” isn’t a typical crime drama. The story is fuelled by arrogance, deceit and lies as much as plot, the crime is almost incidental to the interest created by the characters.
“She Dies Tomorrow,” a surreal new horror film on VOD, is a timely and unsettling story where the fear of death is passed from person to person like a virus.
The story begins with Amy (Kate Lyn Sheil), once a joyful young woman looking forward to setting up her newly purchased home. But now it’s a job that comes with no joy as Amy is gripped with deep, soul-shredding anxiety. For some reason she is convinced she will die the next day. Not by suicide or illness, just death. “There is no tomorrow for me,” she says. She’s so convinced of her inevitable fate she changes her voicemail message. “There’s no need to leave a message.”
Seeking a connection, she invites her friend Jane (Jane Adams) over. Jane swings by and after some awkward conversation about death leaves, also consumed by thoughts of her own, impending passing. As Jane moves through the night, visiting a doctor (Josh Lucas), her brother (Chris Messina) and friends (Olivia Taylor Dudley and Michelle Rodriguez) she leaves an existential trail of fear with everyone she meets.
Directed by Amy Seimetz “She Dies Tomorrow” is not a regular horror film. It’s an experiment in atmosphere building aided by a premise that feels very timely in the midst of a pandemic.
Questions are asked—What is this virus and how is it transported?—but no answers are provided. The film requires you to accept the situation and feel the anxiety of something that may or may not be real. For Seimetz’s characters the dread is palpable, forcing them to examine their choices, in relationships and life, and re-evaluate in whatever time they have left. In this time of real-life uncertainty Seimetz paints a vivid picture of mortality on a countdown that, while speculative, feels rooted in recent headlines.
Fittingly “She Dies Tomorrow” has a hallucinogenic, experimental style. Throbbing, flashing swaths of colour fill the screen as the virus—or whatever it is—attaches itself to a new host. It’s trippy, slightly psychedelic and may test the patience of less adventurous viewers but in a time where COVID-19 has spread worldwide, bringing with it angst and unease, a movie that examines human behavior in the face of transmittable trauma is, perhaps, a nightmarish artistic inevitability.
In the publicity material for “Last Moment of Clarity,” a new crime drama starring Samara Weaving and Zach Avery, the movie is being billed as a Hitchcockian thriller. I have a different, more accurate term. Hitchschlockian. It’s a little clumsy, I know, but it sums up the film’s mix of schlocky twists and turns that make up the plot.
Georgia (Samara Weaving) and Sam (Zach Avery) are a couple. She’s an aspiring actress and photographer and he has the incredible misfortune to have an apartment window that faces a crime scene. When he picks up one of her cameras and absentmindedly snaps a photo he captures Russian mobster Ivan (Udo Kier) kill a woman. Ivan sends his henchmen over to kill Sam and get the camera. They botch the job, and after several stray bullets fly, Georgia is shot. Thinking she is dead Sam hoofs it, hiding out in Paris.
Cut to three years later. Sam, now working in a café run by Gilles (Brian Cox), takes a day off to go to a movie and lo and behold the lead actress, Lauren Creek, looks just like Georgia, except now she has blonde hair. One Google search later he discovers she is an up-and-comer but has virtually no on-line personal history. Convinced this movie star with an enigmatic past is the love of his life, he jets off to Hollywood to track her down.
There he reconnects with Kat (Carly Chaikin), an old high school friend, now working as a film publicist. She doesn’t believe his story but agrees to help him find the truth—is it George in disguise? Is it mistaken identity? Or has Sam gone over the edge?
The clichés come hard and fast in “Last Moment of Clarity.” Characters are imported directly from the thriller department at Central Casting with dialogue to match. The best and most authentic line in the whole film comes from Chaikin, who is more interesting than either of the lead characters, when she says, “This is so f***ing dumb!” As a viewer you’ll be saying the same thing.
“Last Moment of Clarity” simply isn’t as clever as it needs to be. Twists are telegraphed in advance and worse, the very idea that a dye job is enough of a disguise to keep Georgia incognito… while starring in Hollywood films. No amount of stylish low angle shots and atmospheric cinematography can fill the holes in this plot.
“Becky,” a new thriller featuring former sitcom star Kevin James as the King of Criminals, and now on VOD, is a mix of home invasion movies like “The Strangers” and plucky-kid-fights-back flicks like “Home Alone.”
Lulu Wilson is the title character, a fourteen-year-old who never got over the death of her mother. When her father Jeff (Joel McHale) announces his engagement to girlfriend Kayla (Amanda Brugel), Becky goes ballistic and takes off into the woods behind their weekend cottage, hiding out in a treehouse fort. She narrowly misses the arrival of Dominick (James), a neo-Nazi with a swastika tattooed on the back of his bald head, and his goons. They’re there looking for a key that was supposed to be in a container in the basement.
Trouble is, it isn’t there.
Thinking Jeff knows where it is Dominick resorts to the usual home invasion techniques of information gathering—intimidation, snarly rhetoric and when all else fails, torture—not realizing that Becky is lurking in the woods. When he discovers where she is, and that she has the key, he sends the goons to get her. What he doesn’t realize is that the tween is, “as strong willed and vindictive as they come.”
Cue the homemade deathtraps and bloodshed. “There once was a little girl who had a little curl in the middle of her forehead,” she taunts Dom. “When she was good she was very, very good but when she was bad she was horrid.”
“Becky,” I suppose, was to be to Kevin James what “Foxcatcher” was to Steve Carell, or Mo’Nique in “Precious,” a way to break out of comedy and into drama. While it is shocking to see the “King of Queens” without a quip on his lips or Adam Sandler at his side, that’s the only shocking part of this performance. Perhaps it’s his hilariously stilted dialogue or maybe it’s just hard to take a guy who made a career playing a heroic mall cop seriously.
Either way, he’s supposed to be a bad, bad man but compared to Becky he’s a peacenik. Set loose in the woods, the teenager calls on every ounce of her bottled-up rage to unleash holy, bloody hell on the men who did her family wrong. She lets her freak flag fly in ways that would make Anton Chigurh look positively tame by comparison.
“Becky” doesn’t have a whole lot of surprises. Instead it relies on bloody situations to drive the horror of its message home.
Based on a true story, “Above Suspicion,” starring “Game of Thrones’” Emilia Clarke, now on VOD, is set in small Kentucky where there are only two ways to make money since the mine closed, “one is the drug business and the other is the funeral business.”
