Raging Grace
SimilarLéon: The Professional (1994), Stranger Than Paradise (1984),
The Grand Jury Prize winner gives audiences two different flavors of terror.
Raging Grace, the feature debut from writer-director Paris Zarcilla just won the Grand Jury Prize at this year’s SXSW. It’s a film that offers viewers two horror narratives for the price of one. The first is a standard sort involving a creepy mansion, shocking family secrets, and other traditional genre tropes. The second, on the other hand, replaces the overtly spooky elements with more realistic, if no less tense and disturbing, story points.
In that narrative, the audience follows an undocumented worker as she seeks a better life for herself and her child. Instead, she lands in the clutches of real-life monsters determined to exploit others’ desperation for their own twisted gains. Raging Grace handles both approaches effectively. Ultimately, the latter track stings the hardest and will linger longest in the minds of viewers. Continue Reading →
Landscapers
There’s a sort of inflationary issue in the True Crime genre these days. This presents an immediate hurdle to HBO’s new “based on a true story” limited series Landscapers. Continue Reading →
Sid and Nancy
By most accounts, Alex Cox’s Sid & Nancy is not a particularly accurate depiction of the relationship between Sid Vicious, the most notorious member of the Sex Pistols, and Nancy Spungen, the American with whom he had a relationship that began in a state of anarchy, was sealed in a haze of drugs and ended with him allegedly stabbing her to death in a bathroom only a few months before he would himself die of a heroin overdose at the age of 21. Continue Reading →
Fear the Invisible Man
Leigh Whannell's follow-up to Upgrade is a chilling, Hitchcockian thriller about the ways trauma follows us around.
Six months after I moved in with my girlfriend's parents after college, I packed up my things and left one day while she was at work. Scratch that -- escaped. Her parents even helped me load my car. They knew I wasn't happy, and they hated seeing what was happening to me. I was trapped, emotionally (and in one or two cases, physically) abused; she literally would not let me leave if I tried to break things off in person. The prospect of escape was freeing, but also terrifying; Would she come to get me? And worse, would I still have the tools to exist as myself? There would always be something of her, the way she made me feel powerless and isolated, that would linger on for years afterward. Sometimes, I still feel her lingering stare behind me, even when I know she's not there.
While Leigh Whannell's The Invisible Man channels the specifics of the way abusive men wield their power over women, the way it channels the dynamics of domestic abuse and intimate partner violence into a crackerjack sci-fi thriller shell resonated with me in ways I didn't expect.
As the film opens, we see Cecilia Kass (Elisabeth Moss) hatching a long-gestating escape plan from her boyfriend of three years, wealthy "optics" scientist Adrian Griffin (Oliver Jackson-Cohen). Sneaking out of his mannered, Silicon Valley-ornate villa in the dead of night, she barely makes it out alive with the help of her sister Emily (Harriet Dyer) and childhood friend James (Aldis Hodge), the latter of whom lets her lay low at his house with young daughter Sydney (Storm Reid). Weeks later, they hear some shocking news: Adrian has committed suicide, and in one final power move, he bequeaths a $5 million inheritance to her, contingent on her avoiding criminal prosecution or mental distress. At long last, her nightmare can finally end. Continue Reading →