On demand: "Sleep"

Sleep is a Korean chiller conceived after the fashion of the Japanese genre master Kiyoshi Kurosawa. Writer-director Jason Yu presents us with an aspirational couple - he (Parasite's Lee Sun-kyun, in his penultimate role before his death last year) a jobbing actor, she (Jung Yu-mi) a pregnant executive of some kind - who share one of those ultra-cosy movie apartments that typically signal trouble to come. The trouble here transpires to be a not so little matter of insomnia. He wakes her up with a nasty start, then begins sleepwalking and clawing at his own face; soon, he's spending the wee small hours threatening to propel himself out of the window and doing for the pair's pet Pomeranian. (And all this before the baby arrives.) Very quickly, it becomes apparent that sleep deprivation, in this extreme case, stands for all those other niggles that prevent the brain from shutting down at night: her pre-emptive concerns about bringing new life into an uncertain world, his insecurities pertaining to his looks and career. Yu shows us the image of a perfect life in a dream home, and then begins to fill it with weakspots that threaten to undermine its very foundations.

The movie that results is as self-contained as that flat - those looking for another Parasite will likely be underwhelmed - but it allows Yu to maintain a tight focus and push here and there towards a heightened idea of interiority. If Kurosawa forms one influence, the Polanski of Repulsion, Rosemary's Baby and The Tenant looks to have been another, as evidenced in streaks of varyingly black humour: the new father seeking alternative locations to catch a few stray zeds, the cutaways to a wall-mounted platitude ("Together We Can Overcome Anything"), the blue-haired mystic whose presence suggests this might in fact be a supernatural snafu. It's drolly funny that the couple's sleep vacillates, as if they've been set to competing against one another for the same seven hours of shuteye, though Yu isn't much interested in tormenting his characters: these actors are too likable, and we want them to work this thing out. Still, Sleep gets dreamier and more discombobulating as it goes on, with sequences that count as waking nightmares. The chi-chi projector the couple use to watch TV on in the first reel gets repurposed in the last for an infernal PowerPoint presentation given by one driven out of their mind; the electric drill used to secure the flat's fittings is eventually reached for as a threat. Mostly, Yu proceeds with a spare style and quiet intelligence that proves all the more compelling for being so lightly worn.

Sleep is currently available to rent via Prime Video, Curzon Home Cinema, YouTube and the BFI Player.

House of the devil: "Heretic"

A24 have done some radical things within the horror space, some more successful than others artistically, others undeniable hits. Yet Heretic feels to me like the most radical undertaking of the lot: they've lured in the multiplex crowd to sit through a movie on free will and doctrinal deviation, the big sickos. This example of New Horror from the lawyerly-sounding partnership of (Scott) Beck and (Bryan) Woods (who came to prominence with their script for 2018's A Quiet Place and subsequently directed last year's 65) opens with a scene that recalls the horrors of yore: young actresses (Chloe East and Sophie Thatcher) cast as debatably plausible Mormon missionaries, discussing penis size and pornography in a manner that really suggests joshing bro screenwriters hunting a grabby opening for a stealthier, more insinuating script. The latter's rawest material actually has far less to do with the flesh than it does with the spirit. The last stop on the girls' rounds, this ominously dingy night, is the isolated home of one Mr. Reed, played by Hugh Grant with a terse smile and both the wardrobe and unsettling mien of a pass-agg religious studies teacher. Though Reed almost literally turns cartwheels to ease his guests' initial fears - around crossing an unfamiliar threshold with only one another and a pocketful of pamphlets to protect them - we know where the film is heading in some respects: young women at the mercy of a creepy guy. Yet the scriptural debate that comprises the bulk of the film's first forty minutes would also seem to indicate our heroines' chosen path has some significance. What we've been gathered here to witness is as much test of faith as it is a test of mettle and nerve, and even the fact these characters wind up fumbling around in the dark invites allegorical reading: this, too, will be an ecumenical matter.

Beck and Woods pursue it with craft, conviction and a giant scoop of crazy, all the things you thought had gone missing from American movies. The craft becomes evident with each pirouette this camera makes around a house designed like a boobytrap, one in which features glimpsed in passing will prove lifesaving or damning. The talky script sets up a debate and commits to it; the theological aspect isn't mere window-dressing, but as integral to the structure and action as it was to the William Peter Blatty-derived The Exorcist and The Ninth Configuration. Yet the film's secret weapon is that element of absurdity one finds in some religions and the best popcorn cinema. We may just have to swallow the notion that this cosy, chuckling old duffer owns multiple editions of Monopoly, can tell us what Radiohead's "Creep" owes to The Hollies, and knows who Jar Jar Binks is. But we do, because Grant is on exceptional, possibly even career-best form, playing a character who is at once Richard Dawkins, a carnival barker for this script's wilder swings, and a figure recognisable as part of a British comic tradition: the pedant going to extreme lengths to prove an arguably arcane point. Grant has become increasingly adept at sniffing out roles that might also serve as showcases (cf. his rogues in recent Guy Ritchies, and the dastardly Phoenix Buchanan in Paddington 2); here, he brings a rare precision of charm and gesture to that conversion process. It's the mockingly slight downturn of his mouth as he introduces an idea "that might make you want to die"; it's the pitch of his voice as he offers an otherwise humdrum "sorry for the cold". He casually tosses a piece of chalk from one hand to the other, and transforms it into a mini-metaphor for the girls' short, fragile lives. Even if you don't buy all of Heretic's ideas, even if you don't consider yourself as having a dog in this fight, such quasi-miraculous work and godly attention to detail can't help but win you round somehow. I became aware I was grinning around the halfway point, and that grin only broadened in the second as the proposition Beck and Woods make their viewers became ever more dazzlingly clear: what if the Saw movies were as fun to watch as the average episode of Taskmaster?

Heretic is currently playing in cinemas nationwide.

Dark habits: "Small Things Like These"

Cillian Murphy has now reached such a level of stardom that his first venture post-Oppenheimer, an independently produced drama on the subject of the Magdalene laundries run by the Catholic Church in Ireland, is presently outperforming awards season heavy-hitters like this year's Palme d'Or winner Anora and Steve McQueen's Blitz. I'm reviewing Small Things Like These later than expected, in part because two earlier public screenings I'd aimed to attend sold out, suggesting widespread fascination with either the subject matter or the source material (Claire Keegan's Booker-nominated 2021 novel, here adapted for the screen by Enda Walsh). Or - more likely - it was some combination of these and the growing draw of Murphy, again found burrowing assiduously yet unflashily beneath a character's skin. A coalman in rural Wexford in the last years when coalman was still a viable profession (the early-to-mid 1980s), Murphy's Bill Furlong is a generous, loving husband and father and responsible, hard-working citizen, one of the little people who keep a nation going. Yet as Tim Mielants' film joins Bill, it's also clear that something's not right. The guy can't sleep at night; he's distracted at the dinner table; and his tendency to disconnect and drift off indicates he has something weighty and urgent on his mind, the kind of concerns cameras and flashbacks were invented to reveal. Keegan previously authored the novel The Quiet Girl, source of one of the biggest sleeper hits in recent Irish cinema. Small Things Like These, which bears out a similar methodology, would invite rechristening as The Quiet Man, were that title not already taken.

What's been set around Bill Furlong is in itself the definition of muted. Mielants, the Belgian who made the terrific nudist-camp character study Patrick and worked with Murphy on Peaky Blinders, makes choices that forever point towards the titular diminutions. A narrow frame, the better to describe narrow, penned-in lives; the fast-fading light of November, December and January; lots of peering through windows at rooms that sorely need coal to sustain any brightness or warmth. Two decades ago, the actor-turned-director Peter Mullan enjoyed a crossover hit with The Magdalene Sisters, a period drama on the same topic that was never less than grabby, often punchy, and in places bordered on exploitation. Mielants' film, by contrast, is insistently recessive; its primary sites of interest and conflict aren't the laundries but the hollows under Murphy's eyes and cheekbones. Crucially, we follow the actor into these dark places: as we see and hear what Bill does, we come to know what he does, and thus better understand the OCD-level handwashing and panic attacks. We, too, feel the chill as the dead of winter blows in. The box-office success comes as an even greater surprise once you've seen the film, which is a far tougher proposition than the sunny, genial The Quiet Girl: the distributors have had to prioritise stars over quotes on the poster because, as critical recommendations go, "bleak and unsparing" doesn't sell tickets, even prefixed with a mitigating "admirably". Looking round at the pensioners cramming into my Saturday matinee, I was struck by one more thing, which may be no small thing indeed: has the Church done so much damage over the years that folks gravitate to a film like this to help them navigate their own traumas?

Small Things Like These is now playing in selected cinemas.

For what it's worth...

UK box office Top Ten (for the weekend of November 8-10, 2024):

1 (new) Paddington in Peru (PG)

2 (new) Red One (12A)

3 (3) Heretic (15) ****

4 (2) Venom: The Last Dance (15)

5 (1) The Wild Robot (U) **

6 (4) Small Things Like These (12A) ***

7 (5) Smile 2 (18)

8 (new) Blitz (12A) *****

9 (6) Anora (18) ***

10 (new) Piece by Piece (PG)

(source: BFI)

My top five:

1. Blitz

2. Point Break

3. Dahomey

4. Four Unloved Women, Adrift on a Purposeless Sea, Experience the Ecstasy of Dissection

5. Juror #2

 

DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

1 (1) Deadpool & Wolverine (15) *

2 (2) It Ends with Us (15)

3 (new) Joker: Folie à Deux (15) **

4 (4) Despicable Me 4 (U)

5 (new) The Substance (18) **

6 (3) Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (12)

7 (re) Alien: Romulus (15) ***

8 (12) Borderlands (12)

9 (5) Twisters (12) ***

10 (new) Deadpool: Triple Pack (15) **

(source: officialcharts.com)

My top five: 
1. Evil Does Not Exist

2. Didi

3. Late Night with the Devil

4. Twisters

5. A Quiet Place: Day One

 

Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:

1. The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (Saturday, BBC2, 1.30pm)

2. 48HRS. [above] (Friday, Channel 4, 1.05am)

3. Mission: Impossible (Saturday, ITV1, 4pm and Friday, ITV1, 11pm)

4. X+Y (Saturday, BBC2, 12.30am)

5. I Know Where I'm Going! (Saturday, BBC2, 4.10pm)

The Empire strikes back: "Gladiator II"

Unlike the 94-year-old Clint Eastwood, the 86-year-old Sir Ridley Scott seems to have no trouble getting his films into cinemas, promoted and seen. As much businessman as creative, Scott clearly speaks modern boardroom lingo fluently; moreover, and this may best explain his popularity among today's studio executives, he's demonstrated no qualms whatsoever about regarding his own back catalogue as endlessly recyclable IP, as borne out by recent developments in the Alien and Blade Runner franchises, and now by Gladiator II, or GladIIator, as the onscreen title rather awkwardly has it. A bellicose film for bellicose times, the sequel could as easily trade under the title Son of Gladiator: it opens with a hand sifting grain rather than stalks in a cornfield, centralises lineage in its narrative, and continually returns to spectacle that shares its visual DNA with that of the 2000 original. Yet unlike the Alien and Blade Runner follow-ups and footnotes, which often laboured overtime to arrive at novel conceptual twists, Gladiator II is relatively straightforward blockbuster fare, determining to replicate the character arcs and thunderous strengths of its massively successful predecessor; scenes you recall from the first movie land in much the same place as you remember them landing almost a quarter of a century ago. One notable piece of team news: for the no longer battle-hardened Russell Crowe, we instead have rapidly promoted Covid holdover Paul Mescal upfront in the role of Lucius, a loving husband who sees his archer wife offed by a Roman arrow in the opening naval set-to. Captured and sold into slavery, Lucius must thereafter channel the rage and nobility of those of us watching on from the cheap seats, ourselves obliged to spend our waking hours fighting for our lives within a society and a system that shows scant mercy.

Much as even a buffed-and-bearded Mescal doesn't quite map onto the contours of Crowe in his starmaking role, GladIIator can feel callow in comparison with Gladiator. That latter was produced at a time when it was still possible for a director to cast grizzled veterans of mid-20th century stage and screen (Oliver Reed, David Hemmings, Richard Harris) who seemed to have internalised decades of big, brawny character acting. As with modern Hollywood, this Rome is being run by kids (Joseph Quinn, Fred Hechinger), although Scott's saving grace remains his fondness for seasoned performers, here used to bulk out the prevailing palace intrigue. In a role that overlaps with both the Reed and Joaquin Phoenix characters from the original, Denzel Washington is all brisk, chuckling, notionally bisexual authority, working up an unlikely but fun double-act with Tim McInnerny as a weak-willed senator. Scott gets this movie into the arena earlier - he knows full well what he's selling - but the brutal hand-to-hand combat of the Crowe era has been trumped by more pixellated forms of activity: men vs. feral monkeys, men vs. rhinos, men vs. sharks, the sort of setpieces that might have featured in a direct-to-DVD Gladiator knock-off from The Asylum in 2001. If you're anything like me, you may begin to wonder how much of this script (by David Scarpa) is formed of ideas rejected first time around on the grounds of being more silly than mythic. It's watchable enough - unlike Scott's ill-judged Napoleon, there's never a dull moment - and delivers the scale and spectacle one might expect from a Gladiator movie, but increasingly it begins to feel like an echo of the original. 24 years on, we're even further away from what these movies once meant to Hollywood, travelling in the direction of pastiche.

Gladiator II is now showing in cinemas nationwide.

On demand: "Aattam/The Play"

2024 was the year in which the Malayalam cinema belatedly underwent its #MeToo moment, with the publication in August of the Hema Committee report into abuses of power within the industry. Writer-director Anand Ekarshi's slowburn drama Aattam/The Play, which opened in India at the end of 2023 and worldwide this January, now appears to pre-empt the report's line of thinking and interrogation. Ekarshi's raw materials here are the tensions that ripple through a successful touring theatre troupe after leading lady Anjali (Zarin Shihab) accuses a recent recruit, a married film actor renowned for his portrayal of villains, of having groped her at an afterparty. The conversations that break out among the ensemble begin to echo those being had in wider society: some of Anjali's fellow performers don't believe her, quibbling with or casting doubts on her story; others threaten to have the accused beaten up; others still point the finger at a heavy drinking culture within the group, insisting everyone needs to clean up their act. What's immediately notable is that the decision of how best to proceed will be taken in-house, and almost exclusively by the troupe's men, assuming the new roles of judge, jury and potential executioner.

What follows, over two-and-a-bit hours, is a model of movie naturalism: actors you've probably never seen before suggesting very distinct personalities while engaging in conversation that sounds, from first scene to last, like real-world conversation. This may be an even stronger ensemble, all told, than that which powered the spring crossover hit Manjummel Boys. We are, after all, watching less heralded actors playing less heralded actors, the alleged villain of the piece demonstrating a charm and clubbability that has evidently carried his character a rung or two higher up the showbiz ladder, but then every face appears right for the role. While it's still mostly men - Anjali is shuttled offstage for much of the middle stretch - a) that's the industry, and b) the tactic allows Ekarshi to get to how men work these things out together: how they justify, excuse, downplay and enable aberrant behaviour, how quick they are to anger, how often they shirk their responsibilities. (One potential pitch: it's Oleanna done as Glengarry Glen Ross.) Ekarshi sees and dramatises how tricky it is to hold firm in these situations when there are professional benefits (sizeable cheques, European tours) to turning a blind eye; crucially, he understands how essential it is that these men do hold firm. Above all else, Aattam demonstrates how fascinating conversation in itself can be on screen when it's this urgent and necessary; when the speaking parts are invested with depth and cast to perfection, and directed to a rare level of precision. Quietly brilliant and insinuating, and right up there with the best films in the world on this especially fraught moment in male-female relations.

Aattam is now streaming via Prime Video.

In memoriam: Jordan Klein Sr. (Telegraph 12/11/24)

Jordan Klein Sr., who has died aged 98, was an Oscar-winning cinematographer who eased James Bond’s passage into a wetsuit with his underwater photography on Thunderball (1965), Live and Let Die (1973) and Never Say Never Again (1983).

With the first of these, the newly minted spy franchise expanded its horizons, plunging headfirst into the waves from which Ursula Andress had emerged in Dr. No (1962) and thereby assimilating the subaquatic spectacle of Jacques Cousteau’s immersive nature documentaries. Schemer-in-chief Emilio Largo (Adolfo Celi) had a floating lair, a boat called the Disco Volante; the Vulcan bomber he'd hijacked was buried on the ocean floor.

Klein, a diver and engineer who had built protective camera housings for MGM’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954) and a reliable reputation with work on TV’s Sea Hunt (1958-61) and Flipper (1964-67), was deputised to oversee the underwater sequences. As Director of Underwater Engineering, his duties extended from ensuring performer safety to building fully functional props, including the underwater jetpack worn by Sean Connery’s 007.

“I remember I said to [production supervisor] David Middlemas, ‘What is he going to have that was like the briefcase from From Russia with Love [1963] and the rest of that stuff?’,” Klein recalled in 2009. “He said if I could build it and have it there for Monday morning, they would pay what I was asking […] So I jumped on a plane on Friday afternoon and worked steady all weekend and [got] back Monday at 8.45 and gave [the jetpack] to them… I wish I had kept one of them.”

Connery, Klein revealed, “really didn’t like diving all that much”, but there were other reasons for showing up: “The best part of the day was heading back to the dock after a day working with the girls. They would change out on deck as if they were one of the guys!” More perks followed: making $141m off a $9m budget, Thunderball outstripped its predecessors at the box office, and won a Visual Effects Oscar.

Jordan Klein was born December 1, 1925 in Cleveland, Ohio, yet at an early age, his family relocated to Miami, where he began diving as a teenager: “We built our own breathing equipment. We used five-gallon steel milk cans for our diving helmet, soldering on a port… [we] cut a donut out of an inner tube and made a little copper ring that would hold a piece of glass in the front and put that on for a facemask.”

A mischievous child, Klein was sent to military school and served in the Navy during WW2. After the War, he opened a surf shop in Florida and invested in a former PT boat, the Arbalete, to take tourists out on dives. Even with the illustrious patronage of Cary Grant and Errol Flynn, however, Klein realised “it would be tough to earn any serious money running a dive boat for the rest of my life.”

Alternative revenue streams were sought, with some success. Klein’s waterproof housing for stills cameras sold 19,000 units in branches of Woolworths; in 1967, Klein teamed with Cousteau to patent the CryoLung, a liquid-oxygen breathing device that sustained divers three times longer than was then the norm.

Once Hollywood came calling, Klein oversaw the wetter work on The Day of the Dolphin (1973) and Night Moves (1975), as well as Live and Let Die’s shark sequences: “We understood the psychology of a specific shark after working with him for just a few minutes. The psychology was different for almost every one of them. Fortunately, we could outthink them.”

On Never Say Never Again, an unofficial reworking of Thunderball, he was promoted following early production blunders: “We almost got thrown out of the park in Freeport Bahamas when the pilot hit some stalagmites and stalactites in a cave and broke them. The whole world came to an end as far as the ecologically minded people were concerned. So they told me, ‘You run the thing!’”

Later projects included Jaws 3-D (1983), Splash (1983) and Cocoon (1985); in 2002, Klein received a Technical Achievement Oscar for “his pioneering efforts in the development and application of underwater camera housings for motion pictures”. His final credit was The Celestine Prophecy (2006), a Dan Brown-inspired indie filmed in Florida, Costa Rica and Puerto Rico, passing for the Peruvian rainforest.

By then, cheap, flexible digital filmmaking was replacing the expensive business of shooting on film, though Klein professed a fondness for the latter: “In the old days, I’ve had my camera fill almost all the way up with saltwater and… by two o’clock in the morning, the camera is back running. As long as the optics hadn’t gotten screwed up, I was a happy camper; I knew I could get it to run the next morning.”

He is survived by Lori, his wife of 35 years; by a son, Jordan Klein Jr., himself a specialist in underwater photography; and by three stepchildren.

Jordan Klein Sr., born December 1, 1925, died October 1, 2024.