From the archive: "Princess Mononoke"

1997's Princess Mononoke was among the first films to bring Hayao Miyazaki's Studio Ghibli to the attention of viewers in the West, chiefly the US, where it was bought up by Disney and issued in a (fairly flat) English-language dub. A young prince, one of the last of his tribe, is doomed to die a slow death after a clash with a forest demon; his people subsequently send him out into the world to determine the demon's origins. Turns out it was riled up by a female despot - a skilfully drawn composite of all the real world's tyrants - who's dead set on keeping her people enslaved and mining the forest for its natural resources. It's down to the prince and a rebel leader known as The Wolf Princess to ensure justice prevails. Truth be told, Princess Mononoke is a little po-faced about pursuing this particular line, with not much of the magic and wonder that lit up the later Spirited Away, and some very literal-seeming business about "the hatred growing inside of you". In the absence of Ghibli's usual narrative rapture, you find yourself admiring Miyazaki's facility with landscapes anew. There are precious few animators, one would suggest, capable of dreaming up such very wild wildlife - disgruntled wild boars covered in a thick fur of squirming fire-eels, pocket-sized white bugs with heads that rotate like eggtimers - yet Miyazaki also has a way of putting serenity up on screen like no other filmmaker, simply by refusing to clutter his soundtrack with the whistles and bells that now come as standard in American animation. We're often left here with no greater stimuli than the rustling of leaves, the chirruping of crickets and the flow of running water: tiny but vital signifiers of the natural order warmongers and industrialists alike come to despoil.

(March 2007)

Princess Mononoke opens in selected cinemas from October 17.

Computer love: "Materialists"

Whether you embraced it or not (and I couldn't quite), Celine Song's much-admired breakthrough film Past Lives was a small, wispy affair, informed by palpably close personal experience, which dramatised nothing more nor less than people passing like ships in the night. Her follow-up Materialists has grander designs: here, Song intends to use the money and clout Past Lives made available to her to update the Sophisticated New York Romance and triangulate from her characters' uncertain movements Something Profound About Modern Love. Her three key players run into one another at a society wedding where the cake is taller than most of the invitees; they proceed from there to conversations in well-appointed, tastefully lit bars and restaurants. Dakota Johnson's Lucy is a pragmatic singleton and high-end matchmaker who thinks nothing of reducing her clients to a set of stats (age, height, takehome pay, etc.) Her head will be turned, however, by the Internet's favourite boyfriends, cast as suitors representing wildly different prospects. Pedro Pascal's Harry is a private equity player who offers something new and distinguished; statistically, he'd be a good match for anyone. Chris Evans' John, by marked contrast, is a jobbing actor and part-time waiter with whom Lucy has chemistry and - crucially - history, notably a brief fling our heroine terminated once it became apparent this bum had no money. As set-ups for romcoms go, this one feels more than most like an equation any smart writer-director would be keen to take a crack at balancing.

Clearly, Song's intention was to broaden her demographic by expanding out from the specificity Past Lives represented to something much more generalised. (You could watch all this summer's event movies and not see a more calculated endeavour.) The trouble with Materialists is that it proves a great deal more remote, too. The film opens with a 2001-like prologue in which we witness the wooing of cavedwellers, the idea presumably being to flag how we've complicated the processes of courtship over centuries of evolution. Yet despite being thousands of years detached in time from these first, fumbling lovers, I still felt closer to them than I did to the characters in the feature proper, who at almost every turn struck me as creatures from another planet entirely. It's not just the money involved, though that's certainly a part of it: amid a succession of set-ups that resemble advertorial features in our glossier Sunday supplements, Lucy and Harry are at one point seen to occupy a bed the size of an Arctic ice floe. It's how they act and, more specifically yet, how they talk: in the brittle, strident terms people use on social media. (They don't discuss, they discourse.) A24 are clearly generous backers with stuffed contact books, a dream for any emergent filmmaker trying to vault the ever-growing chasm between the indie fringes and the movie mainstream, but my God could they do with a more rigorous script editor, who might have struck out some of the hogwash and hooey in which Materialists trades. 

One pivotal plot point (people having their legs surgically broken and reset in order to gain inches in height) is evidently something Song has read about on the Internet and convinced herself is an actual thing regular folks are doing every day; I understand why she's worked in a sexual-assault subplot - to flag the dangers of modern mating - but it sits uneasily with the moneyed blandness that is the film's default setting. The film often seems as muddleheaded as its own characters, which is not as appealing as it sounds. What Materialists demonstrates more than anything is just how haywire our movie development processes have gone. Whether it's producers turning a blind eye to this nonsense in order to bask in the reflected glory that comes with backing a much-laurelled creative, or critics incessantly waving their pompoms for a brand, a director or their favourite stars, what we've been left with here is one of those sophomore features that only underlines the flaws in a semi-promising first film. Twice now, Song has presented us with characters and relationships that would only pass for credible when taken in isolation, in a screenwriter-engineered vacuum; hold them up to the harsh light of the real world, and they begin to melt away like vampires at sunrise. There probably still is a market for Materialists: with its chichi interiors and largely vibes-based performances, it's the kind of film that gets embraced by folks who want to pass as more sophisticated than they actually are. The cycles of discourse will be sustained, most likely in those same glossy Sunday supplements ("Meet the Real-Life Materialists!"), as if a film and a creative could have no higher aim. But - man alive - is all this exasperating to have to sit through: if this is modern movie love, and if this tepid vapidity is what the American independent sector has been reduced to, give me Matthew McConaughey leaning on Kate Hudson every damn time.

Materialists opens in cinemas nationwide today.

On demand: "Harvest"

Were you feeling generous, you might approach the so-called Greek Weird Wave as less a helpful marketing catch-all than a cinematic mutation of anthropology, some of its core texts being better observed and more insightful than others. Athena Rachel Tsangari has so far specialised in droll portraits of community: the girls behaving badly of 2010's Attenberg, the oceanbound manosphere (or ship of fools) of 2015's Chevalier, my favourite among that initial package of Greek exports. In Harvest, which sees Tsangari using Jim Crace's 2013 novel of the same name to guide her passage into English-speaking arthouse terrain, the filmmaker's gaze turns to another century and world entirely: an agrarian enclave in the British North of the Middle Ages, caught collapsing and disappearing before our very eyes. We join these hapless homesteaders just as their barn burns down, fuelling whispers that the coming harvest will be too weak to sustain their presence on this land, and meet two leadership contenders with differing ideas of the best way to proceed. Charles Kent (Harry Melling) is a terse, beady-eyed social architect, the first to lead any outsiders reaching this patch to the stocks; by contrast, Walter Thirsk (Caleb Landry Jones) is a hairy weirdo who roams the land as though he either has something grander on his mind or is completely away with the fairies. You can argue where these figures would fall on the modern political spectrum and which latter-day statesmen they most resemble, because Tsangari, like Crace before her, is doing everything within her grasp to dissolve the boundaries between past, present and future. These characters are fearful of others, buffeted by the elements, vulnerable to capital and starved of any vision for a better future; in many ways, they're meant to be read as Just Like Us, Really.

The film they populate stands as another example of that late-breaking method of adaptation that regards source material as both blueprint for and permission to build a theme park based on it. (One way of approaching it: as a cross between Villeneuve's Dune and Kevin Brownlow's Winstanley, or between Andrew Kötting's Zola-informed This Filthy Earth and Lars von Trier's The Idiots.) Harvest's strongest element is Nathan Parker's judicious, budget-conscious production design: it uses a few deft strokes at the edge of a field in Oban to carry us all back several centuries. The actors, a mix of adventurous emergent faces (Melling, Frank Dillane, Rosy McEwen, Thalissa Teixeira) and carefully sifted extras, are given their head to wander as they will and do more or less what they like, though the grimy Love Island vibe is occasionally disrupted by jolting rituals: business with masks and firepits that inevitably recalls The Wicker Man, the enforced bumping of heads against boundary stones. (No wonder everyone's so dizzy; here is a community at its most concussed.) The tactic proves immersive to a point, in that we're set down in the moment with characters who don't know how long that moment will last; Tsangari allows both the beauty of this spot and the uncertainty of those living off it to register. It's also perilously drifty, finally siding with Thirsk when it could badly do with a little more of Charles Kent's ruthlessness. Chevalier was governed by its characters' competitive streak: an Olympics for willy wagglers, it got funnier the more absurd it got. (It gave itself a goal, and somewhere to go.) This far glummer undertaking feels closer to filming the kind of actors' bootcamp Mike Leigh puts his performers through behind closed doors before honing a definitive script: from a dramatic viewpoint, it's more preparatory field study, tentatively sowing seeds, than especially fruitful harvest. By refusing to clear a decisive path through this territory, Tsangari instead strands us in the long grass alongside directionless characters doomed to turn in circles before disappearing from sight. (The film's first image - a raised hand sinking into sallow waves of corn - could just as easily be its last; nobody's getting anywhere.) Long, slow downward spirals tend to make for more absorbing novels than motion pictures; here, we're left watching the life drain out of this community like muddy water circling a drain. Tsangari's commitment to this piece of land is such that her film, too, emerges as terminally underdeveloped.

Harvest is now streaming via MUBI.

The trigger effect: "Weapons"

Zach Cregger is shaping up as the current American horror renaissance's narrative strategist-in-chief. His breakthrough film, 2022's Barbarian, was founded on two seemingly unrelated plotlines that dovetailed at a critical juncture; his follow-up Weapons is more of a mosaic-movie, endlessly triangulating new information from the stories tesselating around its spooky centre. It has a terrific inciting incident, announcing what would appear to be the collective influence of the various It adaptations, an older, Grimmer strain of bedtime story, and the Crash Test Dummies' "Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm": at precisely 2:17 one morning, an entire class of eight and nine year olds emerge from their homes, their arms raised to their shoulders like puppets-on-strings or playground Spitfires, to run unseen into the night. (It's one of recent horror cinema's most lyrical openings: an irrational image of total liberation.) The kids' disappearance can't, this time, be pinned on a vengeful clown, so the focus shifts onto those left behind, smalltown folks who don't need much prompting to start pointing fingers and assigning blame. Class teacher Justine (Julia Garner) becomes the initial figure of suspicion, incurring abusive phone calls, having "WITCH" painted on her car and being placed on indefinite leave. Ordinarily, she'd have our sympathies wrapped up, but Garner, an excellent performer who could well do with a hit such as this on her CV, instead makes Justine wiry and frazzled: she takes to drink, pushes away those who care most for her, and makes life doubly difficult for her employer (Benedict Wong) by following untouched pupils home from school. When bad things happen in life, it's how we respond to them that defines us; when bad things happen in Weapons, and they often do, how the characters react shapes and reshapes the film.

Justine's, it transpires, is one of multiple stories being told here, and through this compartmentalisation Cregger can maintain the element of surprise that elevated his previous film. (Which is a handy point for a critic to wave you off to the multiplex if you want to experience Weapons unspoiled; this review will be waiting for you on your return.) This camera, Cregger's own finger of suspicion, will also be pointed at Archer (Josh Brolin), a grief-stricken parent who counts among Justine's most vocal accusers; a beat cop (Alden Ehrenreich) who, in his own shrugging way, gets dragged into the case of the missing children; Wong's headmaster; a drug addict (Austin Abrams) who's picked the worst possible week to drift through town; and an orange-wigged weirdo (Amy Madigan) with an uncanny knack of turning people against one another. Some early responders have cited Rashomon, with its constantly shifting perspectives, as a possible point of reference; structurally, however, Weapons struck this viewer as owing an even greater debt to Altman's Short Cuts, another kaleidoscopic ensemble piece rotating around the loss of a child. An actor before he turned filmmaker, improvising his way to semi-prominence with the troupe known as The Whitest Kids U' Know, Cregger writes the type of roles actors love to play: neither obvious monsters nor innocent victims, and generally withholding some secret, big or small, from us. He's stuck an ace up everybody's sleeve, which the film can whip out and itself play at some point; as a consequence, Weapons proves one of those horror movies where plot feels less significant to the overall design than characters we're invested in and prepared to follow down deep dark holes (or into housing equivalents of same).

Sporadically, however, we get a hint that Cregger is reaching for something more substantial than cheap multiplex thrills: it's there in the title, in one staggering dreamtime image of a giant gun in the sky, its barrel timestamped with the moment these lives were changed forever, and maybe even in the choice of posters in the bedroom of Archer's son ("Bombs Away", "Fury Road"). Where Barbarian was a small, well-turned tale of the unexpected, Weapons feels vastly more expansive, a vision of American society at least as informed by successive high-school massacres and the losses of Covid as 28 Years Later was by Brexit. Cregger's ambition, it strikes me, is to draw a connecting line between unprocessed grief and violent anger. These characters have developed their own coping strategies (drink, drugs, conspiracy theories); yet no-one's really addressing the issue of the missing children, so loss curdles rapidly into frustration and rage. Everybody's triggered: it allows Weapons to feel zeitgeisty without getting unduly literal or specific about it. (There's no social media, crucially.) Does it matter that the new film is as glib around America's collective weight of trauma as Barbarian was around #MeToo? The gloss this filmmaker paints over his constructions may be diverting and surprising, but the one thing Weapons isn't is moving in any way, and the film visibly shrinks when its own finger reaches its final destination. (From everybody's responsibility, all this is suddenly the doing of one old crone who can be easily conquered and divided.) Still, the journey to that point is weird, funny, surreal, jolting, never dull, and more than a little cuckoo; the film is both an unusual delivery mechanism for jumpscares and very much of a moment where we're having to process scrambled thoughts and feelings on the run, on an hour-by-hour, story-by-story basis. Equal parts grand gesture and fairground ride, Weapons is essentially Cregger's Magnolia, though it may also be his Southland Tales.

Weapons is now playing in cinemas nationwide.

On demand: "True Things"

Much like Joanna Hogg's celebrated The Souvenir, Harry Wootliff's 2021 drama True Things found a female British director working something (or some things) through within the tight confines of an Academy ratio frame with the assistance of BBC Films funding and Tom Burke in the role of unreliable male. The source this time isn't specifically personal reminiscence but the emotions stirred up, possibly reactivated by Deborah Kay Davies' novel True Things About Me. Ruth Wilson is the dreamy, distractible support worker for those on parole in the Ramsgate area; Burke's raffish, bleached-blond charmer the only one of her clients to treat her with anything other than contempt, which hardly marks him out as a great catch. Still, it's an obvious thrill when he offers her a lift home from work one Friday night, and thereafter the prospect of a quickie in a multistorey carpark: here is the kind of transgression that generally gets snuffed out by working in an office and adhering to the proper protocols. Here, too, the kind of risk that can be every bit as endangering as it is a turn-on: even amidst this first, broadly ecstatic encounter, we note that he throws her in such a way as to bump her head against the multistorey's concrete wall. The first of many truths Wootliff's film throws up: in love, as in other fields, caution must be exercised.

It is, then, a cautionary tale, but - again not unlike The Souvenir - True Things never feels as overbearing as that term would imply, so alert is Wootliff to the minutiae of her characters' lives. The focus is as narrow as the frame, but those occupying the frame seem real, palpable, tangible. Wilson in particular, dialling down her usual emotional intelligence to give us a woman so starved for attention (and touch) that she's left herself vulnerable to any passing bounder, and started setting her most delicate eggs in this most rough-hewn of baskets. Even if you don't personally know anyone like this, you will almost certainly have read about them: throwing herself into this uncertain tryst, she risks at best terrible disappointment and heartbreak, at worst - you fear - the loss of several thousand pounds of savings, perhaps even her own life. Burke's brusque chancer appears so upfront we, too, could be persuaded he has nothing in the world to hide, but there are red flags apparent if you know how to interpret them: his shrugging disclosure of parental neglect, the big yawn he gives in response to her wish that things could stay this way forever, his tendency to disappear for long stretches, occasionally with her car. (His dismissive-defensive query "what are you trying to do, climb inside me?" would in itself suggest some resistance to the idea of becoming a vessel for her longing and insecurities.)

The actors complicate this bad-romance scenario, and our feelings. He's plainly a man after a shag; he's neither the first nor the last of those, which may well be why Wootliff increasingly films Burke as almost an abstract or fairytale figure, more spectre drifting in and out of this woman's grasp than fully fathomable, flesh-and-blood man. (Hard - not to mention silly - to pin all your romantic hopes on someone when they're basically thin air, a breeze prone to turning in a completely different direction.) She's someone you would have thought old enough to know better, but still she persists in digging a terribly deep hole; for some people, but relatively few movie characters, love can be an unhealthy addiction, a rabbit to be chased even if it scatters your bearings and the self-sufficiency required for self-worth. Wootliff's sympathies aren't entirely where you might expect them to be, which is noteworthy: she appears far more closely aligned with Hayley Squires as Wilson's more practical and responsible married colleague, or her harried heroine's parents, quietly content with a night sat in front of the telly. (But then all of these have somebody.) It makes for a prickly miniature, finally closer to Maren Ade's The Forest for the Trees and Catherine Breillat's Abuse of Weakness than it is to the Souvenirs: a film bound to spark frustration in viewers hoping for an easier ride and provoke fractious post-viewing conversation, even as it lives up to the promise of honesty made by its title. Nobody on screen comes out of True Things especially well, but I suspect there will have been many more relationships like this - brief encounters, false projections, failed experiments - than there have been happily ever afters. Here is a rare Brit film that proceeds from a hard-won, slightly stinging wisdom: that we have all, at some time or another, been fools for love.

True Things is currently streaming on the iPlayer, and available to rent via Prime Video, the BFI Player and YouTube; a DVD is also available through Picturehouse Entertainment.

For what it's worth...

UK box office Top Ten (for the weekend of August 1-3, 2025):

1 (1) The Fantastic Four: First Steps (12A) **

2 (new) The Naked Gun (15) ***

3 (3) The Bad Guys 2 (PG)

4 (4) Jurassic World: Rebirth (12A)

5 (2) Superman (12A)

6 (new) Bring Her Back (18) ***

7 (6) Saiyaara (12A) ***

8 (5) F1 (12A) ***

9 (7) Smurfs (U)

10 (new) Chal Mera Putt 4 (12A)

(source: BFI)

My top five:

1. Amadeus

2. My Beautiful Laundrette

3. Friendship

4. Sense and Sensibility [above]

5. Weapons

  

DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

1 (new) How to Train Your Dragon (PG)

2 (14) Final Destination: Bloodlines (15) **

3 (1) Lilo & Stitch (U)

4 (4) A Minecraft Movie (PG)

5 (2) Sinners (15) ****

6 (8) Thunderbolts* (12)

7 (3) Ballerina (15)

8 (5) Wicked: Part One (PG) **

9 (11) Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy (15) **

10 (new) M3GAN 2.0 (15) **

(source: officialcharts.com)

My top five: 
1. Misericordia

2. Sinners

3. Black Bag

4. The Seed of the Sacred Fig

5. The Surfer

Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:

1. Casablanca (Sunday, BBC Two, 1.40pm)

2. Die Hard with a Vengeance (Saturday, BBC One, 10.20pm)

3. Back to the Future Part III (Saturday, BBC One, 3.35pm)

4. Us (Thursday, BBC One, 10.40pm)

5. Colette (Friday, BBC Two, 11pm)

On demand: "40 Acres"

Like M. Night Shyamalan's The Village before it, some tension exists in the Canadian-shot indie horror 40 Acres as to whether events are taking place in the past, the future or some alternative present. Making the case for the past: that historically loaded title, and the fact the main characters go by the equally loaded name of Freeman. A few spare lines of onscreen preamble sketch a dystopian future where a fungal parasite has wiped out the biosphere, leaving farmland - where folks can grow corn from scratch and rebuild a parallel black market, founded on weed and moonshine - as the most valuable and sought after territory in all of North America. When our farmers enter the picture, however, we get the first inklings of an alternative present: these multicultural homesteaders, driven out of urban population hubs by famine and led by Danielle Deadwyler on close-cropped badass form, find themselves newly targeted by rapacious white militia groups keen to take back this land while erasing all those living on it. The backdrop is one familiar from those Quiet Place movies and the recent 28 Years Later - a society that's collapsed and subsequently been reclaimed by nature, leaving homo sapiens to fight among itself. Yet the race angle renews and refreshes it. The Freemans practice Black Panther-like tribal rituals, and Deadwyler's Mama Freeman assigns her worker bees a formidable reading list; her Native American partner Galen (Michael Greyeyes) cites Luther Standing Bear in insisting "it is the mothers, not the warriors, who create a people and guide their destiny". 40 Acres would have felt more celebratory, and may have played in cinemas longer than a weekend, had Kamala won the election; as it is, the other candidate won, reframing this production overnight as something else: a striking parable of struggle and resistance, and of parenting in a harsh to murderously indifferent world.

Watching this measured mix of scenesetting, character development and woodland action, you start to wonder whether co-writer/director RT Thorne, making his feature debut after long years of apprenticing on music videos and serial television, has cagily hedged his bets: here is a story you feel could easily be repackaged into a Walking Dead-style cable TV pilot if it wasn't commissioned as a movie. (Or, indeed, vice versa.) Some of the film's considerable narrative detail strikes the eye as generic: Mama's eldest son Manny (Kataem O'Connor) is coming of age amid this hellscape, developing a dreamy fixation on the outsider girl he spies bathing at a nearby lake and thereby risking both the integrity of the farm and his guarded mother's wrath. The broader focus on a ragtag extended family - as distinct from the far tighter familial units of the Quiet Places - threatens to leave 40 Acres a little diffuse by comparison: at several junctures, Thorne feels obliged to cut away just when the intensity is building, not unlike a TV director juggling A and B plots. Approaching this world from a variety of angles does however foster an appropriately crouched and defensive atmosphere; unlike the hyper and somewhat distractible 28 Years Later, forever bouncing ahead to the next encounter in Danny Boyle's trademark Tiggerish style, Thorne allows us to soak up and properly feel the Freemans' fear of a world gone feral-wild. (Again, we might wonder whether this world reflects the past, the present or the future.) In her still relatively young big-screen career, Deadwyler has impressed in both serious awards-corridor drama (Till) and half-assed multiplex silliness (The Woman in the Yard). Here again, she proves a forceful and arresting centrepoint, getting us to share the psychic and emotional weight of all this struggle, and cutting through this script's soapier elements with a sharp look or word, or a knife to the thorax.

40 Acres is available to rent via Prime Video and YouTube.