From the archive: "Don't Breathe"

After a summer of indifferent remakes, afterthoughts and comic-book movies, the release of Don’t Breathe – currently the #1 film in the U.S. – has been greeted with understandable relief by critics and audiences alike. Countering all evidence that the major studios have simply run out of worthwhile ideas, here is an at least semi-original property – it has antecedents, but is based on nothing more than a script – sent forth without deafening advance fanfare: it’s been allowed to sneak up on us, in other words, and its movements have been engineered with twisted skill.

The stakes are established with admirable economy. Three punk kids in the impoverished suburbs of Detroit decide to forsake low-level breaking-and-entering for a major payday: swiping a rumoured six-or-seven figure sum from a safe inside the heavily fortified bolthole of a reclusive blind guy (Stephen Lang) who lost his sight in Iraq. You or I might start to hear alarm bells at this point, and they ring only louder when the kids encounter him out walking a vicious-looking guide dog; that’s even before we factor in that old legend about blind people and heightened senses.

Co-writer/director Fede Alvarez’s Evil Dead remake of 2013 was another of those projects you perhaps wouldn’t have expected too much from – but even there he was careful about establishing the perimeters of his world (working out why his idiot teens were in the woods) before throwing open the portals to hell. He does something similar here, offering deft thumbnail sketches of his key players: unrepentant hothead Money (Daniel Zovatto), the damaged Rocky (Jane Levy), and the more level-headed Alex (Dylan Minette), who’s only tagging along in the hope of getting himself out of Rocky’s friendzone and into her pants.

What follows, as the crooks obtain access to the property and disastrously fail to subdue the homeowner, is in essence a nimble-toed game of Grandmother’s Footsteps, a very buff Blind Man’s Buff: a lean exercise in suspense choreography in which our antiheroes take two steps forwards, then find themselves having to stand stock still in unshod feet – or otherwise take evasive steps back – as their enraged target lurches murderously around them. (I suspect the footage would look perilously silly without the soundtrack; having it there conceals the gripped silence playing out in the auditorium.)

Cue fun variations on this theme: one moment, we’re sneaking around a bathroom, the next a basement, sometimes with the lights on, occasionally with the lights off. (The dog’s outside, then all-in.) You might say the whole thing is itself a variant on 1967’s Wait Until Dark, although Alvarez shuffles our points of identification by casting the hulking Lang (Avatar’s hawk-in-chief) in the Audrey Hepburn role, and bringing us on side with his misguided, increasingly petrified invaders. (Another way of approaching Don’t Breathe: as a far better Jack the Giant Slayer movie than 2013’s Jack the Giant Slayer.)

Although Alvarez again commits to his splashes of gore, this is a more reined-in experience than Evil Dead, confined to the movements of anywhere between two and five players around the one set: it takes a wicked glee in overturning our expectations as to how many bodies are left around to hit the floor, even while Naaman Marshall’s very sturdy production design provides new nooks and crannies for camera and characters alike to retreat inside.

Such tight focus inevitably puts the emphasis back on performances, and after their blood-soaked collaboration on Evil Dead, Alvarez elicits another tenacious showing from Levy; he also coaxes a towering display of physicality from Lang, who’s basically acting inside his own movie, unable to see his co-stars while striving to feel (and take) them out.

If it’s a little nuts-and-boltsy – and, if you believe in the concept of the friendzone, has some funny-skewed ideas on how to get yourself out of it – everything lines up into the kind of ruthlessly efficient B-picture that’ll make for electric Friday or Saturday night viewing with the right jumpy crowd. Just try not to rattle or grind your popcorn too loudly. Or, indeed, choke on it.

(MovieMail, August 2016)

Don't Breathe screens on Film4 this Thursday at 11.40pm, and is currently available to rent via Prime Video; a sequel, Don't Breathe 2, opens in cinemas nationwide this Friday. 

From the archive: "Laughing Gravy"

1930's Laughing Gravy is The One With The Dog. (It's also the name of the dog.) 21 minutes, overseen by sure-handed Hal Roach employee James W. Horne, in which Laurel and Hardy attempt to hide their pet pooch from the landlord of their boarding house. It's a fine example of how this duo (and the creatives working hell for leather behind the camera) could find trouble in just about every inch of the one location, from Ollie plummeting into a water butt to Stan climbing the chimney to retrieve the restless dog from the roof. (The latter puts his bowler hat on just to go to the front door, like a soldier helmeting up before entering the combat arena.) Plenty of action and gags, along with one hall-of-fame comic pause as the stars stop to examine the landlord-shaped hole that has suddenly opened up in their kitchen door. Often overlooked in these shorts: some lovely, subtle acting, too, particularly in the closing sequence, where the promise of money threatens to split our heroes up, the dog is caught in the L&H equivalent of a tug-of-love custody battle, and Ollie slants his own bowler while trying to ascertain the details of the financial arrangement - a gesture as indelible and touching as any John Wayne swagger or Marlon Brando muscle flex.

(March 2005)

Laughing Gravy screens on Talking Pictures TV at 5.20pm tonight.

On TV: "Hog Wild", "Saps at Sea" and "Busy Bodies"

1930's Hog Wild, the opening salvo of this afternoon's Laurel & Hardy triple bill on Talking Pictures TV, has one of those can't-fail L&H set-ups: our heroes taking to the roof of Ollie's house to install an aerial ("Mrs. Hardy wants to get Japan"). A working definition of the phrase "topsy-turvy", it (unusually for this pair) starts stronger than it finishes - the closing five minutes are freewheeling, throwaway nonsense in, on and around Stan's car - but notice the stress the early routines place on the whereabouts of Ollie's hat (it's on his head all along, naturally): this is one scenario where the leads' signature bowlers assume a paramount importance as safety helmets. Ollie is bashed around the bonce with a frying pan, has a chimney brought down on him, and then repeatedly plunges into a duckpond, the pay-off to a high-wire act initiated by Stan's adoption of a pole as a balancing beam. Mind your heads.

Pick of the day, however, is 1940's Saps at Sea [above], L&H's final feature for Hal Roach, and a much underrated work in the canon: an hour of Hollywood Dadaism that commits to pushing a particular comic aesthetic as far as it can conceivably go. The set-up (perhaps inspired by off-camera reality) is that Ollie, nerves frazzled by years of hard graft, needs a little R&R. Inevitably, this proves in limited supply. There follows a symphony of loud noises: the opening ten minutes, in particular, have the sound of an avant-garde wager, to determine just how obnoxiously noisy a film can get whilst still being funny. The priceless prologue unfolds in the testing room of a horn manufacturing plant; a talking baby doll skews Dr. James Finlayson's diagnoses; and Ollie's flat is a riot of exploding doorbells, pops and bangs and crashes, an aural booby trap. It's as though, after ten years, the Roach team had finally got a handle on using sound for yuks; the "d'oh!" Finlayson emits after going face-first into the apartment door is as magnificent as any up to Blakey's in On the Buses.

Every element tossed inside the frame has been geared towards making the viewer smile or laugh, from the bit-part players (Ben Turpin as the cross-eyed plumber responsible for Ollie's wonky waterworks, Eddie Conrad as Stan's inanely smiling Italianate music teacher) through to gags with telephones (very Dada) and bananas (very Marx) and the walk-on role for a goat named Narcissus. Amazingly, there's some connecting tissue between all this mayhem, and when Stan, of all people, starts questioning the logic of Mother Hubbard (of "empty cupboard" notoriety), it's clear the leads have ascended onto another plane entirely. The second, shipbound half isn't quite so lively, introducting some humdrum narrative ballast in the form of an escaped convict, but the "sympathetic meal" Stan and Ollie rustle up for him - using a belt for bacon, string for spaghetti and sponge meatballs - is absolutely central to the whole, glorious jumble: this is a comedy of the senses, a screwy synesthesia.

1933's Busy Bodies begins well. Perhaps too well. A sunny day; Stan and Ollie out for a nice drive; a pleasant tune in the air. "Why, even you look bright!," Ollie remarks of his passenger. Cut to: what's waiting for them at their latest place of employment, a logmill. Buzzsaws; some early, rudimentary form of the forklift truck; long, impassable planks of wood. This is the short in which those bowlers made the most sense, affording the stars a limited protection from the hostilities of their environment. By now the pair had become masters of the form, and even those bits that threaten to go on a beat or two too long - such as Ollie getting wedged in a windowframe, or having a glue brush stuck to his chin - are given explosive and imaginative resolutions. It builds to ever more spectacular stuntwork - the chump receiving a barrel over his head for his troubles is an especially satisfying gag, and the topper, when it comes, is terrific - and even if the whole lacks the conceptual heft of the stars' very best shorts, it remains appropriately workmanlike: those whose funny bones are only lightly goosed will still find themselves nodding approvingly at the craft.

Hog Wild screens on Talking Pictures TV at 4pm today; Saps at Sea at 4.25pm; Busy Bodies at 5.35pm.

For what it's worth...

Top 10 films at the UK box office (for the weekend of July 30-August 1, 2021):

1 (new) The Suicide Squad (15)

2 (new) Jungle Cruise (12A)

3 (2) Space Jam: A New Legacy (U)

4 (3) The Croods 2: A New Age (U)

5 (1) Black Widow (12A) ***

6 (new) Spirit Untamed (U)

7 (4) Old (15)

8 (5) The Forever Purge (15)

9 (6) Fast & Furious 9 (12A)

10 (8) Peter Rabbit 2 (U)

(source: BFI)

My top five:

1. Summer of Soul (...or, When The Revolution Could Not Be Televised)

2. Limbo

3. Deerskin

4. Two of Us

5. Now, Voyager [above]

 

DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

1 (1) Peter Rabbit 2 (U)

2 (7) The Croods (U)

3 (3) Space Jam (U) ***

4 (8) Zack Snyder's Justice League (15)

5 (2) Peter Rabbit Double Pack (U)

6 (10) Tom & Jerry: The Movie (PG)

7 (6) Godzilla vs. Kong (12)

8 (5) Mortal Kombat (15)

9 (22) Birds of Prey... (15)

10 (9) Promising Young Woman (15)

(source: officialcharts.com)

My top five: 
1. First Cow

2. Judas and the Black Messiah

3. Aviva

4. Minari

5. Charlatan

Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:
1. Edward Scissorhands (Saturday, C4, 11.20pm)

2. Meet Me in St. Louis (Saturday, BBC2, 4.40pm)

3. High Society (Saturday, BBC2, 3pm)

4. The Peanut Butter Falcon (Friday, BBC1, 10.35pm)

5. The Bourne Identity (Friday, ITV, 11.10pm)

Topical malady: "The Fever"

As this year's Locarno film festival gets underway, a choice selection from a previous edition sneaks onto UK screens. The Fever, co-written and directed by the Brazilian artist Maya Da-Rin, is one of those items that traditionally goes down well at Locarno: blending elements of fiction and documentary, it casts a mix of professionals and non-pros, and is inexorably drawn to pre-existing locations and workspaces, the better to bring out a sense of the wider-world issues in play. Yet it starts, simply enough, as a character study, happening across Justino (Regis Myrupu), a man of indigenous descent stationed as a security guard at a Manaus container yard, as he nods off during the night shift. Early scenes sketch in the details of his world: his fellow, half-asleep commuters, an openly racist colleague he encounters in the locker room, the small shack he shares with what seems like half his extended family. Quietly, Da-Rin introduces notes of insecurity, small, unnerving jolts intended to challenge any viewer complacency: cutaways to an emergency ward (where, it turns out, Justino's med-student daughter has been deployed), a rustle in the bushes on Justino's walk home, a half-heard TV news report about a wild animal on the loose. Our protagonist strikes a dignified figure - Da-Rin composes painterly portraits of him in his hi-vis tabard - but he's also vulnerable. On that walk home in the small hours, he appears way too close to the trucks careening along the road; around the halfway point, he succumbs to the watery-eyed lethargy suggested by the title. If you're anything like me, you may spend the entire movie wondering whether this avatar of cheap, disposable labour is destined to be ground down, or whether he'll have his head bitten clean off first.

There's a reason his predicament grips us as it does: the film has almost exactly the right amount of facts in its fiction, and fiction in its facts. Da-Rin recognises the uncanny fascination of the container yard itself, with its mobile-Mondrian scenery - a sign of how global capitalism has altered the landscape. Yet she's also acutely alert to the microeconomics of this environment, namely the travails of this little guy in his hard hat, an item of uniform that may well have come out of his paypacket, and which seems unlikely to afford him all that much protection when the world finally comes crashing down on his shoulders. When, not if; the film makes it seem an inevitability. A meeting with an HR rep serves chiefly to rub in how little there is waiting for Justino in his pension pot. The daughter who cooks and cares for him is preparing to leave for better things. Given how far we are down the foodchain, it's scarcely a surprise - but still chilling - when we hear screams and yelps off-camera: the wildcat, killer bug or whatever it is out there is but one predator among many in this neck of the woods. The final movement is very Locarno (and arguably a bit too Locarno): determinedly ambiguous and open-ended, designed to be read any number of ways, with or without the clues salted into the song that plays out over the closing credits. What precedes it, however, holds all the tension of a straight-up monster movie, particularly when our hero wanders off the beaten track after dark. It's a tension that, in this instance, derives precisely from the film's considered realism - its awareness that the safety barriers we set up between untamed wilderness and so-called civilisation have come to be eroded over the years for the sake of a few lousy bucks here and there.

The Fever is now screening in selected London cinemas, and available to stream via Curzon Home Cinema and the BFI Player.

Proustian bust: "Bye Bye Morons"

The French tragicomedy Bye Bye Morons arrives here both preceded and overshadowed by its reputation. That it was a sizeable box-office hit in its homeland is the less surprising aspect, given some of the would-be comedies that have performed well on the Continent. That it swept the board at this year's César awards - winning Best Film, Director and Original Screenplay among its seven gongs - is, however, truly bewildering, suggesting either a serious post-lockdown dearth of alternatives or a disproportionate, heavily localised fondness for all those involved in its making. This is a lovers-on-the-lam movie where the fugitives start out dead or dying on the inside, and bond in a doomed pursuit of lost time. (Ho ho.) Virginie Efira - so good in In Bed with Victoria and An Impossible Love, soon to be seen in Paul Verhoeven's already notorious Benedetta - plays Suze, a hairdresser with a terminal illness who's elected to spend her final days tracking down the son who was snatched from her as a teenager. Albert Dupontel - acting and directing, and retaining his familiar air of harassed dishevelment - is JB, a mediocre administrative drone who reacts to a demotion by bringing a shotgun into the office, threatening to commit suicide, and instead injuring the colleague who happens to be handling Suze's case. That she and he would flee the scene together and amalgamate their remaining resources is a contrivance we might only buy if it led the movie anywhere worthwhile; instead, everyone scurries into territory that falls somewhere between tonally haphazard and suicidal in its own right. That Césars sweep looks increasingly like the judges rewarding a high level of difficulty, oblivious to the corpse lying face-down in the pool.

With the usual caveat that comedy is the most subjective artform, Bye Bye Morons just isn't funny enough when it's trying to be, and it's almost impossible to puzzle out what Dupontel is going for when he's not simply trying to be funny. A bad case of the cringes sets in early on, with the launch of the not-quite-amusing running gag that sees everybody fail to pronounce Suze's surname ("Trappet") properly; the laugh rate hardly picks up with the introduction of a blind archivist (Nicolas Marié, César-winner, bof), who proves exactly the kind of supporting character you'd expect to show up in a popular French comedy; and whatever's meant to be going on between Suze and JB gets gradually dissipated by cutaways to the travails of the film's minor players, reduced to one inconsequence among many. One potential selling point: thanks to cinematographer Alexis Kavyrchine, it's a rare screen comedy to foster a considered, glowing aesthetic. (It looks like a project that merits awards consideration, which may have counted for something.) The attempt to throw light on the darkness of this plot occasions one genuinely clever, poignant sight gag, as Suze drives the archivist through his hometown, and reflections in the passenger-side window reveal all the old man's memories as having been bulldozed over and rendered obsolete. Even this, though, speaks to how closely the comedy leans into things-ain't-what-they-used-to-be glumness. Perhaps only the French commercial cinema would afford this much space to a middle-aged white man lamenting the way the world now turns, a subtext only underlined by a cameo from Terry Gilliam, a filmmaker who seems to be working through his own issues in this field. For her part, Efira benefits from having straight drama to play, although it's apparently been ripped from some Victorian melodrama, and it turns silly late on as a master computer is produced to hack an office block and bring about the mother-and-child reunion. (Seven Césars, remember.) Safely ignorable for the time being, but I have a terrible feeling the whole is bound for an American remake that would be as unnecessary a second chance for an indifferent French commercial success as 2017's The Upside was for 2011's Untouchable.

Bye Bye Morons is now available to rent via Curzon Home Cinema.

On demand: "Snowpiercer"

In the wake of The Host's global success and before Parasite's international triumph, Bong Joon Ho was courted and eventually signed up by Harvey Weinstein to make his English-language debut. 2013's Snowpiercer was an unhappy project to assemble, by all accounts: after intervening several times in post-production - and being carefully batted away by his director - Weinstein afforded the finished work only a belated, begrudging release, and no release whatsoever in the UK. Perhaps both parties knew what they had on their hands: an openly Marxist fable, drawn from a French graphic novel and depicting the class struggle aboard a train bulleting around a world in the grip of a second Ice Age, Snowpiercer seems to fold the ongoing, offscreen tension between management and labour into its own front-and-centre storytelling. Guided by an extra-wisened John Hurt, Chris Evans, Jamie Bell and Octavia Spencer are among the would-be revolutionaries seeking to overturn the train's repressive social order; Bong's lucky charm Song Kang-ho is the drug-addled safecracker they entrust with getting them from steerage to first class; Tilda Swinton the resident queen bee, apparently styled after Margaret Thatcher, yet with an overbite, spectacles and broad Yorkshire accent that's pure Victoria Wood (or Aardman). For all the behind-the-scenes turbulence, the production they find themselves in runs on rails; narratively, there may be no straighter line in 21st century cinema. Our heroes begin the film at the very back of the train, in gloom and grime, and scene by scene they fight or think their way through to the front engine and a final confrontation with the mysterious "Wilford". (I'm sure some blogosphere nabob will have already nailed down the echoes of The Wizard of Oz - no bad influence - with Wilford as the Wiz, the Swinton character as the Wicked Witch, and an elevated level of gatekeeping in between.)

The characterisation is refreshingly minimal: these are briskly sketched movers-and-shakers, burdened by precious little of the baggage the movies have recently started to pile onto their Batmen and Batwomen. Bong's focus looks to have been on keeping the scenery changing around them. To give Weinstein some due, he evidently forked out a fair old sum on workspaces for his employees, which makes his reluctance to recoup the expense theatrically seem more perverse yet: we pass at breathless speed through onboard kitchens, nursaries (where we find a chilling Alison Pill in the role of Stepford schoolmarm), aquariums, solariums and nightclubs, stopping only to note how this society has inculcated a certain, self-sustaining set of values in its populace. We go up in the world as the movie goes on, yet for once, this isn't just passing spectacle; rather, everything this camera witnesses accumulates into a vision of a world converted into a grinding machine so as to preserve the status quo. (I watched the film for the first time in the middle of the pandemic, and it helped me better understand just why things felt so eerily quiet at the beginning of lockdown.) That mobility - the search for bypasses and backchannels, for ways around and ways out - is by now a recognisable directorial trait. For all his facility with pausable, individual frames, rendered as striking in their simplicity (and yet as loaded with meaning) as the best comic-book panels, Bong is one of the few contemporary filmmakers with any kind of a feel for how to keep a motion picture moving. The pre-pandemic progression of Parasite - which set similar themes and ideas circulating around an entirely static location - would provide further proof of this polite radical's own ability to outrun, outthink and overthrow any order Hollywood (and its Weinsteins) might still seek to impose on its subjects.

Snowpiercer is available to rent via Prime Video.