Dogs And Cats, Living Together

My thoughts on Flow, Get Away, Nightbitch, The Order and Queer

There have been a number of impressive animated features released over the course of this year—Inside Out 2, Memoirs of a Snail and The Wild Robot, to name a few—and the latest to hit theaters, the Latvian import Flow, is just as impressive as those already celebrated titles. Set in a world where, based on the available evidence, humans once lived but now no longer do, the film follows a black cat whose solitary existence is thrown into upheaval when the area it is living in is hit with a massive flood and whose efforts to escape the rising waters find it meeting and, eventually, working together with a ragtag group of animals that include a Labrador, a capybara, a lemur and a secretarybird as they, after some understandable initial wariness, come together to pilot a boat in the hopes of making it to safety. I realize that my brief description might make the simple premise of this film sound either painfully cutesy or insufferably allegorical but what filmmaker Gints Zilbalodis has done here has taken that basic premise and transformed it into that rare animated work that tells a story that is easy for the youngest viewers to grasp but with enough emotional resonance to keep older viewers engaged as well. (The film is Latvia’s entry in this year’s Oscar race for Best International Feature.)

What is especially impressive about this accomplishment is that Zilbalodis and co-writer Matiss Kala achieve this without resorting to a single spoken word or bit of onscreen exposition to help us understand the characters and their increasing perilous situation. Instead, all of the pertinent details are conveyed entirely through the rich visual detail on display at any given moment—despite the absence of dialogue or narration, you always know how the animal characters are feeling throughout because of the careful manner in which their every move and facial expression has been presented. Even more impressive is the way that it tells a story that is fairly apocalyptic in nature but somehow manages to find moments of warmth, humor and grace without ever softening its more serious points. Barring some kind of miracle, Flow won’t come anywhere close to reaching the kind of wide audience of the likes of the lackluster Moana 2 but my guess is that if there are young kids out there that end up seeing both of them, it won’t be the heavily hyped Disney effort that sticks in their minds for years to come

.As the gory British comedy-horror hybrid Get Away opens, the Smith family—boisterous dad Richard (Nick Frost, who also wrote the screenplay), somewhat high-strung mother Susan (Aisling Bea) and teenaged kids Jessie (Maisie Ayers) and Sam (Sebastian Croft)—are heading off to the remote Swedish island of Svalta in order to attend a festival held by the populace every 10 years to commemorate a tragedy in the area’s past involving an extended enforced quarantine that led to acts of cannibalism amongst those living there—an event that Susan’s family was connected with. Needless to say, their arrival is not especially welcomed—they are warned by a number of people to turn around and go home and when they do finally arrive on the island—where they will have to stay for the next three days—the locals are even more hostile towards them. As they wait for the festival to begin, the family begins to experience a number of weird things going on—are they being caused by the disgruntled members of the community, urged on by town elder Klara (Anitta Suikkari) or are they coming from a serial killer who may have made their way onto the island as well?

There are basically two different films going on here and while they may not mesh completely, each one does offer up its own intriguing and amusing pleasures. The first half is essentially an extended spoof of Midsommar with the focus leaning more towards cringe comedy as we follow the Smiths to the island and watch their increasingly bumbling and bizarre interactions with the weirdo locals, who look upon them as little more than unwelcome interlopers. After a major twist roughly an hour into the narrative, however, it shifts gears and becomes a cheerfully over-the-top bloodbath that also finds room to make some sharp points (pun partially intended) about the grim nature of colonialism. Although director Steffen Haars occasionally fumbles in his attempts to strike a balance between the satire, the broader humor involving outsiders trying to fit in amongst people who don’t want them there and the gallons of gore, he keeps things moving along enough so that you don’t have time to linger on the hiccups. On the plus side, Frost’s script is clever and offbeat without ever losing steam and the performances by him and the other family members are quite good—Bea is especially impressive in the way that she charts her character’s development so that the odd behaviors we see early on pay off nicely as things progress and we get a fuller sense of who she and her family really are. Get Away isn’t perfect by any means but if you are growing restless with the current multiplex fare and are looking for something weirder, funnier and definitely bloodier, it should prove to be satisfactory

.Like Get Away, Nightbitch is a film that attempts to combine elements of social satire and horror within the context of a decidedly bizarre narrative but is unable to make it work. In this adaptation of the novel by Rachel Yoder, Amy Adams stars as an unnamed woman who is growing frustrated with her position as the mother of a newborn child—her husband (Scoot McNairy) is frequently away on business trips and his rare attempts at co-parenting, while sincere, are lackluster at best, she resents having had to give up her career as an artist and gallery worker to become a full-time mom and she is unable to connect in any meaningful way with the other new moms that she runs into wherever she goes and who seem to have everything under control. As her frustrations mount, something has to give and that takes the form of a series of incidents that lead her to believe that, as the title suggest, she transforms into a dog at night, running through the neighborhood with other dogs and occasionally attacking some of the other creatures around and eventually sprouting bits of fur and extra nipples to boot.

The premise is weird, to be certain, but it is one that can theoretically work in the right hands—I know this because I have seen Marianna Palka’s remarkably similar 2017 film Bitch and while that one was certainly uneven in spots, it was an ambitious and often provocative look at the pressures and complications of motherhood that was both very funny and often cringe-inducing. With Nightbitch, on the other hand, writer-director Marielle Heller doesn’t seem to have much of any idea of what she wants to do with it other than to supply Amy Adams with a role that has “Oscar bait” written all over it. While some of its observations about the micro-aggressions of contemporary motherhood (especially in the way that some certain aspects and attitudes have not changed with the times) are tartly amusing in the early going, the film never figures out a way to make the dog metaphor come off and even its initial dark critique of what domestic life can do to women grows increasingly toothless and meandering as things go on, building to a thoroughly unconvincing happy ending in which things just sort of work out. Likewise, Adams is strong in the early going but her performance becomes less impressive as things go on and she has to behave increasingly like a canine in scenes that not even an actress as good as she is could possibly make work. (The best performance ends up coming from Jessica Harper, as a woman at the library who understands exactly what our heroine is going through.) While undeniably ambitious, Nightbitch is ultimately an unfocused mess that squanders its conceit in ways that do both its central character and audiences a great disservice

.Set in 1984, the true crime thriller The Order stars Jude Law as Terry Husk, a tough F.B.I. agent who has just relocated to the Pacific Northwest after spending his time out east working to bring down gangster and hate groups. He begins to investigate a series of seemingly random bank robberies and bombings that have been occurring in the area and begins to suspect that there may be a connection between them and white separatist groups like the Aryan Nation that have begun to flourish in the area. While most of the local police, out of some combination of ignorance and complacency, don’t see them as much of a threat, ambitious young cop Jamie Bowens (Tye Sheridan) passes on some information that leads Husk to focus on a new group dubbed The Order whose charismatic leader Bob Matthews (Nicholas Hoult) has brought these disaffected people together in order to help build an army designed to eventually force a violent overthrow of the government straight out of the pages of the infamous racist book The Turner Diaries. While Matthews and his followers go about following their plans, which range from increasingly daring robberies to the murder of incendiary radio host Alan Berg (Marc Maron), Husk and Bowens do what they can in order to put all the pieces together before the inevitable final violent confrontation between two men who both see themselves as the hero in their shared narrative.

Having spent most of his career specializing in such grim real-life crime dramas as The Snowtown Murders and Nitram (let us be kind and pretend that Assassin’s Creed never happened), filmmaker Justin Kurzel has certainly proven himself to be one who specializes in creating psychologically-driven narratives that attempt to understand the impulses and attitudes that drive some people to commit seemingly unthinkable crimes. This time around, he and screenwriter Zach Baylin have crafted a narrative that is split between a straightforward police procedural as Husk and Bowens doggedly pursue their targets as they continue their crime spree and a examination of how hate groups like the Order, while outwardly projecting an image of all-American Christian values, are able to find people who share their own dark and twisted ideology and use that knowledge in order to draw them in. The procedural aspect is perfectly fine—Law does solid work as Husk and the action beats are staged in an efficient and intense style—but it is the kind of stuff that we have seen done many times before. Far more gripping are the scenes centering on Matthews and the increasingly frightening hold that he has over his followers, which are aided in no small part by the intense performance by Hoult (who, between this, Juror #2 and the upcoming Nosferatu, has certainly demonstrated his range as an action over the course of the last few weeks). Granted, The Order is not exactly a barrel of laughs to be certain, but it is a grim and unsparing drama that examines the monstrousness of white nationalism in America while reminding us that while the events depicted occurred 40 years ago, their reverberations sadly continue to be felt today

.Queer, Luca Guadagino’s adaptation of the novella of the same name by William Burroughs, is centered on expat William Lee (the late author’s frequent literary avatar), who spends his days living in a hazy existence in Mexico City that involves little more than drinking, doing drugs, hanging out with old friend Joe (Jason Schwartzman) and scoping out the handsome men that he comes across in the hopes of being able to lure them into his bed for some sweaty, anonymous sex. The one who really catches his eye is Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey), a handsome but aloof young man who spends a lot of time hanging out with a red-headed woman in a relationship of a decidedly ambiguous nature. After a few days of pursuing him, Lee does manages to get him into bed and while a relationship of sorts does develop between the two, the dissolute Lee never quite seems convinced that it is one that is going to last. Nevertheless, the connection between the two is strong enough that when Lee proposes that the two take a trip into the jungles of South America in search of a drug known as yage that is said to give it users telepathic powers—which he hopes to use to learn how the younger man really feels about their relationship—he agrees to go along. At that point, things get very strange as the two encounter a nutso yage scholar (Lesley Manville) and take a particularly mind-blowing trip courtesy of the drug.

Although handsomely mounted—the superstylized version of Mexico City that was built entirely on the stages of Rome’s Cinecitta studios (and clearly influenced by the look of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Querelle) is a thing of ravishing beauty throughout—and featuring an impressive central performance from Craig, who throws himself fully into the role of Lee (though there are moments when his work here hews a little too closely to his performances as Benoit Blanc in the Knives Out films), and nice supporting turns from Schwartzman and Manville, Queer ultimately proves to be a disappoint dud instead of the intense firecracker that Guadagino was clearly hoping to create. Part of the problem is that neither Guadagino nor screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes (who previously collaborated on Challengers) seem to have any real idea of how to face the particular challenge of transforming Burroughs’s audacious prose into cinematic terms—all of their notions are surface-level at best and the boldest idea that they muster up is to load the soundtrack with deliberately anachronistic songs that offer facile commentary on the action, such as scoring the opening credits to Sinead O’Connor’s cover of Nirvana’s “All Apologies,” presumably so as to highlight the lyric “Everyone is gay.” The bigger problem, however, is the complete lack of chemistry between Craig and newcomer Starkey—although their sex scenes will not doubt raise eyebrows amongst some viewers, they fail to generate any real heat and when they are out of bed, they hardly seem to be in the same movie, even when they are the only people on the screen. There is zero connection between the two and as a result, a final moment between the two that is presumably meant to be heartbreaking simply fails to register. Granted, anyone even attempting to bring Burroughs to the screen—especially at a time when his work stands diametrically opposed to pretty much everything commercial cinema represents these days—deserves some credit for chutzpah alone but if you want to see it actually done well, you would be much better served by skipping Queer and going back to see Naked Lunch again.