Nocturama

My thoughts on Am I OK?, Coma and The Watchers.

One of the bigger hits—at least from a deal standpoint—to emerge from the 2022 edition of the Sundance Film Festival was Cha Cha Real Smooth, an obnoxiously solipsistic look at an awesome guy demonstrating his awesomeness to virtually everyone he encounters (which made sense only when you realized that the same guy, Cooper Raiff, wrote, directed and starred in it) that was enlivened only by the graceful supporting turn by Dakota Johnson as the mother of an autistic child who found herself crossing paths with the twerp while on the Bar/Bat Mitzvah circuit. What made the success of this film particularly galling is that at that very same festival, Johnson appeared in an infinitely better film entitled Am I OK? that was picked up by the entity formerly known as HBOMax, only to have the original plans for it to stream get scuttled as it wound up getting shelved. Finally, the film, co-directed by Stephanie Allynne and Tig Notaro, has finally been dusted off to begin streaming and all that time on the shelf has not dimmed its considerable delights at all.

Johnson plays Lucy, a woman in her early 30s who has just been rocked by two major bits of news. One is that Jane (Sonora Mizuno), her BFF of long standing, has just been offered a big new job opportunity that will force her to relocate from Los Angeles to London, separating the two for the very first time. The other is her gradual realization that her failure to find and sustain any kind of intimate romantic relationship may be due to the possibility that she is a lesbian. Confused and slightly embarrassed that she is only figuring this out now, Lucy tries to process all of this with Jane helping her to negotiate this new emotional territory, leading to the possibility of a relationship with flirty co-worker Brittany (Kiersey Clemons), who is proudly out and clearly interested in her. And yet, while Lucy is trying to figure all of this out, the tensions brought about by Jane’s approaching departure end up hanging over everything and threaten to drive a wedge between them even before Jane leaves.

This may sound like the setup for a goofy/smutty sex comedy filled with moments of embarrassment and interesting underwear or a rehash of Kissing Jessica Stein but Am I OK? has more on its mind than that. The screenplay by Lauren Pomerantz is far more interested in using the premise as a way of exploring the nuances of female friendship at a crisis point that doesn’t have anything to do with a guy or a fatal disease. Instead of creating big artificial hurdles for the two friends that are conveniently overcome in the final moments, the script takes a quieter and more human approach that favors gentle humor over broad slapstick and nuanced observations of human behavior over big dramatic moments. As suggested earlier, Johnson (who has become one of the most reliably intriguing screen presences of late, managing to make even utter dross like Madame Web more tolerable than it had any right to be just by her presence) is quietly spectacular here as she depicts Lucy’s gradual discovery of her sense of self and she and Mizuno (who is also really good) do an excellent job of illustrating a longtime friendship that actually feels authentic. The film has a couple of flaws—supporting characters portrayed by Sean Hayes and Molly Gordon are drawn a little too broadly for their own good and I wish that Clemons had been given a little more to do—but they can be forgiven because the project as a whole is refreshingly smart, funny and touching. Yes, Am I OK? has had a long and ridiculous journey to make in order to finally get seen by a wider audience but it is more than worth the wait.

Another holdover from 2022 that is only now getting released is Coma, a genuinely strange work from French filmmaker Bertrand Bonello, whose more recent The Beast remains one of this year’s very best films. Set during one of France’s early pandemic lockdowns, the film focuses on an unnamed teenage girl (Louise Labeque) trying to find ways of passing the time while seemingly isolated by herself in her home. She plays with a Simon-like handheld game, she does Zoom calls with her friends where they chat gigglingly about which serial killers they like the best, makes dioramas so that her Barbie dolls can enact a soap opera inspired by the things that she is picking up online (the dolls are voiced by the likes of Laetitia Casta, Anais Demoustier and the late Gaspard Ulliel) and watches YouTube videos from influencer Patricia Coma (Julia Faure) in which she offers any number of enthusiastic, if inscrutable, life lessons while subtly plugging any number of products. Oh yeah, while the girl sleeps, she finds herself in a place dubbed the “Free Zone,” a bleak forest-like setting populated by people that she knows who have died and which may be an actual limbo, albeit one where, ironically, she can actually exercise free will.

Baffling even by Bonello’s often-outre standards—at times coming across like the missing link between Videodrome and I Saw the TV Glow—Coma is a film so strange that I fully confess to not entirely understanding large portions of it. That said, while I may not be able to pass a test on what happened or what it all means, I still found myself largely fascinated with it. Here is a film that is  practically bursting with images and ideas (perhaps too many for its relatively brief 82-minute run time), which Bonello deploys utilizing a melange of live-action footage, abstract imagery, stop-motion and regular animation, and tones ranging from quiet observation to dark comedy to moments of outright horror (including one jolt that seems to prefigure what he would go on to do with The Beast). Less a straightforward narrative than a strange, savage and despairing meditation on the state of things (ending with a montage of images highlighting the horrors of climate change), Coma (which Bonello dedicates to his daughter) is a defiantly strange work and if it doesn’t quite hit the heights of such Bonello projects as The Beast or Zombi Child, it still reminds us that he is one of the more audacious filmmakers working today and that even a minor film by him can be more unique and daring than the major works from most others.

You would think that if you were the child of a filmmaker as distinct (for good and ill) as M. Night Shyamalan and looking to make your own debut behind the camera, you would want to take a page from the likes of Sofia Coppola and select a project as dissimilar from dear old dad’s as possible in order to avoid or at least lessen potentially unfair comparisons. However, with her debut film, The Watchers, Ishana Shyamalan, has elected to make a movie that seems virtually indistinguishable from the majority of the supernatural sagas made by her father, right down to the inevitable third-act twist and the inescapable fact that it isn’t very good.

Adapted by Shyamalan from the 2021 novel by A.M. Shine, the film stars Dakota Fanning as Mina, a troubled young American woman living in western Ireland trying to escape her traumatic past while working in a pet store and struggling to become an artist. Sent out one day on a parrot delivery, she gets lost in a seemingly endless forest when her car breaks down. With bird in hand, she tries to make her way through the increasingly unsettling woods until she comes across a building populated by three strangers—Madeline (Olwen Fouere), Ciara (Georgina Campbell) and Daniel (Oliver Finnegan)—who inform her that the area is populated by mysterious creatures dubbed “Watchers” who observe them each night through a giant two-way mirror. Although they are not allowed to escape (though they can go out tor forage for food during the day while their oppressors hide themselves, the creatures do not harm them as long as they abide by a few hard and fast rules. While the others seems resigned to do the required bidding forever, Mina is determined to figure out a way to escape, leading to a number of presumably shocking discoveries.

On a technical level, The Watchers is certainly impressive—presumably on the basis of her famous name, she was able to attract the likes of cinematographer Eli Arenson and editor Job ter Burg and their contributions ensure that it is at least a good-looking film. The problem is that the script is so embarrassingly clumsy in so many ways that it almost comes across at times like an extremely low-key spoof of her father’s work—I have no idea how closely this film hews to the source material but it plays like an amalgamation of such films as Signs, The Village and Knock at the Cabin. That could be forgiven, I suppose, if she could have figured out a way to make it reasonably suspenseful but she never quite figures out how to do that—the characters are resoundingly uninteresting, the dialogue that they speak is roughly 60% clumsily-handled exposition, the tension is practically non-existent and the big third-act shift is insipid (and includes a Hitchcock homage so dopey that even James Nguyen could feel superior to it). Worst of all, the screenplay establishes all of these hard-and-fast rules for living under the eyes (and nastier bits) of the Watchers and then blithely goes about violating them in ways that will leave viewers feeling mostly cheated and annoyed when all is said and done. This is not to say that Shyamalan won’t go on to do good work as a filmmaker (hell, even her dad didn’t find his groove until his third try) but if she wants to prove herself as more than just another so-called “nepo baby,” she will need to find a project with greater emotional stakes, better scares and more compelling characters than she is able to muster up here.