Sisters Are Doing It For Themselves
My thoughts on Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World, Immaculate, Late Night with the Devil and Ryuichi Sakamoto: Opus
Having already startled audiences throughout the world with his own wildly surreal meditation on cancel culture with 2021’s Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, Romanian filmmaker Radu Jude returns with Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, another sprawling examination/indictment of contemporary society that makes its points via caustic and often-strange dark comedy. The focus is on Angela (Ilinca Manolache), an overworked Uber driver/production assistant whose latest gig finds her conducting a series of interviews with employees of an Austrian furniture company who were injured on the job to find one to tell their story in a company-produced safety video. Interspersed between these interviews are scenes from Angela Moves On, an actual 1981 Romanian film from Lucian Bratu showing a government-approved depiction of the daily life of a taxicab driver—eventually these two elements tie together when the star of that film, Dorina Lazar, turns up here as one of the relatives of the crippled worker (Ovidu Persan) who is eventually selected to be featured in the video.
For most of its nearly three-hour running time, the film feels less like a focused narrative and more like a deliberately shaggy revue allowing Jade to throw practically anything that he can think of into the mix—sometimes as a way of offering his commentary on the world today (as when Angela utilizes a face filter to record satirical TikTok videos in the guise of a foul-mouthed misogynist modeled on the likes of Andrew Tate as a way of staving off boredom), and sometimes for his own private amusement (as when one of Angela’s runs finds her crossing paths with none other than the infamous filmmaker Uwe Boll). Much of it is intriguing and often quite funny, though those not in the mood for lots of detours and digressions may find it a little frustrating at times.
However, it all comes together during the film’s galvanizing final section, an unbroken 40-minute take purporting to be the raw footage of the safety video shoot in which company reps keep offering “suggestions” to the worker recounting his story until he is essentially blaming himself for the accident that was clearly due to their negligence. The resulting sequence is hilarious and enraging in equal measure and proves to be an inspired capper for everything that came before it. Sure, Do Not Expect. . . may feel somewhat uneven in comparison to the tighter Bad Luck Banging. . . but in its best moments—and there are a number of them—it serves as a reminder that Jude is one of the bolder artistic voices on the international film scene.
Having just come off her successful (at least financially) attempt to bring the mid-budget rom-com back to multiplexes after a long hibernation with Anyone But You, Sydney Sweeney now attempts to do the same thing for another cinematic subgenre, albeit a somewhat less savory one, that hasn’t been heard from for a while—the exploitation variant known as nunsploitation—with her latest project, Immaculate. Alas, the wires must have gotten crossed somewhere because while Anyone But You proved to be pretty horrifying, Immaculate is little more than laughable. In it, she plays Sister Cecilia, an American nun who been invited to serve at Our Lady of Sorrows, a remote convent in the Italian countryside headed up by Father Sal Tedeschi. Alas, while the devout and dedicated Cecilia is savvy enough to know about the various scandals surrounding the Catholic Church, she somehow manage to ignore all the obvious red flags that pop up the moment that she arrives that suggest that all is not as it seems. Sure enough, a few weeks after arriving, Cecilia learns that she is pregnant and since she has not had intercourse with anyone, the pregnancy is considered a miracle that Father Tedeschi and the others in charge want to keep quiet for the time being. Over the course of her pregnancy, Cecilia finally figures out that things are off and when she finally uncovers the secret behind the convent and her pregnancy, she has to figure out a way to escape her bizarre and potentially unholy predicament.
Although there is plenty of bad behavior on display throughout Immaculate, the biggest sin that it commits, at least during the first two-thirds, is that of boredom. Although director Michael Mohan and screenwriter Andrew Lobel clearly know their exploitation cinema history (the film at times is reminiscent of such things as Rosemary’s Baby and The Omen and one scene is a specific and extended homage to the most notorious sequence in the sleazo semi-classic Mark of the Devil), they employ a restrained approach to the material that just doesn’t quite fit—they try to take the elevated horror route for a narrative that really needs to wallow in the gutter in order to have any juice—and winds up wasting what is actually a pretty good and committed performance by Sweeney along the way. Oddly enough, just as the movie lurches into its final half-hour and with audience interest at an absolute minimum, Immaculate at long last embraces its trashy side with an extended sequence that goes for broke in increasingly wild and lurid ways before culminating with a final couple of minutes that will astonish even the most jaded of viewers with its grisly excesses and make them wish that the rest of the film had that level of craziness going for it. Although the ending does help somewhat (and will no doubt end up on TikTok before too long), Immaculate as a whole is pretty much a drag—a handsomely mounted but largely stultifying collection of cheap jump scares and plot contrivances that will likely bore viewers of all denominations.
Now, if you are looking for a horror film that takes a reasonably ingenious premise and knows exactly how to make it work, I would advise you to forsake Immaculate and head off instead to see Late Night with the Devil, a film from the Australian writer-director duo of Cameron and Colin Cairns that has been gathering strong word-of-mouth on the festival circuit over the last few months and proves to be more than worth the wait. The conceit is that we are watching the long-supressed master tape of the Halloween 1977 episode of Night Owls with Jack Delroy, a late-night talk show hosted by Jack Delroy (David Dastmalchian), a slick and affable TV presence who yearns to be the next Johnny Carson but just doesn’t have the ratings to accomplish that. With the all-important sweeps week kicking into high gear and his contract drawing to a close, Delroy decides to swing for the rafters for a special theme show in which the primary guest is a young girl named Lilly (Ingrid Torelli) who claims to be possessed by a demon—also appearing are an academic expert (Laura Gordon) who believes here claims and Carmichael the Conjurer (Ian Bliss), a professional skeptic who thinks Lilly is a fake and is willing to put up $100,000 if he cannot disprove here claims. Over the course of the show, things inevitably go awry in spectacularly strange fashion, resulting in arguably the most terrifying talk show experience since the premiere episode of Thicke of the Night.
Films purporting to be recordings of television broadcasts that grow increasingly horrific are nothing new—the 1992 British import Ghostwatch is arguably the classic of the subgenre and the low-budget American film WNUF Halloween Special was also pretty effective—but whatever Late Night with the Devil may lack in inspiration, it more than makes up for in execution. If you are old enough to recall the heyday of Carson and the various would-be usurpers of his throne that cropped up from time to time, you will no doubt be enormously impressed with the meticulous manner in which the film replicates the millieu of talk shows of that time, both the stuff that audiences were meant to see as well as the work going on behind the scenes. Beyond that, the film maintains a smart balance between the humor and the horror and manages to get a lot of mileage out of the mostly practical effects once things finally become chaotic. The best thing, however, is the performance by Dastmalchian, who has been stealing scenes in any number of movies in recent years in supporting parts and proves himself more than capable of holding audience attention in a lead, beautifully capturing Delroy as he witnesses his cynical ratings ploy slip out of control in ways that no amount of slick show-biz patter can overcome. Late Night with the Devil may ultimately prove to be just a little too niche of a film to achieve the kind of success that it deserves but those looking for something off the beaten path and who can handle the occasional bit of ickiness will most likely get as big of a kick out of it as I did.
To call Ryuichi Sakamoto: Opus a “concert film,” is technically accurate, I suppose, but this is a project that could not be further removed from something along the ecstatic crowd-pleasing likes of Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour if it tried. Sakamoto, the celebrated Oscar-winning pianist and composer, had been in declining health for several years and while this had led him to give up live appearances, he decided in late 2022 (only a few months before his death in 2023 from throat cancer) that he would do one final performance consisting of solo renditions of 20 of his compositions on a piano in a studio at Japan’s NHK Broadcast Center for an audience of no one save for a small camera crew under the direction of his son, Neo Sora. The performance, covering a wide range of his works that includes pieces from the scores to such films as Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence and The Last Emperor, has been recorded by cinematographer Bill Kirsten in crisp 4K black-and-white and there is no other frills on display—even the song titles are not listed until the very end. Of course, watching the film, we are fully aware that this was Sakamoto’s final artistic statement (as I suspect Sakamoto himself knew as well) and this lends an undeniably mournful patina to the proceedings but he clearly rose to the occasion with the compelling performances seen and heard here. Perhaps worried that nearly two hours of minimalist piano performances done by someone who doesn’t speak a single word and which have been captured in austere black-and-white might be a little too much for most viewers, Sora tries to enliven things from time to time with some fancy camera moves. However, it is the power of Sakamoto’s artistry—even during the moments when he occasionally fumbles a passage—that shines through and gives the film its hypnotic momentum, allowing it to work both as a testament to his artistic gifts and as a touching tribute from a son to his father.