Weekly visions - week 22, 2026 1

Host, directed by Rob Savage, written by Jed Shepherd, Rob Savage and Gemma Hurley, United Kingdom, 2020 - ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Gestures, objects, and conversations reveal that this film was shot during the COVID pandemic. Not so long ago, but still far enough that it takes a moment to readjust to social distancing, masks and elbow bumps. There’s no title card explaining the circumstances during which Host was put together. Nothing to explain why a call should end automatically after fifty minutes.
We have been through this, we know, we remember; but what will people watching it in 20 years think? (optimistically assuming that nothing similar or worse happens in the next couple of decades)
On the other hand, talking with a group of people over the internet, that’s normal. That’s the legacy of COVID. We are having countless work meetings every day with people that exist, mostly, in little squares on our screens.
We’re so used to it, that I felt like I was in this film’s chat, myself. I forgot I was watching a movie. I thought I should have lit a candle too.

The first half of this film is just perfect. The way the atmosphere slowly changes, the inevitable fakeout, the fleeting glimpse of two legs that I remembered from my first watch.
When things quickly escalate, yeah, it’s a film, borrowing from REC, from Paranormal Activity, etcetera. That’s fine.
It’s a miracle this was made.
Too bad Savage’s next films haven’t been as good.

Saw IV, directed by Darren Lynn Bousman, written by Marcus Dunstan, Patrick Melton and Thomas Fenton, US, 2007 - ⭐⭐

This is where the Saw franchise stopped being composed of films and started a serial run. Already with the second chapter, the films were built around two parallel strands: the horror component, an A ‘plot’ based on the traps and a maze for the victims to go through, and the actual story, the B plot, centred on Jigsaw.
With John Kramer and his known acolyte out of the picture, with the fourth part we move to three different strands: to keep Tobin Bell involved, the B plot gets bifurcated into a flashback story - providing some kind of revelation about things we thought we knew - and a forward one - meant to add some elements that future episodes’ B and C plots can build on and eventually subvert.
Plus, there must be a twist for the film to end on.

With all these elements to juggle, it’s nearly impossible to weave a good film: the new screenwriters (authors of the screenplay, written but not filmed yet in 2007, for The Collector - of which I’m not a fan) pick up on a couple of characters who appeared briefly in Saw III to build their path forward, and in the flashback they give John Kramer’s story additional detail (of course, he was an engineer!) and motivation.
But Jigsaw’s philosophy starts (or continues) to get muddled: if in chapter 3 he was urging the main ‘player’ to forgive the people who did him wrong, here he is trying to convince his new target that… he should learn to let people die, to have a better work-life balance?

Director Bousman comes back again and keeps showing off his clever, on-camera scenes transitions. The cinematographer for all the previous chapters, David A. Armstrong, also returns, but the film starts the descending spiral into a much cheaper-looking audiovisual work.
The timey-wimey twists and turns are still fun, but everything else betrays the rushed schedule to put a new film in cinemas every year.

Opus, written and directed by Mark Anthony Green, US, 2025 - ⭐⭐½

I think I said it before, I would like to see Ayo Edebiri in a different role than ’the normal person in the room’. Maybe she has already played a villain or a shady person and I don’t know. After the Hunt maybe (I’m not going to Bezos away my money just to check)? Perhaps she will get there.
In Opus, her character is not very distinct from Sydney in The Bear: a fresh pair of eyes in a somewhat confusing situation that every other character takes as the normality.
In this case, it’s the music industry’s reaction to being invited by retired musician Alfred Moretti (John Malkovich, presumably having a lot of fun) to his ranch/commune, to present a long-awaited new album. His messianic-Elton-John way could be just eccentric or subtly sinister. And the distinction between happy community and creepy cult is always thin.

I see a lot of reviewers comparing Opus to another A24-produced work where a young woman goes and visit a commune in a far away location where things may not be as shiny as they seem: while I was reminded of that film by a single very specific scene, my usually very sensitive similarity detection alarm didn’t go off.
And while, in retrospect, I can see the similarity on the surface, this is a totally different movie, that wants to say completely different things. Not that I’m sure of what those things are.

渇き。 / The World of Kanako, directed by Tetsuya Nakashima, co-written with Nobuhiro Monma and Miako Tadano, based on the novel 果てしなき渇き by Akio Fukamachi, Japan, 2014 - ⭐½

Kōji Yakusho is back in a white suit, but rather than the sexy gangster of Tampopo, he’s a nasty ex-police detective, whose main way of interacting with other people is violence. I have a low threshold for depictions of sexual abuse, and this film has several instances of it, so much so that I considered stopping watching it altogether; it is also the main reason for the rating I’m giving: the tone - including a funky title sequence - seems to think this is an exploitation movie from the seventies, but the content is much darker than that. In all honesty, I am not an expert of that genre, so it might be perfectly in line with that tradition, but still, this is a 2014 film.

As I was watching this, a clear analogy came to mind: this is like Japanese Twin Peaks, depicting the investigation into the disappearance of a young woman, and the slow reveal that her life was very different from what parents and teachers thought. And Yakusho’s character - Kanako’s father, who naturally decides to unofficially investigate on the case - might be to blame for the teenager’s behaviour.

An early scene set in a school brought to mind - I’m not sure why - Confessions, and I was very pleased with myself when I found out the two films share the same director.
Kanako is played by Nana Komatsu, seen recently as the woman in Exit 8.

The Thing, directed by John Carpenter, written by Bill Lancaster, based on John W. Campbell Jr.’s novella Who Goes There, US, 1982 - ⭐⭐⭐⭐

I watched The Thing a looooong time ago; if I remember correctly, it was on a laptop, and the quality was not great. I know I liked it, but I was a bit nervous about revisiting it because, of all the John Carpenter films I’ve seen since, I enjoyed only Halloween and In the Mouth of Madness, and even then, not massively.
Since my monthly Internet consumption was dangerously close to depletion this week, instead of looking for something to stream, I decided to pop the Arrow Blu-Ray I bought months ago into my player.

I’m happy to report that I really liked it: the paranoia that takes up the second half of the film felt a bit repetitive after a while, but the mystery presented in the first half hour (introduced by the amazing first sequence) gives it enough steam to make us forget the fleeting impression that we are looking at a variation on Alien.
I think that Carpenter works better for me as a director when he’s not shooting his own script; here the screenwriter was Burt Lancaster’s son.

On the Waterfront, directed by Elia Kazan, written by Budd Schulberg, inspired by Malcolm Johnson’s articles Crime on the Waterfront, US, 1954 - ⭐⭐⭐½

Right, are you ready for another very unpopular take? I say ‘unpopular’ to avoid what would seem, objectively, the right word, which is ‘ignorant’. Because if Martin Scorsese and Al Pacino and Anthony Hopkins and Jack Nicholson and the Academy and pretty much every critic on paper and on Letterboxd say Marlon Brando’s acting is sublime and the best performance ever seen on screen, that must be objectively true.
Me, I thought of Joey Tribbiani in almost every scene, except for one where I mentally super-imposed the image of an actor in his second Academy-award winning performance crying ’look how they massacred my boy’.
Brando took me out of the film, as if there was a spotlight pointed on him all the time. Perhaps it was charisma. For me, it was unnatural.

So, ok, another blow to my film-assessor self-esteem.
I loved Karl Malden and his ‘ascension’ scene - although, no subtle at all.
As for Elia Kazan, I have a policy of separating the art from the artist (but this is a discussion for another time), but if the artist uses their work to justify their controversial behaviour, it’s hard for me to assess them separately.
The film won Best Picture and seven more Oscars (including for Brando, Kazan, screenwriter Schulberg, and first-time-on-screen Eva Marie Saint - denying the three nominated supporting actors the award).
Criterion lists “Kazan’s defiance” and “Brando’s genius” as two of the three reasons for the importance of this film. So I guess I’m entitled to consider it just fine.