Dear friend,
once again I used an offer to temporarily subscribe to MUBI, ‘a place to discover ambitious films by visionary filmmakers’, so for a few weeks you will find in my round-ups a few films of a different kind than my usual diet.
I have mixed feelings about this platform: it proposes some classics and some ‘arthouse’ films that I may be inclined to watch… when I’m in the right mood for some very delayed gratification, or no gratification at all. It’s not the kind of film I’d watch every day: actually, only the first movie this week comes from MUBI, and the same was true last week.
During the years, I have subscribed for limited periods, and always as a response to a special offer with a big discount: the standard price of €14 a month is just too steep. My problem with the platform is that its catalogue of films I have heard of and am interested in watching is quite limited (my ignorance plays a big role in it, without a doubt), so returning for a month every year or so is enough for me.
Brownian Movement, written and directed by Nanouk Leopold, Germany/Netherlands, 2010 - ⭐⭐⭐½
Sandra Hüller didn’t particularly enjoy her life abroad long before Anatomie d’une chute. Set in Brussels (although I’m not sure it is ever mentioned), this film explores with very little dialogue the need for an apparently happily married woman to be seen as a different person (or at least that’s what I understood). Hüller does an exceptional job of communicating her character’s feelings just with the slightest facial expression.
In the third act, as the camera moves away from her eyes, the film loses much of its strength and becomes maybe a bit too meditative and abstract.
Twin Peaks: The Return, directed by David Lynch, co-written with Mark Frost, US, 2017 - ⭐⭐⭐½ (up from ⭐⭐⭐)
Let’s play the game of considering David Lynch’s last work as an 18-hour film rather than a not-so-mini series.
Knowing beforehand where the journey goes (and the rhythm it follows), without the expectations of the first watch, let me enjoy the whole experience much more.
But let’s be honest, watching Dougie Jones do/not do his thing for so long is still exasperating. And, despite Lynch’s and Frost’s freedom to do whatever they want and defy expectations, nobody turned their TV on to see Caleb Landry Jones play his usual sleazy character, or Jim Belushi and Robert Knepper do the conga, or even Tarantino-mimicking via Tim Roth and Jennifer Jason Leigh. Or to witness a lot of violence against women.
We’re here for the old characters and the new roles played by Lynch’s old flames, and for people switching places, and opera houses in another dimension, and rock stars replaced by living kettles.
We’re here for Agent Cooper and Laura Palmer.
And when any of those arrive, one cannot ask for anything more.
It’s impossible to hold back the emotion when we see Lynch’s favourite collaborators walk alone, side by side, like they did thirty years earlier, joined by the director himself.
Noroi: The Curse/ノロイ, directed by Koji Shiraishi, co-written with Naoyuki Yokota, Japan, 2005 - ⭐⭐⭐ (up from ⭐⭐)
I gave another chance to this film everybody loves but me, this time watched on Blu-ray.
Knowing what to expect helps in this case too. I still find the first half too rough and disconnected for my liking, but instead of just being shocked by the last scene only, the sense of dread was more effective for a longer period in the second half, and it was easier to see how things fit together.
28 Years Later, directed by Danny Boyle, written by Alex Garland, United Kingdom, 2025 - ⭐⭐⭐½
The ‘infected’ are back, and so is the pairing of Boyle and Garland. This film had, for me, a surprising trajectory, but, upon reflection, I should have expected it: it’s the same structure as 28 Days Later, with a first part all focused on the infected, and a second one dealing with more human problems.
So many years, and a pandemic, later, the virus’ spread feels different. The images of bodies lined up one beside the other evoke more real-life horrors.
So many years, and a Brexit later, images from a small island separated from a bigger one, itself isolated from the world, folding back on its own past and traditions, ready to slip into folk horror at any moment, hits really hard. Not to talk about how the final scene/cliffhanger will resonate a bit differently for British viewers.
As Above, So Below, directed by John Erick Dowdle, co-written with Drew Dowdle, US/France, 2014 - ⭐⭐⭐½
Apparently I had not seen enough skulls this week.
There are many conflicting opinions about this Parisian found footage, and after the horrible experience with The Poughkeepsie Tapes, and having started but not bothered to finish Rec’s remake Quarantine, I didn’t have high hopes for this other work by the Dowdle brothers.
This film was quite different from my expectations, being much more Indiana Jones than the Grave Encounters-like monster-filled survival horror I had expected, and much less found-footage-y than promised (there are so many diegetic cameras that I forgot about that aspect premise).
It annoyed me right from the start of the scary part by blatantly copying the claustrophobic scene from The Descent, but then it won me over by moving into a surrealistic, nightmarish, Dante-inspired descent into hell.
Like most Italians, I have a soft spot for any mention of ‘abandon all hope ye who enter here’ because I had to spend a year at school studying the horrors of Dante Alighieri’s Inferno (and two more years on its sequels - Purgatorio and Paradiso - that compose the Divine Comedy… talk about diminishing returns), so I can appreciate a scene where somebody is buried alive with their feet sticking up from the ground.
I feel like I’m being generous with a film where the lead character picks up incredible insights from a single sentence, Da Vinci Code-style. But, why lie? I did enjoy it.