Weekly visions - week 29, 2026

貞子 / Sadako, directed by Hideo Nakata, written by Noriaki Sugihara, based on Kōji Suzuki’s novel Tide, Japan, 2019 - ⭐⭐½

I had missed the fact that Nakata had gone back to the Ringuverse twenty years after Ringu 2, probably because of the abundance of sequels with very similar titles (Sadakos with or without 3Ds, with or without Kayako). Anyway, when I found out, I had to catch up.

Sadako here apparently gained the power of reincarnating, so now she is - or maybe has just attached herself to - a little girl.
I suppose that skipping the middle films in the franchise doesn’t help with following the evolution of the lore around the long-haired lady, but I was a bit confused with both the premise and some of the events in the third act. But maybe continuity is not that important in a twenty-year-old, multi-media franchise.

At some point a character says that Sadako used to be all over the internet, so maybe the creepy video we know and love was monetised to death and that’s why, instead of the usual footage, she now cameos in other content creators’ shorts. One of those ‘YouTubers’ disappears, so his sister (who coincidentally is also a doctor taking care of the troubled reincarnation girl) and his agent team up to find out what happened to him, to compose the canonical woman-and-man investigation duo that drives the Ringu series.

All the usual story beats are featured, and at times it felt more like a reboot of the series than a sequel, or perhaps I’m giving too much weight to the similarity between the leading ladies’ names in this film (Akikawa) and the original (Asakawa).

I guess there’s no point in trying to make sense of everything that happens in a J-Horror sequel, but, still, I was expecting more from this late reunion of the director and the film that popularised the genre in the West.

Spiral: From the Book of Saw, directed by Darren Lynn Bousman, written by Pete Goldfinger and Josh Stolberg, US, 2021 - ⭐⭐ (rating unchanged)

Chris Rock announcing his requel of the Saw franchise, four years after Jigsaw, was one of those puzzling moments where two worlds that looked completely unrelated all of a sudden collide, like Edward Norton writing The Incredible Hulk.

As often happens, neither of the two worlds gained much by the impact, resulting in a Saw imitation about a John Kramer imitator. The idea of focusing the plot around police corruption was good and bore social meaning, but the actual result is quite muddled, and it doesn’t feel much deeper than the way Saw VI criticised the US healthcare system.

I can appreciate director Bousman’s intention of trying to start afresh, free from the need to feature Tobin Bell and from the baggage of the convoluted mythology.
The problem is that those elements made the Saw sequels entertaining: the new puppet - Mr. Snuggles - is ugly rather than scary (although: it’s a policepig threatening corrupted police members? Does it make sense?), and the voice of the recorded messages is just… funny? Lacking the gravity and intention of Bell’s tone, it’s no surprise to learn that the production didn’t really know how to solve the problem, settling on… something just when they had run out of time.

A lot of words are spent to justify the ‘spiral’ as a prominent symbol in Jigsaw’s work. I guess that was more apparent for the film’s production design department than for the audience: spirals give colour to Billy-the-puppet’s cheeks, but otherwise they appear just a couple of times in the previous eight films, and are never given any explicit relevance (if memory serves).

Now, if this had been another Saw sequel with the same production value and the same level of casting as its predecessors, it would be just a failed attempt at reviving the franchise: nothing to see, move along.
Unfortunately, its decently prestigious cast elevates the expectations. Samuel L. Jackson ¹ and Max Minghella don’t particularly shine, but the real issue is the person driving this whole endeavour: Chris Rock’s Ezekiel talks and behaves as usual Chris Rock for the first five minutes, just to reveal that this is just a character he is playing. Then he becomes all serious and dramatic (to signify a change of career for the actor? Although he has done serious roles before), but this means keeping for the rest of the film the same expression I have on mornings when I really don’t want to go to work.

And if his acting choices weren’t enough to undermine the film’s dramatic intention, what about the flashbacks where Ezekiel’s younger version is played by Chris Rock wearing a baseball cap backwards?

Novocaine, directed by Dan Berk and Robert Olsen, written by Lars Jacobson, US, 2025 - ⭐⭐⭐

This sounded like a fun variation in the ‘seemingly ordinary guy single-handedly faces a gang of higher-skilled bad guys to avenge his dog/his family’ genre.
In this case, the villains have kidnapped the guy’s girlfriend (like in a Super Mario Bros. game) and his secret power is not a past as a hitman/special forces member, but a condition preventing him from feeling pain.

I liked quite a lot the initial ‘rom-com’ part (Amber Midthunder is very sweet when she doesn’t have to kill Predators, and protagonist Jack Quaid doesn’t have a stubble, so we know we can trust him), so much so that when the story took a specific turn, I didn’t see it coming.
But, from there onwards, the plot just went into self-writing mode.
I absolutely lost interest, especially after realising that the screenwriter equates ’not feeling pain’ to ’not suffering any effect from wounds’. I mean, one would think that all that stuff that’s inside the body has a purpose and a function…

I had not realised the directing duo also wrote and directed two Maika Monroe films that left me quite cold (Villains and Significant Other). Here, someone else wrote the script, but the effect is the same.

-Quaid is not the only one ‘born into art’ in this film: Ray Nicholson does exactly what an actor bearing that family name is expected to do.

The Odyssey, written and directed by Christopher Nolan, based on Homer’s epic poem, United Kingdom/US, 2026 - ⭐⭐⭐⭐½

Let me be ‘old world’. I don’t know whether my experience is shared by many people my age, in Europe or outside, but I have learnt about Greek mythology very early on. I can’t say with certainty that I knew about Ulisse (the Italian name for Odysseus) and his long journey back home before I knew about Superman, Spider-Man and Thor, but it feels like that.
That’s what you get when your family, for generations, has spent summers at a beach identified, in local legends, as the place where Aeneas first arrived in Italy - after fleeing from Troy and before getting to Latium so that his descendants would end up founding a small town called Rome.

So, Homer’s poems are basically included in my factory settings, and the idea of a hero admired for his wit was, even as a kid, much more appealing to me than someone who was just able to run very fast and had embedded armour except for a heel.

This might explain why, for the first twenty minutes of Christopher Nolan’s adaptation, I was a bit impatient: ‘why do we spend so much time in Ithaca? We know the origin story already! Do we need to see Bruce’s parents get killed once again? And what’s with the wooden horse? That’s not even part of the Odyssey, that’s in the Iliad’.
(It turns out that that’s exactly the structure of the first books of the poem, and that the Trojan Horse is described in Virgil’s Aeneid instead, as the Iliad ends before those events)

Anyway, this approach detached me so much that I spent some time noticing that current Batman wants to marry previous Catwoman, whose son is Spider-Man, while Spider-Man’s girlfriend is now surrounded by sand and - wait, am I watching Dune now?
Then Jason Bourne comes in, as usual having forgotten his past.
Furthermore, my train of thought went into: how many of these actors have previously worked with Nolan? Has he fallen out with Tom Hardy? Great to see Elliot Page back in the clan!

All of these thoughts are signs that a film hasn’t grabbed me yet.
I must underline that I didn’t see it in IMAX (that would have cost me two hours in a tram and more than thirty euros for a ticket), so some of the visual amazement many viewers report wasn’t available.
For a long time, this felt like the standard Nolan film: very well executed, but calculated and cold.

Then Samantha Morton appeared, and the film finally started to capture me. Part of it is the fact that her section is definitely a horror sequence. Part of it is that, that point on, the themes that the film wants to discuss began to be clear.

As usual, I don’t want to spoil the film, and even if this is a well-known story, the points that Nolan wants to make may deserve a gradual discovery and personal understanding.
When it all finally clicked for me, during a flashback scene towards the end, I was so overwhelmed by emotion that I cried.

It’s a story about society, gender equality and, above all, human decency.
Odysseus’ cleverness, which I have admired for almost five decades, does come with a dark side, that I probably never considered before.