Weekly visions - week 32, 2026

貞子3D2 / Sadako 3D 2, written and directed by Tsutomu Hanabusa, based on Kōji Suzuki’s novel S, Japan, 2013 - ⭐⭐½

This is obviously a direct sequel to last week’s Sadako 3D, helmed by the same director, adapted (or just inspired, it’s not very clear) from the same novel, with a few actors returning.
So, I was expecting more of the same (also known as, rubbish).
Much to my surprise, I liked it substantially more! In fairness, the bar was very low.

Following the end of the previous film, Akane Ayukawa had a baby girl, but we are told she died giving birth; the father, her not very useful boyfriend, just decides he wants nothing to do with the child, and lets his sister Fuko raise her.
We pick up with them when little Nagi is five years old, has long black hair, and is understandably pissed off at the world and her lack of a dad and a real mum.
She copes by drawing scary pictures that seem to predict accidental deaths that will happen around her. Such accidents are also announced by internet-connected devices behaving weirdly.
Fuko, who works at the Asakawa Medical Center (name cameo from Ringu), is a good auntie but she starts to be scared of Nagi, and she tries to get help…

I didn’t notice any actual 3D-ness, and there are fewer CGI abominations.
These two elements alone make the film more enjoyable, but what really worked for me is that this is essentially The Omen in a Ringu sauce.

The plot doesn’t make a tiny bit of sense, and the editing is very weird, with scenes starting in one environment and suddenly jumping to a different one.

If last week I ended up giving a higher rating than my critical sense would suggest, I considered here even giving three stars, before my brain advised me otherwise.

The Nun II, directed by Michael Chaves, written by Akela Cooper, Ian B. Goldberg and Richard Naing, US, 2023 - ⭐⭐

In short: the reviews at the time mentioned one cool scene at a newsstand, and not much else worth noting. That is correct.

I believe that in an imaginary film reboot of Buffy: the Vampire Slayer, Taissa Farmiga would have been an excellent Willow. At least, that’s what her eyes tell me, constantly oscillating between scared/surprised and determined.

This sequel to the misadventures of Sister Irene (no need to bother with a plot summary: the title tells you everything you need to know) feels like a humourless mix of a Buffy episode and an Indiana Jones film, dipped in a Devil’s Backbone sauce.

The lack of fun is a bit surprising, given that the script was originally penned by the writer of Malignant and M3GAN (before a rewrite by future Conjuring 4 co-authors). There’s a dose of Cooperian camp in the last act, which can’t shine because it’s drowned in the classic Conjuring appropriation of Christian beliefs: this time, the film is focussed on Saint Lucy of Syracuse, of course keeping the parts of the lore that serve a screenplay and happily contradicting the rest (it could have been explained by the Rupert Giles-like librarian at the Avignon Palais des Papes, but I don’t recall him doing that; better not touch topics that might upset the Catholic Church).

Director Chaves, at this point having directed more Warrenverse features than James Wan himself, delivers a movie that’s perfectly in line with his other efforts in the series (which also constitute his whole directorial experience): a good film on the technical side, disappointing on the emotional one, dramatically not scary and verging on tedious towards the end.

The titular demon nun (Bonnie Aarons of course) appears here and there, looks menacingly straight ahead, but really does nothing until the end, preferring to delegate the action to other, more corporeal threats, which in turn don’t do anything new.
Jonas Bloquet also returns from the first film as handyman Maurice.

The cinematic Warrens themselves (Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga) appear in a post-credit sting, revealing Last Rites was coming.

De la Comédie-Française / Comédie-Française, directed by Bertrand Usclat and Martin Darondeau, co-written with Clémence Dargent and Pauline Clément, France, 2026 - ⭐⭐½

If you watch French films, you have surely noticed credits where some actor names are followed by ‘de la Comédie-Française’. It means that the person is an associate of the permanent theatre company founded in 1680 in honour of Molière.
It’s as if every time David Bradley appears in a film, his name was followed by ‘of the Royal Shakespeare Company’.

The ‘joke’ in this film is that every actor appearing is part of the troupe, so all of their names in the opening credits bear that specification, while the creatives’ names are followed by ‘pas de la Comédie-Française’. The whole story is also set within the theatre, and about a debuting director (Pauline Clément de la Comédie-Française) in the few hours before the première of her version of Macbeth: everything that could go wrong absolutely does, but as they say in France, le show must go on. Especially because no performance has ever been cancelled at the Comédie-Française.

So, this is supposed to be a celebration of this French institution, even if in the form of a comedy.
Now, do we really believe that the concept of ‘understudy’ or ‘stand-in’ hasn’t ever reached Parisian stages? Or that actors can reach the dress rehearsal without knowing their lines?
Of course everything is played for laughs, and there was some laughing at my screening among the four people attending (me included), but when unbelievable becomes too much, even a 75-minute running time feels very long.

It’s probably more enjoyable if you know the performers: I was only aware of Guillaume Gallienne de la Comédie-Française, who steals the first ten minutes in the funniest scene of the whole film, and of Laurent Stocker de la Comédie-Française, just because I saw him two weeks ago in Les pistolets en plastique.

I was left a bit perplexed by one specific scene involving one of the two persons of colour appearing (the roster of artists de la Comédie-Française is currently not extremely diverse).
I felt it was humiliating, but maybe that was the point of the satire. I can never tell.

The Hunt, directed by Craig Zobel, written by Nick Cuse and Damon Lindelof, US, 2020 - ⭐⭐⭐½ (down from ⭐⭐⭐⭐)

My Letterboxd note from three years ago: ‘I watched this film without knowing who its creators were. Only at the end I read it was directed by the author of Compliance (which annoyed me so much that I never finished watching it) and written by one of the authors of Lost and the son of the other one. At least this explains why the movie doesn’t make any sense (politically or plot-wise) but, at the same time, is thoroughly enjoyable.’

Today, I mostly agree with myself. The political point of view is a bit clearer, but that only makes things worse, considering the state of the world today.
And then of course Cuse and Lindelof give themselves a convenient way out of the controversy.

I would like to ask Hollywood people to please stop depicting Eastern European countries in a negative light.

Cold Storage, directed by Jonny Campbell, written by David Koepp based on his novel of the same name, United Kingdom, 2026 - ⭐⭐⭐½

The director of Ant & Dec’s 2006 film Alien Autopsy and of the best episode of BBC’s Dracula is given another chance at directing a movie, and is quite successful.

He seems to have quite a predilection for reaction shots of Georgina Campbell (no relation between the two), here in a more animated role than usual, and a bit less so for Joe Keery, whose presence heightens the impression that this could be a Stranger Things spin-off.

This is a story about a space organism brought to Earth in 1979 by the re-entry into the atmosphere of the Skylab space station (hey, I remember talking about the Skylab reentry with my friends at the playground!). Twenty years later, the people living in the remote Australian location where one of the fragments fell are killed by the mutated parasitic fungus, which is valiantly contained by Liam Neeson, Lesley Manville and Smile’s protagonist Sosie Bacon.
The threat is safely put in, indeed, cold storage until another twenty years pass, and climate change makes the storage no longer that cold. Then it’s up to the two young security guards to save the world.

It’s a pleasant, no-brain-required horror comedy where you gladly put up with two leads that have no real chemistry, more coincidences than you would normally accept and no small amount of contradictions. And that’s mostly thanks to Neeson and Manville.

Now, if anyone could explain to me what the point of Vanessa Redgrave’s character is, I would be grateful for a couple of minutes.