Dear friend,
it seems that my weekly consumption of films has gone down in the last few months. I would love to claim that that is the result of a conscious choice to spend my time in a different, more creative way, but the truth is that I just don’t seem to find on my streaming services anything that inspires me anymore. I guess the times are a-changing.
Don’t Look Up/女優霊, directed by Hideo Nakata, co-written with Hiroshi Takahashi, Japan, 1996 - ⭐⭐⭐
After the anthology film I watched a couple of weeks ago, this is the first proper feature-length horror directed and written by the creative team that will give us Ringu two years down the line. Nakata and Takahashi are getting closer to that goal, with this story of a film crew who shoots their movie on a haunted set. Their dailies are spoiled by footage from a different film, which the director barely remembers, and the apparitions of a scary long-haired woman dressed in white get more and more frequent.
Unsettling rather than scary (Nakata will get the idea, after this, that not showing the ghost’s face is much more effective), it also reminded me of Nigel Kneale’s The Stone Tape.
No One Gets Out Alive, directed by Santiago Menghini, written by Jon Croker and Fernanda Coppel, from the novel by Adam Nevill, Romania/US, 2021 - ⭐⭐½
There are a few films that Netflix insists that I should watch and, frankly, not many horrors I haven’t seen are left on the platform, so I decided to give this one a chance.
Adapted from a novel by the author of The Ritual (itself adapted into a Netflix film which I reasonably liked), this one is centred on an illegal immigrant in Cleveland having to find a place to stay, and settling for a cheap and no-question-asked room in a woman-only guesthouse managed by a creepy man.
This is again (like The Ritual) a horror based on grief and with a weirdly-looking villain, but it doesn’t work as well as that film, maybe because you see the lead character, a smart and capable woman, making a lot of wrong decisions out of desperation, and other characters making even worse ones for reasons that are not really justified.
The lead actress, Cristina Rodlo, is quite good.
A Complete Unknown, directed by James Mangold, co-written with Jay Cocks, based on Elijah Wald’s book Dylan Goes Electric, US, 2024 - ⭐⭐⭐½
My weekly tribute to the upcoming Academy Awards, this was to me a completely uninteresting biopic that’s only kept alive by its performances: Timothée Chalamet is perfect (maybe a bit too much) in the role of the full-of-himself young genius, hailed, like in Dune, as the messiah. This time the Fremen are folk legends Pete Seeger (a great heartbroken Edward Norton) and Woody Guthrie (the always dependable Scoot McNairy). The Chani of the situation, sceptical about the chosen one, is Joan Baez (a charming Monica Barbaro).
Look, I used to like Bob Dylan and especially Highway 61 Revisited, but all the behaviour around the acceptance of the Nobel Prize made me lose a bit of interest in the person himself.
Rashomon/羅生門, directed by Akira Kurosawa, co-written with Shinobu Hashimoto, based on Ryūnosuke Akutagawa’s book 藪の中, Japan, 1950 - ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
The first time I saw this film, maybe fifteen years ago, it didn’t have much effect on me: I suppose I was expecting something different, and I suspect the copy I watched wasn’t high-res. But then last week I found a cheap Blu-Ray, and this was a totally new experience: visually it was amazing, and the section narrated by the medium was creepy and unexpected. Above all, I loved that the narrators in the story do not, as usually described, remember things differently, but purposely distort the objective facts to depict themselves in a different light.