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glenngaylord · 2 years

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Haneke Comes Early – Film Review: Speak No Evil ★★★★1/2

A short time ago, I was coming home from dinner with a friend when a young man with a pronounced limp walked towards us, his little dog in tow. Just as he drew close, he dropped his phone on the sidewalk. With my natural instincts kicking in, I picked up his phone, returned it and asked if he was okay. He muttered something about injuring his leg recently, thanked us, and we all continued on our way. It wasn’t until we returned to my car that my friend realized his bag of possessions, which he usually hanged from the back handles of his wheelchair, was no longer there. Retracing our steps, I found the stolen and now completely empty bag right by the spot we had encountered Mr. Dogwalker. Clearly he had a partner in crime who would swoop up quietly from behind while I was helping out the first guy. With my kindness used against me, I have since discovered my vulnerabilities, vowing to increase my awareness when confronted with such situations again. I’m not saying I’ll never again help, for example, an elderly person cross the street, but I’m not NOT saying that either!

I bring all of this up because the new film by Danish filmmaker Christian Tafdrup, Speak No Evil, delves into the nuances of niceties and our ability to avoid seeming rude even when faced with increasingly dire situations. This slow burning, expertly calibrated story caused me to reflect on my own blindspots. Co-written with his brother, Mads Tafdrup, the film begins with a somewhat tightly wound Danish couple, Bjørn and Louise (Morten Burian and Sidsel Siem Koch) on a Tuscan vacation with their sweet daughter Agnes (Liva Forsberg). There they meet a more gregarious Dutch couple, Patrick and Karin (Fedja van Huêt and Karina Smulders) with their sullen, withdrawn son Abel (Marius Damslev). Abel, they explain, has a condition in which he was born without a fully developed tongue, which affects his speaking abilities. The families become fast friends, and once home again, Bjørn and Louise receive an invitation from their “vacation friends” to come to rural Holland for a long weekend. While Louise thinks it’s a little odd, since they barely know them, Bjørn seems a little more excited by the adventurousness of the idea, so off they go. “What’s the worst that could happen?” a friend of theirs asks.

Not the subtlest of questions when feelings of dread creep into the first frames of this movie. Right off the bat, the score by Sune Kølster blares melodramatically like some film noir from the 1950s playing over normally benign images. Upon arrival, things seem increasingly off, but in quiet ways which make you question whether or not our guests are perhaps a little too uptight. What could seems like honest misunderstandings, such as Patrick forgetting Louise was a vegetarian, or noticing our hosts utilizing aggressive parenting skills, force you to wonder if we’re looking at cultural differences or maybe something more insidious. Add a subtle hint of homoeroticism between Bjørn and Patrick, and you are left wondering which direction each scene is headed, knowing full well it’s not going to be pleasant.

Without spoiling anything further, Speak No Evil examines how human graciousness can often leave one vulnerable to exploitation. As such, it shares its DNA with such films as George Sluizer's The Vanishing, Bryan Bertino’s The Strangers and especially Michael Haneke’s Funny Games. Direct visual and aural references abound while continually challenging the audience to wonder where they would draw the line if they found themselves in increasingly uncomfortable situations, however harmless they may seem. Like its predecessors, the film will not appeal to everyone as it pushes itself further and further into darker territory.

There is, however, no denying the craft on display. Tafdrup not only has a gift for unsettling images, complicated dynamics, and slowly turning screws on the story, but he also has guided his quartet of lead actors to deliver incredible performances. Burian’s Bjørn does most of the heavy lifting as we watch his initial excitement wearing away. It’s a step-by-step master class in how to expose layer upon layer of a character. Koch gives Louise a brittle energy, fully justifying her ever-increasing discomfort and anger. While Smulders has a quieter role, she perfectly finds just the right bone-chilling notes to prevent her from getting upstaged while van Huêt's showiness and bluster make for an unforgettable portrayal, especially in the film’s many set pieces.

At times the film loses some credibility, especially during its later stages, but Tafdrup stays so focused on his characters with the subjugation and micro-aggressions always taking center stage, one carefully rendered reaction at a time. It may be the feel terrible movie of 2022, but as a cautionary tale, one cannot deny the valuable lessons learned and the blazing talent from both sides of the camera. Not only will I never forget this film, I will never, as my parents taught me, take candy from strangers.

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weekendwarriorblog · 2 years

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Sundance 2022 Day 2 & 3: Speak No Evil, Summering, Sharp Stick, Call Jane

Things are going fairly well as Sundance went through the weekend, and here are four more reviews, still focusing on narrative films even though I’ve been watching a few more docs over the weekend, as well.

SPEAK NO EVIL

Christian Tafdrup’s third movie is the first movie I personally have seen from the Danish filmmaker. Before the movie, Tafdrup said that he and his co-writing brother Mads were looking to make “The most unpleasant experience for an audience ever.” In fact, I had already been hearing comparisons to Von Trier and Haneke being bandied about before even knowing what the movie was about. The movie sets itself up with music that sounds foreboding that I really wasn’t sure what I was getting into, although this appropriately was the Day One Midnight movie for this year’s Sundance.

Danish couple Bjørn and Louise (Morten Burian, Sidsel Siem Koch) are on holiday with their daughter Agnes (Liva Forsberg) in Tuscany, where they meet a strange Dutch family, adding Speak No Evil to the long list of vacation movies we’ve seen in the past year, but also reminding us that the Swedish film Force Majeure started that trend a very long time ago. They accept an invitation to visit the other couple, Patrick and Karin (Fedja van Huêt, Karina Smulders) at their home. They have a quiet and sullen son Abel (Marius Damslev), who barely speaks, but they’re disturbed by how strict his parents are with him, which makes them uncomfortable. On top of that, Louisa is a vegetarian (or rather, a pescaterian, a term I hate), but Patrick still offers her the boar he has cooked and challenges

Patrick and Karin (Fedja van Huêt andKarina Smulders) keep putting their visitorsin odder and uncomfortable situations, including lots of PDA (public displays of affection) and spying on the couple while they’re having sex, so they decide to get out of there, leaving in the middle of the night. Things just get more awkward when they have to return for Agnes’ stuffed rabbit.

You can only imagine what’s going to happen… are they killers or swingers or something more horrible than either? It’s over an hour before Bjorn starts venturing around the house and starts realizing that things are even more wrong than they thought.

Essentially, Speak No Evil is the much darker non-comic version of Vacation Friends, another vacation-related movie from last year, oddly.. Like Haneke and Von Trier, Speak No Evil is more about the psychological terror of being put into a horrible situation, more than the type of horror with supernatural elements. The movie is filled with such great performances across the board, and there was a lot more English than I was expecting, not that I necessarily have any issue with foreign language films. Tafrdup does a terrific job with a movie that would surely have a difficulty tone.

This is just a fantastic thriller, one I do hope will get some sort of theatrical release, even if it means playing a few non-virtual festivals, although the streaming horror site Shudder has already picked it up for distribution.

Rating: 8/10

CALL JANE

Call Jane was actually my first Sundance movie this year that didn’t show up at the festival with distribution lined up, although it’s a bit of a misnomer that it’s the directorial debut by Phyllis Nagy, the screenwriter of Carol, since she previously directed the HBO movie, Mrs. Harris.

It stars Elizabeth Banks as Joy Griffin, a suburban housewife in the ‘60s, married to Chris Messina and with a teen daughter Charlotte. Joy gets pregnant but needs to get an emergency pregnancy termination due to how it’s physically affecting her. Joy’s case gets the attention of the Jane Collective, a group of women who helps women get illegal abortions in the ‘60s pre-Roe v Wade, and Joy ends up getting more and more involved, first offering support to women during the uncomfortable procedure and then doing some of the procedures herself.

I was mildly surprised that this film wasn’t actually written by Nagy, who was working from a screenplay by Hayley Schore and Roshan Sethi that may have been around for some time. But the writing isn’t that great, and you wonder why Nagy didn’t take more of a writing credit herself.

While I understand the timeliness of this film with what’s going on in Texas and other states, this is just not a situation that affects me at all, and therefore not a particularly interesting premise to me, despite my belief in women’s right to choose. It’s a fairly bland drama, even though there are moments that are quite difficult and uncomfortable to sit through, such as when Joy herself is getting the procedure.

That said, I liked the movie more and more as it went along, and much of that came down to the terrific performance by Banks, who is given a lot of room to really make Joy far more interesting than the typical Douglas Sirk heroine. (Originally, the role was supposed to be played by Elisabeth Moss, who may have been better, but Banks handles the material quite well.) The second most interesting performance comes from Sigourney Weaver, who is running the clinic, but unfortunately, Messina is back to playing another bland indie role, which I was hoping he had put behind him. Kate Mara plays their neighbor who adds absolutely nothing to the movie.

The rest of the cast is okay, but there are many scenes of the women sitting around talking, and the film is shot so blandly, that it does little to invigorate the film’s slower paced moments. Things definitely get quite dramatic with many great moments showcasing the actors, as well as showing off Nagy’s talents as a theater director.

The biggest problem with Call Jane, and this could just be due to Nagy’s inexperience as a film director, is that it’s two hours without needing to even be that long. The story could definitely have been tightened up to improve its pacing with more than a few scenes that served very little purpose.

The Jane Collective is an intriguing and timely subject to explore for a movie, but Call Jane’s closest benchmark is Mike Leigh’s Vera Drake, and it doesn’t come close to being that good. On the other hand, Call Jane is a fine showcase for Banks as an actor; I just wish the writing and filmmaking aspects of the film were better.

Rating: 7/10

SUMMERING

It’s always nice when James Ponsoldt has a new movie, especially since I was such a fan of his movie Smashed when it played at Sundance, or maybe it was TIFF, or maybe it was both? Summering is a very different movie, because it’s a coming-of-age movie about four young girls wanting to spend the last weekend of summer together before going to middle school. While on one of their adventures, they find a dead body, but instead of going the River’s Edge route, the girls try to find out who the man is and why he jumped (or fell) from a bridge above.

Summering comes into Sundance with distribution in place from Bleecker Street, and you can kind of understand why it appealed to the smaller distributor, because it’s a movie with definitely Stand by Me vibes, maybe a little bit of The Goonies?

Shot in Utah during the summer, the movie stars Lia Barnett, Eden Grace Redfield, Madalen Mills, and Sanai Victoria as the four best friends of different diversities and backgrounds but some seem more mature and taller than others. A nice touch is that for the majority of the film, all four young actresses do almost every single scene together, and Ponsoldt does a good job giving these talented young actors the direction to pull off some pretty complex scenes, as we follow them around, trying to learn more about the dead man they found.

All four young actresses are given their moments, and then on the flip side, their mothers are played by Lake Bell, Megan Mullally, Sarah Cooper, and Ashley Madekwe, who also have some nice scenes together. The fact is that Ponsoldt has managed to make a movie with almost no men whatsoever (except for the dead body and a small cameo).

It’s less successful at mixing genres ala last year’s Ghostbusters: Afterlife, because the comedy aspects aren’t particularly hilarious and the mystery and horror elements are rather subtle. The girls do get spooked after seeing the dead body, and even try to throw a seance to communicate with him.

Summering is sweet and cute and not particularly groundbreaking, but for what it’s trying to achieve, which is to make a pleasant movie that can appeal to younger girls, it offers some truly heartfelt moments and a wonderful ending that allows the girls to say goodbye to their childhoods as they head to middle school.

Rating: 7/10

SHARP STICK

Although Sharp Stick is Lena (Girls) Dunham’s first feature film since 2010’s Tiny Furniture, it’s actually her first movie at Sundance, since that other film premiered at SXSW. I wasn’t really a fan of Tiny Furniture, and honestly, I could take or leave Girls, but of course, it’s hard not to be interested in anything Ms Dunham does. This one could be seen as a character piece, and if it hadn’t played at Sundance so soon after I had seen Sean Baker’s significantly better Red Rocket, I might be a little less jaded and open to the story she wanted to tell here.

It stars Norwegian actress Kristine Froseth as 26-year-old Sarah Jo, a bright and bubbly caregiver to a young boy with Down’s syndrome named Zach (Liam Michel Saux). She lives with her mother, played by Jennifer Jason Leigh, and her sister Treina, played by Zola’s Taylour Paige, who is obsessed with TikTok and being a social media influencer. There’s not much to be said about the latter characters, since they don’t really bring too much to the overall story/movie.

Still a virgin, Sarah Jo decides that it’s time for her to explore her sexuality, so she comes on to Zach’s father Josh (Jon Bernthal) and begs him to take her virginity. They end up having an affair, trying to hide it from Josh’s pregnant wife (played by Dunham herself). In hopes of being better at sex, Sara Jo starts watching a lot of porn, and eventually becomes obsessed with a porn star (Scott Speedman) and starts experimenting with the things she watches in his porn.

Due to the sexuality on display in this coming-of-age tale, it’s hard not to think of something like Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac, or some of the work of Todd Solondz, particularly Welcome to the Dollhouse, although Dunham does bring a uniqueness to it with her own writing voice. Froseth is quite a find to play the naive young woman looking to explore her sexuality, and it’s her performance that keeps the movie from becoming absolutely loathsome. She’s a little childlike herself, and more than once while watching the movie, I wondered whether Sarah Jo was meant to be on the spectrum or that it was decided not to state that outright.

The movie just takes Sarah Jo further and further down this wormhole of sex, and the film gets darker – again, much like Nymphomania – but at least there’s some redemption for Sarah Jo that at least things eventually end in a happier place. Dunham is definitely a better director now than when she made Tiny Furniture, and one thing I really liked was the choice of songs, which did a terrific job adding to the mood.

The problem is that Sharp Stick leaves the viewer with too many questions about what they just watched. Although it does end in a good place, there are elements of the movie that are just so icky, it’s hard to forgive them, making it harder to fully recommend the movie.

Rating: 6.5/10

More reviews coming soon…

#Movies #Reviews #Sundance 2022 #Sharp Stick #Speak No Evil #Summering #Lena Dunham #Elisabeth Banks #Call Jane

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