Cinequest opens tonight, so this week’s video pick comes from the 2017 fest. In the Norwegian suspense thriller Revenge, the slightly creepy Rebekka (Siren Jørgensen) appears at a hotel on a remote fjord under the false pretense that she is a travel writer. The hotel is otherwise empty because it is off-season (think The Shining). She ingratiates herself with the hotel’s owner Morten, the most economically and socially significant person in town, and his wife (Maria Bock). It turns out that twenty years before, Morten date-raped Rebekka’s little sister, leading to her suicide. Now Rebekka wants to exact vengeance.
Revenge becomes a tick-tock suspenser as Rebekka deliberately lays her trap. We’re able to see some, but not all, of the web that she spins, which will put in jeopardy Morten’s reputation, marriage, business and his very health and survival. Can she pull it off? And how lethal will her revenge be?
It’s the first feature for Kjersti Steinsbø, who adapted the screenplay and directed. She has created a real page-turner here. In one very effective touch, it turns out that one of the characters knows FAR more than we initially suspect.
Anders Baasmo Christian in REVENGE
Revenge is uniformly well-acted, but Anders Baasmo Christian, as Bimbo the bartender, is exceptionally good. Just keep your focus on Bimbo. There’s more there than initially meets the eye. And Bimbo’s relationships with both Rebekka and Morten are very conflicted and complicated.
The ending is satisfying, and Morten’s ultimate fate is unexpected. Revenge was one of the world cinema high points of the 2017 Cinequest. Revenge can be streamed from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
Megan Hensley in Charlie Griak’s NINA OF THE WOODS, premiering at Cinequest. Photo courtesy of Cinequest.
The supernatural thriller Nina of the Woods follows a cynical reality TV crew into a forest; the struggling actress Nina (Megan Hensley) has signed on to the gig, and the shoot happens to take place where Nina grew up. This is one of those lurid shows about the supposed supernatural – sensationalizing phenomena from aliens to Sasquatch; these guys are used to creating the ILLUSION of the supernatural, not FINDING the supernatural. Everyone gets a surprise.
The show’s on-screen host Jeremy (Daniel Bielinski) is the biggest asshole, but this is mostly a jaded bunch. As the crew sneers at the working class locals, they get some truth from Eric the camera guy (Ricardo Vázquez),
These are the people who actually watch your show. Average people. This is who you do it for…. “Reality”. This is reality. Not what we do. No one would want to watch the real thing anyway. It’s too much and too boring all at the same time. Who would care?
A local backwoods guide (Shawn Patrick Boyd) is hired; he is a very serious guy who respects the menace of this particular forest. Nina, having been raised by a father with a spiritual sense of the forest, can also sense something off kilter.
Now something happens that is unexplainable on the time/space matrix. Weird shit happens, and the party happens upon more than they bargained for.
Director and co-writer Charlie Griak unsettles us without employing gore or monsters. Nothing is as unsettling as when our reality is challenged.
In 2015, Cinequest hosted the world premiere of Griak’s debut feature (The Center), a remarkably good drama about recruitment for a Scientology-like cult. Hensley played Annika in The Center.
Griak inserts file footage of old Northwest lumberjacks at work with some very cool Foley.
Cinequest hosts the world premiere of Nina of the Woods.
Michael Olavson in FOX HUNT DRIVE, premiering at Cinequest. Photo courtesy of Cinequest.
In the thriller Fox Hunt Drive, Alison (Lizzie Zerebko) is an architect whose career has been stymied by an unfair blackballing; she works as a rideshare driver at night to make the rent and subsidize her futile daytime job search. She picks up a ride (Michael Olavson) who may be a serial killer, and we’re all off on one wild ride.
The rider is anything but the wild-eyed Charlie Manson type. He is polite, professional and contained, and he doesn’t show any sign of compulsivity. But Alison finds some disturbing evidence in his bag…
So, here we have a woman alone, driving around deserted streets at night with a killer in the back seat, and the audience is screaming “Get away! Get away!” But she doesn’t.
This sets up a massive plot twist. Setting up this turn of events so that it’s credible as well as gobsmacking requires some ingenuity, so kudos to screenwriters Adam Armstrong and Marcus Devivo and director Drew Walkup.
Cinequest will host the world premiere of Fox Hunt Drive.
In the thriller Before the Fire, this year’s Must See at Cinequest, the only escape from an apocalyptic flu pandemic is a woman’s long-estranged rural hometown – but the scary family who traumatized her childhood is there, too. Written by its female star Jenna Lyng Adams, and the first feature by its female director Charlie Buhler, this indie thriller rocks.
Ava Boone (Adams) is a Hollywood actress who has found some success “pretending to be a vampire”, as she puts it, on a television series. As a killer flu sweeps America’s cities, her photojournalist husband (Jackson Davis) seeks to save her by tricking her into refuge with his family in their sparsely populated childhood hometown.
The problem is that growing up in a family ruled by her abusive father was deeply traumatizing. And it’s only a matter of time until her family finds out that she’s back.
As star and screenwriter Adams has said, “but what if the last place you wanted to go was the only place you could go?”
Veteran Charles Hubbell is excellent as the monstrous dad. The part is written to acknowledge that domestic abuse is about power and control – and not just physical abuse. This guy emanates physical brutality, but he is also a master manipulator.
To make things worse, the dad leads a militia of Deliverance-style yahoos, whose strategy to suppress the flu is to murder outsiders.
Ava was once – and is definitely no longer – a farm girl. For necessity’s sake, she begins repairing fences and doing the other hard, dirty and unglamorous work of the family farm run by her husband’s brother (Ryan Vigilant) and his mother (M.J. Karmi). Along the way, she physically hardens up and develops some skills with firearms.
Unsurprisingly (since she wrote it), the role of Ava is a showcase for Jenna Lyng Adams (The Kominsky Files). When Ava first sees her father again, she’s terrified to her core, which tells us all we need from the back story. Adams’ performance is compelling and credible as Ava has to devise and execute her own survival plan. Adams is on-screen in almost every scene and carries the picture.
“Audiences are thirsty for unconventional, layered, and imperfect women on-screen,” said Adams. “I wanted our protagonist to find her strength by facing the darkest parts of her life in the darkest hours of the world. She reinvents herself over and over again to survive.”
“We fought to make this movie, because we felt that there was a very specific expectation about the types of stories women were able to tell,” says director Charlie Buhler. “Male directors shift between genres much more fluidly, and I think you can feel it in the types of stories that make it to the screen. But Jenna and I both love action, we both love sci-fi, so we wanted to make a female protagonist that we women could really rally behind.”
Indeed, women filmmakers shouldn’t be left to the high-falutin’ Message Pictures while the guys have all the fun with the genre movies.
Before the Fire was filmed on location in South Dakota. Cinematographer Drew Bienemann (visual effects in Beasts of the Southern Wild) makes the barren wintry landscape work to illustrate the Ava’s isolation and vulnerability.
Cinequest will host the world premiere of Before the Fire, which is the best American narrative feature in the fest.
Maja Stojan in 3 DAY WEEKEND. Photo courtesy of Cinequest.
The inventively constructed thriller 3 Day Weekend is a storytelling triumph for writer-director Wyatt McDill and a taut 80 minutes of gripping entertainment.
3 Day Weekend begins with a lovelorn Millennial doofus, Ben, on a solo camping trip. Despite a noticeable lack of outdoor skills, Ben pitches his tent in the woods near a remote lake; but other people arrive, and everything that Ben witnesses tells him that he has blundered into a kidnapping in progress, and, possibly, a murder. But all is not as it seems…
We follow what Ben sees for 29 minutes, and then the point of view shifts to that of a second character. The added vantage point provides the audience with more puzzle pieces, and we start understanding that the story is going in another direction. Then a third character, and, finally a fourth, add layers to complete the story.
McDill even takes us from one crime subgenre to another – is this a peril-and-rescue film, a heist movie, a tragic neo-noir or a perfect crime flick?
And McDill tells his story with hardly any dialogue – and essentially none in the first half of the movie, unless you count grunts. The actors – Maya Stojan, Morgan Krantz, Nathan Phillips and Scott MacDonald – ably tell the story without many lines.
This isn’t exactly like Rashomon, where each character’s perspective shapes the facts differently. In 3 Day Weekend, the facts are all the same; it’s just that some characters come to the story knowing things that others don’t, and some characters experience events that others miss.
There’s plenty of humor slyly embedded in this tale, chiefly in the foibles of the male characters. Plus there are two tattoos that the audience will not be expecting.
McDill also cleverly uses the time-stamped notifications and texts from smart phones to set and reset the timeline of the story threads.
This is an ingenuously-constructed story. Cinequest hosts the world premiere of 3 Day Weekend.
Rebecca Hall, Jason Bateman and Joel Edgerton in THE GIFT
The character-driven suspenser The Gift is more than a satisfying thriller – it’s a well-made and surprisingly thoughtful film that I keep mulling over. It’s a filmmaking triumph for writer-director-producer-actor Joel Edgerton, the hunky Australian action star (the Navy Seal leader in Zero Dark Thirty).
Simon (Jason Batemen), a take-no-prisoners corporate riser, has moved back to Southern California with his sweetly meek and anxiety-riddled wife Robyn (Rebecca Hall). In a chance encounter, they meet Gordo (Edgerton), who knew Simon in high school. Gordo is an odd duck, but the couple feels obligated to meet him socially when he keeps dropping by with welcome gifts. At first, The Gift seems like a comedy of manners, as Jason and Robyn try to figure out a socially appropriate escape from this awkward entanglement. But then, the audience senses that Gordo may be dangerously unhinged, and it turns out that Simon and Gordo have more of a past than first apparent. Things get scary.
Edgerton uses – and even toys with – all the conventions of the suspense thriller – the woman alone, the suspicious noise in the darkened house, the feeling of being watched. And there’s a cathartic Big Reveal at the end.
But The Gift isn’t a plot-driven shocker – although it works on that level. Instead it’s a study of the three characters. Just who is Gordo? And who is Simon? And who is Robyn? None of these characters are what we think at the movie’s start. Each turns out to be capable of much more than we could imagine. I particularly liked Bateman’s performance as a guy who is masking his true character through the first half of the movie, but dropping hints along the way. Hall is as good as she is always, and Edgerton really nails Gordo’s off-putting affect.
And, after you’ve watched The Gift, consider this – just what is the gift in the title?
The Gift is available to rent on DVD from Netflix and Redbox and to stream from Amazon Video, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
Adam Sandler and filmmaking brothers Benny and Josh Safdie serve up neo-noir in a pressure cooker in the relentlessly tense Uncut Gems.
Howard (Adam Sandler) is a Jewish jewelry dealer in New York City’s Diamond District, who makes his big bucks catering to NBA stars brought in by his associate (LaKeith Stanfield). He’s also a gambling addict. One of the consequences of gambling addiction is losing more than you can afford and owing money that you don’t have to very nasty people.
Kevin Garnett, LaKeith Stanfield and Adam Sandler in UNCUT GEMS
Howard has a lot – a wife and kids in a luxurious suburban house, a young mistress in a Manhattan apartment, a thriving business. But he’s always on the verge of losing it all because it’s not enough; his life is driven by the compulsion to make five figure exotic sports bets.
That means that he is constantly robbing Peter to pay Paul, shifting money, jewelry, schemes and bullshit around like a spinning plate act on The Ed Sullivan Show. Throughout Uncut Gems, the chaos elevates, as Howard bets on being bailed out by the Big Sale and the Big Bet. There’s a massive Ethiopian opal (a MacGuffin like the Maltese Falcon), a spine chilling auction and an even more gripping sports bet.
It’s clear that the inevitable will catch up with Howard – we just don’t know where it will fall on the continuum between having all of the bones in his hand broken and wearing cement shoes in the East River. Or whether his spiking blood pressure will send him out with a stroke or heart attack. Come to think of it, this probably isn’t the best movie choice for a cardiologist.
Adam Sandler in UNCUT GEMS
Here’s the challenge that the Safdies faced in writing this character and that Sandler faced in playing him. How do you make him just appealing enough to keep us engaged with his situation? This is a guy who, were we in the same family or community, we would dread his every approach (Here comes trouble).
This is an extraordinary, awards-worthy performance by Sandler; he inhabits a perpetually frenetic guy, fueled by his compulsions and by the resultant desperation.
Idina Menzel is superb as the wife who knows Howard best and assesses him the most accurately (and cruelly). Stanfield is very good, as are Julia Fox as the girlfriend and Eric Bogosian as a frustrated creditor. Former NBA star Kevin Garnett plays NBA star Kevin Garnett and holds his own with the professional actors.
The 2 hours and 15 minutes of Uncut Gems flies by (and you feel like you’ve been running the whole time). This is one of the Best Movies of 2019.
Rojo is Argentine writer-director Benjamín Naishtat’s slow burn drama. Rojo is set just before the 1970s coup that some characters expect – but no one is anticipating how long and bloody the coup will be. Several vignettes are woven together into a tapestry of pre-coup moral malaise.
A prominent provincial lawyer Claudio (Darío Grandinetti) is invited to participate in a scam. There’s a scary encounter of lethal restaurant rage. It looks like Claudio, bobbing on a sea of moral relativism, may well remained unscathed, but the arrival of crack detective becomes a grave threat.
As Claudio weaves through his life, his society shows signs of crumbling. There’s a failed teen seduction, an emotional breakdown at a formal reception and a natural metaphor – a solar eclipse.
It’s funny when the audience finally connects the dots and understands who the character nicknamed “the Hippie” is. And Naishtat and Grandinetti get the most out of the scene where Claudio finally dons a toupee.
We know something that the characters don’t know – or at least fully grasp – how bloody the coup will be. Watch for the several references to desaparecido, a foreboding of the coup. Argentina’s coup was known for the desaparecidos – the disappeared – thousands of the regime’s political opponents went missing without a trace, having been executed by death squads. In Rojo, a very inconvenient madman dies and his body is hidden, there’s a disappearing act in a magic show, and a would-be boyfriend vanishes.
This is a moody, atmospheric film that works as a slow-burn thriller. I saw Rojo earlier this year at the San Francisco International Film Festival (SFFILM) and it opens this weekend in Bay Area theaters.
The East is a smart and gripping thriller that explores both our response to corporate criminality and the unfamiliar world of anarchist collectives. Brit Marling plays a brilliant up-and-comer in an industrial security firm who goes undercover to hunt down and infiltrate a band of eco-terrorists named The East.
The East seeks to brings deadly personal accountability to corporate leaders who injure people and the environment. These aren’t Hollywoodized corporate villains – all of the corporate crimes depicted in the movie have occurred in real life. Lesser filmmakers would have made The East into a revenge fantasy with a Robin Hood-like merry band of earnest kids – or a conventional espionage procedural, hunting down a gang of wild-eyed terrorists.
The East is so good because it explores our helplessness in the face of corporate malfeasance. The corporate targets deserve to be held accountable, and their crimes cry out for punishment. Yet the vigilante violence of The East is clearly unacceptable. No self-selected group of avengers – no matter how legitimate their grievance – should be able to inflict extra-legal violence. (If you don’t think so, just substitute white supremacist militia, fundamentalist Mormons or Chechen immigrants for the hippies in this movie.)
We view this dilemma through the perspective of Marling’s protagonist, whose own views evolve through the course of the story. Marling co-wrote the screenplay with director Zal Batmanglij. Marling and Batmanglij spent over three months in an anarchist collective, living a cash-free life off the grid; that experience has paid off with an unusual authenticity in the depiction of the anarchist lifestyle.
Marling and Batmanglij also co-wrote the indie The Sound of My Voice, and Marling wrote and starred in last year’s sci-fi hit Another Earth. Here, they have created a set of original characters and invented some really ingenious plot points, especially a very powerful initiation dinner and an astounding bit of tradecraft involving dental floss.
Besides Marling, Ellen Page is especially good as one of the eco-terrorists. Julia Ormond is brilliant in a tiny part as a business executive. There are other fine performances by Patricia Clarkson as Marling’s nasty boss and by Alexander Skarsgaard and Toby Kebell as anarchists.
There may be some holes in the plot, but The East is such a tautly crafted thriller that we don’t have time to notice. There is one unfortunately corny scene between Ellen Page’s character and Jamey Sheridan’s (he’s become the Go To Guy to play entitled white male scumbags). But those are quibbles – The East is a very strong film.
The East is available on DVD from both Netflix and Redbox and streaming from Amazon, Vudu, iTunes, GooglePlay and other VOD outlets.
For the second straight week, I’m recommending the marvelously entaertining Headhunters to kick off your summer. The smug Norwegian corporate headhunter named Roger Brown (don’t ask) explains his motivation at the very beginning of the movie: at 5 feet, 6 inches, his insecurity about keeping his six foot blond wife leads him to cut some corners. As ruthlessly successful as he is in business, he feels the need to also burgle the homes of his clients and steal art treasures. So the dark comedy thriller Headhunters (Hodejegerne) begins like a heist movie. But soon Roger becomes targeted by a client with serious commando skills, unlimited high tech gizmos, and a firm intention to make Roger dead.
Roger Brown is played brilliantly by Aksel Hennie, a huge star in Norway who looks like a cross between Christopher Walken and Peter Lorre. The laughs come from Roger’s comeuppance as he undergoes every conceivable humiliation while trying to survive. As a smoothly confident scoundrel, Roger is at first not that sympathetic, but Hennie turns him into a panicked and terrified Everyman when he becomes a human pinata.
HEADHUNTERS
Headhunters is based on a page-turner by the Scandinavian mystery writer Jo Nesbo. A Hollywood remake of Headhunters is somewhere in development. In the meantime, stream Headhunters on Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube or Google Play and have a fun time at the movies.
