thriller

SEARCHING: more than a gimmick

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John Cho in SEARCHING

In the thriller Searching, a Silicon Valley engineer David (Jon Cho) has been single-parenting his daughter since the death of his wife. The daughter, now sixteen, doesn’t come home.  Has she run away?  He she been abducted?  Is she even still alive?  Searching is a ticking clock thriller as David and the investigating police detective Vick (Debra Messing) race against time to solve the case.  There are several red herrings, a couple major plot twists and one mega-surprise.

Here’s what is really different about Searching – the movie is entirely on the character’s screens – those of his computers, but also on smartphones, television, a security video and a live funeral cam.  The sixteen year-old flashbacks are shown on a sixteen-year-old version of Windows desktop.

This is NOT a “gimmick movie”. It is a complete movie that writer-director Aneesh Chaganty has chosen to tell through this device. For example, Chaganty barely gives a glimpse of the comments on on-line news reports – and no character comments on them – but the audience finds them maddening and suffers the indignities along with David. In the same vein, I also enjoyed the recent teen horror Unfriended, also told on a computer screen, and the claustrophobic drama Locke, set in the driver’s seat of an auto.

Detective Vick asks David, “Who is your daughter and who does she talk with?”, which puts the spotlight on the movie’s theme.  He’s her dad, and he was certain that he knows his daughter – but he finds out that, as a teenager, she has developed into an entirely new and unrecognizable person.  Obviously, that revelation brings him enormous guilt to go along with the shock, but he throws himself into the search by grabbing her laptop and hacking her social media.  As any good Silicon Valley parent, he opens a spreadsheet and starts filling it with what he finds out from the trail she has left online.

John Cho’s performance is pretty much perfect.  Of course, he’s already achieved popular success in two movie franchises – as Harold in the Harold and Kumar stoner series and Sulu in Star Wars.  Here, he gets a full-out, adult dramatic role and knocks it out of the park.  Cho modulates David’s increasing tension and desperation through the story, and he is perfect in the flashback scenes, too.

Aneesh Chaganty is a San Jose native.  Although he says that only two percent of the movie was actually filmed in San Jose, Searching really nails the vibe of Silicon Valley in 2018.  Locals will unmask the very slight name changes to recognize the Sharks, the SJPD, Oakridge Mall, Evergreen/Silver Creek Highs and more.  (The only egregious misstep is one character referencing Highway “101” in LA-speak as “the 101” .)

Searching can be streamed from Amazon (Starz channel), iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.

THE HANDMAIDEN – gorgeous, erotic and a helluva plot

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THE HANDMAIDEN
THE HANDMAIDEN

After a few minutes of The Handmaiden, we learn that it’s a con artist movie. After 100 minutes, we think we’ve watched an excellent con artist movie, but then we’re surprised by a huge PLOT TWIST, and we’re in for two more episodes and lots of surprises in a gripping and absorbing final hour. It’s also one of the most visually beautiful and highly erotic films of the year.

Director and co-writer Chan-wook Park sets the story in 1930s Korea during Japanese occupation (Japanese dialogue is subtitled in yellow and Korean dialogue in white). A young heiress has been secluded from childhood by her guardian uncle, who intends to marry her himself for her fortune. A con man embarks on a campaign to seduce and marry the wealthy young woman to harvest her inheritance himself. The con man enlists a pickpocket to become handmaiden to the heiress – and his mole. I’m not going to tell you more about the plot, but the audience is in for a wild ride.

The Handmaiden takes its time revealing its secrets. Who is conning who? Who is attracted to whom? How naive is the heiress? How loyal is the handmaiden? Who is really Japanese and who is really Korean? What’s in those antique books? What’s in the basement? Is the uncle perverted or REALLY perverted? And what legendary sex toy will show up in the final scene?

THE HANDMAIDEN
THE HANDMAIDEN

Chan-wook Park’s 2003 US art house hit Oldboy is highly sexualized, trippy and disturbing. The Handmaiden is much more mainstream and accessible than Oldboy, but its sexuality packs a punch.

Gorgeous and erotic, The Handmaiden is one of the most gloriously entertaining films of the year. You can order the DVD from Netflix or stream it on Amazon Instant Video, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.

From SFFILM: ROJO – bobbing in a sea of moral relativism

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Benjamin Naishtat’s ROJO. Courtesy of SFFILM.

The San Francisco International Film Festival (SFFILM) was set to open tomorrow before it was cancelled for the COVID-19 emergency, so in tribute, here’s a film from SFFILM’s 2019 program.

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 a year agoat the San Francisco International Film Festival (SFFILM). Rojo made my list of 10 Overlooked Movies of 2019. Stream from Amazon, iTunes and Vudu.

GONE GIRL: 2014’s best Hollywood movie

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Rosamund Pike in GONE GIRL

In the marvelously entertaining Gone Girl, Ben Affleck plays Nick, a good-looking lug who can turn a phrase. At a party one night, he’s on his A game, and he snags the beautiful Amy (Rosamund Pike). She’s smarter, a good rung on the ladder more attractive than he is, has parents with some money and is a second-hand celebrity to boot. Not particularly gifted and certainly not a striver, he knows he’s the Lucky One. He has married above himself, but he doesn’t have a clue HOW MUCH above until she suddenly disappears.

Based on the enormously popular novel by Gillian Flynn (who also wrote the screenplay), Gone Girl is the mystery of what has happened to Amy and what is Nick’s role in the disappearance. Plot twists abound, but you won’t get any spoilers from The Movie Gourmet.

This is Rosamund Pike’s movie.  Her appearance is so elegant – she looks like a crystal champagne flute with blonde hair – that pulling her out of the Victorian period romances that she was known for and into this thriller was inspired. And Pike responds with the performance of her career. She’s just brilliant as she makes us realize that there’s something behind her eyes that we hadn’t anticipated, and then keeps us watching what she is thinking throughout the story.

Gone Girl is directed by the contemporary master David Fincher (Fight Club, Se7en, Zodiac, The Social Network, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo). Here, Fincher has successfully chosen to rely on Flynn’s page turner of a story and the compelling characters, so Gone Girl is the least flashy of his films, but one of the most accessible. I’ll say this for Fincher – I can’t remember a more perfectly cast movie.

Kim Dickens (Treme, Deadwood) is superb as the investigating detective – this time almost unrecognizable as a brunette. Tyler Perry is wonderfully fun as a crafty celebrity attorney. The previously unheralded Carrie Coon is excellent as Nick’s twin sister (she’s gone on to cash in on the Avengers franchise). Missi Pyle does such a good job as a despicable cable TV personality that I thought I was actually watching a despicable cable TV personality. And David Clennon and (especially) Lisa Banes positively gleam as Amy’s parents. (Carefully observe every behavior by the parents in this movie.)

Just like the thug in The Guard who forgets whether he had been diagnosed in prison as a sociopath or a psychopath, I had the ask The Wife, who turned me on to this passage from Psychology Today. It’s useful to read this because, although you don’t realize it for forty-five minutes or so, Gone Girl is also a study of psychopathy.

Psychopaths … are unable to form emotional attachments or feel real empathy with others, although they often have disarming or even charming personalities. Psychopaths are very manipulative and can easily gain people’s trust. They learn to mimic emotions, despite their inability to actually feel them, and will appear normal to unsuspecting people. Psychopaths are often well educated and hold steady jobs. Some are so good at manipulation and mimicry that they have families and other long-term relationships without those around them ever suspecting their true nature.

When committing crimes, psychopaths carefully plan out every detail in advance and often have contingency plans in place. Unlike their sociopathic counterparts, psychopathic criminals are cool, calm, and meticulous. Their crimes, whether violent or non-violent, will be highly organized and generally offer few clues for authorities to pursue. Intelligent psychopaths make excellent white-collar criminals and “con artists” due to their calm and charismatic natures.

Gillian Flynn changed the story’s ending for the movie. The Wife, who is a big fan of the novel, didn’t mind. Gone Girl is recommended for both those who have and have not read the book. I understand that there’s more humor in the movie, as we occasionally laugh at the extremity of the behavior of one of the characters.

It all adds up into a remarkably fun movie and one that I was still mulling over days later. Gone Girl was the best big Hollywood studio movie of 2014 (not counting releases from the prestige distribution arms of the major studios). It’s now available to stream on Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play and Redbox.

Cinequest Stream of the Week: REVENGE – the web is spun

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Siren Jørgensen in REVENGE

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.

REVENGE
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.

NINA OF THE WOODS: finding the supernatural – but for real this time

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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.

FOX HUNT DRIVE: one gobsmacking plot twist

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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.

BEFORE THE FIRE: when sanctuary brings its own terror

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BEFORE THE FIRE. Photo courtesy of Cinequest.

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.

3 DAY WEEKEND: an ingeniously constructed thrill ride

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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.

Stream of the Week: THE GIFT – three people revealed

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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.