The Babadook (2014)

The Babadook is one of the most powerful and moving films that I’ve seen in years. It tells the story of Amelia, a woman whose husband was killed in a car crash as they were on their way to the hospital to give birth to their first child. Seven years later, she’s a single parent to her son Samuel but it’s clear that she has not recovered from the trauma of her partner’s death. Moreover, she feels deeply conflicted about having to devote her life to parenting Samuel, who has a number of behavioral problems. When Samuel starts complaining that the Babadook, a monster from one of his picture books, is living in the house and tormenting him, Amelia naturally dismisses his fears as a child’s delusion, but as the film progresses, she finds it more and more difficult to deny that the Babdook is real and wants to hurt them. At this point, director Jennifer Kent makes a very important decision that makes The Babdook so much more than a good genre film. Rather than filling the film with hi-tech special effects and thus producing a standard ‘creature feature’ horror film, Kent keeps the Babadook defiantly lo-fi, a product more of the increasingly unhinged imagination of Amelia than a ‘real’ monster. Although the film is genuinely frightening, our fear comes not from sudden jump cuts, copious amounts of gore, or vividly outlandish monsters, but from a close-up and unflinching look at the psychological torment that the lead characters have to endure. Consequently, although the exact meaning of the Babadook remains a matter for debate (and this is one of the film’s many strengths), for me at least it came to symbolize Amelia’s grief, a grief that she has denied for years and thus has never come to terms with, and which is threatening to destroy her life and her relationship with her son. The resolution of the film, in this reading, signals Amelia’s ability to finally mourn the loss of her husband and move on. Crucially, however, this does NOT mean killing the monster: the Babadook still lives, but it is confined to the basement of the house (i.e., the subconscious and/or the past) and although it still needs to be acknowledged, it has lost the destructive ascendancy that it had earlier in the film. The Babadook thus develops a number of complex ideas about the nature of emotional attachments, the difficulties of (single) parenting, as well as death, grief, loss, and memory. But none of this would make the film work in and of itself were it not for the two extraordinary performances that bring these themes to life: Essie Davis as Amelia and Noah Wiseman as Samuel are both amazing and their on-screen relationship is the most miraculous thing about this wonderful film. On a personal note, I also want to say that, as the son of a mother who struggled with depression throughout her life, and was often emotionally abusive, The Babadook made an even stronger impression on me than it might on others, not least because (and I know this sounds like a strange thing to say about this film) it is so true to life.

Berberian Sound Studio (2012)

Berberian Sound Studio is that rarest and most delightful of things: a genuinely original movie. Directed by Peter Strickland, it features the excellent Toby Jones in the lead role as a sound engineer who travels to an Italian film studio to work on what is clearly a horror movie, although the director objects vehemently to that label. Part of the film's strength comes from the fact that we never see a single frame of the film that is being made and that Jones is working on; appropriately, we only hear it. This gives the viewer a lot of freedom to imagine what has been filmed, especially if one is familiar with the Italian giallo tradition of horror film that Berberian is clearly referencing. I hesitate to call it an homage to the giallo, however, precisely because Strickland's film is gore-free (and for that reason might disappoint a certain kind of horror fan). What we are treated to instead is a subtler kind of violence that pervades the whole film and the film-making process, seen most explicitly in the interactions between those who are in control of the making of the film (all men) and their exploited employees (all women). At first, Jones' character seems excluded from this dynamic, partly by virtue of his Britishness and partly because he has never worked on this kind of film before. As the film progresses, however, Jones becomes gradually infected by the atmosphere of violence that not only soaks the atmosphere of the studio but also seems capable of altering the nature of reality (for example, towards the end of the film, Jones' character begins (without any explanation) speaking Italian fluently). With a sense of helplessness, we watch Jones gradually turn into a kind of monster who is as willing and able to torment the women he works with as any of the other men. Most interestingly, Jones' transformation also starts to be reflected in the very texture of the film itself, as scenes repeat, Jones becomes a character in his own film, and the line between reality and illusion becomes ever more blurred. As a reflection on gender roles in horror film, and as a distinctly old-fashioned tribute to and warning about the power of film, Berberian has a lot to offer to viewer who is willing to look beyond the absence of blood.

Under the Skin (2013)

The premise of Under The Skin is simple: an alien visits Earth and preys upon single men. But what director Jonathan Glazer does with this premise is amazingly creative. First, in making the alien female, Glazer inverts the normatively gendered relation between predator and prey that underpins so many other films. Instead of women alone at night signifying as potential victims, now it is men walking alone who are under threat. One might think that casting a glamorous A-list star like Scarlett Johansson as the alien would work against this inversion, and in some ways it does. To the extent that the alien’s victims are so willing to go off with her because of Johansson’s conventional beauty, the film reinforces rather than subverts conventional ideas about sexuality and desire, rather than reworking them. But to leave the analysis there would be unfair to the excellence of Johansson’s acting. She gives an amazingly restrained and controlled performance, saying very little and emoting even less (which is doubtless why she did not win all the awards she deserved for this role). Part of the reason for this technique is to stress that she needs to do very little to ensnare her victims—these men are so cocksure (I choose this term deliberately!) that it never occurs to them that they could be in danger until it is too late. But the main reason Johansson exhibits such a limited range of emotions and facial expressions is to enable us to see our familiar world through the alien’s eyes. Because we receive no cues from the alien about how she is reacting to what she sees, everything familiar is rendered strange, enabling us to see it as if for the first time (although I must say that, as a British ex-pat living in America, I received the images of Glasgow through the lens of nostalgia, and didn’t really experience any estrangement). Were the film to finish here, it would be a very interesting take on some sci-fi conventions (especially as used by Nicolas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell To Earth) but not much more than that. But then the second part of the film begins, and that’s where Under The Skin becomes something extraordinary. The alien picks up her latest victim, who happens to have a facial neurofibromatosis. As one might expect, Glazer plays with the idea that both of these beings are, in a sense, alienated from the environment around them, but fortunately he does not stop there. After taking this man back to her house, where she has delivered her other victims, something happens to the alien, a shift in consciousness that is never articulated or explained, but that makes her let the man go and stop her search for further victims. At this point of the film, several things become clear: the alien has been accompanied by a motorcyclist from the beginning of the film, who appears to assist her, but who in fact we come to feel is supervising or even controlling her; he captures the man she releases and makes frantic attempts to find (hunt down?) the alien when she walks away from what amounts to her job. We also realize that the alien is, in some ways, as much a victim as the men she has been capturing; ever since the opening scene of the film (we realize retrospectively) she has been unable to exercise any free choice about who she is and what she does, and her attempts to ‘fit in’ to the simultaneously human and utterly alien world in which she finds herself are (sometimes comedically) hopeless. This is where the casting of a female actress in the role of the alien begins to signify differently and even more powerfully. If anyone felt that the inversion of the normatively gendered predator-prey distinction in the first half of the film was a little too tidy and glib, one cannot possibly say the same about the closing section of the film. By the time the alien dies, the phrase ‘under the skin’ has acquired multiple layers of meaning and we are left to process the meaning of what we have just seen. To say all this is only to scratch the surface of this extraordinary film—I haven’t even mentioned its moving and powerful score, and the images that feel like they’ve been burned into your head: the crying toddler on the beach, the point of view shot from one of the victims as the alien walks away above him, the simultaneously comic and tragic instance of coitus interruptus, and most of all, the alien’s last moments as she kneels on the floor of the forest: all of these moments and many more will stay with you long after the film has finished.

Rough Trade (1995)

Dominique Manotti's debut crime novel, Rough Trade (1995, Trans. 2001) is astonishingly assured. A police procedural set in the Sentier district of Paris in 1980, the novel has an almost impossibly complicated plot that, remarkably, does not spoil the book at all, for two reasons: 1. the complexity feels absolutely natural as the police uncover an international plot revolving around drug and arms smuggling that starts with their investigation of the murder of a 12-year-old Thai child prostitute; 2. the pace of the novel never flags. The reader keeps track of the course of the investigation by the way the novel is organized according to calendar entries (stipulating the time, date, and place of each chapter) and this gives us the feeling of moving inexorably through time and space at such a rate that we are content not to have mastery over all the details (after all, the police don't have such mastery!) and instead we hang on and see where the ride will take us. Despite the fact that there is so much going on in the book (there is also a major sub-plot involving the attempts of illegal Turkish garment workers to achieve legal status) Rough never feels too crowded; rather, we feel that the complexity of real life is being honored and represented accurately. The other striking thing about the novel is its complete lack of sentimentality--the police officers are not heroes in the conventional sense (some of them being just as, if not more, flawed than the villains) but the best of them earn our respect for their commitment to the idea of retribution, if not justice. Not surprisingly, the results of their efforts are mixed--some are punished, some get away; some questions are answered, but many are not. But that incompleteness feels just as satisfying as every other part of this novel.

The Power of the Dog (2005)

Don Winslow’s 2005 novel The Power of the Dog is an ambitious and sprawling account of America’s involvement in the Drug Wars from the 1980s to the early 2000s. The product of years of research by Winslow, the novel charts with painstaking detail both the structure and the operating procedures of the drug trade, as well as its multiple points of contact with corrupt members of law enforcement and politics in both Mexico and the United States, from the lowest to the very highest levels. In doing so, Winslow of necessity also recaps American foreign policy in Central America over the same period, including the arming of the Contras in Nicaragua, its involvement in Guatemala’s brutal civil war, and its attempts to limit the influence of FARC in Colombia, all of which Winslow portrays as parts of a larger American effort to control the spread of Communism during this period. If this sounds overwhelming, it is, not only because Winslow is trying to cover so much ground in Power, but also because his descriptions of the brutality with which the Drug Wars were fought on both sides are explicit and unrelenting. Winslow does a couple of things to make the impact of the novel a little more manageable for his readers. First, through using a core group of protagonists, he attempts to personalize/put a human face on the complex geopolitics of this time and place. In some ways, this inevitably oversimplifies his subject matter, but it may be necessary to keep his readers with him. Second, and on a related point, Winslow finishes the novel with some sense of closure, and even of hope. Although, on the one hand, Winslow’s DEA protagonist, Art Keller, admits that the drug trade has not even been dented by his career-defining efforts, on the other hand, the main villain is in jail, other villains are dead, and some of the ‘good’ have even survived and may be happy. To Winslow’s credit, this resolution feels deliberately contrived. After all, one of the distinctions that has been most comprehensively destroyed by this novel is that between ‘good’ and ‘bad,’ between ‘innocent’ and ‘guilty’; given this fact, bare life may seem like a victory, but it’s inevitably a hollow one. 

Black Rock (2012)

The last two movies I saw, Starry Eyes (2014) and Borgman (2013) were both quite disappointing. The former, despite an outstanding performance from lead actress Alex Essoe, failed to deliver on its potential to say something interesting about contemporary celebrity culture, while the latter, despite some superficial resemblances to Michael Haneke's classic Funny Games, had neither Haneke's inventiveness nor his film's daring. I fared much better with Katie Aselton's 2012 horror-thriller Black Rock, which was partially funded through a Kickstarter project. The initial set-up is quite simple: three old friends (two of whom have been estranged from each other for some time) have a reunion on a remote Maine island where they used to vacation as children. While there, they meet three men who are hunting on the island. One of the women flirts with and kisses one of the men but when he becomes aggressive, she tells him to stop. He refuses and attempts to rape her. While defending herself, she accidentally kills him. The remainder of the film concerns the women's attempts to stay alive while the remaining men hunt them down to avenge their slain friend. So far, so predictable, one might think. But there are a couple of things that separate this film and make it memorable. The first is the fact that the three men are all Iraq/Afghanistan veterans who have been dishonorably discharged from the US Army and have recently come home. They use the skills they acquired in the military to hunt the women down, but more importantly, their depersonalization and hatred of the women is strongly connected by the film to their experiences with hunting 'Haji.' The film has important things to say, in other words, about male violence on both the domestic and international level, at times of both war and peace. Ironically, considering that the actions of the two remaining men are superficially motivated by their friendship with the man who's been killed, the other distinctive feature of the film is the friendship that bonds the three women. It's this bond that enables some of them to survive their ordeal, but only after  the two survivors come to terms with the past and overcome their estrangement, which was caused, not incidentally, by a disagreement over a man. Friendship, then, can serve as an alibi for violence and as a source of strength. All this, and a reaffirmation of the never-to-be-forgotten fact that 'No Means No,' no matter when the word 'no' gets spoken. Aselton does more in the 83 minutes of Black Rock than most films of twice its length.

The Fall, Season Two (2014)

The closing scene of the first season of The Fall set things up for the second season to revolve around a confrontation between Paul Spector and Stella Gibson and to some extent that’s exactly what happened. When they sit down across from each other in the interrogation room after Spector’s arrest, it feels like the climax of the entire show and it’s a very suspenseful and dramatic moment. Both Jamie Dornan and Gillian Anderson are at the top of their game in this key scene and their long discussion gives the viewer an opportunity to process and try to make sense of everything that happened in the previous episodes and in particular to answer the question ‘Who is Paul Spector?’ So why would I have a problem with it? Mostly because I felt that organizing the drama around the relationship between the show’s two protagonists risked narrowing the focus on The Fall as a whole. After all, one of the things that stood out about the first season was the way in which Spector’s murders and sexual assaults were connected to other forms of male violence in a way that problematized any attempt to see Spector as an aberration with no relation to other ‘normal’ men. I was concerned that we might lose this broader scope through overemphasizing the Spector/Gibson antagonism. As it turned out, I needn’t have worried about this as The Fall’s second season worked hard to maintain this aspect of the show. When Stella’s boss tried to force himself on her, when Jimmy Tyler tracked down his estranged wife at a women’s refuge and threatened to kill everyone there, when the paedophile priest who knew Spector as a boy was interviewed, and even when Spector’s ability to be a loving father was mentioned—all of these things made The Fall’s exploration of violence much more nuanced and complex than that of the vast majority of television crime series, even though it still comes nowhere near The Wire in this respect. With this context in mind, the fact that this season continued to show Stella Gibson as a sexually active professional woman reads somewhat differently than it might otherwise do. While I still have reservations about this aspect of Gibson’s character receiving so much attention, and while some examples of it came very close to pandering to the audience (for example, the scenes with Gibson and Reed Smith), I think it is important and commendable for a number of reasons. For example, in the context of a show where male hatred and fear of women play such a large role, it is crucial for Gibson’s character to be assertively sexual precisely because it tempts the audience to judge her in the same way some of the show’s characters do. Moreover, Gibson’s need for these types of physical and emotional connections tells the viewer something important about this character, and this is especially valuable information about a character that is usually rigidly controlled and gives very little away (indeed, if I have any criticism of Anderson’s amazing performance in this role, it’s that she sometimes comes close to emptying this character of all emotion in a way that makes her seem practically unresponsive). This is not to say that The Fall’s second season was perfect—far from it! To start off with, there are major parts of the plot left unresolved, most glaringly featuring the character of Katie Benedetto, who is problematically stereotypical character in all kinds of ways. Even though some of this lack of resolution can be explained away by the possibility of a third season, the fact is that the whole plotline of Benedetto becoming Spector’s disciple and partner in crime basically went nowhere and that was extremely frustrating. Then there’s the way in which the season ended. Trust me, I have no problem with cliffhangers, and I actually very much liked the fact that the show did not end with what would seem like the natural resolution of the action, i.e., Spector’s arrest. My problem was with the fact that Jimmy Tyler could walk right into the middle of an area that had supposedly been cordoned off by the police and apparently shoot Spector to death. I know, being annoyed by implausibility is the most conservative and banal reaction one could possibly have to a scene like this, but this is a police procedural and so generically speaking, plausibility matters and this was so egregiously implausible a development (upon which so much hinged) that it really bothered me. Anderson is reportedly keen for a third season to happen and I don’t blame her. Not only are there a lot of loose ends to tie up but one also feels that the surface of her character has only been scratched. For all its flaws, The Fall is still one of the most interesting shows on television today.