Unsane

Unsane is a thriller come horror that was apparently all shot on an iPhone.

Sawyer Valentini (Claire Foy) is a young woman attempting to rebuild her life, having moved to a new city to escape a stalker. However, she is struggling with that rebuilding job, finding herself unable to form relationships and seemingly constantly on the edge of a nervous breakdown.

She then inadvertently tips herself over the edge when at a counselling session she confesses that she sometimes has suicidal thoughts. The therapist promptly asks her to sign a document agree ing to more sessions but then, before the ink is dry, a man in a white coat leads her away to a locked room.

Unfortunately protesting that she’s been locked up by mistake just makes it look like she’s in denial. Then when she’s assaulted by another patient and fights back, it just reinforces the impression that she needs to be locked up and drugged up. Then when she gets side effects from the drugs, this is just another reason to keep her in.

With help from fellow inmate Nate Hoffman (Jay Pharoah), she manages to get word to her mother (Amy Irving) but she just comes up against the immoveable bureaucracy of the hospital. This all appears to be a dig at the American healthcare system, where hospitals can be paid handsomely through a patient’s private medical insurance.

Sawyer is convinced that one of the staff (Joshua Leonard) is her old stalker and who is therefore still stalking her. But do we believe her? Is Sawyer really sane or is she actually ill? The question of whether or not Sawyer is a reliable witness to her own sanity is the hook here.

Sadly the film then starts to go insane itself as it attempts to shovel something\anything into the large plot holes that have appeared. We can buy the incarceration idea for a while but by now basic logic says somebody would have got her out. The film therefore has to keep inventing twists why this isn’t the case and this just undermines the good story they had put together so far.

Luckily Foy’s performance keeps things watchable and the film is good but probably could have been a lot better. Nice idea, shame about the execution.

You Were Never Really Here

From the novella by Jonathan Ames, comes You Were Never Really Here. A nice family film...

Joe (Joaquin Phoenix) is a war veteran, traumatised  by his past, addicted to pain killers and a hired killer who specialises in retrieving trafficked girls. He has a reputation for brutality but also for getting results, with his hammer. An implement of which he has not so found childhood memories.

He spends his free time between jobs caring for his elderly mother (Judith Roberts) and having flashbacks to his past, as a Gulf War soldier and as the victim of an abusive father.

He is offered a large wad of cash to rescue Nina (Ekaterina Samsonov), the 13-year-old daughter of a New York senator called Albert Votto (Alex Manette), who is missing from home. He locates Nina in an ‘upmarket’ brothel from where he rescues her, killing several security guards and customers on the way. 

Then before he can get Nina back to Votto, he sees on the news that Votto has apparently killed himself. Corrupt police officers then storm his motel room and take Nina off him. They come for him too but he escapes.

He then finds that both his boss and his handler have been murdered in an attempt to track him down. Once they know where he lives they head there, kill his mother and then lie in wait for him. Joe outsmarts them, kills one of them and finds out from the other than the man behind all this is Governor Williams (Alessandro Nivola) who wants his favourite sex slave back and has the power to do it.

Joe gives his mother a water burial and also attempts to drown himself, but a vision of Nina convinces him to save the girl fromWilliams instead.

This is a film where you really need to concentrate, or revise beforehand, as the director leaves you to find your own way but it’s a really excellent film with a great performance from Joaquin Phoenix as the man who is never really there. Although some folk might need a blindfold as it’s a violent film but ‘tastefully’ done with most of the bloodshed off-camera.

Recommended served with a few beers.

Red Sparrow

Tonight we go see Red Sparrow, a spy thriller which has attracted a lot criticism. This allegedly perverse ‘15’ certificate film has been accused of being both violently and sexually perverse with woman beaten and raped seemingly at will by powerful men.

I must admit that I have been a little surprised by this reaction but then I think I was possibly too busy being annoyed at how they'd made a complete hash out of a decent book which was written by former CIA operative Jason Matthews.

Perhaps I need to re-watch it to see what I missed but I do remember they’d left out the hair brush scene (thankfully). That would have caused even more of a stir.

The story goes like this. Dominika Egorova (Jennifer Lawrence) was a ballerina at the Bolshoi whose promising dancing career was ended by injury. Sadly her dancing also funded the care for her ailing mother.

Not to worry, her uncle Ivan (Matthias Schoenaerts), who works in Russian intelligence, offers her work to help her get by. It is just a small favour he requires, for her to be the honey in a trap that is to be sprung on a Russian politician. She does the favour and does a rather good job, although it probably goes a little bit further than she would have hoped. Then just as the politician is having his way with her, he is murdered.

Unfortunately she’s now in a bit of a pickle because she’s seen too much. She is told she can either die or start working for Russian intelligence herself. Tough choice that.

So her uncle sends her off to Sparrow School where Matron (Charlotte Rampling) teaches the recruits to use the skills of sexual seduction to get what they want from the enemy.

Once graduated, Dominika is sent to Budapest to meet her target, Nate Nash (Joel Edgerton), who works for the CIA and knows the identity of a Russian mole known as Marble. However, Nash quickly sees through her and the long and short of it is that he persuades her to become a double agent.

I was a fan of the book even though it was at times convoluted and hard to follow, so a simplification was required for it to work as a film and that doesn't happen. In fact what we have here is an even more convoluted plot.

The other problem is where is the seduction? There’s a total lack of chemistry between the two agents. For someone supposedly trained in seduction, Dominika doesn’t pull any tricks out of the locker for him. In the book they have a conflicted relationship due to the nature of their jobs but a relationship nonetheless, here they eventually have a quick bonk. It's not quite the same and where was the swimming race? That was one of my favourite bits.

Instead the script seems to demand that all the Russians must be portrayed as ice men and ice maidens. So Lawrence goes through the entire film wearing only one expression, one of indifference, while Edgerton goes about attempting to be the all American hero.

In fact Lawrence seems hugely miscast in this but then so too are the likes of Charlotte Rampling, Jeremy Irons, Joely Richardson and Ciaran Hinds. Were there no genuine Russian actors available the weekend that they did the casting?

There is also no back story to the Russian mole which was pivotal to the original story, instead the film just seems overloaded with violence. It’s all deeply disappointing.

This would have made a wonderful independent flick or even a mini series but Hollywood completely wrecked this one.

A Fantastic Woman

I was sort of dragged to tonight's film, A Fantastic Woman. On the surface of it a subtitled Chilean flick about a wronged transgender person didn’t really rock my boat. However, I was wrong. My boat was somewhat agitated and it also showed that my partner doesn’t always pick bad films.

Marina (Daniela Vega) is a young transgender woman living in Santiago where she works as a waitress and as a singer in a night club. She is in a relationship with a much older divorced man called Orlando (Francisco Reyes). 

After a romantic night out, which ends with Marina staying over at Orlando’s flat, Orlando falls ill. Marina attempts to take him to hospital but he ends up falling down the stairs of the apartment building. This not only results in his death but, because he sustains significant bruising in the fall, the police get involved.

The police make her go through an intimate medical examination in case Orlando was abusing her and that was why she ‘threw' him down the stairs. All the while they insist on referring to her by her birth gender and calling her Daniel.

She gets an even frostier reception from Orlando’s already bitter ex-wife Sonia (Aline Küppenheim) and his grown up son (Nicolás Saavedra). They just about tolerated her existence before but are now completely open with their dislike of her. 

Marina finds out very quickly that she has no rights as Orlando’s girlfriend, that she must vacate his flat, give up his dog and won’t be welcome at his funeral. Some of the extended family go as far as to threaten her.

It is an enthralling film in which Vega is excellent as Marina and yet I can’t help thinking that had she not been transgender but instead just his young live-in female lover then things wouldn’t have been much different. His ex-wife and son would still have loathed her, the funeral would still have been off limits and the police would still have been suspicious about their relationship. However none of this needs to distract from what was still a very good film.

I, Tonya

I, Tonya is a mockumentary type film based on the true story of US figure skater Tonya Harding.

In 1994 Harding was convicted for her part in the attack on her bitter rival Nancy Kerrigan. She, at the very least, attempted to cover up the attack which was carried out by her ex-husband Jeff and some hired thugs. This film however paints Harding as the victim, rather than Kerrigan who barely gets a mention, let alone any sympathy.

In its defence the film doesn’t pretend to be accurate, it is the account of those involved on Harding’s side. The film instead shows Harding (Margot Robbie) as a victim of life, fighting her way to the top of the figure skating world against the odds and despite the 'help' of her chain-smoking mother, LaVona (Allison Janney) who believes in the motivational power of abuse. 

 

She gets slapped around all the time, first by her mother and then by husband (Sebastian Stan). However Harding’s aggressively style and technical brilliance get results on the rink but although her approach is tolerated it is not loved. She feels she is constantly discriminated against by the judges because she came from the wrong side of the tracks and couldn’t afford a smart dress to skate in.

With her likely to be outshone by Kerrigan at the 1994 Olympics in Lillehammer, Jeff and his drinking buddy Shawn (Paul Walter Hauser) make plans to intimidate her rival.

Though the men ultimately get prison time for what they did, Tonya’s life ban from skating to her was possibly worse.

It’s a decent film but in a slightly tiresome style. Margot Robbie is excellent in a role that I don’t think really suits her and perhaps because of that it is Allison Janney who is getting all the plaudits.

The Shape Of Water

Everybody is raving about Guillermo del Toro at the moment but I'm not that familiar with him. His films range generally from Spanish language horror films such as the acclaimed 'Pan’s Labyrinth' to weird action affairs such as 'Hellboy'. So the 'Shape Of Water' is already being acclaimed as a masterpiece.

Del Toro calls it a fairy tale and everyone says its based on ‘Beauty And The Beast’, which I suppose, tenuously, it could be but personally as I watched it I was thinking 'Splash' only without Daryl Hannah or maybe the 'Creature From the Black Lagoon'. 

This is probably why it's up for so many Oscars, the Academy does like a bit of cross pollination with old films and this, like ‘La La Land’,  name checks many, features a cinema and also a man obsessed with old movies.

Then again the Academy aren't going to like the plagiarism allegations surrounding the play ‘Let Me Hear You Whisper’ which is a love story between a cleaner and dolphin that is held in a laboratory.

The cleaner in this story is Elisa Esposito (Sally Hawkins) who is a mute and has been since she was found by a river one day with odd scars on her neck. She lives above the Orpheum cinema which somehow survives on its minuscule audiences and next door to Giles (Richard Jenkins), an out of work artist who watches old TV movies all day long while having the hots for the waiter at the nearby pie emporium.

Elisa’s cleaning job is at a ‘top secret research facility’ where she works alongside Zelda (Octavia Spencer). The research facility has a new project, having come across an amphibious creature somewhere in the Amazon. Despite the top secret-ness of the facility the two cleaners stumble across it while doing the hoovering.

Elisa is immediately mitten but then she is a strange one. She hard boils eggs every morning while masturbating in the bath to her water fuelled fantasies. I'm not sure these scenes were strictly necessary but I suppose when you've got a film based on bestiality I guess you think 'what the hell'. 

Elisa then shares her eggs with the creature, plays him music and dances for him. He seems smitten too and she devises a plan to save the creature from the clutches of the film’s bad guy Colonel Strickland (Michael Shannon) and his boss General Hoyt (Nick Searcy).

She talks Giles into helping her and they are assisted by the sympathetic scientist Dr Hoffstetler (Michael Stuhlbarg), who wants to study the creature which he says was once revered by the Amazon tribes as a god. Neither of these men nor her colleague Zelda appear to think her romance with the creature is at all strange. 

Back at her apartment, she keeps the creature alive in her bath which she fills with salt water but things don’t take a good turn when he dines savagely on the cat and then Hoffstetler turns out to be a Russian spy. This is the cold war by the way and Russian Agents have already infiltrated the facility with the soul purpose of killing the creature. 

The creature does she to get on with Giles because as well as being able to heal bodily wounds, he can also restore hair to a bald man. Elisa is happy as well because she now gets to consummate her relationship with the creature in her bathroom, Which we find out will hold ten feet of water simply by closing the door and putting a towel under it. Well, apart from a few leaks into the cinema below.

So all that is left is to complete the plan. The plan being that once the river is at full tide, the creature can be set loose to find the ocean. What can possibly go wrong...

Well... it is indeed a good film but bloody weird too. Best Film? Probably not.

Phantom Thread

Reynolds Woodcock (Daniel Day-Lewis) is a celebrated dressmaker in 1950s London, dressing the rich and famous but now feeling under pressure from new fashion influences coming across the Channel.

The well established bachelor and general misery appeared to uncharacteristically on holiday when he meets Alma (Vicky Krieps), a German waitress who appears to be about thirty years his junior. He appears to falls in love with her (or what he calls in love) and she seems to reciprocate. What he sees in her and more particularly what she sees in him is never really made clear. However, smitten (of sorts) she moves in with the work-obsessed Woodcock where she becomes his muse cum live-in human mannequin/occasional companion, that is on the very rare occasions he needs one.

Once she is living with him she comes up against the strict regime run by Woodcock and his sister Cyril (Lesley Manville) and has to cope with a man who, if he has any emotions at all, keeps them very well hidden. She clearly wants much more from their relationship than she is currently getting, which appears to be next to nothing, but he won’t have his carefully constructed life disrupted for anything, not even an attractive young woman half his age. It is not even suggested that they might be lovers.

So leave you think... but she doesn’t. Instead she serves up a surprise romantic meal to a man who clearly does not like surprises or romance. Domestic war breaks out with asparagus chosen as the weapon of choice.

Alma is right about one thing though. The solution to her problem was to be found in the kitchen. When she cooks him up an omelette containing poisonous mushrooms he promptly falls proper near death ill after eating it. Now she is finally happy because she can indulge herself in nursing him back to full health, openly relishing his reliance on her, and for a time they have a normal-ish relationship.

Until he reverts back to being a miserable bastard. So she does it again.... and he knowingly lets her... and she says she will do it again and again if it makes him need her. Now call me old fashioned but any relationship which relies on one party being poisoned regularly to bring out their good side is not a great basis for a long lasting future together. Perhaps they should have gone for counselling instead but what do I know?

It’s a decent film by the way with Day-Lewis in a Day-Lewis role that couldn't be a more appropriate one for him to end his career on, that is if he now retires as he has suggested he will do.