Blurbing For The Weekend 2/7/25

While A24 didn’t invent art-horror, they sure gave it a commercial bump. A bizarre, internationally co-produced sci-fi thriller about a young lesbian chased by a bird-person in Germany would have to settle for a limited run, if not just festivals, before hitting DVD twenty years ago. Today, a dramatic trailer is all one needs to justify giving it a thousand-screen opening weekend. Modern horror audiences are primed for a level of uncommercial auteurism and artistry far beyond the Scream era, let alone Jason’s. All that matters is the promise of novel willies, and the Cuckoo trailer, featuring Dan Stevens and Euphoria’s Hunter Schafer, definitely delivered.

Cuckoo itself, however, would have deserved that earlier fate. Schafer plays a troubled teen joining her father’s second family at a German resort run by Dän Schtevens' "Herr Konig." Trembling camera shots, time loops, and a shrieking woman in a raincoat have Schafer running into glass panels, joining her mute, newly epileptic half-sister at the hospital, and annoying her distant dad. Where most mediocre horror bogs down in belabored metaphor about trauma these days, writer/director Tilman Singer swings hard in the other direction, filling the screen with intimations of mother/daughter relations but with no clear intent or message. Clumsy blurts of exposition don’t really explain anybody’s choices, and frequent shots of wiggling ears and trembling necks sure weren’t poetic or eerie enough for me to get on board.

Stevens likely resembled a Vince McMahon meme while reading the script, with the ominously ingratiating Konig using a hypnotic flute to cause violence before trading it for an assault rifle. But between this and Abigail, it’s clear that, for all the impish vitality beneath his handsome exterior, he can’t make just anything work. He still needs a good role (The Guest), or a good bit (Eurovision Song Contest), to truly come alive. A better director helps, too: both his and Schafer’s performances are as scattershot as the script. Schafer’s Gretchen randonmly goes from indifferent to caring, aloof to invested, not evolving as much as dramatically changing to fit the needs of the scene. “Herr Konig” could get away with just being a nut in comparison, but it's still distracting when his accent jumps from the classic “Is It Safe?” enunciation to an SNL Christoph Waltz at the climax. 

Despite being less than the sum of its parts - or its trailer - Cuckoo is still a Cronenbergian mystery where Dan Stevens plays an evil German with a flute. Hunter Schafer fans won’t mind the sapphic French musician ex machina, and she has enough affecting moments I look forward to seeing Schafer in something more competently put together. Hollywood has tricked horror hounds into seeing far worse movies than this. FOUR BAGS OF POPCORN.

Blink Twice, Zoe Kravitz’ debut directorial effort, is arguably even more disjointed than Cuckoo. Naomi Ackie and Alia Shawkat play waitresses who haplessly charm their way onto the getaway island of a notorious tech billionaire (Channing Tatum, putting a dark twist on his sheepish stud thing). As the women gradually realize shit is fucked up, Twice leaps wildly between horror and hilarity, refusing to deny itself moments of girlboss flair even as the story undermines the pretension. The cast is either overqualified (particularly Kyle MacLachlan and Geena Davis in glorified cameos) or all over the place (Ackie, blithely superficial with Shawkat, is suddenly sensible and assured when bonding with Adria Arjona’s reality star). But where Cuckoo just seems underthought and overbaked, Blink Twice’s frantic leaps from confident sisterhood to abject terror, intentionally or not, fit the message: to survive within such a toxic, powerful patriarchy requires lunatic levels of detachment and disassociation, plus ruthless determination. Whether Kravitz came about this tone knowingly or fortuitously isn’t clear (actors-turned-directors are often both showy and sloppy), but Twice is entertainingly manic enough that I hope we get more chances to find out. FIVE BAGS OF POPCORN.

Alex Garland has made enough movies that I’m confident the further away he gets from British beardo sci-fi, the less he knows what he’s talking about. His best film, Ex Machina, is entirely about two tech bros and the robot women one of them made. But, thanks to his crossover-arthouse success, no one’s stopping him from tackling how women experience patriarchy (Men, where star Jessie Buckley was the only woman with a position of power on the shoot) and - in Civil War - American politics, made with the same British crew as Men. Though set in a dystopian future where insurgents are about to storm the White House and depose a tough-talking President, Civil War is actually about journalism and whether one should (or even can) be a passive witness to human atrocity. There’s a kinky fun to watching foreign filmmakers superficially use the U.S. as a canvas for their story, the way Hollywood directors have regularly exploited the rest of the planet’s issues and iconography for decades. At its best, like when the White House is finally taken, there’s a dispassionate quality I doubt American filmmakers could pull off. But plenty could and have made movies about photographers monomaniacally focused on that perfect shot, and Garland doesn’t have any ideas about it we haven’t already seen in Salvador or The Year Of Living Dangerously. 

Kirsten Dunst plays a veteran photojournalist, and it’s neat to see the unapologetic confidence of her ‘00s roles now weathered by experience. Less neat is when her hubby Jesse Plemons shows up to play yet another inexpressive, casual psycho. For every inspired moment, like the acknowledgement America’s big enough some communities could choose to ignore national politics, there’s corn like Wagner Moura’s cocky, cliche interviewer losing it as tanks roll by in slo-mo. Ben Salisbury and Geoff Barrow initially contrast Americana with Silver Apples and Suicide on the soundtrack (man, I admire how little Barrow worries about revealing BEAK>’s precedents), but eventually we have to sit through a long montage set to a Sturgill Simpson ballad. Ain‘t that America. FOUR BAGS OF POPCORN.

The bags of popcorn are explained here. Anthonyisright at gmail dot com is where you can tell me about another 2024 film I should see already. Or whatever. Your call.