Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma
Emphasis on Camp. The myriad genre hooks in Jane Schoenbrun’s latest are ostentatiously framed by quotation marks—the title alone betrays the writer/director’s eagerness to make their reflexivity as legible as possible.
Her Private Hell
No one ever accused Nicolas Winding Refn of not having an aesthetic. Her Private Hell begins with our heroine Elle (Sophie Thatcher), a beautiful young actress in long red leather, traversing the expansive, tastefully illuminated avenues of what appears to be an otherwise empty city bathed in pink and plum neon and permanently engulfed, to varying degrees, in “the Mist.”
Backrooms
Kane Parsons inaugurated Backrooms as an adolescent, crafting ersatz VHS shorts for the internet that explored the eponymous shadow realm, a labyrinth of eerily bland rooms and corridors where every thing was at once known and made strange by sundry spatial distortions and inexplicable intrusions.
Obsession
Obsession begins with a rehearsal. We watch tight-jawed twentysomething cutie-dweeb Bear (Michael Johnston), cordoned off in a tight single shot, nakedly confess his heretofore hidden love for friend and workmate Nikki (Inde Navarrette).
Cat People
On one level, this is a story of longing and projection, of strange love between opposites.
X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes
The first thing we lay eyes on is… an eyeball! No enveloping head. Just an eyeball attached to an optic nerve, floating in a beaker, a precious organ isolated, helpless. What has it seen?
undertone
Listen. Movies, like so much culture, are subject to the hegemony of the visual, but it’s sound that surrounds us.
Wetiko
I’ve no idea how literally to take Wetiko’s claim, displayed in multiple languages during its ominous title sequence, that the film is based on true events.
Cronos
The aging antiques dealer discovers the device in the hollow of an archangel statue. The device was forged over 400 years previous by an alchemist who used this intricate creation to filter his blood and grant him eternal life—until his heart was pierced by debris from a fallen edifice and his contract with eternity was suddenly terminated.
The Brood
What was, until The Shrouds (2024), David Cronenberg’s most overtly autobiographical film, The Brood (1979) chronicles the bitter termination of the marriage of Frank (Art Hindle) and Nola (Samantha Eggar) and the accompanying battle over custody of their young daughter.