Friday reviews: 17 November 2023

Saltburn, The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes and Five Nights at Freddy’s are in cinemas, The Killer is on Netflix

I saw two films in cinemas yes­ter­day and only one of them was a ser­i­ous film – and it’s prob­ably not the one you are think­ing of.

First, a thought or two about aspect ratios. I named this news­let­ter Funerals & Snakes after a com­ment by vet­er­an Fritz Lang in Godard’s Contempt where he said that widescreen cinema was “only good for funer­als and snakes”. It’s a good gag but he’s wrong.

Widescreen cinema does open up the world, opens up land­scapes, opens up rela­tion­ships between people. I used to love it when the mask­ing at the cinema would click into action and go wider because you were going to see some­thing truly epic. It’s as if the movie was going to throw its arms around you.

Now epic movies have become taller – think of IMAX fram­ing as opposed to CinemaScope – and I’m not sure it has the same psy­cho­lo­gic­al impact. If any.

Emerald Fennell’s new film Saltburn, the follow-up to her sur­prise hit Promising Young Woman from 2021, is presen­ted in the 1.33:1 ratio – the pro­por­tions of old tele­vi­sions and of a stand­ard 35mm film frame – and its pur­pose is to show the char­ac­ters as hemmed in, con­strained, imprisoned. It’s a con­stip­ated aspect ratio but like so many aspects of Fennell’s films, it’s too obvi­ous and at the same time too clev­er by half.

The film is set in 2006, before ubi­quit­ous pock­et com­puters arrived and ruined everything, espe­cially storytelling.

Barry Keoghan plays Oliver Quick, a schol­ar­ship boy at Oxford who falls in with the rich kids and, when they dis­cov­er his under-privileged past, is invited to spend the sum­mer at the coun­try house that gives the film its title.

Oliver is a bit of a mys­tery, rotat­ing from guile­less work­ing class rube to Orton-level sexu­al manip­u­lat­or and he does appear to be work­ing some kind of angle among this house­ful of unworldly toffs.

The cent­ral rela­tion­ship is between Oliver and the impossibly hand­some eld­est child of the Catton fam­ily, Felix, played by Australian act­or (and soon-to-be Elvis for Sofia Coppola) Jacob Elordi. His par­ents are Richard E. Grant and Rosamund Pike and there’s some humour to be mined from their absent minded dis­tant rela­tion­ship with the real world.

In fact there’s not much wrong with the per­form­ances or the beau­ti­ful cine­ma­to­graphy in what is some­thing of an advance for Fennell as a director.

It’s her script that’s so frus­trat­ing, betrayed by that same ded­ic­a­tion to the gotcha end­ing, so happy to sac­ri­fice good sense, them­at­ic weight and con­vin­cing char­ac­ters in the belief that audi­ence sat­is­fac­tion comes from leav­ing the theatre shak­ing our heads say­ing “I did not see that coming.”

The gif­ted Keoghan car­ries the film for as long as he can, until it sells him out along with every­one else, but for most of it he really does feel like he’s the only live action act­or in a cartoon.

Saltburn is hol­low. It made me angry and not in a good way. 

The high oper­at­ic styl­ings of the Hunger Games fran­chise are back with The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, a pre­quel to the four-film tri­logy that ended in 2015. Presumably, enough fans were des­per­ate to know how devi­ous Donald Sutherland became President Snow that Suzanne Collins wrote a best­seller and the dir­ect­or of the last three, Francis Lawrence, is back to steer the movie version.

Like the ori­gin­al films, it pays not to cogit­ate too deeply on the logic behind any of it, but the ongo­ing themes of cruelty as enter­tain­ment, enter­tain­ment as dis­trac­tion, dis­trac­tion as a tool wiel­ded by the power­ful to sub­due the masses, are, if any­thing, stronger in this one.

Because we are deal­ing with the early years of the Games, there is still some dis­quiet in the lead­er­ship about the mor­al­ity of them, before they become baked in to the fas­cist Panem constitution.

Young Snow (Tom Blyth) is a stu­dent at the academy, groomed for power but liv­ing in secret poverty since the death of his fath­er, the famed General Crassus. The Games are fail­ing in their mis­sion and there is talk of shut­ting them down. In one last attempt to win back audi­ences, the academy stu­dents are tasked with ment­or­ing the young trib­utes who will Battle Royale them­selves to the fin­ish in the arena.

As luck would have it, Snow is partnered with the ‘song­bird’ Lucy Gray from District 12, a feisty folk-singer with a kind of Romany back­ground, played by West Side Story’s stand-out star Rachel Zegler.

Seeing the early devel­op­ment of the ideas behind the Hunger Games, as opposed to their high-tech even­tu­al­ity, hits pretty hard when our real world screens are full of destruc­tion – of con­crete, and flesh, and dreams. This is what hap­pens when we stop see­ing whole cat­egor­ies of people as human.

The long third act is not as suc­cess­ful as the first two, partly because the nar­rat­ive impetus dries up and the plot holes become potholes, but also because the neces­sity of mak­ing Snow a cred­ible future dic­tat­or seems to fly in the face of the storytellers’ instincts about the character.

There are two new films in cinemas that I couldn’t get to this week. The doc­u­ment­ary about Ennio Morricone doesn’t have a Wellington present­a­tion at the moment and Ti West’s new slash­er Thanksgiving didn’t fit into yesterday’s sched­ule because the Hunger Games was nearly three hours long!

But I have caught up with the sur­prise hit Five Nights at Freddy’s which has cracked $1.5m at the kiwi box office after only three weeks.

The Blumhouse stu­dio spe­cial­ise in this sort of high concept low budget hor­ror and Freddy’s is both – based on a video game so there’s a degree of pre-existing IP to coat­tail on, but also the stars are the rel­at­ively inex­pens­ive Josh Hutcherson and the seen-too-rarely Mary Stuart Masterson.

Hutcherson is the dead­beat care­giver for his young sis­ter and, when his aunt (Masterson) threatens to win cus­tody, he is forced to take a night secur­ity gig at an aban­doned pizza par­lour that once spe­cial­ised in animat­ron­ic enter­tain­ment. A bit like Disney’s Country Bears but a hun­dred times more creepy.

In a con­fus­ing shift away from where you think the hor­ror will come from, it turns out that Hutcherson is a dead­beat because he has been hav­ing dreams that provide a clue to the abduc­tion of his oth­er, older sib­ling, sev­er­al years earli­er and he needs to keep reen­ter­ing those dreams to solve the mystery.

There was alto­geth­er too much plot in this film for me to keep track of but it did appear as if it all got wrapped up in the end. Not super-scary either, just an R13, so it’s a decent entry-level Blumhouse for some of the young­er folk out there.

David Fincher’s The Killer has com­pleted its very lim­ited run in cinemas and dropped on Netflix, where it belongs. Earlier this week, before I saw this film, I wrote about Fincher as an auteur for RNZ and I can con­firm that The Killer is very much a Fincher film.

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Michael Fassbender plays a hit­man. If you believe his inner nar­rat­or, he’s a very good one and like so many of these char­ac­ters who believe they are some kind of samurai (they have a code, etc.) he has a very high opin­ion of him­self. But he’s a char­ac­ter in a David Fincher film which means that high opin­ion of him­self isn’t always backed up by the object­ive facts on the screen.

Dryly amus­ing, expertly made, suit­ably globe­trot­ting, cas­u­ally viol­ent, The Killer is much more enter­tain­ing than I was expect­ing. The lyr­ics at every Smiths needle­drop are always perfect. 

In a recent inter­view, Fincher has said that he’s not much inter­ested in mak­ing import­ant films (if he ever was) but The Killer has a lay­er or two that elev­ates it above the usu­al films in this genre. Perhaps Fincher is too mod­est, per­haps it’s mis­dir­ec­tion, but there’s always more to his films than meets the eye.

Further reading

I’m still on this mis­sion to watch or re-watch all of the top 50 films in the BFI/Sight & Sound greatest films of all time and this week we get to equal 41^st place – Kurosawa’s Rashomon from 1950.