Speak No Evil, Grafted, Marguerite’s Theorem and The Blind Sea are in cinemas and Wise Guy: David Chase and the Sopranos is streaming on Neon
Films like Speak No Evil – dark and menacing thrillers slash horrors – with their potential for violence and cruelty are not my usual cup of tea. In fact, I only tend to watch them for professional reasons. I’ve never sought out Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs, for example, and I don’t think I have willingly watched a Blumhouse production except for a review.
That’s not say that I haven’t enjoyed films like that. One of the pleasures of this life is being forced by the vagaries of the release schedule to go where I wouldn’t normally go.
But I was not entirely looking forward to Speak No Evil, in which an American family living in London are invited to the remote farm of some acquaintances they met on holiday. There, they discover that the plans their hosts have for them are more sinister than just making a vegetarian eat roast goose.
Mackenzie Davis and Scoot McNairy play the couple – he has uprooted them from the States on the promise of a job that has dematerialised – and Alix West Lefler is their eleven-year-old daughter Agnes, her anxiety not helped by her parents’ quarrelling.
In the West Country, they are staying with the free-spirited couple, Paddy (James McAvoy) and Ciara (Aisling Franciosi) and their mute son Ant (Dan Hough). Paddy has the kind of personality that loves to see people around him get into difficulties out of an excess of politeness. His attitude is that people don’t tell the truth to each other and his mission is to goad it out of you, one way or another.
Writer/director James Watkins (adapting a 2022 Danish film) successfully builds and releases and then builds the tension once more, assisted by strong performances from his entire cast.
McAvoy, in particular, is in fine form – and stacked – as the dangerously manipulative Paddy, even though at times his accent sounded like Arthur Christmas, which was presumably not the effect he was going for.
If you can handle a bit of dread (and children-in-peril) and the eventual explosion of gory action, Speak No Evil is pretty effective – possibly my favourite of all the Blumhouse Productions I’ve seen. It even makes an attempt at some psychological depth by bringing out Philip Larkin’s “This Be the Verse” to argue for the impact of ongoing generational trauma. A poem that is too good for this context, to be sure, but always good to have it recited in its entirety for a change.
Speak No Evil works because it has strong, distinct and believable characters with credible motivations, despite the unlikeliness of the situation. Sasha Rainbow’s kiwi body horror, Grafted, doesn’t do any of that and therefore crumbles underneath its own ridiculousness.
Joyena Sun is Wei, a Chinese student offered a scholarship to a New Zealand university where she will study first-year microbiology along with her cousin Angela (Jess Hong) and Angela’s decidedly un-academic friends Eve (Eden Hart) and Jasmine (Sepi To’a). University life in Auckland appears to be exactly like an American high school, full of mean girls and social failures like Wei.
But she has a secret – her late father’s scientific notebook in which he was researching a groundbreaking discovery in human skin grafting, a breakthrough that would fix the striking birthmarks that his family believes are the result of an ancient curse.
So far, so ridiculous, and while it seems harsh to be criticising a film about face-swapping for not making any sense, if more time and energy had been put into the characters and their motivations, the rest of it might have been able to come along for ride.
Instead, it’s just a bloody cartoon and Rainbow’s script and direction manages to make normally good actors look like bad ones (which doesn’t seem fair).
Actors selling an audience something that only they can see is the high point of Anna Novion’s drama Marguerite’s Theorem. Ella Rumpf (as Marguerite), Julien Frison (Lucas) and Jean-Pierre Darroussin, as their PhD thesis supervisor Lauren Werner, spend an inordinate amount of time chalking up complicated formulae on blackboards and then telling us with their performances whether we are witnessing triumph or disaster.
I’m not even sure that the finest mathematical minds would be able to see enough of the complicated workings to know whether they are accurate or not. We just have to trust, and we do.
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Even extended sequences of Marguerite using her giant maths brain to make money at Mah Jong have to be taken at face value – everybody in the scene says she has won, so I guess she’s won.
Rumpf first came to my attention as the veterinarian cannibal in Raw in 2017 and she is excellent in a part that could easily be a one note obsessive. Her character’s journey of personal (as well as mathematical) discovery after she drops out of university, gives the film the kind of grounding that Grafted doesn’t even know it’s missing.
If you have seen any of the action from the recent Paralympic Games on TV, you’ll already be aware of how many inspiring stories of remarkable achievement there are out there. Daniel Fenech’s documentary The Blind Sea tells another one – although because surfing hasn’t yet made it into the Paralympics, this is the only place you’ll find it.
Matt Formston is one of Australia’s foremost disabled athletes, a multi-medallist as a track and road cyclist despite being almost 100 percent blind due to macular dystrophy since childhood. In 2016, he retired from cycling and turned his surfing passion into a profession, winning three gold medals at the World Para Surfing Championships between 2016 and 2019.
The documentary follows him as he takes one more challenge, becoming the first blind surfer to take on the biggest waves in the world at Nazaré in Portugal. It’s incredibly dangerous, even for experienced and sighted surfers, but he builds his team and commits to the gruelling training.
While there’s plenty of spectacular surf action for fans, the film does a terrific job of explaining Formston’s disability and how he has quietly gone about overcoming it.
I’ve only seen a couple of episodes of The Sopranos, and not likely to persevere beyond that, but I am extremely interested in its place in the pantheon of prestige series television and the growth of HBO over the past 25 years, so I was glad to watch Wise Guy: David Chase and the Sopranos, a new two-part documentary by Alex Gibney.
The first thing it taught me was that for years I have thought that David Chase (The Sopranos) and David Milch (Deadwood) were the same person and I’m glad to be able to make that distinction finally.
The second was the realisation that in 1999, when The Sopranos first aired, HBO was mainly known for movies and boxing and that the executives who greenlit the show didn’t really know what they were doing either, giving Chase plenty of leeway to basically invent 21st century television as he went along.
Gibney’s film is built around an extended – and somewhat reluctant – interview with Chase and the abundant behind-the-scenes material that HBO have made available. Fans will love the insights into favourite characters and moments but I enjoyed the insight into the mysteries of storytelling and how important casting is. And what a gamble it is.
