Special 300th edition! Monday new releases: 23 September 2024

This is the 300^th news­let­ter since we restar­ted Funerals & Snakes over here at Substack and to cel­eb­rate we are offer­ing a spe­cial 50% dis­count on a one-year paid sub­scrip­tion. That’s only NZ$30 for a full year of recom­mend­a­tions and reviews dir­ect to your inbox. What a bar­gain! And what a way to sup­port inde­pend­ent screen criticism.

Click here to take advant­age of that incred­ible, lim­ited time, dis­count. It’s only avail­able until the end of September.

As a gift to non-paying sub­scribers, I’ve made this edi­tion free to all. The full ver­sion of the Monday new releases column is usu­ally only avail­able to paid subscribers.

Let’s start this column with a confession.

Body hor­ror is my least favour­ite cine­mat­ic genre. I am squeam­ish, I admit it.

So, I woke up yes­ter­day already trep­id­a­tious about my impend­ing after­noon screen­ing of Coralie Fargeat’s notori­ous new movie, The Substance, in which Demi Moore reacts to being fired from her TV exer­cise show by tak­ing a mys­ter­i­ous potion that res­ults in Margaret Qualley emer­ging from her back to become a young­er, hot­ter, ver­sion of herself.

At least, that’s my under­stand­ing of the plot.

Because, dear read­er, for some deep psy­cho­lo­gic­al reas­on, I chose not to check the time of my tick­et and arrived at Event Cinemas an hour after the film started.

I need to point out that this abso­lutely not com­mon. Funerals & Snakes is usu­ally a pretty well-oiled machine. But I was clearly res­ist­ing this one.

The jury is out on wheth­er I go tomor­row and include The Substance in next week’s new releases news­let­ter or wheth­er I wait for the home video release and review it then. I’m inclined towards the lat­ter, if only because I feel like I’ll give it a bet­ter shot when all of the noise and heat has gone out of it – it will be fairer to watch it without all the hype.

One of the reas­ons I was feel­ing so unenthu­si­ast­ic about The Substance was that all my trips to the pic­tures recently seem to have been for hor­ror films. On Saturday it was for Never Let Go, in which a moth­er and her two sons hide out in a remote cab­in, hid­ing from the evil that has laid waste to the rest of civilisation.

The fam­ily home is the last good thing in the world so they all have to remain tied to its found­a­tions by very long ropes whenev­er they go out­side to for­age for food, lest that evil infect them and gets invited in.

As the film goes on we start to real­ise that Momma (Halle Berry, also a pro­du­cer) may not be the most reli­able of guides to the hor­ror of the bay­ou and her twin tween boys (Anthony B. Jenkins and Percy Daggs IV) start to won­der wheth­er out­side is all that dan­ger­ous after all.

Lionsgate have just signed a deal with an AI com­pany to let them steal mine their cata­logue to cre­ate one of those large lan­guage mod­els to gen­er­ate “new” ideas. At first Never Let Go feels like it’s an early res­ult of those … we can’t call them efforts because AI is the oppos­ite of effort, devel­op­ments might be the word … as the cent­ral con­ceit feels so thin and deriv­at­ive. Like A Quiet Place, the enemy is unspeak­ably hor­rible and the rules for stay­ing safe so simple to under­stand but so hard to stick to.

But then the film – scrip­ted by KC Coughlin and Ryan Grassby with addi­tion­al “lit­er­ary con­tri­bu­tions” from dir­ect­or Alexandre Aja – heads off in an inter­est­ing psy­cho­lo­gic­al dir­ec­tion and leans heav­ily on its bib­lic­al ref­er­ences: ser­pents, Cain and Abel, suf­fer­ing for our sins, that sort of thing.

Well acted by a small cast – lit­er­ally in the case of the kids – Never Let Go ended up being quite intriguing with some decent story sur­prises in the final act.

Watching Iris and the Men – an utterly ami­able romantic com­edy – in the wake of the hor­rif­ic Pelicot rape case in France made some of it play a lot dark­er than any­one would have intended.

Laure Calamy (from Two Tickets to Greece and Call My Agent!) is a suc­cess­ful Parisian dent­ist, in a happy mar­riage with two lovely chil­dren. Her hus­band (Vincent Elbaz) is a work­ahol­ic and for the last few years the heat, shall we say, has gone out of their relationship.

Complaining about this to one of the oth­er par­ents at school pickup, she gets the sur­pris­ing advice to just get on one of those dat­ing apps. Not any dat­ing app, one that spe­cial­ises in help­ing people cheat.

This she does and, by golly, she is a smash hit. And this is where things took a turn, for me. There are a couple of fantasy sequences where Iris sees the mes­sages appear­ing rap­idement on her phone and ima­gines that they are being sent by all the male occu­pants of the metro car­riage. They make all sorts of las­ci­vi­ous and sug­gest­ive com­ments and it doesn’t take much to ima­gine them all respond­ing to a much less inno­cent online invitation.

A music­al num­ber in which Iris is wooed by dozens of men while lip-synching to the French ver­sion of “It’s Raining Men” plays equally icky as you are reminded that this whole scen­ario has the poten­tial to be very unsafe.

But that’s not the mes­sage of the film, and it’s not the film’s fault that it has arrived when it has. It’s a gen­er­ally sex-positive story of female affirm­a­tion and Calamy is often very funny as she real­ises that, to be frank, she’s still got it.

And the end­ing is a happy and appro­pri­ate – and sexy – one.

Further reading

Just pos­ted at NZ On Screen is my pro­file of the great New Zealand pro­duc­tion design­er Kai Hawkins. He was respons­ible for some of the most icon­ic designs in Kiwi cinema includ­ing the Battletruck (which he also drove) in 1982. Beyond Reasonable Doubt, Vigil and The Footstep Man are just a few of his many cred­its in a fas­cin­at­ing 60-year career.