Monday new releases: 2 December 2024

It’s here in the New Releases column but Heretic feels like it has been around for ages. Premiering at the Terror-Fi film fest­iv­al a few weeks ago, this is a film that has been build­ing a jus­ti­fi­able word-of-mouth reputation.

Two young women are in a small town to do mis­sion­ary work for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. When we meet them, they are hav­ing a con­ver­sa­tion on a park bench that doesn’t have very much to do with their pros­elyt­ising pur­pose – the first hint that there may be more to these two than meets the eye.

As the winter rain pours down, they make it to a remote cot­tage where they are to meet one of their ‘leads’, a man named Mr Reed (Hugh Grant). They are not meant to be alone with a man but he insists that his wife will be join­ing them any minute – once she has com­pleted bak­ing a deli­cious blue­berry pie – so they step inside.

Reed is at first quite affable, although he appears to already know a great deal about Mormonism, and the con­ver­sa­tion becomes quite chal­len­ging, bor­der­ing on con­front­a­tion­al. Reed appears to be one of those ‘reply guy’ types who sees an oppor­tun­ity to school these inno­cents in how he sees real­ity and religion.

The theo­lo­gic­al debate is much more robust than the one than in Freud’s Last Session but we soon learn that Reed’s meth­ods are – to say the least – unsound. In the ori­gin­al Saw movie, the vic­tims were forced to cut off a limb in order to sur­vive. For a while it’s as if he’s chal­len­ging these women to cut off some part of their soul – their faith – but we even­tu­ally revert to grue­some hor­ror type.

Expertly con­struc­ted, with a found­a­tion­al idea that is scru­pu­lously adhered to and a con­clu­sion that man­ages to not take a side in their exten­ded debate while also not selling itself out, Heretic is one of the most sat­is­fy­ing recent hor­rors. Grant is sen­sa­tion­al and – if the Academy were ever to con­sider genre films for their awards – he should get some recog­ni­tion for it. Sophie Thatcher and Chloe East as the two young women are strong foils but it is Grant’s show.

On RNZ Nights on Friday night, I talked with Emile Donovan about the loc­al doc­u­ment­ary Taki Rua Theatre – Breaking Barriers and the new Disney anim­ated music­al Moana 2. I wanted to make the point that without Taki Rua’s four-decade com­mit­ment to advan­cing pro­fes­sion­al Māori theatre – includ­ing cham­pi­on­ing per­form­ing and writ­ing in te reo – a film like Moana would be unthink­able (espe­cially the reo Māori ver­sions which are now being released simultaneously).

The con­tent below was ori­gin­ally paywalled.

Several of the cast mem­bers of Moana 2 were con­nec­ted to Taki Rua back in the day and it’s an excel­lent example of the mes­sage in that great Paul Kelly song – “From Little Things, Big Things Grow”. Watching the doc­u­ment­ary was quite nos­tal­gic for me – I was around the Wellington theatre scene in those early days and pro­duced work at the Alpha Street ven­ue. I’m pleased that the his­tory has been recor­ded and, while some of the recol­lec­tions from Māori cre­at­ors are jus­ti­fi­ably forth­right, it doesn’t men­tion that Taki Rua was always the third or fourth pri­or­ity for theatre fund­ing in Wellington, even though its foot­print has proved to be so much big­ger than its main­stream contemporaries.

Moana 2 is a good example of a fairly sol­id Disney sequel, engin­eered to push all the right but­tons in all the right order, but without the spark that made the first Moana such a ton­ic in 2016. Like Inside Out 2 earli­er this year, the tim­ing is per­fect to max­im­ise audi­ences who were either around for the earli­er ver­sion or who dis­covered it sub­sequently on Disney+. It has a very strong begin­ning – Little Sis’ Simea (voiced by Khaleesi Lambert-Tsuda) is a great char­ac­ter and per­fectly anim­ated – and even­tu­ally reaches a sat­is­fy­ing and emo­tion­al con­clu­sion, but it loses its way in the middle for long stretches.

And the less said about the songs, the better.

Last week I men­tioned that we had to choose between two new Netflix fea­tures – Joy and The Piano Lesson. I chose the August Wilson adapt­a­tion because it seemed more worthy some­how, more ser­i­ous. I had the idea that Joy – a film about the devel­op­ment of IVF tech­no­logy in the 1960s and 70s – might be a bit of a nostalgia-fest, a fantasy cel­eb­ra­tion of the era like The Boat That Rocked or Made in Dagenham, but I was wrong.

The Piano Lesson was, indeed, incred­ibly worth­while (even if it was a bit of a slog at times), but Joy turned out to be much more sat­is­fy­ing as well as being a much easi­er watch. Perfect Saturday night enter­tain­ment, in fact.

Thomasin McKenzie plays Jean Purdy, a nurse who joins sci­ent­ist Robert Edwards (James Norton) and obstet­ri­cian Patrick Steptoe (Bill Nighy) in their search to help women become preg­nant. The estab­lish­ment at the time were skep­tic­al, to say the least, of the idea that eggs could be fer­til­ised in a test tube (or rather a petri dish) and Purdy’s own reli­gious com­munity proved to a social rather than sci­entif­ic chal­lenge that had to be overcome.

By fore­ground­ing Purdy the film also pri­or­it­ises the story of the women whose lives they were hop­ing to change. Joy is a film about choice, and it’s choice.

Memory, by Mexican writer-director Michel Franco, is one of those good films that eas­ily mer­its a pos­it­ive review and four stars but our memory of it will soon fade.

Jessica Chastain plays Sylvia, a recov­er­ing alco­hol­ic and single moth­er. One night, she is fol­lowed home by a stranger who then sleeps on the street out­side her apart­ment. Saul (Peter Sarsgaard) has early onset demen­tia and wakes with no memory of the night before. Against her bet­ter judge­ment, Sylvia takes on a home help role for Saul and they start to become close. For both, fam­il­ies are just people who don’t under­stand them but Sylvia’s story is very spe­cif­ic and Saul’s frus­trat­ingly vague.

Screenwriters are told that audi­ences should enter every scene as late as pos­sible and leave it as early as pos­sible, but Memory fol­lows this advice to a fault. 

Finally, There’s Still Tomorrow gets a full cinema release after schlep­ping its way around the coun­try for nine months as part of the Italian Film Festival. A huge hit in Italy, it seems destined to be a crowd-pleaser here (although I was a little put off by the huge ton­al shifts):

The struggle in There’s Still Tomorrow is the struggle for women to be able to live fully as human, without hav­ing to beg their men for money, time and choices. An arrest­ing mix of ugly drama, fam­ily com­edy, social com­ment and ana­chron­ist­ic music cues, There’s Still Tomorrow was a huge hit in Italy last year – beat­ing both Oppenheimer and Barbie.

You can read the rest in my Italian Film Festival pre­view for RNZ.