Friday new releases: 19 April 2024

Origin, Challengers, Abigail and Mad About the Boy: The Noël Coward Story are all in cinemas

Greetings new sub­scribers. Friday is new releases day where I try and cov­er as many of this week’s new motion pic­tures as I can, wheth­er in cinemas or stream­ing. Today it just so hap­pens that they are all theatrical.

The most import­ant new film of the week is also the hard­est to see. Ava DuVernay’s rig­or­ous and ambi­tious Origin has divided crit­ics since it first appeared in Venice last year but the film – and the dis­cus­sions it needs to pro­voke – deserves more than the hand­ful of ses­sions it is get­ting in Wellington this weekend.

Simultaneously inspired by, and an adapt­a­tion of, Isabel Wilkerson’s best­selling book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, the film chal­lenges us to think again about the issue of racism. Not its impacts (which are vis­ible and to a degree address­able) but its ori­gins, which for many people is a much more uncom­fort­able topic.

Wilkerson (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) is an aca­dem­ic and author liv­ing a life that, from the out­side at least, appears to be insu­lated from bigotry. She lives in middle-class secur­ity, has a ten­ured uni­ver­sity pos­i­tion and a lov­ing white hus­band (Jon Bernthal).

When Black teen­ager Trayvon Martin is murdered by a vigil­ante she is asked to write an art­icle about it. Initially res­ist­ant – she writes books now, she says – the record­ing of the 911 call shocks her to dig deep­er. The ques­tion of why a latino man would kill a Black kid to “pro­tect” a white neigh­bour­hood per­turbs her. When ‘brown’ attacks ‘brown’, is racism what we are see­ing? Or is racism just an example of some oth­er – deeper-seated – form of ‘oth­er­ing’, of dehumanising.

The film draws par­al­lels between the racism that Black people in America con­tin­ue to exper­i­ence (based on clearly iden­ti­fi­able racial char­ac­ter­ist­ics), anti­semit­ism (not usu­ally based on how someone looks) and the per­ni­cious con­tin­ued pre­val­ence of the caste sys­tem among Hindus in India – a pre­ju­dice that occurs with­in racial boundaries.

So, if this kind of dehu­man­isa­tion can occur without clear racial or skin col­our ration­al­isa­tions, she asks, what is it that we are actu­ally seeing?

And then she goes a step fur­ther. At a back­yard bar­be­cue she asks a friend wheth­er she thinks that slave own­ers con­sidered their slaves to be less than human. Her friend con­curs. But, she replies, the author Toni Morrison points out that if they thought we were less than human, why did they get us to look after their children?

Dehumanisation is a kind of smokescreen. Racists don’t neces­sar­ily believe that their vic­tims are less­er beings, they just tell them­selves that because it makes their choices easi­er to live with. 

And those choices are mostly about some­thing as simple as, “you have some­thing and I want it”. Greed. Capitalism.

Sandra Hüller’s char­ac­ter in The Zone of Interest believes that the Jews being gassed next door are not worthy of con­sid­er­a­tion because the most import­ant thing to her is that she and her fam­ily get to live the life of afflu­ence that their murder allows. If think­ing that Jews are sub­hu­man means she sleeps at night, so be it.

To some view­ers this might not seem like such a start­ling insight but the examples that DuVernay uses, and the stor­ies she tells, are extremely per­tin­ent and power­ful in their own right.

Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers is a thor­oughly enter­tain­ing romp set in the world of pro­fes­sion­al tennis.

Zendaya, prov­ing that she is a movie star of the first rank, plays a former prodigy who has to retire through injury before she even gets to turn pro. When we meet her she is wife and coach of a cham­pi­on whose career is going down­hill (Mike Faist from West Side Story). In an attempt to get some easy wins under his comeback belt, they head to a tiny tour­na­ment where he has to face off against his former doubles part­ner – and her former boy­friend – Josh O’Connor. He, too, needs to win this tour­na­ment before his fad­ing career expires.

This menage is told with some furi­ous inter­cut­ting between timelines, usu­ally explained with cap­tions but also by keep­ing track of hairstyles.

The film is sur­pris­ingly astute about the inter­sec­tion of ambi­tion, tal­ent and lust and wheth­er there’s a com­bin­a­tion of the three that can ever add up to love.

This week’s hor­ror is a vam­pire movie made in Ireland but set in the US. In Abigail a ragtag crew of crim­in­als is recruited by Giancarlo Esposito to kid­nap an heir­ess. What they don’t real­ise is that said heir­ess (Alisha Weir from Matilda the Musical) is actu­ally a 300-year-old vam­pire and that she is the one doing the actu­al recruit­ing. This mot­ley bunch aren’t there to pro­tect her, they are there to enter­tain her.

Directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett were at the helm of the recent Scream reboots (which I haven’t seen) but they were also respons­ible for the excel­lent Ready Or Not in 2019 (reviewed for RNZ back in the day).

Strong char­ac­ters, played to the hilt by com­mit­ted act­ors, and an excel­lent mix of vis­cer­al prac­tic­al effects help make Abigail a very suc­cess­ful com­ic hor­ror. With one excep­tion (Melissa Barrera as Joey), this bunch of eejits deserve all they get so you can cheer on every amus­ing kill with a clear conscience.

Successful hor­ror relies heav­ily on tim­ing and so does com­edy and there are few great­er expo­nents of it than English enter­tain­er Noël Coward. There are plenty of examples in the new bio­graphy of him, Mad About the Boy, and the film itself man­ages a couple of moments that make you want to applaud the storytelling.

Coward was a fas­cin­at­ing man. Born in 1899 into a poor fam­ily – his moth­er ran a board­ing house – he left school at the age of 9 and was the fam­ily bread­win­ner two years later thanks to act­ing tal­ent, single-minded ambi­tion and a prodi­gious appet­ite for hard work.

The arc of his life is remark­able. A phe­nom­en­ally suc­cess­ful stage act­or and writer in the 1930s, when World War II came along he was recruited by MI6 to spy on the Americans (!) and then made and starred in one of the finest pieces of British pro­pa­ganda ever, In Which We Serve. For that film he basic­ally dis­covered co-director David Lean and future dir­ect­or Richard Attenborough (it was his first screen credit).

Before the war ended, he wrote the clas­sic Brief Encounter for Lean but after it his career became a vic­tim of chan­ging times and by the early 50s he was in debt and founder­ing. But then he dis­covered that his greatest asset was him­self (and his rep­er­toire of over 150 mostly com­ic songs) and he became a cab­aret act and Las Vegas superstar.

The film relies heav­ily on Coward’s own writ­ing (voiced by Rupert Everett), a couple of late-in-life tele­vi­sion inter­views and stor­ies from long gone con­tem­por­ar­ies like David Niven and Harold Pinter. There are no pro­gnost­ic­at­ing mod­ern talk­ing heads in this picture!

There’s a lot to enjoy, not least Coward’s cab­aret per­form­ance of “Mad Dogs and Englishmen” which con­tains some of the most idio­syn­crat­ic phras­ing I’ve ever heard.