Heretic, Moana 2, Taki Rua Theatre – Breaking Barriers, Memory and There’s Still Tomorrow are in cinemas and Joy is on Netflix
Editor’s note
I’m changing the format of these weekly new release summaries as I’ve been frustrated that they haven’t been as much fun to write (and presumably to read) as my old Capital Times columns from back in the day but it has taken me a while to work out why.
I’ve been giving every title its own image and, even though that makes for a strong visual presence, the fact that Substack can only showcase images at full width means that they interrupt the flow. It’s harder to make comparisons and connections.
And every time I start a new section after an image, I feel like that film deserves a full-blooded review which isn’t always the case (or at least I don’t always feel like it). So, fewer pictures should mean fewer but better words.
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.
