You know fall has arrived when movies begin opening that practically feel designed to support an Oscar campaign. Such is somewhat the case with The Outrun, which has Saoirse Ronan as a young woman from the Orkney Islands (off Scotland’s north coast) who struggles with alcoholism. Rona is a biologist with a bright future she constantly undermines in drinking binges that frequently end in abusive, insulting, and self-destructive behavior she seldom remembers the next day. These ugly, sometimes dangerous incidents (at one point she drunkenly accepts a ride from a would-be rapist) sabotage her nascent scientific career, and her relationships, notably with adoring London boyfriend Daynin (Paapa Essiedu). Enrolling in a zero-tolerance, drop-in recovery program only provides a fragile toe-hold on sobriety; eventually she needs to go home to the Orkneys, where complete isolation might be a more effective deterrent.
All this is related in scrambled chronological terms by director-adaptor Nora Fingscheidt, whose prior features also dealt with female protagonists on the rebound from transgressive behavioral patterns. There are flashbacks to the root of Rona’s problems, a traumatizing childhood with a schizophrenic father (Stephen Dillane) and hapless born-again Christian mother (Saskia Reeves) with whom she maintains separate, still-problematic communication now. The Outrun is based on Amy Liptrot’s acclaimed memoir, which was less a straight addiction-and-recovery chronicle than an original melange of autobiography, travelogue, and musings on the natural world. That latter element is retained here via educational digressions into the habits of the corncrake and such. While attractive, these interludes now feel like strained efforts at adding a “poetical dimension” to an already crowded, disorganized narrative agenda.
Usually cast as a “good girl” of one sort or another, Ronan throws herself into this character’s disarray, with vividly ugly scenes when Rona has to be thrown out of bars or drives away the people she loves. Yet accomplished as the filmmaking and performers are, too often these histrionics feel like the project’s raison d’etre—an excuse to put a star through a mill of substance abuse and denial that’s mostly on the surface, sans the deep insight that made something like Andrea Riseborough vehicle To Leslie so wrenching. The gestures towards triumphant catharsis at the end don’t feel earned; we’re not sure just when or how Rona turned a corner in this dirge-like compilation of indignities, though Fingscheidt throws in everything but the kitchen sink (including animated sequences) to vary it.
There are few moments as simply effective as the one where our heroine admits “I can’t be happy sober” to a fellow recoveree, and nothing else in these two hours felt so affecting as the closing credits’ use of The The’s “This Is the Day.” (That ’80s act also has climactic pride of place on the soundtrack of Megalopolis, oddly enough.) The Outrun opens in Bay Area theaters including SF’s Opera Plaza and Emeryville’s AMC Bay Street 16 on Fri/4.
There are mixed results, too, from three very different but intriguing new films opening Friday. Also at the Opera Plaza is Daaaaaali!, the latest from French writer-director Quentin Dupieux. It’s natural that his penchant for surreal humor should lead him to the famous surrealist painter, whose over-the-top persona was as deliberately provocative as his art. Disrupting its own narrative continuum in myriad ways—not least by casting five different actors as Salvador D.—this clever construct is as aptly unconventional as recent biopic Daliland (with Ben Kingsley in the role) was disappointingly straightforward.
Anais Demoustier plays a journalist whose attempts to interview the grande artiste-celebrity are forever stymied by her endlessly self-promoting yet impetuous and frequently impossible quarry. Bending time, space, dreams and whatnot to its own will, Daaaaaali! has some good jokes, but it’s less hilarious than amusing, finding wittily inventive new approaches to an arguably over-familiar subject.
There is little that is familiar about Eureka, a frequently striking if often mystifying new work from Argentine’s Lisandro Alonso—his first since Jauja a decade ago. That film’s Viggo Mortensen returns in the first and briefest of three narrative panels here, as a lone stranger who arrives in a frontier town with a singleminded purpose, ready to shoot everyone in sight if they get in his way. But this B&W tribute to classic westerns turns out to be showing on a TV in the home of South Dakota Lakota Nation reservation Alaina (Alaina Clifford), who then leaves to work a very eventful night shift of rounding up drunks and batterers during a blizzard. Then one character seemingly turns into a heron, taking flight to land in an unspecified 1970s South American forest where indigenous residents cope with love-triangle violence, fever, and the economic lure of an outsider seeking gold.
The sheer physical beauty of this last section compensates for its opacity, as the middle part’s more pointed drama does for its sometime dullness, and the opener’s genre homage is its own reward. You can pick out recurrent themes of colonialism and such. But these panels largely stay separate, their joining into 147 minutes of “slow cinema” baffling as well as beguiling. The sum impact is one of those monumental slabs of semi-abstract screen high art that may reward and/or frustrate, but is worth seeing… if you can relax into its hypnotic rhythms, and not expect much crystal-clarity of intent. Eureka opens Fri/4 at the Roxie.
There’s nothing impenetrable about White Bird, a YA adaptation that in concept is a little embarrassing, an attempt to Twilight the Holocaust—turning disturbing subject matter into a pretext for wish-fulfillment teen romance. However, this screen version of R.J. Palacio’s graphic novel is quite deftly handled by director Marc Forster, an old hand at improving popular but pandering literary material (The Kite Runner, A Man Called Otto), so it’s a relatively guilt-free affair that can be recommended to open-minded adults as well as younger viewers.
Framed as a story told by a grandmother (Helen Mirren) to a bratty grandchild (Bryce Gheisar), it primarily takes place during WW2. Sara (Ariella Glaser) is a pretty, self-involved 15-year-old in a quaint Alsatian town. Once Nazi occupation forces arrive, her Jewish family realizes they’ve put off fleeing for too long. Sara manages to escape capture thanks to hitherto snubbed classmate Julien (Orlando Schwerdt), whose parents agree to hide her away Anne Frank-style for what turns out to be a very long duration.
There’s a storybook quality Forster heightens with some “enchanted forest” visuals (the film was actually shot in the Czech Republic), and the eventual stolen snoggery between juvenile leads can feel a bit tritely predictable. But this production generally elevates a story originally intended for 4th-to-8th graders, its good taste lending the drama’s obvious instructional points sufficient potency. The result is a movie you can take the kids to in good conscience, and won’t be sorry you saw, either. It opens at Bay Area theaters including SF’s AMC Metreon Fri/4.
More new movies:
Can’t Stop the Music: ‘Louder Than You Think,’ ‘Studio One Forever’
Two documentaries peel back the curtain on the peak indie-rock and disco eras. Jed I. Rosenberg’s Louder Than You Think, which opens at the 4 Star on Tues/8, is a portrait of Stockton music scene veteran Gary Young, whose first words here are “I took LSD 375 times.” He’s also been in 29 bands, but is primarily known for one: Pavement, which hired him as their original drummer despite his being twice the other members’ age, not to mention an “old hippie” into prog rock. Those other members still appreciate his “huge artistic contribution.” Nonetheless, his drunken antics eventually got him pushed out, which was probably what he wanted anyway. Decades later, Young remains a bit of a hot mess. But he’s still good company, too, and an entertaining screen subject even if you don’t like Pavement. (Though you should.)
Marc Saltarelli’s Studio One Forever commemorates the West Hollywood gay disco (formerly a camera factory, then a ’60s private discotheque owned by Paul Newman and other celebrities) that launched in 1975, staying open for two decades. The building was vast enough to also allow a separate cabaret performance space that launched many a career, as well as other sidebars. It survived the AIDS era, hosting myriad fundraisers, while enduring the addiction issues of major players—including a coke-addled founder who died prematurely from plastic-surgery complications. Forever covers a lot of familiar ground, seemingly oblivious to the fact that similar goings-on were happening in every major gay community, its nostalgia driven by the recollections of primary interviewees for “the place where they were happiest in life.” This is a colorful flashback, even if those who’ve attended Frameline over the years may feel they’ve seen variations on its gist many times before. Gravitas is releasing to On Demand platforms Tues/8.
The Horror, The Horror
It is finally October, and you know what that means: Only x days left to Halloween! It also means, of course, that the usual spill of horror and horror-adjacent movies will thicken into a solid mass. This week sees the home-formats arrival of South Korea’s biggest hit thus far this year, the sprawling ghostbuster tale Exhuma—and mention should be made of a like-minded if much smaller-scaled thriller from the same country, twisty haunted-apartment tale Sleep, which opened in theaters last weekend. Both are worthwhile.
Launching in both theaters and On Demand this weekend is seriocomedic The Radleys, based on Matt Haig’s well-received YA novel. It has Kelly Macdonald and Damian Lewis as doting parents hiding a wee secret from their teenage offspring: The whole family are vampires, albeit “in recovery” (or in denial). When the kids indulge their hitherto unacknowledged taste for blood, however, things go south fast. Euros Lyn’s film could be tighter, given its not terribly original conceit. But it has its points, and a late-breaking gay romance angle is sweetly handled.
Moving from the ‘burbs to the outback, another family suffers more gravely from supernatural circumstances in F. Javier Gutierrez’s Spanish The Wait aka La espera, which also hits VOD platforms this Friday. Victor Clavijo plays Eladio, who ekes out a threadbare early 1970s existence for his wife (Ruth Diaz) and son (Moises Ruiz) maintaining a private hunting ranch for a wealthy landowner. When he’s pushed to relax his own safety standards, the consequences are tragic. But what at first just appears to be hideous bad luck soon starts looking like some sort of occult curse.
A very slow burn rather cheaply goosed by horrorish effects (including a creature transformation that turns out to be “just a dream”) in the later going, this movie takes itself too seriously to be much fun, yet lacks the gravitas to be taken seriously as it would like. Another period rural nightmare, Hold Your Breath, debuts on Hulu this Thurs/3. Starring Sarah Paulson as a Depression Dust Bowl matriarch combatting another unseen malevolent force, it was unavailable for preview by press time.
Considerably lighter in tone is Lucy Harvey and Danielle Kummer’s documentary Alien on Stage, a real-life Waiting for Guffman in which a group of Dorset bus drivers decide to do something a little different for their annual charity pantomime—yes, a live theatrical version of Ridley Scott’s 1979 sci-fi scarefest. When the cheesy amateur effort unexpectedly gets invited to play a legitimate West End theater, it becomes a cult hit. This genial documentary reaches streaming platforms next Tues/8.
Opening this Fri/4 at the Alamo Drafthouse is Steven Kostanski’s Frankie Freako, a frantic sendup of the already goofy likes of The Garbage Pail Kids, Troll, Critters, and other 1980s juvenile horror-comedies involving puppets and gross-out gags. I loved some of the Canadian filmmakers’ prior genre-spoofing projects, like Psycho Goreman and Manborg…this one, not so much, though admittedly viewers who grew up watching its inspirations will probably find it a riot.
Finally, there’s a slew of revivals all month, the immediate prospects including “You Are So Cursed: J-Horror Classics” (more info here), a retrospective of celluloid terrors from the Land of the Rising Sun. It commences this Fri/4 with Takashi Miike’s hair-raising 1999 Audition. Later entries include the original Japanese versions of Cure, Pulseand Dark Water, before ending on the 26th with the old-school B&W frights of 1964’s ghost story Onibaba.
Meanwhile the Alamo Drafthouse has two hugely enjoyable oldies from 1979: Sat/5 it’s the whacked-out, all-star English-language Italian sci-fi horror campfest The Visitor (more info here), and on Mon/7 franchise-kickstarting US indie nightmare Phantasm (more info here), one of that decade’s most original genre hits.
