It’s always entertaining reading complaints from the misogynist conservative “manosphere,” many of which centers around guys finding ways to blame women for the fact that their “alpha” boorishness no longer attracts the opposite sex. Gee, what female wouldn’t want to rush into the arms of some dude who wants to turn the gender equity clock back to 1950? A frequently seen line of self-care amongst those circling incel status is clucking over how modern women’s choices—i.e. prioritizing anything of their own over what My Man wants—will “leave them alone,” like that’s the worst fate on Earth. Living alone can be great, especially if/when the only available alternative is playing “the weaker sex” to someone who needs to feel superior to women in order to feel good about himself. Personally, I’d take “reading a book in bed” over that any day.
Several of this week’s new movies underline that wisdom—they’re not about misogyny per se, but reinforce the notion that sometimes you’re better off alone. Not every familial or marital situation is an automatic improvement over hassle-free solitude. Indeed, many make flying solo seem the best of all travel options.
Certainly illustrating that thesis is Bring Her Back, perhaps the most alarming and effective horror movie about a dysfunctional domestic dynamic since Ari Aster’s Hereditary. When their father suddenly dies, the already motherless half-sibling duo of teenaged Andy (Billy Barratt) and younger Piper (Sora Wong) is at the mercy of the state, with a high likelihood of being separated—a particularly traumatizing prospect given that visually impaired Piper is very dependent on her protective older brother. In a few months he’ll turn 18, and be able to apply for legal guardianship. But meanwhile, they accept the only foster parenting offer that is willing to keep them together.
That is from Laura (Sally Hawkins), a retired child-services counselor who lives in a home well outside urban Adelaide. She makes a rather manic, ditzy, New Age hippie-like first impression that is a little off-putting. It is soon clear that she’s only really interested in bubbly Piper, treating Andy as a sort of thinly-tolerated additional burden. (The “bedroom” he’s given is obviously a storage closet with a cot shoved into it.) This imbalance grows creepier once we realize that Laura recently lost her only child, a girl who was also blind and just about Piper’s age. She is notably evasive in explaining the presence of Oliver (Jonah Wren Philips), a shaven-headed, androgynous, almost catatonic mute pubescent she keeps locked up most of the time. And no wonder—he’s ghoulishly feral, with small animals. Even furniture is unsafe around his gnawing teeth. Is he even her own child?
Eyeblink flashbacks suggest some sort of sinister occult doings in Laura’s recent past, as well as reasons why Andy has a record of juvenile misbehaviors behind him—he’d acted out after enduring some parental abuses he’s kept hidden from Piper. But Laura is aware of that record, and we soon perceive that under her rather creepy perkiness, she is plotting to make him look like a violent menace who must be separated from his sister for her own good. That’s just the beginning of the complications in Bring Her Back, which to its credit springs some real narrative surprises—a rarity in the largely formulaic landscape of current horror movies.
The Australian director siblings Danny and Michael Philippou made their debut a couple years ago with Talk to Me, a solid supernatural thriller that did well both critically and commercially. It was above average, but also trod familiar terrain, being yet another variation on the basic template of “Teens fuck around with ouija board/book of spells/etc… then find out.” This sophomore feature (which Danny again co-wrote with Bill Hinzman) is a big leap forward—far more original and disturbing in content, with thornier emotions, as well as greater textural complexity in both images and audio.
It’s not a perfect film, but it really goes out on some limbs, to potent effect. The central characters have more psychological depth than the genre usually allows. Laura is a great role for Hawkins, whose usually benign fluttery mannerisms turn out to adapt very well to a more sinister context, while Barratt is equally good as the main protagonist. And while violence is sparingly used (this is one of those “elevated” horror films slasher fans may fault for demanding some patience), the Philippous make sure that when it arrives, you will jump. Perverse, ironical, and ambiguous in addition to being tense, occasionally shocking, Bring Her Back is well worth seeing—if you can take it. It opens in theaters nationwide on Fri/30.
Two more new movies provide considerably more humorous—if still somewhat “dark”—takes on the perils of not being able to choose your own family. Daniel Robbins’ Bad Shabbos is a medium-black comedy in the “dinner party catastrophe” mode, as David (Jon Bass) and fiancee Meg (Meghan Leathers) prepare with gloomy foreboding for her visiting midwestern Gentile parents to meet his very neurotic Upper West Side Jewish family for a Shabbat meal.
Meg has already converted to Judaism in a desperate attempt to ingratiate herself. But clearly nothing will ever be good enough for her future mother-in-law (Kyra Sedgwick), the kind of personality that might qualify for a doctorate in passive-aggression. Her husband (David Paymer) is amiable enough, but then there’s the perpetual drama of a daughter’s (Mila Vayntrub) bad boyfriend, who also clashes with the clan’s heavily mis-medicated youngest offspring (Theo Taplitz). Well before the out-of-town guests arrive, an already tense situation gets a lot worse because…well, there’s a wee accident. One that leaves a dead body in the bathroom.
Feeling somewhat like a stage play, though shot nimbly enough, Bad Shabbos is ultimately clever and amusing enough. But it’s also pretty sitcomish in tenor, with some performances laboring pretty hard for wackiness. I preferred the more low-key, droll turns in the cast, including stylishly adept comic playing from rapper-turned-actor Cliff “Method Man” Smith as a building doorman whose problem-solving skills extend far beyond the call of duty. Heavy on familiar shtick, if fairly skilled at pulling it off, this movie does prove its filmmakers’ versatility—director Robbins and cowriter Zack Weiner’s last narrative feature was Pledge, a rather hair-raising low-budget hazing thriller you’d be hard-pressed to guess came from the same minds. Shabbos opens Fri/30 at area theaters including SF’s Opera Plaza, Berkeley’s Elmwood and Marin’s Rafael Film Center.
A much more peculiar comedy of sorts is Lon-based Karan Kandhari’s first feature Sister Midnight. Giving its central characters no preamble or backstory, it plunges us right into the arranged Mumbai wedlock of surly country lass Uma (Radhika Apte) and awkward Gopal (Ashok Pathak). They’ve apparently been paired because no one else would have either of them—and perhaps because their families want them gone.
It’s not that they lack chemistry—it’s just that said chemistry is toxic. She hates the city, has zero social or housekeeping skills, and regards her husband as one might a flea-ridden stray dog that won’t leave. Having caught her vibe, he maintains a cautious distance, insofar as that’s possible in their one-room home. Bored, eventually Uma gets a job as a nocturnal office janitor. Eventually she also begins experiencing some odd, compulsive, animalistic behaviors, and is accused of being a witch—intriguing elements that don’t really lead anywhere pointed in the director’s exquisite-corpse-like script.
That arbitrariness is somewhat frustrating. But unpredictability is also Sister Midnight’s charm. Though handsomely photographed in widescreen format, the movie has an absurdist minimalism redolent of Jim Jarmusch or Aki Kaurismaki. Its enigmatic progress is further goosed by a soundtrack that ranges from incidental music by Interpol’s Paul Banks to eccentric mixtape cuts by Buddy Holly, The Band, and other unlikely sources. There are even stop-motion animation elements realizing some of this grotesque tale’s more puzzlingly fantastical aspects. You may not entirely “get it” (I didn’t), but Sister is still pleasingly oddball. It opens Fri/30 at the Rafael Film Center and May 6 at SF’s Roxie Theater.
Lastly, there’s the extended-family reunion of 1990’s To Sleep With Anger, last in a “Three by Charles Burnett” series at the Roxie, which has already shown his raw 1978 debut Killer of Sleep and 1999’s The Annihilation of Fish, a strained, out-of character whimsy that was thought unreleasable then (and maybe should have stayed that way). But Sleep remains this perpetually undervalued filmmaker’s best theatrical feature, a sneaky parable in which Harry (Danny Glover) turns up unannounced on the South Central doorstep of friends unseen since they lived “back home” (presumably in the South) 30+ years ago.
They are delighted to see him—but gradually it dawns that this Harry (if indeed it is Harry, rather than some trickster spirit in his form) is an agent of stealth destruction, methodically laying open the pious middle-class hypocrisies of his hosts, exacerbating their petty squabbles and discontents. This sly, beguiling-if-slowly-paced tale gives the great Glover one of his best roles. It’s currently scheduled to play the Roxie Sun/1 and Tue/10; check listings for possible added shows.
But enough about the horrors of domesticity…this week also brings to streaming access two new documentaries analyzing the how-we-got-here aspects of our current WTF?! status as a nation. Andrew Goldberg’s White With Fear details the gradual ruse of “a white fear industrial complex, where many people get very rich and powerful by telling white America that they are under constant assault.” This “strategic racism” is traced back to the Nixon era—and it is noted that it’s been so successful, not a single Democrat presidential candidate since has carried the majority of white voters.
The real goal is money and power, facilitated by manufactured villainy in terms of lending certain words (like “terrorist”) an implicit racial tinge, pushing imaginary crises (the border “invasion,” “the Great Replacement Theory”) and scandals (Obama’s “birther” controversy), irrationally targeting ethnic demographics for blame (all Muslims post-9/11, all Asians post-COVID, etc.), ignoring statistics to focus on sympathy-grabbing isolated cases like Kate Steinle’s notorious death in SF a decade ago…everything that exploits the “secret politics of figuring out who hates who.”
Alongside Hilary Clinton and others from the left side of the aisle, Goldberg interviews former or current reactionary power brokers (including Steve Bannon), some of whom are astonishingly unapologetic about spreading blatant disinformation for party gain. “Hey, that’s politics” is their rationale—but only because they’ve lowered discourse to that level. Likely to be of the greatest educational use to the people least likely to see it, White With Fear may not tell you much that you didn’t already know. Still, it’s a solid primer in how “dog-whistle politics” have invaded our mainstream. It gets released to On Demand platforms on June 2; more info here.
Arriving on VOD the next day is Peter Hutchinson and Lucas Sabean’s The Invisible Doctrine, drawn from English journalist George Monbiot’s nonfiction bestseller of the same name. Indeed, it’s basically a feature-length lecture by the author, gratuitously acting as if he’s being “interviewed” by some mute personage just off-camera, while reciting a canned script. Nor can I say I was at all enthused about the fact that this doc uses a boatload of original AI imagery, a terrain currently too fraught with well-deserved negative connotations to be redeemed in this context.
Nonetheless, Doctrine provides a strong introductory overview to “The Secret History of Neoliberalism,” as it’s subtitled. That term was first popularized by thinkers who feared “welfare states” might invariably lead to totalitarianism à la Hitler and Stalin, and that only free market capitalism could stave that fate off. But starting in the 1980s of Reagan and Thatcher, it began being applied to what amounted to “authoritarian capitalism”—reducing taxation, regulation, public services, union power, collective bargaining rights, and voter participation in determining policy. Meanwhile, corporations were granted “human rights,” freely offshored labor to the Third World, privatized hitherto public holdings, etc. Those tactics and others put new spins on old colonialist methods, once again extracting maximum value from a majority to benefit an elite, widening the gap between rich and poor.
Monbiot draws a clear line to today’s neo-fascist leaders, for whom “distraction is their superpower,” and the anti-democratic chaos they have already sown. He also provides some hope, with specific ideas on how to “build a new narrative” via popular resistance. I didn’t much like Doctrine’s choices in the medium, but its message is worthwhile.
