Screen Grabs: The shivers and ‘The Shrouds’

I wasn’t aware “body horror” was a term familiar outside a fairly limited genre fanbase until The Substance came out last year, announcing that category as apparently now-common parlance. Generally considered the godfather of the form is Canadian director David Cronenberg, whose early features (Shivers, Rabid, The Brood) were hugely successful commercial exports—while considered so distasteful, they constituted a kind of national scandal at home in the 1970s.

His graduation to more expensive, mainstream, Hollywood-financed projects tamped down the ick factor somewhat. But not always: There was squirming aplenty at the likes of Videodrome, his remake of The Fly, Dead Ringers, and Crash. Then for a while Cronenberg seemed to distance himself from such extreme content, with a run of films (including A History of Violence and Eastern Promises) that were still edgy but not so icky.

He’s now 82, back after an activity lull with new movies. So far, they’ve returned to his independent roots, as well as the themes of morbidity, technology, obsession, conspiracy, sexuality, and deformity that dominated so much of his career. I did not much like 2022’s Crimes of the Future, a gory yet airless dystopian-future miniature—it felt like a rote reprise of ideas he’d already exhausted. The Shrouds, which opens this Friday is an improvement in some respects. Yet again, it ends up a more boring and pretentious replay of conceits he probed with a lot more vigor in years past.

Vincent Cassel, styled to look like the gaunt writer-director himself, plays wealthy entrepreneur Karsh, who’s invented something called GraveTech—which enables the living to monitor the decaying corpses of their loved ones via viewing screen stop high-tech burial sites. Who would want that? Well, Karsh does, as he cannot stop grieving the wife who died of cancer, possibly harmed rather than helped by experimental treatments she was undergoing. When his voyeuristic cemetery is vandalized, he begins to entertain various conspiracy scenarios, including possible Russian and Chinese espionage.

Elegantly crafted, initially intriguing enough, The Shrouds grows talky and convoluted over two full hours’ course. It hands its actors—also including Diane Kruger in multiple roles, as well as Guy Pearce and Sandrine Holt—unplayable dialogue, and suspense stubbornly refuses to materialize. Cronenberg has made some of my favorite movies (particularly Shivers and Spider), but I’m starting to wish he’d just stop. This film is revealing in ways you might’ve noticed before, but which were seldom quite so discomfitingly obvious: Mostly, the way his female characters are often sexy ciphers whose allure becomes a threat. Worse, Karsh’s mourning for his wife grows more and more objectifying, his lament “Her body was the meaning and purpose of the world” underlining that he seemed to see nothing else about her.

It reminded me of a Philip Roth novel (The Dying Animal) in which another authorial alter ego seemed to be grieving an ex-flame’s demise from breast cancer… until you realized he was only really missing her breasts, something not remotely presented as a joke or critique. The Shrouds is equally humorless in presenting a covetous/combative gender dynamic that just made me depressed for David Cronenberg, if that’s how his mind really works. The Shrouds opens Fri/25 at Bay Area theaters including SF’s Roxie and Daly City’s Cinemark.

There’s more body horror, albeit from a very different perspective, in Emile Blichfedt’s French The Ugly Stepsister. This Norwegian-language multinational production subverts a familiar fairy tale a la Wicked, though not in musical or child-friendly fashion. In the fictive kingdom of Swedlandia, widowed Rebekka (Ane Dahl Torp) marries aristocratic widower Otto (Ralph Carlsson), both mistakenly thinking they’ve solved their financial woes. Alas, his premature heart-attack demise reveals there is no fortune left, despite the late husband’s impressive manse.

As the Prince (Isac Calmroth) is seeking a bride, Rebekka figures marrying off one of her own offspring is the only path forward. The obvious household candidate is blonde, pretty, already-princessy Agnes (Thea Sofie Loch Naess)—but she’s Otto’s daughter, resentful towards her new step-family. Instead, stepmom determines to mold her own eldest, clumsy and plain Elvira (Lea Myren), into a “noble virgin” fit to catch the prize bachelor’s eye. Even if it almost kills her.

So, yes, this is Cinderella, only here that figure isn’t particularly nice—and the Prince is something of a lout. But the emphasis is increasingly on poor Elvira’s tortured efforts to attain “beauty,” no matter how costly, painful or artificial. In this world, virtue is supposedly championed, but looks (and money) are all that really matter. As satire gradually gives way to sadism, I found Stepsister more unpleasant than anything, though it’s an impressively accomplished debut feature. Still, those who’ve jones’d for this particular fable to be visualized much closer to the Brothers Grimm’s grisly original model may be delighted, as well as disgusted. It is currently playing SF’s Alamo Drafthouse.

Gay Coupling: ‘Queens of Drama,’ ‘On Swift Horses,’ ‘Viet and Nam,’ ‘Frewaka’

Offering various types of contrast to the rather grim views of heterosexuality noted above are four new features from around the world. Their gay, lesbian and bi characters do find at least potential true love with one another—but the outside world provides no lack of hurdles.

Queens of Drama is a candy-colored musical fantasia that’s like a Sapphic The Apple meets Phantom of the Paradise… if less fun than that may sound. Punk band frontperson Billie Kohler (Gio Ventura) and aspiring pop diva Mimi Madamour (Louiza Aura) first meet while auditioning for the Idol-like cheesy TV talent competition Starlets Factory. Though Billie is rejected for being too nonconformist, Mimi gets sculpted into a stock chart-topper in the “Lolita” mode of Britney & co. Nonetheless, they carry on a fervent romance until Mimi’s careerist fear of being outed and Billie’s outspoken queerness prompt an inevitable falling out. Their comet-like trajectories are narrated in retrospect by a viciously obsessive, cross-dressing fan (Bilal Hassani)—in fact all the trans characters here are villainous. It’s also problematic that Alexis Langlois’ French debut feature exploits the relentless sexualizing of female music stars even as it as comments on it.

With lyrics like “You fisted me to the heart” and a lot of negligible Eurovision-type songs, Queens is too campily, cartoonishly simple to be nearly two hours long, or take itself so seriously. But maybe the appeal is too Instagram-leaning for me to grok—the broad jabs at ambulance-chasing celebrity news culture seem to come from a sensibility that nonetheless doesn’t perceive much outside that bubble. It’s a splashy, trashy, high-gloss wallow in selfie-centric melodrama which might well seem awesome to someone half or one-third my age. It also opens Fri/25 at SF’s Alamo Drafthouse.

There’s been some controversy over the advertising for On Swift Horses, because it implies the main erotic tension is between figures played by Normal People’s Daisy Edgar-Jones and Jacob Elordi (Elvis in Priscilla)—when in fact their primary romantic interests end up being same-sex ones. But actually that’s the same approach this adaptation of Shannon Pufahl’s novel deliberately misleads us with. At first, we expect the Eisenhower era marriage of Kansas-bred military vet Lee (Will Poulter) and Muriel (Edgar-Jones) will be threatened by the unexpected surfacing of his sexy, ne’er-do-well brother Julius (Elordi). But it turns out Muriel will instead be waylaid by surprise attraction to butch So. Cal. neighbor Sandra (Sasha Calle), while Julius finds his own turbulent soulmate in Henry (Diego Calva from “Babylon”), a fellow security employee in a Vegas casino.

This first theatrical feature by Daniel Minahan since 2001’s reality-TV sendup Series 7—he’s done a lot of quality series work in between—covers thematic terrain similar to Todd Haynes’ Carol. But its portrait of sexual repression in the 1950s is spread out amongst more characters, and is less austere in tone. It may be somewhat contrived, as well as familiar, with the kind of fadeout that looks cool yet leaves the narrative dangling. Nonetheless, I found it engrossing, the appealing performers and handsome production milking another epoch’s nostalgia value while making it clear that the American Dream wasn’t accessible to everybody then. Has it ever been? Horses opens Fri/25 at theaters throughout the Greater Bay Area, including SF’s Metreon, Berkeley’s Elmwood, AMC Bay St. in Emeryville and Mill Valley’s Sequoia.

The middle-class security chased—or sometimes given up—by those couples is almost unimaginable to the “two boys without a father” in Truong Minh Quy’s Viet and Nam. They are young men in an impoverished Vietnamese backwater, a quarter-century or so after the end of the “American War.” Nam’s (Pham Thanh Hai) mother (Nguyen Thi Nga) is obsessed with finding and properly burying the remains of her husband, who died as a Viet Cong soldier. Yet he himself wants to escape the country for hopefully better prospects abroad, while orphaned Viet (Dao Duy Bao Dinh) would prefer to stay put. They are lovers, their relationship so far beyond common local imagination that they can get away with sneaking sex in the coal mines that provide the grueling sole job opportunity hereabouts.

Lyrical, spare, proceeding at a meditative pace for 129 minutes without ever going slack, this drama (which is banned in Vietnam itself) feels reminiscent of Malaysian auteur Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s work—it has a similarly bemused, matter-of-fact perspective on the supernatural, the world of the living sharing space with that of the dead. You can’t say much “happens,” yet this very quiet film casts a considerable spell, ending on a particularly haunting note. It opens at SF’s Roxie Theater Fri/25.

The supernatural is a much more aggressive, sinister presence in Aislinn Clarke’s Frewaka, which begins streaming on genre platform Shudder this Friday. Shoo (Clare Monnelly) is a home care nurse who must leave pregnant girlfriend Mila (Aleksandra Bystrzhitskaya) for a two-week gig in a remote village on Ireland’s east coast. Her elderly charge Peig (Brid Ni Neachtain) is a piece of work, paranoid, initially hostile, perhaps a bit mad. But we also realize her fears about an unspecified “they,” not to mention “a house under the house,” may be rooted in something real—alarming noises sometimes issue from the charm-fringed door to the basement, and Peig herself disappeared from her own wedding decades earlier. Indeed, the whole village may be in on some occult secret that has ties to Shoo, too.

This Irish-language exercise in folk horror may remind you of others in that category (The Wicker Man, Midsommar). Like them, it aims not so much for big scares or violent setpieces as a creepsome sense of everyday life drifting prankishly, then threateningly off the rails. It’s full of arresting images, with an original score by Die Hexen to match. If you’re up for a thriller more inclined to unsettle than goose you with jump scares, whose lesbian protagonists are taken refreshingly for granted, this stylishly eerie film is well worth a look.

Revivals: From Tangerine Dream to Betty Boop

A few choice current archival excavations merit brief mention. This weekend the Balboa Theater has curated a brief series, “Going Electric: The Films of Tangerine Dream,” that highlights the distinctive soundtrack work of the long-running German progressive electronic band. It begins Friday night with their first major contribution in that idiom, the pulsing score for William Friedkin’s Wages of Fear remake Sorcerer (1977)—a costly commercial failure now recognized as one of the greatmovies of its era. They brought a similar otherworldly tension to Michael Mann’s 1981 Thief, remaining busy in the medium throughout that decade.

Other titles in the series (through Sun/28) are offbeat 1988 doomsday romance Miracle Mile, and two early Tom Cruise vehicles: 1983 hit Risky Business, plus Ridley Scott’s ornate 1985 sword-and-sorcery fantasy Legend. The latter somewhat controversially got a new TD score only after it became clear it wasn’t connecting with audiences, so attempted fixes included a drastic edit, and replacement of Jerry Goldsmith’s original orchestral accompaniment with a more “modern” contribution from the Germans. For more info on the Balboa event, go here.

Of contrastingly down-home musical interest is a rare revival of James Szalapski’s 1976 Heartworn Highways, which throws a spotlight on several shaggy young singer-songwriters—including David Allan Coe, Guy Clark, Steve Young, and Townes Van Zandt—who were then beginning to change the Nashville industry landscape. These “New Country” representatives would also provide the seed for the “Americana” movement later on. It plays SF’s Alamo Drafthouse on Wed/30.

Now anachronistic, B&W cinematography gets showcased over a seventy-year span in three more choice throwbacks. Also at the Alamo (on Sun/27) is “The Cartoons of Max Fleischer,” a terrific program of nine newly restored shorts from the witty, technically inventive animation studio that introduced Betty Boop, Popeye and Superman to the screen. Some of these films are well-known classics (like the surreal 1931 Bimbo’s Initiation or Betty’s 1933 outing as Snow-White), but others are revelatory discoveries, like apocalyptically crazy 1928 silent Koko’s Earth Control. More info here.

A protegee of the “LA Rebellion” filmmaking school whose documentary about that movement (Spirits of Rebellion) we recently covered here, Zeinabu Irene Davis made her feature directorial debut with 1999’s Compensation. Well, actually she shot it six years earlier—such are the hazards of low-budget cinema that it took so long to finish. Mostly dialogue free, and evoking pre-sound cinema, it’s a unique parallel narrative in which two deaf African-American heroines (both played by Michelle A. Banks) acquire hearing suitors (John Earl Jelks). These separate romances, attempting to surmount communication and cultural gaps, take place at opposite ends of the 20th century in Chicago. It’s an adventurous, resourceful and accessible indie drama whose Roxie Theater screening on Sat/26 will be attended by Davis herself, scenarist Marc Chery, and cast member Christopher Young, all of whom will participate in an onstage conversation and audience Q&A. More info here.

Finally, Kino Lorber has just released to On Demand platforms one of the best if under-sung World War II combat movies. Based on a best-selling novel, Charles Frend’s 1953 The Cruel Sea is a moving but non-hyperbolic tale that follows the history of a British Royal Navy convoy escort vessel, the Compass Rose, from that global conflict’s outbreak in 1939 to its end in 1945. Having to dodge attacks from Axis submarines, U-boats etc., the ship doesn’t quite make it to that finish line—nor do some of its crew. But those that survive (including Jack Hawkins’ commander, plus others played by Donald Sinden, Denholm Elliott and others) wrack up unforgettable experiences, both harrowing and heroic, though the film renders them all the more powerful for its unsentimental presentation. Though a big UK hit and a modest US one at the time, it’s been somewhat unfairly left out of the pantheon of great screen war depictions since. It began streaming on AppleTV, Prime, YouTube and other outlets as of Tues/22.