Bertaut Reviews

The Outsider (2020)

Starts very strong but the narrative weakens as the show progresses

[7/10 · 25 November 2021]

If you ever wondered what the first season of might have looked like had the merely-hinted-at supernatural elements become more than merely hinted at, then The Outsider gives you a possible answer. Starting as a grim and gritty police procedural, the show takes a left turn in the third episode, before diving head-first into the supernatural in the sixth and seventh. And do these two tones mix well? Kind of. The early episodes are easily the strongest, and as the hokey horror elements start to take over, the foreboding portentousness of those beautifully constructed episodes gives way to Stephen King-isms. Relatable themes such as guilt and the paralysis of grief are dropped in favour of larger (and thus more abstract) issues such as the infectious nature of evil and the ability of ordinary people to band together in extraordinary circumstances (as I said, it's King-101). But for all that, and despite the not entirely successful mixing of genres, I enjoyed the show. I hadn't read the novel, and so I was genuinely invested in finding out where all of everything led. And even though the journey (the early stages, in particular), proved more interesting than the destination, it was a journey that I don't regret taking.

Cherokee City, Georgia. When the badly mutilated corpse of a young boy, Frankie Peterson, is found in the woods, homicide detective Ralph Anderson (the always excellent Ben Mendelsohn) immediately launches an investigation. Within a few hours, it appears the murderer has been identified, with multiple witnesses reporting seeing local little league coach and school teacher Terry Maitland (Jason Bateman) covered in blood near the scene of the crime. When physical evidence and surveillance footage further point to Terry's guilt, a bull-headed Ralph has Terry arrested in front of the whole town. As Terry's wife, Glory, (a suitably frazzled Julianne Nicholson) and his lawyer, Howie Solomon (Bill Camp; as good as he always is), scramble to understand what has happened, Terry maintains his innocence, saying he was at a teaching conference in another state on the day of the murder, a claim soon backed up by irrefutable evidence. But how can one person be in two places at once?

Airing on HBO, and based on the 2018 novel by Stephen King, the show was adapted for TV by acclaimed novelist Richard Price. Showrunners/executive producers include Price and Jason Bateman (who also co-stars and directs the first two episodes, establishing the Ozark-esque aesthetic template). Novelist Dennis Lehane also contributes scripts for two of the later episodes.

If the show has a singular standout element (aside from the excellent ensemble cast), it's the aesthetic design. Bateman, who has directed multiple episodes of Ozark, establishes a dark and gritty tone in the first two episodes, imbuing every shot with a foreboding sense of unease. Shadows abound; bright colours are muted, with greys and washed-out blues dominating; characters are often shown isolated in long shot, framed in doorways, or pushed into corners; depth of field is often extremely shallow; camera movements are methodical and slow; the editing is non-linear enough to keep the narrative slightly off-kilter (although this non-linearity is confined primarily to the first two episodes and the opening of episode nine); there's even a split-diopter used at one point to keep the foreground and background in perfect focus. The show looks every inch an HBO prestige crime drama. There are also some nice directorial flourishes. For example, in the last episode (directed by Andrew Bernstein), as the good guys are moving through a cave, they pass a body of water and we see the villain's eyes non-diegetically reflected in the water, taking up almost all of the screen's real-estate. Sure, it's not subtle, but it looks good.

Perhaps the most noticeable aesthetic element is the discordant score by Danny Bensi and Saunder Jurriaans, which helps the atmosphere, tone, and pacing immeasurably. Music cues are often just one deep note, held and elongated for up to two or three seconds. Oftentimes, entire scenes will be scored to these singular notes, giving whatever is on screen a sense of portentousness beyond the purely visual.

For all its aesthetic gymnastics, however, the show does have some problems both stylistic and narrative. For one thing, it's too long; eight episodes would have been more than sufficient to tell this story, and the narrative really starts to drag in episodes five and six. It picks up again in eight (which is largely a character-focused episode), but there's just not enough material to fill 10+ hours. There's also the genre-mixing mentioned earlier. What starts as a tough cop investigating a grisly murder morphs into a quirky paranormal sleuth chasing down an ancient evil, and as these two vie for space, neither genre feels fully developed. The early episodes are creepy and unnerving, with tone and atmosphere doing the heavy lifting. But as the show goes on, the horror becomes broader and less effective, and Price is never really able to fully yoke these two disparate elements into a cohesive whole.

Other problems (presumably) come from the source text, such as the first solid transition into the supernatural, which is based on a coincidence so preposterous that I was convinced the show would return to it to offer an explanation (it does not). There's also the merry band of blue-collar salt-of-the-Earth types who band together to face something beyond any one of them, a trope that King has done to death by this stage.

All in all though, I enjoyed The Outsider for the most part. It has significant problems, but it does a lot right. The aesthetics and acting help a hell of a lot, and although it's far from the best King adaptation ever made (that would remain The Green Mile), it's a damn sight better than recent efforts such as the two It films and (shudder) The Dark Tower.

The Devil You Know (2019– )

An excellent examination of a wrongful conviction, a virtual cult, and the insanity that connects them (thoughts on the second season)

[8/10 · 27 October 2021]

Are you concerned about the alien reptiles who can take on human form and have infiltrated the highest levels of world government on the orders of Satan? What about that family member who is almost certainly a clone? Surely you're worried about your colleague, the one who is, without doubt, not just a witch, but a witch with a vampire demon inside her. What about the giants? Or the zombies in Miami? And let's not forget the fact that the CIA is a cover for a global paedophile ring, the children of which are sacrificed to Satan after they're raped, and then eaten (usually during lunch break). If you worry about any of these issues, care about your fellow man, or love the lord, then Sherry Shriner is the person you need. The earthly manifestation of God's actual literal daughter (yep, Jesus had a sibling. In fact, he had thirteen of them. Apparently), Shriner wants you to join her movement today and help fight the war for the very fate of humanity (first though, make sure you subscribe to her Patreon. And contribute to her GoFundMe. And buy some merchandise. And sign up for a recurring donation on her website).

Okay, as flippant an introduction as this is, it does serve to make a point regarding the utter absurdity, unworkability, mercenary, and thoroughly incoherent nature of Shriner's core beliefs, which posits that mankind is engaged in a millennia-old war with Satan and an army of aliens, reptiles, clones, vampires, witches, vampire witches, demons, giants, zombies, genetically engineered super soldiers, paedophiles, Meg Ryan, Lady Gaga, and Taylor Swift (don't ask). As cults go, her unnamed movement (they were informally known as the Orgone Warriors) certainly isn't one of the better-known ones, but as the excellent second season of The Devil You Know illustrates, you don't need thousands of followers living together on a compound to make an impact, to create pain and suffering, or to ruin lives. In fact, you don't even need to leave your house.

July 15, 2017; Tobyhanna Township, Monroe County, Pennsylvania. A woman makes a frantic 911 call to report her boyfriend has been shot. Police arrive on the scene and find that the man, Steve Mineo, is dead, a single gunshot wound to his forehead. Confused and distraught, his girlfriend, Barbara Rogers, isn't making much sense, so police bring her in for a formal interview, during which she tells them that although she was holding the gun, Steve knowingly pulled her trigger finger to fire it. Finding this explanation hard to believe, over the next seven hours, police press her, and eventually she says she killed Steve by accident. And ignoring her obvious mental health issues and her state of shock, this admission is all the DA needs to charge her with murder.

As directed by Lana Gorlitz and Zebediah Smith, the second season of The Devil You Know initially seems to be setting up for an investigation into a case of someone wrongly accused, but it instead uses Steve's death to probe the Orgone Warriors, of which both Steve and Barbara were members, before running afoul of Shriner. Active on Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Patreon, GoFundMe, Blog Radio (her twice-a-week show ran for 14 years, totalling over 500 hours of content), her own websites (all 19 of them), and with three self-published books (one of which is an actual literal interview with Satan and Lilith), Shriner output a massive amount of material in which she outlined and re-outlined her wild theories. And because of the vast reach of social media, those theories were disseminated to a fair larger audience than they ever would have been pre-internet.

And, aside from Steve's death, that's the real theme of the show - much as the first season used the Pazuzu Algarad case to probe disaffected youth, drug addiction, and a broken mental health system, here, Steve's death is used as a springboard to examine the power of social media and how easily it can be used to manipulate and indoctrinate. Ultimately, the show asks the question of how could a lone middle-aged woman who barely left her house and who met almost none of her followers in person amass thousands of blind adherents all over the globe and raise hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations.

And boy did she say a lot. Indeed, her claims about herself are almost as fantastical as her claims about the New World Order, the aliens who signed a treaty with the US government in the 1930s, and the war between God and Satan. So, for example, she suffered from night terrors from a young age and later claimed these night terrors were caused by one of Satan's top generals, who had been sent to kill her; she said that God began to give her visions in 1994, and in 2001, he told her she needed to use a bible code program to decode the bible, whereupon she discovered it was the end times; in 2012, she claimed she saved New York from Hurricane Sandy (which was actually a secret alien invasion intending to sink Manhattan); in 2015, she revealed that she was an angel whose heavenly name was Shazuraze, in 2018, despite originally saying Trump was an agent of Satan, she claimed that he was a literal angel and that they often worked together. Oh, and she also predicted the end of the world...every year from 2007 to 2014.

Despite rarely leaving her house, and despite meeting only a handful of her followers in person, by 2010, Shriner had gained followers in 116 countries. By 2016, her YouTube channel had 6,000 subscribers and her videos totalled over a million views. As of October 2021, there are 29,000 subscribers and close to two million total views. Her GoFundMe generated over $700,000 over ten years. The almost exclusively virtual existence of the cult is also touched on in the excellent podcast The Opportunist (2021), which aired around the same time as the show (and is well worth a listen to if you want to know more about Shriner). In the fourth episode, the podcast interviews Reza Aslan a professor of the sociology of religion, who points out how much social media has changed the nature of cults in the modern era; "a few years ago you would have to literally upend yourself from your community and your family and go and join a group. Now, you can just be the same person that you are, that you've always been, but you're a cultist. The Internet has changed drastically the efficacy of the cult. I firmly believe that if Heaven's Gate existed today, it would be a global movement of individuals, all of them linked together through social media."

The other major theme, of course, is Steve's death and the subsequent investigation, with the show very much taking the stance that Barbara's conviction for murder in the third was the wrong decision. For example, it reveals that during their seven-hour interrogation of a woman clearly suffering from shock and trauma, the police heard her say it was an accident 27 times, saying that Steve put the gun in her hand and moved it up to his head and that both of them were holding it went it went off. The police point blank refused to accept this. Eventually, exhausted and deeply confused, she started to change her story to suit their narrative (although she never wavered from her contention that the death was an accident). The show also interviews a ballistic expert, who says the evidence suggests that both Steve and Barbara's hands were on the gun, as she said, but this evidence was ignored by the police, who argued that only Barbara's hands were on it.

Another example is the prosecution arguing that Barbara would have known how to shoot because she had been in the army, whereas she was actually a supply clerk and was never trained on firearms. There's also an unfortunate interview with the prosecuting DA saying you can't make out what Barbara is mumbling to herself when she was left alone during the interrogation - cut to footage of her mumbling accompanied by a full transcript of what she's saying. And the show takes the judge to task for removing involuntary manslaughter as an option for the jury. Instead, they could only pick from not guilty, murder in the first, or murder in the third.

Things are also pretty impressive from an aesthetic perspective. This is best seen during scenes set in Shriner's home. Only two known pictures exist of Shriner, and no video, but the show features her a lot in voice over. To get around this, during the lengthy extracts from her radio show, the camera moves around her empty house as various images related to what she's talking about are rear-projected onto the walls, giving the whole thing an almost haunted house vibe. It's a really nice touch and really well done.

All in all, the second season of The Devil You Know isn't as good as the first, however, it's still an impressive documentary. The third episode in particular is brilliantly done, really making you feel just how badly manipulated Kelly Pingilley (a young believer who killed herself because she believed it was what God wanted) was and how much her friends miss her. Tightly paced, very well edited, with an excellent selection of Shriner's voice-overs and Steve's video clips, the season is definitely worth your time.

In the Fade (2017)

Disappointingly shallow

[5/10 · 7 July 2021]

Fatih Akin, the writer and director of Aus dem nichts (lit. Trans. From Nothing) is a political individual; he makes political films and he makes political statements in his personal life. Akin identifies as a German-Turk; he was born in Hamburg, but his parents are both Turkish, having come to Germany with the first wave of Turkish immigrants following the Wirtschaftswunder of the fifties and sixties. He lives and works in Germany, and although almost all of his films are set there (the notable exception is The Cut (2014)), and all have German-funding, he considers himself a Turkish filmmaker. When he won Best Screenplay for Auf der anderen Seite (2007) at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival, he accepted the award "on behalf of Turkish cinema." Easily the best known/most notorious of his political statements, however, was in 2006 when he was photographed wearing a t-shirt with the word "BUSH" on it, but with the "S" replaced by a swastika. Displaying a swastika in public is against the law in Germany, and after a complaint was made, he was investigated (but not charged) by German police. He later defended the shirt, stating "Bush's policy is comparable with that of the Third Reich. I think that under Bush, Hollywood has been making certain films at the request of the Pentagon to normalise things like torture and Guantánamo. I'm convinced the Bush administration wants a third world war. I think they're fascists [...] You can apply irony to something like that. You can redefine the symbol in a politically correct horizon. My T-shirt is more than mere provocation. You have to look into the context. The swastika is not there on its own, but as part of the word 'BUSH.' One would have to be pretty stupid, not to understand that." In short, this is not a guy afraid to speak his mind.

Akin's main political preoccupation in his filmography, however, is not Nazism or American presidents, it's the experience of Turkish immigrants in Germany, specifically the racism often directed towards them.

So, with that in mind, Nichts (co-written with Hark Bohm) doesn't jump off the page as a typical Akin film - when former convicted drug dealer Nuri Sekerci (Numan Acar) and his son are killed in a bomb blast at his office, his wife Katja (Diane Kruger) has faith that the police and courts will find and punish those responsible. However, as Katja finds herself becoming more and more disillusioned with the systems which are supposed to be on her side, she comes to believe she must take things into her own hands. Read like that, this could be any number of bad Hollywood movies (the wonderfully risible Law Abiding Citizen (2009) springs to mind). However, when we include the fact that Nuri is Turkish, and that the police quickly come to suspect the bombing may have been connected to a Neo-Nazi group, it fits much more comfortably into his oeuvre. Unfortunately, it's not very good.

First of all, the film is rigidly divided into an intentionally artificial three-act structure, with each act given its own title ("The Family", "The Trial", and "The Sea") and introduction by way of home-movie footage. One of the most significant problems with the film is that the acts simply don't yoke. The first is a pretty decent study of grief, the second is a rather dull courtroom drama, and the third is a bizarrely hollow (and irritatingly repetitive) investigation into the morality of revenge. The last act mirrors the first in its use of slow pacing, long shots of people not doing very much, and sparse dialogue (as opposed to the very wordy second act), and while this is interesting in setting the narrative up in the first act, it falls flat in the third, as the whole thing ends up coming across as rather po-faced and self-important; a film convinced of its own profundity. For all that, however, up until the conclusion, I was thinking I would give it a six; it's entertaining enough, in a fairly disposable way. But then the bottom falls out. The last scene itself is actually pretty good. It's what happens next that irritated me.

This has not been an especially political film - the Neo-Nazi storyline barely features; a few mentions by police in the first act, a single scene in the second, and a couple of short scenes in the third. That's it. As Katja is the only character who is really given any degree of agency, the Neo-Nazi characters are little more than background extras (in fact, in some scenes, they are literally background extras). So this is not a film which spends a lot of time delving into issues of racism in Germany or offering insight into the rise of Right-Wing Populism across Europe. It's a revenge drama. However, as it ends, a legend appears on-screen informing the audience how many race crimes are committed against Turks in Germany each year. The film has absolutely not, by any stretch of the imagination, earned the right to preach to the audience in this way. It's almost as if Akin forgot he was trying to make something political, only remembering in time to throw together a vaguely worded statement on the sufferings of his people in an effort to give the audience something to think about. It doesn't work, with the statement serving only to trivialise the issue by trying to tie it to a film in which it barely featured, and it leaves a decidedly bitter aftertaste.

Too Old to Die Young (2019)

I loved it, but this is the definition of "not for everyone"

[8/10 · 5 July 2021]

Created by Nicolas Winding Refn and Ed Brubaker, and directed by Refn, Too Old To Die Young is the definition of "not for everyone". This is Refn sans restrictions, representing the purest yet expression of his aesthetic sensibilities and thematic concerns. If you thought Only God Forgives (2013) was slow, all style and no substance, and pretentiously self-indulgent, then TOTDY is not for you, simple as that. Running for 13 hours across the course of 10 episodes, Refn regards it as "a 13-hour movie" and insists that it is not a television show. Either way, I loved it. The aesthetic is exceptional, the quirks are pure surrealism, the humour is spot on, the violence (particularly the sexual violence) is sudden and barbaric, but never gratuitous or pointless, and the themes are fascinating. This isn't going to turn a single person into a Refn fan. Indeed, it will probably alienate some of his more casual fans, as it tests the limits of what even the most artistically open-minded viewer will watch on their television screens. That said, if you're on-board with it, you're in for an unforgettable ride.

Martin Jones (Miles Teller) and his partner Larry (Lance Gross) are two uniformed LA cops on patrol. After sexually harassing and extorting a young woman because he can, Larry is taking a selfie for his mistress, when Jesus Rojas (an exceptional Augusto Aguilera) shoots him in the back of the head. And from that opening scene springs the story, which introduces us to local crime boss Damian (Babs Olusanmokun), Martin's 18-year-old girlfriend Janey (Nell Tiger Free), her billionaire father Theo (a completely insane William Baldwin), former FBI agent Viggo Larsen (John Hawkes), his associate Diana (Jena Malone), and Yaritza (a stunning, scene-stealing Cristina Rodlo), a young woman with a penchant for sexual domination who claims to be the High Priestess of Death.

If this makes the show sound like a densely plotted neo-noir, then let me put that notion to bed right now - make no mistake, in TOTDY, the plot comes a long way behind such things as tone, imagery, mood, and atmosphere.

The most obvious aesthetic elements are the cinematography by Darius Khondji and Diego García and the editing by Refn's regular cutter, Matthew Newman. The first episode, and several of the later episodes, are bathed in neon, with vibrant reds, purples, oranges, blues, and greens saturating the screen. The second episode then is set in Mexico and is a complete contrast to the first, almost over-exposed, with whites popping and bleeding into any nearby blacks.

Additionally, every shot feels deliberate, meticulously composed, important, like every element of the composition is saying something of significance; for example, whether the camera moves or not offers a commentary on the content of the scene. Every item within the frame feels necessary, intentional, and by design. And scenes go on for a loooooong time; most run at least two beats beyond where the natural end would seem to be, with long silences and languidly-paced, emotionlessly delivered dialogue. This all creates a sense of extreme awkwardness that makes the viewer restless and uncomfortable, which, of course, is precisely the point.

This lethargic sense is helped immensely by the editing, which is almost imperceptible. It feels like the show was edited before it was shot; every cut feels measured, happening where it does because that's the only place it could happen. I'd be shocked to learn that a lot of coverage was shot to be assembled in the editing room later; it's too tight for that. The edit must have been planned out from the get-go. Coupled with this, the sound design by Paul Hackner is unique. For interiors, there is often no ambient room noise and because there are such long pauses in the dialogue, the silence is oppressive. It has the effect of suggesting the characters aren't in the room, making it feel almost ethereal and hypnotic, and it turns conversations that are already slow and full of silence into something even more distinctive.

And what is all of this in service of? What is Refn saying? The main theme is very straightforward - toxic masculinity and the commodification of the female, in particular the sexual commodification. TOTDY is a show wherein many of the female characters are looked upon by men as objects to be used rather than as people with their own agency. In one particular scene, a porn director washes down a young woman with a hose, the way one might wash down a horse after a race. When the show begins, it seems to commit the same sin, as none of the females have much in the way of vibrancy, and all are defined based upon their relationships with men. It's only as the series moves on, and the characters of Diana, Janey, and Yaritza assume centre stage that we realise the method in Refn's madness - despite how it begins, this isn't a show about men. Paedophiles, racists, violent misogynists, amoral murderers, people traffickers, even a father who unashamedly hints at incest - Refn and Brubaker have assembled quite a collective of male bottom feeders to pitch against the female characters. Never has the phrase "the evil that men do" been more appropriate.

Another issue looked at includes the notion that America is a dying empire, unaware of its own imminent demise. When this happens, it will return to what it was born from - violence, and only the few who were prescient to the collapse will be able to protect the weak and the innocent. This is laid out fairly explicitly in an astonishing monologue from Viggo which taps into some of the tenets of post-Darwinian French decadence, whereby industrialisation was often linked to notions of the fin de siècle and the theory that humanity was more likely to devolve than evolve. In TOTDY, Refn presents humanity as at a transitory moment right before a cataclysmic shift. Technology has overtaken morality; civilization has pushed itself to the point of self-consumption; the individual is insignificant. Viggo thinks about this in terms of society fracturing and collapsing, with humanity no longer at the centre, no longer a part of nature. Diana thinks of it in social and political terms, with the privileged few coming to rule over the many. Jesus thinks about it in more biblical terms where he is an Old Testament-style God punishing those who have wronged him.

All in all, I loved the show. But there's no denying that the very things which some people embrace and celebrate (particularly the pace), will drive others up the wall. And certainly, it's not hard to imagine a hell of a lot of people watching for 20 minutes before hastily changing the channel and deeming the whole enterprise the "worst show ever." Amazon has allowed Refn to indulge in everything that his detractors criticise and his fans laud, and the result is either a travesty or masterpiece, depending on your perspective.

Chernobyl (2019)

Terrifying and sobering - as exceptional a piece of television narrative as you're ever likely to see

[9/10 · 7 May 2021]

Created, written, and executive produced by Craig Mazin, Chernobyl is directed by Johan Renck as part-horror movie, part-cautionary tale, and part-political treatise. Equal parts political deconstruction and painstaking recreation of what it must have been like to live through the worst nuclear disaster in history, the show presents a terrifying, nightmare vision of how bad things can get when hard scientific facts are made subservient to political agendas, and governments strive to undermine not only scientific expertise but the very nature of truth itself (the Soviet Union was a big fan of "alternative facts" long before the GOP). Chernobyl begins and ends by asking the viewer to ponder the cost of cumulative nation-wide lies. However, it's just as interested in celebrating the heroes as it is assigning blame, and in that sense, it has an extraordinary sense of humanism.

The acting is immense, the writing is incisive and terrifying, the aesthetic is exceptional, and the show was a worthy winner of no less than 10 Emmys from its 18 nominations, 7 of its 11 nominations at the British Academy Television Craft Awards, and two of its four Golden Globe nominations. All in all, Chernobyl is that rarest of beasts - a show which lives up to the hype.

April 26, 1986, 1:23am; near the city of Pripyat in the north of the Ukrainian SSR. Reactor No. 4 at the Vladimir Ilyich Lenin Nuclear Power Plant (aka Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant) explodes, sending out masses of radioactive material. Fire crews are called, but neither they nor the local people have any idea of the severity of the situation. As the Central Committee tries to keep a lid on things, a commission is assembled to investigate the disaster. The commission's head is Boris Shcherbina (a career-best performance from Stellan Skarsgård), Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers, and a devout party-man. The commission's scientific expert is Valery Legasov (a mesmerising Jared Harris), deputy director of the Kurchatov Institute, who immediately realises that the accident is much more serious than the government are saying. The show opens with the explosion and then follows Legasov and Shcherbina as they investigate why it happened and unexpectedly form a strong friendship.

Thematically, Chernobyl is not subtle. The opening line is "What is the cost of lies?", and this issue is front and centre for the entire five episodes. The show presents the Soviet Union as a place where lying and statecraft were one and the same, and in so doing, it illustrates what can happen when institutions of government put political ideology above objective facts, when egotistical politicians disregard everything that experts are telling them in favour of their own ill-informed theories (sound familiar?). The first episode in particular gives us some fine illustrations of a system obsessed with committees, bureaucracy, and secrecy, all built upon an unnecessarily complicated and rigid hierarchy. For example, shortly after the explosion, the plant's manager, Bryukhanov (Con O'Neill), explains to the Pripyat Executive Committee,

I have spoken directly to Deputy Secretary Maryin. Maryin spoke to Deputy Chief Frolyshev, Frolyshev to Central Committee member Dolghikh, and Dolghikh to General Secretary Gorbachev. Because the Central Committee has the greatest respect for the work of the Pripyat Executive Committee, they have asked me to brief you on matters as they stand.

If you think this is an exaggeration, all of these people are real, and this is precisely the sequence of how the information got from Bryukhanov to Gorbachev. As it's presented in the show, there's nothing remotely subtle about it, as we're invited to shake our heads at the ridiculousness of it all. An even more telling example of governmental secrecy occurs in the same scene, as Zharkov (Donald Sumpter), a member of the Pripyat Executive Committee states,

It is my experience that when the people ask questions that are not in their own best interest, they should simply be told to keep their minds on their labour - and to leave matters of the State to the State. We seal off the city. No one leaves. We cut the phone lines. Contain the spread of misinformation. That is how you keep the people from undermining the fruits of their own labour.

This speech is met with applause. There's a lot to unpack here, but the line "keep the people from undermining the fruits of their own labour" is especially telling. Essentially, "keep the people uninformed so they don't ask us to explain ourselves."

And, to a certain extent, much of the rest of the show depicts how that is exactly what the government has accomplished. If there's an overriding mindset amongst the Soviet people, it's a sense of civic duty, borne of a genuine belief in socialism and total trust in the Central Committee. Not all characters share this trust, but enough of them do to make it an undeniable trope. And for the most part, the show presents this sense of duty to the State as deeply honourable, worthy of a great deal of respect. How the State elicits, manipulates and exploits these feelings is being criticised, not the feelings themselves - a vital distinction. This is seen most clearly when one contrasts the noble self-sacrifices made by multiple characters, often knowingly giving their lives for the State and for one another, with the callous way the politburo look on such sacrifices - they expect people to give their lives because lives have to be given. As Shcherbina says at one point, "you will do it because it must be done". To the Politburo, the proletariat is not a collective of individuals, it is a single body, and it can afford to lose a person here and there without any significant damage.

Aesthetically, Chernobyl opens with the explosion, throwing the audience into the chaos and confusion. However, rather than placing us in the control room at the moment of the explosion, we see it through the closed window of a character who doesn't even notice it happening until the shockwave hits a couple of seconds later. It's a wholly unexpected way to begin, presenting a massive real-life disaster not from the perspective of spectacle (Deepwater Horizon (2016), I'm looking at you), but from a subjective human perspective. This immediately sets up the show's interest in people. The helicopter crash seen in the trailer is shot the same way - focusing on human reactions to the crash rather than the crash itself.

As for the cinematography generally, Jakob Ihre shoots everything unfussily, with no real visual gymnastics. However, there are still moments of stark beauty and great artistry. The second episode ends with a dialogueless scene that Michael Mann would be proud of - a terrifying claustrophobic sequence shot almost entirely in pitch darkness with the only light coming from the torches carried by the men on screen. This episode also features perhaps the single most extraordinary shot in the series - a high elevation shot of Pripyat looking down at the residents being evacuated onto a fleet of buses. In the background, the power plant can be seen still burning, whilst the people and the plant are bifurcated by the flats in which they used to live. This is as good an example of thematic photography as you're likely to find.

As for problems, well, if there is one, it is probably that the characters are a little too black and white - the 'good' characters are practically saintly, and the 'bad' characters are almost pure evil. Legasov, for example, is depicted as a truth-teller who disapproves of the Soviet system and cares only for the facts. In reality, he was a party man, and he initially agreed with the cover up. The same issue is apparent with Ulana Khomyuk (Emily Watson), a composite character representing the many scientists who aided Legasov. Watson is good in the role, but as written, she embodies multiple hackneyed Hollywood clichés, and if Mazin wanted a prominent female character, why not use Maria Protsenko, the architect who designed Pripyat and supervised its evacuation? In essence, many of the characters are either stupid or evil, or both, while the scientists are righteous prophets. And there's not a lot of ground in between.

At its core, the show is most interested in what happens when governments stop listening to science, when every smart person in the room is telling a leader one thing, and he or she decides to ignore it based on nothing other than ideology or ego (and yes, Trump's attitude to the ever-worsening global climate crisis is very much the target). An exceptional piece of television in pretty much every way, Chernobyl is as terrifying as it is compelling, as heartbreaking as it is eye-opening.

And all of this is not even to mention the dogs. I'm just not ready to talk about the dogs.

True Detective (2014– )

Thoughts on Season Three

[8/10 · 31 March 2021]

A murder mystery set in small-town southern America, focusing on a dedicated cop who drinks too much, letting the case burrow under his skin as he chases answers across multiple time periods. But underneath, it's about more than that - it's about personal demons, good and evil, the soul, American identity, memory, time. And as the case progresses, a conspiracy slowly comes into focus. There may even be a supernatural element. Thus was the first season of True Detective. And thus is the third. With one major difference - season one was ground-breaking, one of the finest seasons of TV ever made. Season three, on the other hand, is, well...of all the shows I've ever seen, season three of True Detective is one of them.

This being True Detective, there is a lot to praise - the aesthetics, the sense of place, the acting. And there are some interesting themes - racial tension, journalistic ethics, marriage, fatherhood, the shadow of the Vietnam War, old age. But this being creator/writer/showrunner Nic Pizzolatto unfettered, there's a lot to criticise too - the glacial pace, the under-written female roles, the cod-philosophy, the (toxic) machismo, the clichés, the dreadful finale. Pizzolatto (a novelist by trade) seems to need an exceptional director to turn his ideas into something resembling brilliance, to imbue his relatively quotidian script with a portentousness well beyond the written word. He needs a director with a keen enough vision to mask the fact that his scripts are actually pretty by-the-numbers. Season one had Cary Joji Fukunaga who brilliantly directed all eight episodes, presenting a very thin story by way of such unforgettable imagery that it made everything feel deeper and more profound than it really was. Season three has such a vision for two episodes; the first two, which are directed by Jeremy Saulnier (look out for a stunningly beautiful night-time shot of a search party walking through a field, torches moving in front of them - Saulnier gives the image a haunting fairy-tale-like quality). After these two episodes, directorial duties were split between Pizzolatto himself and journeyman TV director Daniel Sackheim. Season three without Saulnier (or Fukunaga) isn't as bad as season two, nowhere near, but it's still very weak, telling a threadbare story that it stretches out well beyond breaking point only to reward us with the limpest and most poorly written denouement you can possibly imagine.

The story is split over three time periods. In 1980, in the fictional town of West Finger, Arkansas, Will Purcell (Phoenix Elkin) and his older sister Julie (Lena McCarthy) go out to play on their bikes and fail to return. When the police are alerted, the case lands on the desk of Wayne Hays (an insanely good Mahershala Ali), a tracker during the Vietnam War, and his partner Roland West (a superb Stephen Dorff). Shortly thereafter, Wayne meets and forms a bond with the kids' English teacher, Amelia Reardon (Carmen Ejogo), who has her own reasons for pursuing the case. Ten years later, in 1990, Hays (now married to Amelia and with two children) is working a dead-end desk job and West is a lieutenant. In the same week that Amelia's book about the case is being published, unexpected evidence comes to light and the Purcell case is reopened. And then, in 2015, Hays, now a widower suffering from memory loss, begins recording an interview for a true-crime TV show. Talking about the case, however, stirs something in him, and he determines to finally solve the mystery once and for all.

As with the first season, the use of multiple timelines muddies the narrative waters in a manner that wouldn't be possible were the story being told chronologically. Especially laudable is how the show handles the time jumps, employing a variety of methods that serve to collapse the three different periods into one another. So, for example, a question asked of Hays apparently in 1990 is actually a question he's being asked in 2015, with the sound bridging the picture edit; a streetlight going out in 1980 cuts to a key-light going out in Hays's 2015 interview; a shot of Hays looking through a window in 1980, shows a reflection of his 2015 persona; a single-shot scene in a car depicts the characters repeatedly changing from 1990 to 2015 every time their face is off-screen. It's really well done, and carries thematic significance insofar as memory, particularly its subjectivity, unreliability, and mutability, is one of the main issues being examined throughout the season.

Also laudable is the old-age make-up by Michael Marino, which is some of the best I've ever seen, and is complemented by an exceptional performance from Ali. He plays Hays differently in each of the three timelines - in 1980, he's driven, confidant, imposing; in 1990, a sense of bitterness and indignation has crept in; in 2015, he's become a vulnerable and confused old man with just a hint of his past acerbity. It's a bravura performance. Elsewhere, Dorff is exceptional throughout, with his portrayal of West more uniform and unchanging than Ali's (which makes sense as West is more of a company man than Hays), and Scoot McNairy as the kids' father is heartbreaking in a somewhat thankless role (an interrogation scene in the sixth episode is worth looking out for). Ejogo is also excellent, although she's shackled by the poorly-written character she's playing.

So, why is season three a dud? Well, for a few reasons. It moves at an agonisingly slow pace, and without the visual gymnastics of someone like Fukunaga or Saulnier, the story can't sustain itself - it's stretched way beyond breaking point, lapsing into repetition and falling back on narrative strands that go absolutely nowhere. It's a story that could have been told very comfortably in five episodes, not the indulgent eight Pizzolatto has taken. And yes, I know, the show isn't really about the murder-mystery, it's about the characters. I get that, and I accept that, but the characters here aren't any more interesting than the plot. There's certainly no Rust Cohle (Matthew McConaughey) or Marty Hart (Woody Harrelson). Hell, there isn't even a Ray Velcoro (Colin Farrell). Hays is brilliantly played, but he's as dull as dish-water, and the 1990-set problems between himself and Amelia, which come to take up an increasing amount of screen-time, are so uninteresting, they're difficult to watch (especially when we're watching them have the same argument for the third time). The point is that neither the central mystery nor the main characters are engaging enough to sustain such a slow-moving plot.

And then there's the finale. Okay, the finale of season one was weak. It was the episode when Fukunaga's smoke and mirrors cleared and allowed us to see that at the season's core was the tale of a serial killer paedophile. The conspiracy went nowhere, the philosophical musings went nowhere, the supernatural hints went nowhere, and the mythology (the Yellow King, black stars, Carcosa) all boiled down to a psycho. It didn't ruin the season, but it was underwhelming. Season three's finale is about five times worse. It's so badly structured and written that I genuinely do not understand how it made it to screen. About three-quarters of the way through the episode, with most of the season's questions still open, a character quite literally sits down and explains everything (and I mean everything). He walks us through every single event and answers almost every single question. It's horrid writing. Forget the cardinal rule of writing for film or TV ("show, don't tell"); here we have a finale with a 10-minute exposition-dump right at its heart, which literally tells without showing. I don't know of a single criterion by which one can judge that decision a sound one.

Despite disliking two of the three seasons of True Detective, I still consider myself a fan (the first season was that good). But it's starting to look more and more like that first season magic had more to do with the director than the writer. Pizzolatto just doesn't have a unique enough vision, not when he's allowed creative carte blanche anyway. Much like the first season, the mystery at the heart of season three was never as complicated nor as portent as it initially seemed, but unlike season one, season three doesn't give us much else to latch onto. The story Pizzolatto is telling and the characters who inhabit it are too weak to support eight hours of narrative architecture. And, by God, that ending!

Season rating: 2.5/5.

Dublin Murders (2019)

A dark and well-made show about the effects of psychological trauma, but the bifurcated narrative is a significant mistake

[7/10 · 23 February 2021]

Airing on BBC One in the UK and Ireland and Starz in North America, Dublin Murders is an eight-part series that adapts the first two novels in Tana French's Dublin Murder Squad series - In the Woods (2007) and The Likeness (2008). And herein lies the show's biggest problem. French's series is pseudo-anthological in design; each novel has a different protagonist, and although there are common characters across all of the stories, each plot is wholly self-contained. In writing Dublin Murders, Sarah Phelps has made the strange decision to present the plots of the first two novels as happening concurrently, with each case bleeding slightly into the other. This doesn't even remotely work, with the events of The Likeness never feeling like anything other than a half-baked B-plot that serves only to detract from the far superior material in the A-plot. It's a maddening decision, as In the Woods could have made a superb five or six-part series, but instead, we've got an over-long eight-parter with a ton of what feels like completely extraneous fat. Nevertheless, there is much to laud here; the acting, the cinematography, production design, and art direction, the editing and directing, and, when focusing on the first novel, much of Phelps' writing, which admirably captures the thematic and tonal essence of French's 500-page interiorised narrative.

The show takes place in 2006 and begins with the discovery of the body of twelve-year-old Katy Devlin (Amy Macken) in the woods around Knocknaree, a (fictional) housing estate in Dublin's suburbs. Detectives Rob Reilly (Killian Scott) and Cassie Maddox (Sarah Greene) of the (fictional) Dublin Murder Squad (DMS) are assigned to the case, which has attracted a great deal of attention, as twenty-two years earlier three young children disappeared in the same woods. One of those children was found a few hours after they disappeared, and although he was uninjured, his shirt was ripped as if by claws, and his shoes were filled with someone else's blood. He swears, however, that he has no memory of what happened in the woods. That child, Adam, left Ireland with his parents and as far as anyone knows, never returned. However, Rob is in fact adult Adam, having secretly returned to Ireland with a new identity, after years spent in England, a fact known only to Cassie, and he plans to use the Devlin investigation as a means to delve into the 1985 case. Meanwhile, Cassie is approached by her old boss, senior investigator Frank Mackey (Tom Vaughan-Lawlor), with an intriguing undercover operation made necessary by a very unusual murder.

Aesthetically, the show has a lot going for it. To a certain extent, it successfully mixes genres - there's the obvious whodunnit, but there's also a pseudo-Chinatown (1974) motif of greed, conspiracy, and corruption, and a vaguely supernatural, otherworldly undercurrent, not unlike Twin Peaks (1990). In terms of narrative structure, although the 2006-set events are presented chronologically, the show makes ample use of flashbacks, which jump around quite a bit in the timeline. That this never becomes confusing or arbitrary is a testament to the editing, which always ensures to establish the link between the show's present and the moments to which the characters are flashing back. The one major deviation from this is that the opening scene in the first episode takes place right at the end of the story, but it's a wholly justified way to begin, succinctly establishing the tone, and introducing us to much of the psychological conflict within Rob.

The cinematography is also worth mentioning, working hand-in-hand with the production design to suggest that things just aren't quite right in Knocknaree in general, and the Devlin home in specific. The world genuinely feels lived in, and the people who live here all have their quirks. It's hard to put your finger on, but the visuals do a great job of keeping the tone slightly off-kilter, sometimes suggesting that this character knows more than they're letting on, sometimes suggesting that another character does. There are also some lovely subtle details, such as the ladybird crawling across Katy's face, and the reveal that her body has attracted a colony of ants. The acting too is impressive. Scott and Greene have tremendous chemistry, which is pivotal, and although both are initially presented as likeable, if damaged, individuals, as the show goes on, both actors allow us to see a much darker side to their personas, with each turning on the people closest to them in a particularly vicious manner. Also worthy of praise are an exceptional Leah McNamara as Katy's older sister, the ever-reliable Moe Dunford as Cassie's boyfriend, Conleth Hill as the unapologetic acerbic and un-PC head of the DMS; and Peter McDonald as Katy's father, about whom something just doesn't feel right.

Thematically, much like In the Woods, the show isn't so much focused on the Devlin murder as it is the nature of lingering trauma. Virtually every character is damaged in some way, but none more so than Rob, who, to a certain extent, never really made it out of the woods in 1985. This is evidenced perfectly by the fact that he uses the Devlin murder as a cover to delve into the disappearance of his friends. The show begins with Rob asking Cassie, "what if the killed are the lucky ones?" And this is a central theme throughout - what if it's those who are murdered who could be considered free, and those who survive that are forever trapped within their trauma?

All of which brings us to the show's fatal flaw. Notice above how almost everything I've said relates to the Devlin case/In the Woods rather than the undercover operation/The Likeness? That's because the undercover investigation does little but detract and distract from the far more interesting and compelling murder inquiry. Phelps is unable to mould the two plots to coalesce properly, with the characters in Cassie's case never being developed to even half the degree of those in Rob's. Every time we cut to the undercover case, all I wanted to do was get back to the murder case. This is particularly apparent when we get to the big reveal at the end of the undercover case and it just kind of limply sits there. It's about as "meh" as you could imagine, and it's because we've never gotten to know these people or their relationships with one another, as the whole thing never feels like anything other than an afterthought. Splitting the show's real estate does neither plot any favours - in the novels, each case works by immersing us in the interiority of the protagonist, as the plot unfolds in a manner coloured by that character's subjectivity. Continually cutting away from one plot to show us the other completely breaks that immersion, and seems to imply an inherent connection between the two plots that simply doesn't exist.

Nevertheless, although this might sound very negative, I did enjoy the show for the most part. It's well-acted, looks great, and in relation to the murder case, is very well written. A shorter run focusing on just that case would have been infinitely preferable, but that's not what we got. It's absolutely worth checking out, but be prepared to be frustrated once the undercover operation starts taking up so much time.

Dracula (2020)

A sarcastic posthumanist Dracula won't be to everyone's taste, but I thoroughly enjoyed this unique take on the Count

[8/10 · 27 January 2021]

Bram Stoker's 1897 novel, Dracula, has seen over 350 adaptations for the screen (big and small), with many of them using the original tex to explore some of the socio-political issues of the day. So, for example, Tod Browning's Dracula (1931) turns the count into an elegant aristocrat analogous to the various monarchs in power across Europe at the time; the nine Hammer Horror films from 1958-1974 are at least partially structured around simple Cold War good/bad-west/east dichotomy politics; Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992), which was made at a time when the media were in the habit of making superstars of criminals, very much leans into the idea of the seductive power of evil. And now we have this latest BBC adaptation, created by Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat. Running a hefty 270 minutes (divided into three episodes of 90 minutes each), the series seeks to capture the tone of the original novel, if not necessarily the plot. Extremely funny in places, extremely disturbing in others, this is probably the best small screen adaptation since Philip Saville's superb Count Dracula (1977). There are some problems, and fans of the novel have taken especial (and not entirely unjustified) umbrage with the unexpected narrative shift in the last episode, but all in all, helped in no small part by an immense central performance, I thoroughly enjoyed this version.

Hungry, 1897; Jonathan Harker (John Heffernan), an English lawyer sent to Transylvania some months prior, has become a shell of a man. Physically deformed and mentally fragile, he is now staying at a small convent. Having written an account of his experiences, Harker is being interviewed by the acerbic Sister Agatha (a superb Dolly Wells), who is hoping he can fill in some of the details he left absent from his document. And so he tells how he came to Transylvania to meet the elderly Dracula (an exceptional Claes Bang having the time of his life), and of the subsequent horrors he experienced.

Whereas the novel begins just before Harker arrives at Castle Dracula, the show begins with him already in a nunnery in Hungry, having fled the castle, and the novel's multi-perspective epistolary narrative is replaced with a more basic single-character flashback-style narration. Opening this way is a wise move, as it alerts the audience immediately that this isn't a 1:1 adaptation. Unfortunately, because the show deviates so much from the novel, and because the third episode is so unexpected and unique, discussing much about the overarching narrative design lends itself to spoilers.

Indeed, the same could also be said of the aesthetics, with each episode looking and feeling substantially different from the other two, but in such a way that to go into detail would spoil the nature of the final episode. In any case, the first episode is your basic gothic horror full of deep shadows, huge towers, labyrinthine interiors, and ominous opulence; the second is a ship-based murder-mystery along the lines of Murder on the Orient Express (except, of course, we all know who the killer is from the start); and the third is a gaudy, postmodernist-infused examination of youthful vapidity, corporate greed, decadence for decadence sake, and the all-conquering power of superficiality. Arwel Jones's production design across all three episodes is simply stunning; from the twisting staircases and dead-end tunnels of Castle Dracula to the weather-beaten Demeter (the doomed ship in the second episode) to Dracula's quite stunning residence in the third episode, everything on screen seems completely real and the world feels legitimately lived in. Costume designer Sarah Arthur also deserves praise, especially for her work in the first episode, where Harker's disintegrating mental and physical state is matched by his increasingly shabby clothing.

And there are some really extraordinary visual moments here. A close-up of a fly crawling on an eyeball, for example, which then crawls behind the eyeball is particularly disturbing (indeed flies are a recurring visual motif throughout the show), as is a scene where Dracula quite literally climbs out of a wolf (shot practically on set without any CGI). The exterior shots of Castle Dracula are also amazing, and why wouldn't they be as the show uses the incredible Orava Castle in Slovakia, which was also used for Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens (1922).

The acting is also terrific, particularly Bang and Wells, who both get to have tremendous fun; Bang as the sarcastic Count and Wells as perhaps the most irreverent nun ever committed to screen. Much of the strength of their performances comes in how well they handle the incredibly dry humour, of which there is a surprising amount (although Bang can also be truly terrifying when necessary). So, for example, when the convent is surrounded by hundreds of bats, and Agatha is asked "why would the forces of darkness wish to attack a convent", to which she replies (completely deadpan), "perhaps they're sensitive to criticism." Dracula also gets in on the comedy. Explaining to Harker how he has had artists paint the sun for him, he then says, "And Mozart wrote such a pretty little tune", before mumbling to himself, "I really should have spared him". The nonchalant way Bang delivers the line is hilarious, as if it's only just occurred to him (not to mention that it ties into real-world speculation about what actually killed Mozart). Later on, he points out, "I'm undead - I'm not unreasonable". As the show goes on, Bang gets to show more of his range, bringing out not just Dracula's confidence and sarcasm, but so too his pride, frustration, boredom, and fears, culminating in an exceptional final scene, with Bang doing some truly wonderful silent acting.

Thematically, the show deconstructs much traditional vampire lore, particularly the power of crucifixes. Exactly why Dracula would fear the cross when he doesn't believe in God is a theme that spans all three episodes. Along the same lines, Dracula's immortality is examined in light of the boredom that it must entail and the irony of how a creature of death can't know death itself ("in a world of travelled roads, death is the last unprinted snow"). Similar deconstruction of Dracula's need for blood sees it presented more like an addiction than a necessity. And, of course, as in so many vampire movies, the show examines the idea that evil can be seductive, suggesting that if evil is sexy and alluring, if it's attractive, it can be difficult to resist.

As for problems, many viewers despised the last episode, and I can see why (although I loved it), as it takes things in a wholly new, totally unexpected direction that asks more than a little leap of faith from the audience. Certainly, if the first two episodes form a broadly coherent unit, the third disrupts everything, and is thematically, aesthetically, and tonally divorced from its predecessors. Some of the humour in this episode also pushes things a little too far, with one joke in particular crossing the line into farce. I'm also not sure the show needed to be as long as it is; three 60 minute episodes probably would have sufficed.

That aside though, I loved this adaptation. Purists' disdain for it is understandable, but to my mind, it captures much of the tonal qualities of the original very well. Much like Coppola's version, it deviates wildly from the book but is made by people who are clearly familiar with the source and respectful of its mythology. Featuring a suitably posthumanist Dracula for our jaded times, Gatiss and Moffat may not have pleased traditionalists, but this is a very fine attempt to bring Dracula into the 21st century without ever losing sight of his origins and raison d'être.

A Christmas Carol (2019)

A darkly magical realist retelling that definitely isn't for kids

[7/10 · 13 January 2021]

Written by Steven Knight and directed by Nick Murphy, this latest adaptation of Charles Dickens' 1843 novella (which aired on the BBC in the UK and Ireland as three one-hour episodes over three nights, and on FX in North America as a three-hour film) was heavily advertised as the "darkest" version ever made, with a Scrooge for our bitter and jaded times. Very much eschewing the sweetness of previous adaptations, the show interrogates not just such standard fare as the exploitative nature of capitalism and the illogicality of certain Christmas traditions, but actually deconstructs the thematic foundations of the novella itself. Fans of the original have taken issue with some of the changes (such as the reformulation of Scrooge from misanthrope to villain, the depiction of child sexual abuse, and the joyless nature of the Cratchit family), and certainly, some of these complaints are justified. On the other hand, it looks amazing, is anchored by an extraordinary central performance, and the attempt to ground the whimsical nature of the original in something more akin to psychological realism is, for the most part, very well-handled.

Good lord though, the last 30 seconds are ill-advised.

Set in London in December, 1843, Ebenezer Scrooge (an incredible Guy Pearce) is a miserly and cynical individual, who is contemptuous of the good cheer that people exhibit at Christmas, arguing that such sentiments are hypocritical and fake, a philosophy he takes great delight in explaining to his put-upon clerk, Bob Cratchit (Joe Alwyn). Meanwhile, in Purgatory, Scrooge's dead friend, Jacob Marley (an excellent Stephen Graham) is told that because he and Scrooge worked together to exploit others, his redemption is tied up with Scrooge's. And so Marley visits Scrooge, telling him that three ghosts will be coming to see him, laying bare his life and choices - the Ghosts of Christmas Past (Andy Serkis), Christmas Present (Charlotte Riley), and Christmas Future (Jason Flemyng).

The first thing that jumped out at me in this adaptation was the aesthetic, particularly Si Bell's dark and oppressive cinematography, which avoids primary colours as much as possible, instead casting the world in blacks, greys, browns, and off-whites, with ample use of deep shadows. Interiors punctuate these shadows with the teal and orange glow of the fireplaces, and overall the show's palette is extremely muted, as it should be. In this sense, the opening scene, featuring an ominous raven and a child urinating on Marley's grave, tells us just how unique the visual template is. Another nice early scene is when Scrooge is counting the recurring noises outside his window so as to chart his frustration. The scene is shot entirely from his perspective, we're locked inside his subjectivity, so we hardly ever see the people who are making the noises, we just hear the noises, which is an excellent way to convey that he looks at the world quantitatively, seeing no humans, only numbers.

The most aesthetically impressive sequence comes in the last episode; as Scrooge stands in his office, he looks up and the ceiling has become a layer of ice. Then someone falls through the ice and seems to float in the air - we're actually underneath the ice layer, and the person who has fallen through is drowning, all the while Scrooge looks up from his office below, helpless to intervene. It's a haunting and extraordinary image. There's also a very subtle shot in the second episode with huge thematic importance - as Scrooge relives a moment from his childhood, we see his father (an intense Johnny Harris) threaten to beat him as he cowers on a bed. However, although it is the adult Scrooge we can see, the shadow he casts is that of his childhood self. Really good stuff.

Thematically, the show covers some of the same ground as the novella. In an early scene, for example, Scrooge brilliantly deconstructs the concept of gift-giving and then goes on to pick apart the very notion of Christmas cheer, in a speech that represents some of Knight's tightest writing; "How many Merry Christmases are meant and how many are lies? To pretend on one day of the year that the human beast is not the human beast? ... Instead of one day good, the rest bad, why not have everyone grinning at each other all year and have one day in the year we're all beasts?" In a subsequent scene, Scrooge relives the origins of this philosophy, as his drunken and bankrupt father tells the child, "A gift is just a debt unwritten but implied" and "everyone out there - every man, every woman - they're all beasts who care only for themselves. Because that's what a human is. It's an inward-looking thing only."

Where this adaptation breaks from the novella is in the depiction of Scrooge himself. Usually, a curmudgeonly old misanthrope, the worst you could really say of him was that he was a personification of some of the more unpleasant aspects of capitalism. Here, however, he has been refashioned as an outright villain. A manipulative asset stripper, Scrooge is complicit in the deaths of numerous factory workers and numerous miners, due to his penny-pinching ways. He's a man who goes out of his way to be nasty to people and whose treatment of Cratchit is almost fetishistically perverse. And that isn't even to mention his abuse of the power his wealth affords him, using it to compel people to demean themselves for his curiosity.

However, I would contend there is thematic justification for making this significant change. Dickens' Scrooge is not an irredeemable character, but the Scrooge of this show is, which necessitates that the joyful catharsis found in Dickens be reformulated as an altogether more sober moment of self-realisation. And the absence of such catharsis is precisely the point; this Scrooge is savvy enough to understand that redemption won't do anything to erase his past deeds, so he doesn't especially care about redemption, which is a kind of psychological verisimilitude not found in the original or any of the adaptations. Depicting Scrooge as much worse than usual allows Knight to build organically to a more downbeat, but so too more realistic ending that's far more in tune with our own cultural milieu than the twee optimism found at the conclusion of Dickens's tale.

Indeed, most (but not all) of the significant changes can be explained thematically. For example, the much-discussed childhood sexual abuse storyline is there to add an extra layer of psychological trauma to Scrooge's childhood. Similarly, there's no final joyous scene with Fred because the show doesn't deem Scrooge worthy of such a scene. On the other hand, portraying Scrooge as a pseudo-sexual predator serves little intrinsic purpose. Yes, I understand it's to paint him as thoroughly vile, but it's unnecessary, and achieves nothing that couldn't have been accomplished using less extreme tropes. Another change I didn't really like is the unrelenting miserableness of the Cratchit family. In the novel, they're poor but loving, a deeply happy family who get strength from one another. In the show, they're a bunch of sourpusses who do little but complain (except Tiny Tim, he's fairly laidback). This achieves nothing - the whole point of the family in the novella is to show Scrooge that happiness doesn't necessarily depend on material possessions and wealth.

On a much more practical level, the pacing of the show is very poor. The Ghost of Christmas Present only appears to Scrooge at the top of the second hour; he then takes that entire hour and about 20 minutes of the last hour. The Ghost of Christmas Present gets about 20 minutes and the Ghost of Christmas Future no more than 10 or so. This has the effect of making the first hour seem unending and the last hour seem rushed. Another issue I have is the design of the Ghost of Christmas Future. See the awesome Death-like figure on the poster? Don't get too attached to him because he never appears in the show, not once. The Ghost of Christmas Future is instead a guy wearing a long black coat and a black hat, with his mouth sewn shut...and that's about it.

And then there's final 30 seconds. I have no idea what they were going for with this ending, but it makes little contextual sense, it's patronising, incredibly preachy, and...just wrong, both thematically and tonally. Indeed, if you really think about it, it completely undermines much of the themes the rest of the show has established.

Nevertheless, I enjoyed this adaptation, which is dark both literally and figuratively. It's an altogether more realistic version of the story, one more in tune with our cynical times, and for that, Knight should be commended. But the changes are significant, and a few don't work. In this sense, I'm honestly not surprised it got such a mixed reaction.

Tenet (2020)

An aesthetic showcase that's completely uninterested in human beings (and for the love of God, what does Christopher Nolan have against decent sound mixing?)

[2/10 · 27 December 2020]

Spending almost ten years working on the story, and five writing the script, in Tenet, Christopher Nolan is yet again examining the vagaries of time, a theme that's front and centre in Memento (2000), Inception (2010), Interstellar (2014), and Dunkirk (2017). It's undeniably fascinating to see a tent pole Hollywood production engaging with issues such as entropy, thermodynamics, reversibility and irreversibility, the grandfather paradox, and T-symmetry, all the while keeping proceedings housed firmly within the spy genre (it's a Bond movie in all but name). However, the film's main problems aren't related to the squandered existential potential, the much-ballyhooed complexity, the puzzle-like structure, the philosophical musing, or the thematic similarity to Nolan's previous work. Rather, they are more fundamental, existing almost entirely at a structural level (although some of the performances don't help matters, nor does the abysmal sound mixing). The film looks incredible, the practical effects in the action scenes are extraordinarily mounted, the cinematography is stunning, and the editing is superb, but there simply isn't anything of note under the shiny veneer. It's a film with virtually no interest in human beings.

The plot of Tenet is straightforward in outline. We follow a CIA operative known only as The Protagonist (John David Washington) as he is recruited into an ultra-secret international espionage squad called Tenet. His mission is simple - at some point in the future, someone has figured out how to reverse the entropy of objects, effectively being able to send them back along the timeline without having to reverse time itself. The implications of this are catastrophic and have set humanity on course for World War III, and probable extinction, unless The Protagonist can figure out who is doing it and put a stop to their machinations.

Tenet is an event movie in every way; this 150-minute, $200m+ original idea is a massive studio tent pole written and directed by the most popular filmmaker alive. And I will say this, the budget is on the screen. Oftentimes, you'll see a movie that's cost a ridiculous amount and you'll sit there thinking, "they must have spent a lot on catering." With Tenet, however, it's all there, front and centre. No small amount of that money, of course, must have gone on the practical effects (incredibly, the film has only 280 VFX shots) - whether it be bungee-jumping onto the side of a building, a close-quarters fight where one of the combatants moves in reverse, a Boeing 747 jet crashing into a building (which was shot for real), a highway chase where some of the cars are going forward in time and others are going backwards, or an all-out battle scene where, again, some of the soldiers travel forward whilst others move in reverse.

It's one of those films where you'll genuinely be asking yourself, "how the hell did they do that?"; a question that's become increasingly rare in our CGI-reliant times. Along the same lines, the cinematography by Hoyte Van Hoytema is stunning, as he mixes 15-perf 70mm IMAX film with traditional 70mm stock and a few 35mm sequences in a manner where the shifts in aspect ratio are barely noticeable. It's the kind of film that could only exist in the medium of cinema - no other art form could even begin to approximate its aesthetic design and splendour. A celluloid purist, Nolan has always made a big stink about the artistic importance of cinema, and Tenet finds him pushing the aesthetic boundaries of what the art form can accomplish.

Unfortunately, no matter how visually unique or aesthetically impressive it may be, no amount of gloss can hide the fact that the screenplay is a turgid mess and suffers from some fundamental problems - most notably, it's bereft of emotion and populated with cardboard cut-outs that are supposed to be characters. The problems start early when The Protagonist is told that the future of humanity depends on his mission. This is precisely when I started to tune out. Any film that declares its story is none-other than saving humanity has gone so big as to render the people who populate its narrative as insignificant. It's also a cliché, it's dull as dishwater, and we've seen it done a million-and-one-times.

As for the characters, good lord, they're badly written. The Protagonist isn't a person with an interiority; he's a cypher, the audience's surrogate so that Nolan can explain the plot to us. And there's nothing more to him - he's utterly emotionless, seemingly void of any kind of relatable motivation, has no psychological through-line, and nothing even resembling a character arc. As for Kenneth Branagh as Russian oligarch Andrei Sator, think of the most clichéd Russian villain you've ever seen. Now square that and you'll be some way towards imagining how ludicrous Sator is. He isn't a person - he's a collection of near-satirical tics, clichés, and elements from other, better films. Maybe with a more menacing actor in the role, it might have worked, but all I could think whenever he was on screen was "that accent is hilarious." Robert Pattinson's Neil (The Protagonist's handler) and Elizabeth Debicki's Kat (Sator's wife) fair better, but neither set the screen alight. Along the same lines, much of the second half of the film hinges on the fact that The Protagonist and Kat find themselves drawn to one another, yet Washington and Debicki have zero chemistry. At a human level, there's nothing to take a hold of the audience, nothing to make us care about any of these people.

Speaking of Kat, a common criticism of Nolan's filmography as a whole is that his female characters tend to be victims whose deaths motivate men or who need saving by men, and/or women who define themselves almost entirely in terms of their relationship to men. Now, I'm not saying that Nolan is obliged to write more rounded female characters. He isn't. Much like one of his favourite filmmakers, Michael Mann, Nolan's films are androcentric. And there's nothing wrong with that. However, in Mann, there are to be found strong female characters with considerable agency, whereas in Tenet, Kat is nothing more than a pawn in a game played by powerful men who effortlessly control her. She defines herself almost entirely in terms of her role as a self-sacrificing mother, and whilst this is an interesting trait the first couple of times it comes up, by the time Nolan is reminding us of how much she has sacrificed for the 237th time, it had become obvious that this was going to be the extent of her characterisation.

At one point early in the film, The Protagonist is told "don't try to understand it, just feel it", which is advice that Nolan is also offering to his audience. The problem is that there's nothing to feel. Tenet is a puzzle, the impenetrability of which will depend on each individual viewer (and how much of the appallingly poorly-mixed dialogue you can make out), but unlike Memento (which remains Nolan's best by a long way), which packed a seriously emotional gut-punch when we finally learn what was at the heart of the puzzle, Tenet offers us nothing more than the task of deciphering it for its own sake. There's no payoff. There's nothing to make us want to penetrate a story that seems more intent on reminding us how clever it is than trying to depict real people or establish real emotional stakes; it's a film more enamoured by the complexity of its own design than by any of the people contained within. It's an emotional void - all technical virtuosity and surface sheen with next to nothing at its core.

Save Me (2018–2022)

Give it time and you'll be rewarded

[8/10 · 4 December 2020]

Nelson "Nelly" Rowe (Lennie James) is a popular self-styled womaniser living on a Deptford council estate in London, whose life is turned upside down when he is arrested on suspicion of kidnapping his thirteen-year-old daughter Jody (Indeyarna Donaldson-Holness) whom he hasn't seen in ten years. After convincing the police of his innocence, and frustrated with the way the case is progressing, Nelly decides to take matters into his own hands and try to track down Jody himself.

From a plot perspective, the first season of Save Me starts very slowly, but what it does do extremely well is build up a background of small details that help establish the milieu as authentic and lived-in. The housing estate in Deptford is essentially a character in itself, and the glimpses of the denizens going about their idiosyncratic ways gives an almost documentarian tone - from the guy doing tai chi on his balcony, to the kids kicking a football at one another, to the young lesbian couple stealing a kiss against a wall, to the meditating Buddhist, to the couple dancing slowly on a basketball court, to the woman in a burka carrying a skateboard, to the older folk watching it all happen day after day, it's a paean to the real lives that people lead in this kind of community. Indeed, one of the most consistent themes is the importance community in general. Elsewhere, the penultimate episode features a 'rape' scene that's exceptionally difficult to watch, but not for the reasons you'd think, and which offers a fascinating portrayal of how potent sexual power dynamics can be.

Lennie James, who also wrote the show, is predictably enthralling, with a simmering rage just below the surface, which is constantly threatening to boil over. Stephen Graham plays Fabio "Melon" Melonzola, a convicted sex offender trying to put the past behind him, bringing his usual chameleonic abilities to a difficult part. Suranne Jones as Claire McGory, Jody's mother, isn't really given a huge amount to do beyond a few generic scenes as the quintessential worried parent, it she plays the part well, going with subtlety and shock rather than histrionics. Strangely, a subplot involving her husband Barry (Barry Ward) is inexplicably dropped in the penultimate episode. These missteps notwithstanding, the season is a fine amalgamation of a Ken Loach warts-and-all tone with a more thriller-esque core that's well directed by Nick Murphy.

Picking up eighteen months after the end of the first season, the second season, dubbed Save Me Too, also starts with slow early episodes which almost imperceptibly ramp up the tension, and once again, the last two episodes are exceptional. With this season's directorial duties split evenly between Jim Loach (son of Ken) and Coky Giedroyc, the show's aesthetic becomes slightly more adventurous (the second episode, for example, is primarily a flashback, whilst other episodes place us more directly in Nelly's head, with a more noticeable sense of subjectivity), but not to the point of distracting from what remains the core of the story - realistic characterisation.

Just as with the first season, the second is far more interested in characters than plot, and once again, James and Graham are exceptional. James goes all-in on Nelly's bull-in-a-china-shop mentality, making the character, if anything, less attractive than he was in the first season. He's still got the twinkle in the eye, but the events of the last year and a half have definitely had an impact on him. Never the most tactful character, his tendency to shout first and ask questions the next day after he's calmed down is even more apparent than before. And although characters such as Clair and Barry drop into the background a little, others come to the fore and help to expand the milieu; there's Tam (Jason Flemyng), Nelly's kind-hearted cross-dressing friend; Bernie (Alice Feetham), Melon's conflicted wife; Stace (Susan Lynch), may or may not be in love with Nelly; Zita (Camilla Beeput), Nelly's girlfriend; and, especially, Grace (an exceptional and emotionally devastating performance from Olive Gray), who was once held by the same people who took Jody.

Watchmen (2019)

Exceptional in every way; thematically rich, aesthetically breathtaking, and emotionally devastating

[9/10 · 17 November 2020]

Written by Alan Moore and illustrated by Dave Gibbons, Watchmen was published by DC Comics in 12 issues in 1986 and 1987. Although I know nothing of comics, I read it in 2005, and I liked it a great deal. Its deconstruction of the superhero genre is brilliantly handled, dismantling and interrogating virtually every generic trope so as to question the purpose of such stories even as it exists as an example of one. At the same time, its depiction of Cold War paranoia and condemnation of right-wing idolatry are front and centre without ever seeming forced. Created by Damon Lindelof (co-creator of the TV game-changer that was Lost (2004) and the seminal existential masterwork that was The Leftovers (2014)), the most significant thing about this adaptation is that it isn't an adaptation; it's an original story set 33 years after the events of the comic. And is it any good? It's not as good as The Leftovers (what is?), but it is an exceptional piece of work. The acting is immense, the writing is challenging, the aesthetic is stunning, and the show was a worthy winner of no less than 11 Emmys. All in all, Watchmen is that rarest of beasts - a show which lives up to the hype.

Familiarity with the plot of the original isn't a requirement so as to appreciate the sequel, as you're given all the world-building back-info you need, but it can certainly help you get the most out of Lindelof's intricate narrative and thematic tapestry, especially in the earlier episodes. The world of Watchmen is a slightly different version of our world, in which the 1930s saw the rise of "costumed adventurers"; ordinary people who took to the streets to fight crime. Over the years, however, the public come to lose faith in adventurers and in 1977, the Keene Act outlaws all costumed adventurers except those sanctioned by the government. The comic is set in 1985 and tells the story of escalating nuclear tensions between the US and the Soviets, and how Adrian Veidt (the costumed adventurer Ozymandias) enacts a plan to trick the superpowers into allying against a greater extra-dimensional threat (which doesn't actually exist).

And so we arrive at the TV show.

Tulsa, OK, 2018. Veidt's 1985 plan worked perfectly, and the US and Soviets formed an alliance to guard against the possibility of another 'invasion'. Meanwhile, white supremacist groups have been on the rise, and after an incident in Tulsa where almost the entire police department was wiped out in a coordinated attack by a KKK off-shoot known as the Seventh Kavalry, a law is passed that allows police to wear masks and remain anonymous. Meanwhile, President Robert Redford is currently in his seventh term, and has introduced a massive system of reparations for African-Americans whose ancestors experienced racial injustice. In essence, the story follows the fallout from a murder, which is soon discovered to be much more complex than originally thought, and could have far-reaching implications not only for Tulsa, but the entire planet.

As with the original comic, the TV show is thematically rich. Lindelof has stated that he wanted to tackle whatever socio-political issue that was to 2019 as the Cold War was to 1985, and to him, it "felt like it was undeniably race and policing". Politically then, the show does much the same thing as the comic did - it deploys a real-world socio-political problem in a not quite 1:1 fictional milieu. In Reagan's America, the focus was on apocalyptic Cold War paranoia, whereas in Trump's Divided States, the most pressing existential threat is the rise of right-wing extremism, with those who once remained in the shadows newly emboldened by a racist president to confidently espouse their hatred for all to see.

Speaking of the importance of reparations to the show's theme, Lindelof explains, "I happen to think that reparations are a really good idea, whether they're reparations for slavery or reparations for something like the Tulsa Massacre. I also have to accept that were reparations actually enacted, there would be a virulent pushback from a large sector of our society." This is a key point; in a country as ideologically divided as the post-2016 United States, achieving any kind of political or cultural harmony is next to impossible, and the show reminds us of how attempts at reconciliation can often serve to force people even farther apart.

The theme of white and black and racial tension comes up time and again throughout the series. For example, the main family are a black couple with two adopted white children; a very rare sight on TV or in cinema. In "An Almost Religious Awe (2019)", a member of Seventh Kavalry asserts that "white men in masks are heroes. Black men in masks are scary," whilst in "See How They Fly (2019)", another member of the group proclaims, "it is extremely difficult to be a white man in America right now" (ie. the real-world argument that those who are really oppressed are white, Christian, heterosexual males). In the same episode, speaking of President Redford, it is stated, "first he took our guns. And then, he made us say sorry. Over and over again. Sorry. Sorry for the alleged sins of those who died decades before we were born. Sorry for the colour of our skin."

Of course, within this, another major theme is how racial tensions are manifested in law enforcement. As the first episode begins, we are watching Trust in the Law, a 1921 Oscar Micheaux film about Deputy Bass Reeves, aka The Black Marshal, the first African-American federal marshal west of the Mississippi (Bass Reeves was a real marshal and Micheaux was a real director, although Trust in the Law is not a real film). Here, the bad guy wears white (and is white) and the good guy wears black (and is black), thus inverting the typical assumptions. After a brutal and harrowing depiction of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre (when white supremacists killed up to 300 African-Americans in Greenwood District), the first scene set in 2018 depicts a menacing cop pulling over a truck and exchanging a few words with the nervous driver. However, again, the colours are inverted - the cop is black and the driver is white. These two scenes form a beautiful bit of visual story-telling, establishing immediately the centrality of racial tensions, conveying that such things are often more complex than they appear, and that the show plans to upend and invert common tropes.

As thematically rich as it is, however, one cannot help also admiring its aesthetic. For example, look at how the show-within-the-show is presented. Within the Watchmen milieu, America Hero Story is a hugely popular TV show about the Minutemen, a group of costumed adventurers formed in 1939. We see several extracts from the show, but none are more eye-catching than the scene depicting Hooded Justice (the first costumed adventurer) foil his first crime. This scene is staged as an elaborate over-the-top action sequence with a quite ridiculous amount of unjustified slow-motion (mixed in with fast transitions). Sound familiar? If you've seen Zack Snyder's adaptation of Watchmen, you'll immediately get the joke. For me, the main reason the 2009 film failed was that these characters are not supposed to be noble action heroes. Quite the contrary. Yet in Snyder's film, characters who are supposed to represent the unworkability of heroes in the real world and illustrate how human foibles will always destroy idealism are shown in elaborately choreographed and frenetically edited slow-motion brawls. The style is literally contradicting the theme - it's amateur hour 101 and smacks of someone who responds to the coolness of the comic's visual design, but understands none of the underlying context. And this is what makes the American Hero Story scenes so funny.

Elsewhere, the cinematography and editing are particularly noteworthy, and I'd be remiss here not to mention episodes six and eight. "This Extraordinary Being (2019)" is shot primarily in black and white, and takes place in the 30s and 40s, with the cinematography by Gregory Middleton nothing short of exemplary. Employing the odd bit of colour here and there within the black and white photography to focus our attention on particular objects, there is also an extraordinary 6-minute single shot which goes in and out of several buildings, features a plethora of extras, some VFX, and a lot of SFX. Stunning stuff. As for "A God Walks into Abar (2019)" (as good an episode of TV as you could ever imagine), if you're interested in learning about editing, watch this episode. Cut by Henk Van Eeghen, the episode essentially tries to give a visual representation of how Doctor Manhattan experiences time - with every moment in his existence happening all at once, so he can 'remember' things that haven't happened yet, or experience multiple memories from the past all at the same time and as if they are happening now. It's a spellbinding exercise in stylistic control, with flawless time jumps that fold organically into one another to form a single cohesive template.

Watchmen is an exceptionally good show. There will be fans of the comic who'll dislike it on principle. There will also be those who accuse it of pandering to a liberal PC agenda, and there'll be those who simply don't like the idea of a Watchman TV show with a black woman at its centre. Make no mistake, however, this show has been put together by people who know, appreciate, love, and understand the comic. Thematically complex, aesthetically breathtaking, brilliantly acted, Watchmen is an exceptional piece of television.

The Lighthouse (I) (2019)

A superbly made film about madness, isolation, alcohol, a cheesed-off one-eyed seagull, and farts

[8/10 · 15 November 2020]

A manic fever dream fusing Greek mythology, Jungian psychology, and German Expressionism with Herman Melville and H.P. Lovecraft, The Lighthouse is about isolation, insanity, competitive masculinity, alcoholism, and farting. The second film from writer/director Robert Eggers, who exploded onto the scene with the masterful The VVitch: A New-England Folktale (2015), The Lighthouse was co-written with his brother, Max Eggers, and is very loosely based on the "Smalls Lighthouse Tragedy" (1801). A bizarre film in just about every way, from its glorious visual and aural design to its grandiose acting to its jet black humour to its wonderful ambiguity to its avenging angels/seagulls, if you thought The VVitch was somewhat inaccessible, then you'll most likely despise every second of The Lighthouse. However, if you favour the cerebral, difficult-to-define, and always slightly off-camera terror that was the foundational principle of The VVitch and films such as The Blair Witch Project (1999), The Babadook (2014), and The Wind (2018), or the oppressive dread of classic German Expressionist films such as Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (1920), Der müde Tod (1921), and Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens (1922), then you'll find much here to appreciate.

In the late 1890s, Ephraim Winslow (Robert Pattinson) and Thomas Wake (Willem Dafoe) arrive on an outcropping off the coast of New England to begin their four-week rotation manning the lighthouse. The more experienced Wake assigns Winslow menial tasks such as cleaning the floors, emptying the chamber pots, oiling the gears in the basement etc., whilst he himself attends to the Fresnel lens, telling Winslow that he is never, ever to approach it. Although Winslow has some unnerving dreams, and is being pestered by a one-eyed seagull, the four weeks pass without too much incident. However, on the night before their relief is due, the wind suddenly changes, and the island is hit by a violent storm. The following morning, their ferry doesn't arrive, and with no way of contacting the mainland, the duo find themselves trapped.

The first thing that jumps out at you in The Lighthouse is the aesthetic. The importance of Damian Volpe's incredible sound design is indicated immediately, as before we see anything, we hear the wind blowing and a foghorn rumbling in the distance. That horn is omnipresent throughout the film, and to say it gets under your skin is an understatement. You know the siren from the Silent Hill games that sounds right before the town transitions from the Real World to the Otherworld? Well, imagine that sound bellowing out every minute or so for an entire film. It's unsettling, it's disturbing, and it makes it impossible to ever really acclimate yourself to this strange milieu. There's only one sequence in which we don't hear the foghorn, the pivotal opening scene of the third act, and the silence is oppressive - it's one of those instances where you don't realise how loud something was until it suddenly goes quiet and you're left with a ringing in your ears.

The sound design is matched by the stunning monochrome visuals. Working with cinematographer Jarin Blaschke, who also photographed The VVitch, Eggers shot The Lighthouse on 35mm black & white celluloid in the relatively unheard format of 1.19:1. This ratio was a transitional format that was only used briefly during the shift from silent cinema to sound (1926-1932). And that's exactly why Eggers and Blaschke chose it. Yes, they do match form to content insofar as the nearly square format traps the characters within the frame. Beyond that, however, this is a folktale, a fable from a by-gone age, so what better way to present that fable than by replicating the way the film would have looked had it been made during the early years of sound filmmaking? At the same time, although shot with modern cameras, Blaschke used period-specific Baltar lenses and an off-cyan filter to more accurately emulate the look of late 19th-century photography. Taken together, the black & white images, the square frame, the lens design, the patina, and the haunting sound design all work in glorious tandem to create the sense that the film is a disturbing artefact, an antique vestige from a different era, into whose very DNA dread has burrowed.

One also has to praise Craig Lathrop's production design. The lighthouse used in the film wasn't an existing structure, but was custom-built to scale on Cape Forchu, an outcropping off the coast of Nova Scotia. However, you'd never know it. Most of the interiors were shot on soundstages, but all exteriors were shot on Forchu. And Lathrop has imbued every inch of the building, both inside and out, with an existentialist dread - from the industrial hell of the gears in the basement to the almost Eden like peace of the lantern room high above, from the cramped and crude bedroom to the squalid kitchen. Malevolence stalks every nook and cranny.

Eggers also does something interesting with the narrative itself. I've seen some critics refer to Winslow and Wake as "unreliable narrators", and whilst such critics are on the right track, to call the characters narrators is, in strict narratological terms, inaccurate. Both characters are, in fact, focalisers - the world is filtered through their perspective, but they don't narrate. Indeed, although we shift from one character to the other, meaning there is a narrative presence at the extradigetic level, Eggers never leaves their perspective, nor does he present any kind of omniscient or overt heterodiegetic narration; we're imprisoned within their perspective for the duration of the film. Also important here is the use of "fallible focalisation". The story is one of madness, and it's abundantly clear that neither man is a reliable witness, so everything filtered through their perspective (i.e. the whole film) could be tainted or unreliable (which is why critics erroneously refer to them as unreliable narrators). As things begin to fall apart, this sense becomes ever more prevalent - for example, in an important scene near the end, we see Wake do something, and in the next scene, when Winslow confronts him about it, a confused Wake points out it was actually Winslow who did it. Is Wake lying? Is Winslow projecting his own actions onto his companion? Who exactly is misleading who here? It's a wonderful use of a defamiliarising technique which works to keep the audience constantly on edge and constantly second-guessing everything they see insofar as we know that some, none, or all of it could be the figment of a failing mind.

The film's storyline is slight enough as to suggest several themes without really going too heavily into any of them. For example, one could certainly read Winslow and Wake's relationship as homoerotic, maybe a study of the suppression of desire, whilst the societal construct of masculinity, particularly as manifested in competitiveness, is never far from the surface. Another reading would be that the film is an allegory for class struggle á la J.G. Ballard's High Rise (1975) - the lantern room high above is the upper class, with Wake doggedly protecting the room; meanwhile, the bowels of the lighthouse is the working class, with Winslow performing menial tasks assigned him by Wake. Alcoholism is also omnipresent, with the duo progressively drinking more and more each night, until they run out of rum, and so try to mix turpentine and honey, so dependent have they become on the numbing effects of drink.

The Lighthouse definitely isn't for everyone, and is challenging and rewarding in equal measure. Personally, I loved every crazy minute of it. There's a lot that has gone into making this film what it is, both in terms of crafting the folkloric story and in the more mechanical sense of putting the finished film together - it's an aesthetic marvel in pretty much every way. Thick with mood and atmosphere, The Lighthouse proves that The VVitch was no fluke.

High Life (2018)

Esoteric and poetic, but very singular; certainly not for everyone

[7/10 · 6 October 2020]

A science fiction thriller from Claire Denis? The uncompromising darling of French art house cinema, adored by critics and met with general puzzlement by audiences? And it's in English? And it stars the guy from Twilight (2008)? You have to be making this up.

Not at all. However, as intriguing as that may sound, it's a deceptive overview. Yes, it is Denis's first English-language film, and yes, it is set in space, but it's a science fiction film in name only, and has more in common with 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and Solyaris (1972) than with anything in the Star Trek or Star Wars franchises. And just for the record, the guy from Twilight has developed one of the most eclectic recent CVs of any actor in Hollywood. The long and short of it is that Denis has not sold out, and High Life is as multiplex-friendly as anything in her oeuvre (which is to say, not in the slightest), covering several of her more familiar themes - the darker aspects of desire; the notion of being an outcast; parenthood; the inescapability of death; the beauty of the human body; the relationship between violence and sexuality. The presence of Robert Pattinson will probably draw in a lot of unsuspecting folks, who will have no idea what to make of Denis's slowly paced existential musings, resulting in a slew of "worst film ever" reviews. But although it's not Denis's best (that remains either Beau travail (1999) or Les salauds (2013)), it's a fascinatingly poetic and original film that is utterly uncategorisable - a space thriller about a mission collapsing in on itself; an ecological allegory positing that we don't have a huge amount of time left to save the planet; an analysis of the psychological ramifications of long-term incarceration; an erotic skin flick obsessed with bodily fluids; a metaphor for the perils of imperialism; a fable on the subject of paternity; a story about loneliness and grief; a literalisation of the premise that no amount of evolution, philosophy, or esotericism can ever change the fact that we're biological organisms controlled by our sexual yearnings and impulse to procreate - desire will always trump the social contract; we can place as much artificial limitation on our carnality as we want, but ultimately, desire will betray us.

Like I say, very multiplex-friendly.

Deep space. On an unnamed ship marked only with the number #7, Monte (Pattinson) lives alone with his baby daughter Willow (Scarlett Lindsey). However, this wasn't always the case, and as the film begins, Monte is releasing the bodies of his deceased crewmates into the void of space. How this situation came to pass is revealed via an achronological flashback narrative structure. A group of death row were offered a pardon if they undertook a mission to investigate the viability of the "Penrose Process" - a theory developed by Sir Roger Penrose whereby energy could be extracted from the area close to a black hole. However, the groups' de facto leader, Dr. Dibs (an ethereal Juliette Binoche oozing uninhibited sexuality from every pore), a criminal herself, is using the journey to conduct biological experiments on the crew; harvesting the men's semen and attempting to artificially inseminate the women. Monte, however, refuses to comply, arguing that his chastity gives him strength. His obstinacy fascinates Dibs, who determines to get a sample from him by any means necessary.

High Life, written in French by Denis and her regular writing partner Jean-Pol Fargeau in 2013 and translated into English by Geoff Cox, begins with pseudo-Edenic shots of lush vegetation, before slowly revealing we're seeing a garden on a spaceship, surrounded by and subservient to technology. We then hear a baby crying. This opening, mixing vegetation, technology, and biology, signals both the film's tone and demonstrates the economy of Denis's visual language, telling us much of what we need to know about the upcoming film. Denis and director of photography Yorick Le Saux employ similarly precise storytelling tools in shooting everything on the spaceship on HD video, whereas the few scenes on Earth are shot on 16mm - this gives the space scenes a sleek polished sheen, whilst the Earth material looks grainy and gritty, more lived in, setting up an instant visual contrast.

Thematically, rather unexpectedly, the film has a lot in common with First Reformed (2017) ; both deal with the looming end of existence; both examine the possibility of finding hope amidst the oncoming cataclysm; both see the human race as essentially not worth saving; both focus on a spiritual character facing a crisis of faith - in First Reformed, that crisis concerns Fr. Toller's Catholicism, whereas in High Life it's Monte's belief in the importance of self-discipline and chastity.

Of course, on a more prosaic level, the film is obsessed with sexuality. Fluids are a recurring motif throughout, whether the blood that several characters shed, the sperm with which Dibs is obsessed, the oil that keeps the ship's systems running, the water that nourishes the garden and that keep the crew alive. Speaking of fluid, perhaps the film's most haunting image is a shot of one character lactating; her body producing nourishment for a baby she can't feed, as Dibs has taken it from her, the milk running down her body going to waste. Interestingly enough, at the film's world première in Toronto, this scene sparked a considerable number of walkouts, almost every single one of which was male. Make of that what you will.

The subject of fluids is introduced from the onset. One of the first things we hear Monte saying is telling Willow that even if it is recycled, one should never eat one's own faeces or drink one's own urine, as such behaviour is "taboo". If we accept that the ship's garden is Eden, then Monte and Willow are our Adam and Eve, and, as we all know, what comes next in Genesis is temptation and desire. Thus Monte's emphasis on taboo in this opening scene becomes ironic given that later in the film, he will come face to face with an even more controversial taboo.

In terms of problems, the film will be far too abstruse for some. Denis obviously intended for High Life to be esoteric, and she's unconcerned with CGI spectacle or any of the tropes we've seen rehashed a million times in other sci-fi movies. For some, however, the film will cross the line from esotericism to impenetrability, with Denis allowing the socio-political themes overwhelm the film's identity as popular entertainment, refusing to explicitly reveal its fundamental meaning. And for those more used to films that openly reveal themselves without the audience having to put in much effort, High Life will prove too abstract.

In this sense, Denis's litany of themes does come across as a little haphazard, as she jumps around fairly randomly between them. This results in something of a thematic pile-up, which, by definition, can feel like a bit of a dead-end. I don't agree with people who say the film "has no point", but I can certainly see from where such criticism could arise, as Denis leaves several ideas frustratingly incomplete. Another issue is that the journey of #7 is never presented in any way urgently, meaning there's rarely tension, as life on ship moves along at its own lethargic pace. And I have to admit, at times my attention began to wander.

Nevertheless, High Life is a fascinating film that fits right into Denis's oeuvre. Although it recalls the clinical detachment of 2001 and the psychological intensity of Solaris, High Life is very much its own animal. Asking questions about our inability to recognise the oncoming extinction, it offers a savage and pessimistic corrective to the idealism of films such as Interstellar (2014) and The Martian (2015). Positing that mankind is a monster driven by its desires isn't going to earn Denis legions of new fans, but for those of us who were already on board, there's much to be relished here.

I Love You, Now Die: The Commonwealth v. Michelle Carter (2019)

A balanced overview of an unprecedented case

[7/10 · 4 August 2020]

Erin Lee Carr's two-part HBO documentary I Love You, Now Die: The Commonwealth v. Michelle Carter, takes as its subject the story of the 2014 case where a 17-year-old woman encouraged her suicidal 18-year-old boyfriend to kill himself, and was subsequently charged with involuntary manslaughter. Attempting to tell a more comprehensive story than the sensationalist narrative adopted by the media at the time, which was basically "evil devil woman secretly bullies vulnerable boyfriend to death so she can get sympathy", the series expands on some of the lesser known details of the case in an effort to understand the psychological underpinning of what happened. Looking at issues of technology, mental health, the ethicality of prescribing powerful SSRIs to teenagers, a reductionist media that pushes an easy-to-digest narrative based on familiar tropes and themes at the expense of the more multifaceted, complex, and uncomfortable reality, and, of course, whether one person can be held legally responsible for another's suicide, the show doesn't so much take a side as work to remind viewers that more than one side exists. And although there are some notable problems, it does a pretty decent job overall.

Massachusetts; July 2014. 18-year-old Conrad Roy, III has been 'dating' 17-year-old Michelle Carter for around 18 months, although their relationship exists almost exclusively through text messages, with the odd phone call. Despite living only an hour's drive from one another, and both possessing cars, they have met only five times. Conrad suffers from depression and had previously tried to kill himself on four separate occasions, and shortly after they met, he told Michelle that he wanted to die and was doing research to find a method that would be 100% guaranteed to work. Both Conrad and Michelle are on SSRIs, drugs which can exacerbate suicidal ideation. For 18 months, Michelle steadfastly refused to endorse Conrad's desire to kill himself, continuously asserting he had much to live for and reminding him how much he was loved, but on July 2, she seems to begin to actively encourage him.

On the evening of July 13, Conrad drove his truck to a Kmart parking lot, and hooked up a portable carbon monoxide generator. At 18:28, he called Michelle and they spoke for 43 minutes. At 19:12, she called him and they spoke for 47 minutes. Three minutes after the end of the last phone call, she called him again, then two minutes later, then another two minutes, and then a further 25 times over the next two hours, but all calls went to voicemail. Following Conrad's death, police discovered the tens of thousands of text messages sent between himself and Michelle, noting that in the last 48 hours of his life, she had asked him over 40 times some variation of "are you gonna do it now". The case ignited a media firestorm with Michelle painted as an evil narcissist void of emotions or empathy.

As there is no law against encouraging suicide in Massachusetts, the DA made the controversial decision to prosecute the case as a homicide. In February 2015, a Grand Jury returned an indictment for involuntary manslaughter ("wanton and reckless conduct resulting in death"). The case hinged on the fact that Michelle had told a friend that she was on the phone to Conrad as he died, and at one point, he had gotten scared and got out of the truck, but she had told him to get back in. It didn't help her case that an hour after she already knew Conrad was dead, Michelle was texting his sister Camdyn asking if she knew where he was. It helped even less that two days prior to his death, she was texting friends and telling them Conrad had gone missing, whilst simultaneously texting Conrad himself, something the prosecution would later call a "dry-run" to see if she got the attention she was looking for. The case came to trial in 2017, with Michelle waving her right to a jury trial, instead leaving the decision up to Judge Lawrence Moniz. Whatever he decided would set a landmark legal precedent.

According to journalist Jesse Barron, "the biggest mystery of this story is not why Michelle Carter did what she did, but what Michelle Carter thought she was doing", and this is a central point - Michelle's own understanding of her actions are at the centre of everything. Certainly, her actions were inhuman, immoral, and abhorrent, but did she intend them as such? Psychiatrist Dr. Peter Breggin argues that Michelle became overwhelmed by the caretaker role Conrad had assigned to her and pinpoints July 2, the day when she began to encourage him to kill himself, as the point at which she became "involuntarily intoxicated"; a result of her being on Prozac. However, in an example of the show's balance, we immediately cut to another psychiatrist pointing out that there's no agreement in psychiatry that involuntary intoxication as a medical diagnosis is even real.

The show makes a solid argument that, in this case, Occam's razor does not apply; the simplest explanation for Conrad's death - that Michelle manipulated him into committing suicide so she could elicit sympathy from those around her - is not necessarily the most likely explanation. This is not simply a case of hideous sociopathy; it's far more psychologically complex, and Carr does a fine job of peeling back the layers to illustrate this complexity, restoring context to much of the information that the media presented in a streamlined fashion to advance the "devil woman" narrative. Such context does not, in any way, excuse what Michelle said or how she acted, nor does the show suggest as much. But it does go some way to explaining her psychology; in a case where context has been ignored, yet context is everything, the show attempts to provide the viewer with that context, revealing Michelle's own deeply disturbed psyche and psychological trauma.

However, there are some problems. Take Breggin's centrality. Should a psychiatrist who says something like, "she's clearly out of her mind and so is he" really have such a prominent role in a show of this nature? There's also no mention of the fact that he's against psychiatric drugs in general, nor is there anything about how, in 1987, after appearing on The Oprah Winfrey Show and telling psychiatric patients not to take their medication, he was brought before a disciplinary board.

Aesthetically, although the replication of the text messages as on-screen text without narration was a wise decision, there are also some questionable aesthetic choices. The use of a sentimental piece of piano music when discussing how Michelle had no real friends is manipulative, and the chronology of events is a little confusing, jumping around a lot between the suicide in 2014 and the trial in 2017. There are also a couple of examples of information being introduced which seems to go nowhere. The best example is a physical fight between Conrad and his father, which Carr makes no effort to tie back to events concerning Michelle.

The biggest problem, however, is that neither Michelle nor any of her family participated in the film. Given how concerned Carr is with understanding what was going on in Michelle's head, this is a considerable problem. Several of Conrad's family appear, and the cumulative effect is to convey just how crippling his mental health issues were. In terms of Michelle, however, the only person who speaks to her mindset is Breggin. Along the same lines, Conrad's background and family life are sketched pretty thoroughly, but Michelle's is left completely blank - we learn absolutely nothing about her childhood or parents, who are never even mentioned. This is a significant misstep on Carr's part, and the lack of background contextualisation renders Michelle as something of an impenetrable question mark, which works against the show's attempts to elucidate her mindset and motivation.

Nevertheless, I Love You, Now Die: The Commonwealth v. Michelle Carter is an informative engagement with a case of huge complexity and importance. Challenging the prevailing media depiction of Michelle, Carr sets out to remind the viewer that things are more complicated than they may have been led to believe. Never advocating for Michelle's complete innocence nor endorsing the devil woman persona, Carr stays fairly balanced throughout. She acknowledges that Michelle's actions and words were indefensible and inhuman, but so too does she argue sociopathy may not have been the primary cause. The central question of the case is whether Conrad would have killed himself had Michelle not encouraged him to do so. The easy answer is "no, he wouldn't". Carr, however, suggests that that question may be unanswerable. What happened is clear. But Carr is attempting to remind us that why it happened is a much more complex question.

American Horror Story (2011– )

Thoughts on 1984

[8/10 · 22 July 2020]

A pitch-perfect homage/parody of summer-camp slasher movies, AHS/1984 is, for me, the best season of American Horror Story since the exceptional second season, Asylum. However, there's no denying it's divisive, and AHS purists probably won't be overly impressed. For one thing, it's a dark and camp comedy before it's a thriller or a horror. For another, it leans very heavily into '80s clichés and slasher movie tropes. On the other hand, it's consistently hilarious, it doesn't take itself seriously, and despite the ridiculousness of the plot and the twists layered on top of twists, it manages to elicit quite a bit of empathy for a couple of characters who were introduced as one-dimensionally irredeemable. And the soundtrack, wardrobe, and hairstyles have more '80s cheese and excess than you could ever imagine.

LA, 1984. Montana (Billie Lourd), a fiery devil-may-care extrovert; Xavier (a superb Cody Fern), a self-serious aspiring actor; Chet (Gus Kenworthy), a professional athlete who has been suspended from Team USA for the 1984 Olympics after failing a drug test; and Ray (DeRon Horton), a friendly man with a troubling secret, are heading to work as counsellors at a newly reopened summer camp called Camp Redwood. They ask their new friend Brooke (Emma Roberts) to join them, but she declines. However, that night, she's attacked by Richard Ramirez, aka the Night Stalker (a brilliant Zach Villa). She fends him off, but the incident convinces her to join the others. At Redwood, they meet Margaret (an exceptional Leslie Grossman), who survived a massacre there in 1970 and now owns the camp; Rita (Angelica Ross), the nurse; Bertie (Tara Karsian), the chef; and Trevor (a hilarious Matthew Morrison), the activities director. Meanwhile, Benjamin Richter, aka Mr Jingles (a scene-stealing John Carroll Lynch), the former groundskeeper at Redwood and perpetrator of the 1970 massacre, escapes from a nearby mental facility and heads to the camp.

The first thing you'll notice about 1984 is how immersed it is in slasher movie references and tropes, with a particular preference for Halloween (1978) and, especially, Friday the 13th (1980), both of which are referenced throughout the nine episodes. Not quite a post-modernist reimagining of the genre, the season could stand as a respectable slasher story in its own right, and in this sense, the tone is absolutely pitch-perfect. Take the opening credits. Whereas previous AHS sequences are usually unnerving, the opening to 1984 is a thing of tacky '80s beauty - shot on VHS in 1.33:1 (the recording even has some visible tracking lines from time to time), the pastel-infused credits are made up of shots of aerobics, tape decks, gaudy fashion, dodgy '80s video graphics, VCRs, Ronald Reagan, and roller skates. Meanwhile, the unsettling AHS theme music is here reproduced on a synth. It's horrible, cheesy, about as unthreatening as you can imagine, and awesome.

The show goes on to hit classic genre markers such the campfire scene used to provide heavy exposition, the clichéd chase scene where the girl being pursued keeps tripping and falling over, the characters continually splitting up for various (dubious) reasons, and the plethora of pseudo-POV shots from behind trees.

Having said all that, however, there are certainly elements of postmodern-esque deconstruction at play; the girl with the huge breasts becomes the guy with the huge penis, the black characters survive beyond the opening act, the quintessential shower scene upon which someone is spying involves not women but men, and there's a fascinating pseudo-meta defamiliarisation of the clichéd notion that despite being flesh and blood humans, serial killers in slasher films are notoriously difficult to kill.

A vital element of any season of AHS is humour, and so too 1984. Usually, the best laughs come from the earnestness of the characters, who are blissfully unaware of how ridiculous they sound. So, when Brooke meets Xavier, he tells her, dead-pan, "I trained with Stella Adler. I'm method". Later on, he discusses the dangers of being in a coma by referencing the song, "Coma Chameleon". After one of the characters is badly burned, an argument breaks out and when someone tells this character to breathe, they proclaim, "I have breathed the fire of a thousand white-hot suns". Discussing Billy Idol, a character points out to Ramirez, "You can't sing "Rebel Yell" and not be a rebel", a point he concedes as pretty reasonable.

Thematically, despite its campiness, 1984 does actually have some things to say. The most obvious issue is media commodification of serial killers. Whether it be by making a movie or putting their face on a magazine, serial killers and mass murderers sell, and there's something inherently wrong about that; why do we give serial killers cool nicknames and then endlessly engage with them in every way imaginable, thus giving them exactly what so many of them want - infamy. And, of course, it wouldn't be AHS without looking at gender issues. Here we see a critique of the notion that female victims of male serial killers are celebrated as "feminist heroes", as if they'd rather be an icon than be alive. There's also a nicely written reformulation of the serial killer trope whereby women are not believed as they fight male monsters.

In terms of problems, on the one hand, there is too much time spent on explaining things the audience already knows and hitting character beats we've already hit. On the other, there is a disorienting and not entirely successful time jump between the second to last and last episode, and it feels almost like there was an episode skipped between the two, especially insofar as the finale ill-advisedly introduces an entirely new character (this sense of truncation isn't helped that the season is only nine episodes - AHS's shortest yet). Some viewers will also undoubtedly find the humour too camp and too frequent, undermining the horror element, whilst some will find the plethora of references nothing more than pastiche, intertextuality for its own sake.

All in all, I thoroughly enjoyed this season of American Horror Story. It's not the most thrilling or unnerving, but it is the funniest and most self-reflexive. Strong characters, typically tremendous acting, and some genuinely heartfelt moments combine with great costumes, foolish hair, and a soundtrack of so-bad-they're-great songs to produce a season that might mean little to those born post-1989, but to the rest of us is an ode to the achingly familiar.

The Loudest Voice (2019)

A fine overview of a pivotal figure in American socio-political history and an insightful piece of cultural anthropology

[8/10 · 10 July 2020]

Although it may seem bizarre to more rational minds, in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the wearing of protective face masks has somehow become a partisan issue in the Divided States of America. How does a country get to this point - how does it become so ideologically at odds with itself that even the issue of breathing is a political battleground? It's easy to blame Trump - he is, after all, as incendiary as he is incompetent - but this division was gestating before his rise to power. The US from 2016 has been called Trump's America, but it is less his than another man's; the real architect of the partisan hatred we see today at all levels of society was Roger Ailes.

Based on The Loudest Voice in the Room: How the Brilliant, Bombastic Roger Ailes Built Fox News - and Divided a Country by Gabriel Sherman (2014), The Loudest Voice takes as its subject Ailes's rise and fall, and the concomitant rise and ongoing success of Fox News, the "fair and balanced" news network he founded in 1996, creating a nationwide platform for his particular brand of fear, intolerance, and xenophobia masquerading as patriotism. And whilst Bombshell (2019) focuses on the women who brought Ailes down, The Loudest Voice is more interested in the man himself. Depicting a man who believed (correctly, as it turned out) in the profitability of fudging the distinction between reporting the facts and offering opinions on them, the show illustrates the damage such an ideology can have on society as a whole. Does it tell us anything new? Not really. Is it biased? Absolutely. Is it subtle? Not even a little. However, it's well-written, brilliantly acted, extremely well-mounted, and, for the most part, it avoids caricature.

Rather than providing a straightforward biographical account of Ailes (played a superb Russell Crowe behind a layer of not-always-convincing prosthetics), the show instead focuses on seven key events, looking at one per episode, beginning with the formation of Fox News ("1995"). The following six deal with Ailes and Fox's response to 9/11 ("2001"); the rise of Barack Obama, who Ailes sees as a non-American Muslim-educated communist intent on destroying the country ("2008"); Ailes and his wife Beth (Sienna Miller in a performance every bit as good as Crowe's) purchasing a local newspaper in their home town of Garrison, New York ("2009"); Obama running for a second term ("2012"); the rise of Donald Trump ("2015"); and Ailes being sued by Gretchen Carlson (Naomi Watts) for sexual harassment ("2016").

The most immediately obvious element of Loudest Voice is the non-linear editing, which is not dissimilar to Oliver Stone's use of "vertical editing". So whilst 90% of any given scene will be cut fairly conventionally, the other 10% will be out of sequence - so a conversation, for example, might feature the occasional shot of one of the participants returning to their office.

The most impactful scene in this respect occurs in "2009"; a scene of Ailes compelling employee Laurie Luhn (Annabelle Wallis) to give him oral sex, intercut with her cleaning her mouth out in the bathroom afterwards. It's a horrific moment and a brilliant example of using the mechanics of the medium to comment on the events depicted without resorting to dialogue, showing us how disjointed editing can be thematic, telling us all we need to know about Luhn's attitude towards her relationship with Ailes, particularly the power disparity upon which it is built and upon which he depends.

While we're on the subject of Luhn, her storyline is one of the show's most effective. Her discomfit with the relationship is hinted at throughout the first two episodes, but it's only in "2008" that it takes centre stage, culminating in a horror show of mental collapse across two episodes. There's an obvious reason for structuring things this way; Luhn's role in the story is to serve as a precursor to Carlson. Additionally, the early scenes between her and Ailes are really the only ones that speak to his darker characteristics, which go on to be such an important theme in later episodes. Much like John Lithgow in Bombshell, Crowe initially plays Ailes as intelligent, inspiring, funny, charming, even nurturing, and the only real suggestion of the depravity beneath that veneer comes in the form of the increasingly disturbing sex scenes between him and Luhn.

Thematically, the show doesn't do a whole lot you wouldn't expect. So, for example, Ailes and Fox's roles in dividing the country along ideological lines is a major focus, and nowhere is it more paramount, or more effectively conveyed, than in "2009". Here, we see Ailes stoking the fires of division in Garrison by interjecting himself into a dispute amongst the locals about zoning regulations, supposedly playing the conscientious neighbour fighting for the little man, but really just out for himself. This is the microcosm. In the same episode, we see the increasingly volatile clashes between Obama supporters and those who oppose him, fuelled by Fox's anti-Obama vitriol and scaremongering, even as the network champions itself as standing up for the silent "real Americans". This is the macrocosm. Both strands depict Ailes fomenting division for his own ends, all the while claiming to be fighting for the common man. As visual metaphors go, cutting between a fractious townhall meeting in Garrison and news coverage of street clashes across the country is more than a little heavy-handed, but it is effective in getting the point across - Ailes was very good at breeding division, and even better at convincing people he was acting out of genuine grievances, a concern for working-class America, and a love of the flag. The show essentially suggests that Fox was the propagandistic manifestation of Ailes's conservatism - self-interested, permanently aggrieved, and unashamedly xenophobic.

And of course, there's the constant theme of Ailes and Fox's crimes against journalism (in an early quote, he hilariously argues, "at Fox, our aim is to be objective"). "2001" features a scene in which Ailes willingly turns Fox into the propagandist arm of the Republican Party, promising the Bush administration that the network will support an illegal war he knows has no justification in reality. An even clearer look at Ailes's lack of journalistic morality comes in "2008", when discussing the presidential election being contested by Obama and John McCain. Ailes pushes his staff to find evidence of Obama's Muslim education and Michelle's apparent racism, stating, "Obama has managed to trick the entire media, except for us, into getting behind him and his socialist ideas and manifestos. The last two guys who did that? Hitler and Stalin. That man is a danger to this country, and it is on us to make sure the voters know." Again, none of this is subtle, but neither was Ailes himself.

Of course, a lack of subtlety isn't the show's only issue, but none of its other problems are especially damaging. Although it improves exponentially as time goes on and Ailes grows older, the prosthetic work in the first couple of episodes is really poor, especially in bright light. Ailes's skin is far too smooth and plastic-like, as if he's been run through a Photoshop filter a dozen times too many. Another issue is that the high quality of the first two and last two episodes leads to some narrative sag in the middle three, and I'm not entirely convinced that seven hours were necessary. Tied to this is some unusual choices when deciding what content to include and what to leave out - so we get, for example, an entire episode on the purchasing of a local newspaper, but there's no mention of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal in 1998, which was Fox's first big ratings win.

If Roger Ailes didn't exactly build the Divided States with his own hands, at the very least, those who did were working from his blueprint, and The Loudest Voice is a very fine deconstruction of that blueprint. Certainly, it's more interested in probing the political impact of Fox than examining the psychology of the man, and it's disappointingly silent on the question of why he did what he did - it never really deals, for example, with whether or not Ailes genuinely believed he was fighting the good fight or if he recognised that he was essentially a snake oil salesman. And accusations that it's one-sided can't be denied - it's a show that never advances beyond reinforcing everything the left already believe about Ailes and Fox. However, for all that, it's very enjoyable - the acting is top-notch, the aesthetic superb, and the events it recounts of great importance in today's cultural climate.

Smiley Face Killers: The Hunt for Justice (2019– )

An engaging if not especially convincing series

[6/10 · 25 June 2020]

Smiley Face Killers: The Hunt for Justice aired on Oxygen in North America and Sky Crime in the UK and Ireland. And as the title suggests, the show's focus is the so-called Smiley Face Murder Theory as developed by retired NYPD detectives Kevin Gannon, Anthony Duarte, and Mike Donovan, and Dr. Lee Gilbertson, criminal justice and sociology professor at St. Cloud State University. In essence, they believe that over 40 men found dead in bodies of water across the American Midwest from the late 1990s to the present did not accidentally drown, as ruled by law enforcement, but were the victims of a group of serial killers operating in cells and co-ordinating their activities via the dark web. In every case, the victim is a male in his early 20s, always Caucasian, and often either an above-average athlete, a promising academic, or both. Aside from the similarity of victimology and the fact that in every case, the young man was out drinking with friends when he disappeared, the common element across 22 of the cases is the presence of graffiti depicting a smiley face near locations where Gannon and his team hypothesise the bodies were dumped into the water. Hunt for Justice examines six such cases, and although it does a very good job of arguing that these deaths were homicides, it's weak when it comes to connecting them all to the same killer(s).

Each episode adheres to roughly the same structure - an introduction to the case, interviews with the victim's family and friends, an explanation of discrepancies that may tie the case to the smiley face murder theory, and an attempt to convince local law enforcement to reclassify the death as a homicide.

The show is at its strongest when examining why these six cases were not accidental. Dakota James (23) disappeared from Pittsburgh in 2017 and was found 40 days later in the Ohio River. Forensic pathologist Dr. Cyril H. Wecht says cold temperatures could account for the lack of decomposition, but the body should have been more damaged having travelled for 30 miles in the river, including passing through the Emsworth Back Channel Dam. Additionally, police maintain that James must have crossed the Roberto Clemente Bridge, yet none of the many cameras on the bridge picked up a single image of him. Wecht also finds possible evidence of a ligature mark on James's neck and discolouration on his fingers which suggest he may have been trying to free himself from something that was chocking him.

Luke Homan (21) disappeared from La Crosse, WI in 2006 and was found three days later in the Mississippi River. The show points out that the river is in the opposite direction of the bars and most of the houses in La Crosse, and is half a mile away from the centre of town - why would he have been heading in that direction in the first place? Furthermore, the lead singer in the band playing at the bar where Homan was last seen was said to have gotten into an altercation with him. Police checked his van and a cadaver dog gave a positive ID for blood, but police let the van go, and never followed up.

Will Hurley (24), a US Navy veteran, disappeared from Boston in 2009 and was found six days later in the Charles River, only 100 yards from where police had searched eight hours prior. Attending a hockey game at TD Garden with his friends, less than halfway through the game, Hurley asked his girlfriend to come pick him up. Surveillance footage shows him staggering around outside the arena, having difficulty staying on his feet, despite having drunk very little. By the time his girlfriend arrived where they'd agreed to meet, Hurley was nowhere to be seen despite talking to her in the phone less than two minutes prior. He later tested positive for high dosages of GHB, a drug often used in date rape cases, and which would explain the surveillance footage. But where did the GHB come from? The body is also shown to have evidence of blunt impact to the head and lower extremities, a contusion on the nose, and a periorbital contusion around the eye. Forensic pathologist Dr. Elizabeth Laposata argues that these injuries could not have come from a fall and that the heart must have been still pumping when Hurley received them.

Brian Welzien (21) disappeared from Chicago in 2000 and was found 77 days later and 30 miles away washed up on a Lake Michigan beach in Gary, IN. He too was shown to have very little alcohol in his system, but was seen on security footage throwing up multiple times. For the police theory that Welzien wandered into Lake Michigan to be correct, he would have had to cross Lake Shore Drive - ten lanes of traffic - and scale three fences, despite barely being able to stand up.

Tommy Booth (24) disappeared from Woodlyn, PA in 2008 and was found 14 days later in a creek behind the bar from which he disappeared despite it being searched just 24 hours prior. When he was found he was still in rigor mortis (impossible if he was dead 14 days) and there was little to no decomposition.

Todd Geib (22) disappeared from Muskegon, MI in 2005 and was found 21 days later in nearby Lake Ovidhall, a privately owned lake. Two drugs were found in his system that are used to treat depression - desipramine and amitriptyline, but he had been prescribed neither. The upright position in which the body was floating is also atypical for drowning victims. The rate of decomposition and relative absence of insects and algae on the body also suggest he hadn't been in the water anywhere near three weeks. Several days after his funeral, a smiley face sticker was placed on his headstone.

It's all very well presented, both fascinating and intriguing, and for the most part, pretty convincing. But if that's where the show is at its strongest, however, it's at its weakest when attempting to prove that a group of serial killers are behind these six deaths. It fails to address the three biggest problems with the theory - 1) smiley face graffiti is some of the most common, and can be found almost anywhere where there's significant graffiti, 2) none of the smiley faces look anything like any of the others; they're painted in different styles, different sizes, using different paints and different colours, and 3) the lack of specificity in terms of the smiley faces being found "near" where the body may have entered the water is compounded by the fact that the identification of these locations in the first place is based on nothing other than speculation.

Disappointingly, there is nothing whatsoever on the origins of theory, which is more than a little strange, especially when one considers how focused the show is on trying to convince us of its validity. It also leaves out any information on what the motivation for the murders may be. Gannon and Gilbertson have speculated that the men may have been taken for their sperm, which would explain why most are white, athletic, and academic achievers. Providing some info on the possible reasons behind the murders should definitely have been a component of the show.

All things considered, although Smiley Face Killers: The Hunt for Justice makes a very strong case that these six men were murdered, that they were all murdered by the same killers is a theory for which it provides zero evidence, with the show seeming to share in the confirmation bias of its four protagonists. It's provocative, and as a call to reopen cases that should never have been closed, it's compelling. But as evidence of an international group of serial killers, it lacks anything substantial.

Death at the Mansion: Rebecca Zahau (2019)

A lot of confirmation bias on both sides and a lot of info left out, but the central thesis is convincing

[6/10 · 3 June 2020]

On July 13, 2011, Coronado PD received a phone call from a man named Adam Shacknai, who had found the body of a woman hanging from a balcony and was desperately trying to revive her. He was unable to do so, and by the time police arrived, the woman, identified as 32-year-old Rebecca Zahau, girlfriend of millionaire pharmaceutical tycoon (and Adam's brother) Jonah Shacknai, was already showing signs of rigour mortis. However, what caused the case to make national headlines were the specifics of her death. As well as the rope around her neck, Zahau's hands were bound behind her back. Her feet were tied together. Her mouth was gagged. A nonsensical suicide note was scrawled on a door in handwriting that didn't resemble hers. The nine-foot drop from the balcony should have caused extensive damage, certainly internal decapitation, and possibly partial external decapitation, yet her wounds were more consistent with manual chocking. A knife lay on the floor of her bedroom, the handle of which was encased with her menstrual blood. And she was naked.

Police ruled her death a suicide.

Airing on Oxygen in North America and Sky Crime in the UK and Ireland, the four-part Death at the Mansion: Rebecca Zahau follows the efforts of former LA prosecutor Loni Coombs, investigative journalist Billy Jensen, and forensic criminologist Paul Holes, they try to uncover enough evidence to convince the San Diego Sheriff's Department to declare Zahau's death "undetermined" and re-open the case. It's compelling stuff, but as a TV show, much of the four hours feel padded. This is especially frustrating when one considers just how much information is left out; information one can learn by watching the superior (and much shorter) Rebecca Zahau: An ID Murder Mystery (2019), or by listening to Dr. Phil McGraw's excellent five-episode podcast on the case, "Mansion of Secrets: The Mysterious Death of Rebecca Zahau" (2019). The trio at the centre of Death at the Mansion spend a lot of time talking about the confirmation bias of the police, apparently unaware that their own bias is clear to see. It isn't a bad introduction to the case, but I'd strongly advise that, if you're interested in Zahau, you supplement your viewing with something a little more objective.

Having said that, the show does raise some fascinating issues, and for the most part, it's convincing. For example, asking if Zahau would have been able to secure her hands behind her back using the knots with which she was found, we're shown footage of a police officer demonstrating how she may have done so, and Coombs and Jensen visit a BDSM expert who instructs Jensen on how to secure his own hands behind his back. However, as is discovered later on, both the demonstration and the BDSM example use a simpler form of the knots than Zahau used. Thus far, no one has been able to demonstrate how it's possible to tie one's hands behind one's back using an exact replica of the knots used by Zahau.

The show also spend time looking at the huge (unanswered) question of why she was naked? The police's main argument is that Zahau killed herself due to the guilt she felt after Jonah's six-year-old son suffered a horrific accident whilst he was under her supervision just two days earlier (he would die a few days after Zahau). It's extremely unusual (although not completely unheard of) for a female suicide victim to be naked, but if one believes that the suicide was related to honour and brought about by guilt, how does her nudity factor in?

We also examine her 'suicide note' - "SHE SAVED HIM CAN YOU SAVE HER", written on a door in black paint. "She saved him" presumably refers to Zahau performing CPR on Max, but if it is a suicide note, why is it written in the third-person, and what does the second half mean? To whom is it addressed? It also seems that the note was not written in her handwriting, although experts are somewhat divided on this issue. Additionally, the paint used to write the sign was found on Zahau's nipples and inner thigh. How'd it get there? And why only there?

Another issue is the complete lack of any DNA or prints other than Zahau's at the scene, which makes little sense as there should have been plenty of both in a room that was used by many people. The lack of DNA and prints is itself a significant red flag, suggesting the room was wiped clean.

The show also looks at other pieces of fascinating evidence that speak to murder rather than suicide. For example, a woman (Marsha Alison) two houses down from Spreckles heard a woman shouting "help me" the night of the suicide. However, police never tried to find another ear witness. Another example is that forensic audio engineer Brad Murphree analyses Adam's 911 call, and hears Adan saying "hold her still". To whom was he talking? Murphree also identifies a very a garbled voice that isn't Adam's, although what the voice is saying is impossible to make out.

It's all pretty fascinating and convincing. But one of the main problems with the show is that everyone who is interviewed (with the exception of a lone police officer) believes that Zahau was murdered. Now, fair enough, the show is about trying to uncover enough evidence to convince the police that there was foul play, so it makes sense to focus on that side of the debate. Nevertheless, there's no balance; it's so one-sided as to be distracting. The showrunners don't seem to realise that interviewing people who believe it was a suicide would have forced Coombs, Jensen, and Holes to more actively engage with such theories, which would have strengthened their own arguments for homicide. All three believe that confirmation bias played a huge role in the investigation, and they may be correct, but their own confirmation bias is just as big a problem.

Another problem is what the show leaves out. A big example is Max's fall. According to Zahau, she performed CPR on Max, but when doctors examined him, they found no evidence of CPR. Additionally, Zahau said that when she reached him, Max asked for the family dog, but according to Dr. Judy Melinek, a forensic pathologist hired by Max's mother Nina, Max's injuries would have made it impossible for him to say anything. Melinek also found that the thickness of the carpet on the second floor would have made it impossible for Max to have gotten up enough speed to go over the baluster. She also argued that his centre of gravity was too low to support Zahau's version of events.

On the other hand, the show even leaves out information that supports its case. For example, there's virtually nothing on the fact that famed forensic pathologist Dr. Cyril Wecht found four subgaleal haemorrhages on Zahau's scalp that couldn't be explained except by blunt force trauma. Police said they came from impact with branches as she fell - but how could that be possible if she went over the balcony feet first? Another issue left out of the show is something that was presumably cut for time, as it has been released as a web exclusive on the show's official website. In a meticulous recreation of the crime scene, using a mannequin of the same weight and height as Zahau tied to the same bed on the same carpet with the same rope, biomedical engineer Prof. Cynthia Bir conducted multiple experiments by dropping the body off the balcony in a variety of ways. In the real case, police say the bed moved seven inches when she hung herself, but in the experiments, the shortest distance the bed ever moved was 24 inches, suggesting she was lowered carefully into position rather than dropping a sheer nine feet. This scene absolutely should have been included.

Death at the Mansion: Rebecca Zahau is a flawed documentary about a suicide that was almost certainly a murder. Although many of its central points are convincing, it does itself no favours by limiting its interviewees to people who already support its conclusions, nor does it address the very real confirmation bias of the hosts, even as they criticise the confirmation biases of others. As an introduction to the case, it's decent, and its main theories are convincing, but I wouldn't recommend it as a final word, and would suggest you check out some other resources.

The Devil You Know (2019– )

Thoughts on the first season

[8/10 · 12 May 2020]

In William Peter Blatty's 1971 novel The Exorcist, and William Friedkin's 1973 filmic adaptation, a young girl is possessed by a demon named Pazuzu, a figure from the mythologies of Ancient Mesopotamia. Fast-forward a few thousand years, and travel a few thousand miles to Clemmons, North Carolina where Pazuzu Illah Algarad (born John Alexander Lawson) is a mentally-ill young man who worships Satan, sacrifices animals, and claims he can control the weather. And he murdered at least three people.

Although The Devil You Know, directed for Vice by Patricia E. Gillespie, is an excellent overview of the Pazuzu Algarad case, its real focus is the efforts of local journalist Chad Nance to get beyond the sensationalist media headlines of cannibalism and witchcraft, and get to the issues which gave rise to someone like Pazuzu. Through Nance, the show branches off to examine issues such as addiction, law enforcement, societal apathy, and the ease with which directionless and marginalised young people can drift into potentially dangerous situations in the hope of finding somewhere they can belong. Devil You Know paints a vivid, compelling, and often heartbreaking picture of a community and way-of-life that appears idyllic, but which is rotten at the core and fundamentally broken in so many ways.

For Nance, Pazuzu's story isn't about Satanism or animal sacrifices - it's about a broken mental healthcare system that allowed an ill young man to fall through the cracks, it's about an indifferent law enforcement agency that allowed him to act without repercussions for years, it's about a man (Matt Flowers) so disgusted by the actions of his best friend that he's driven to act against him, and it's about the tragedy of one of his victims, Josh Wetzler, and the concomitant pain of Wetzler's wife, Stacey Carter. In this sense, the first episode, "There's a Satanist in the Suburbs (2019)", goes into Wetzler's background to a far greater degree than Pazuzu's, which is unexpected - how many documentaries dealing with murder spend more time telling us about a victim than about the killer?

When Wetzler and Carter lost their life-savings trying to open a horse rehabilitation centre, Wetzler turned to selling weed and mushrooms to try to make ends meet. However, after having some mushrooms sent to his house in the mail (a federal crime), he was arrested and convicted on a felony drug charge. Nance uses this as a launching pad to examine some of the incongruities found under the surface of the Pazuzu case. Speaking of how Pazuzu got merely a few months' probation after participating in a murder, Nance opines, "the system is really just broken. You have Pazuzu and his posse committing crimes that seriously affect everyone around them, but they get just right back out on the streets. But non-violent crimes like having a bag of pot or mushrooms in your pocket? Those lead to felony convictions that fills up prison and totally ruin lives."

Another major theme is addiction, with the show being remarkably open about the heroin usage of Nate and his girlfriend Jenna (two of Pazuzu's followers), showing them openly shooting up on-camera. In the case of Jenna, before she's even said anything, we see her injecting, and whilst she's happy to admit she doesn't want to kick the habit, Nate laments how he's been an addict for more years than he's been clean, pointing out (as he's shooting up) that drug possession is a violation of his parole and would land him in jail if he were caught.

Indeed, directionless youth, in general, is an important theme, as it was this kind of societal alienation that brought so many impressionable young people into Pazuzu's circle. This theme is also touched on in relation to Matt Flowers, an Iraqi War vet and John Lawson's friend before he became Pazuzu. When Flowers learned that Pazuzu had supposedly killed and buried someone in his backyard, he was one of the first to contact the police, even telling them where in the garden the grave was supposed to be. However, when nothing happened, and as years went by, Flowers saw Pazuzu becoming increasingly unhinged and dangerous. In a remarkable admission, he explains that he told police that if they didn't properly investigate, then he was going to kill Pazuzu himself to prevent anyone else dying. But what's really extraordinary about how the show presents this part of the story is how guilt-ridden Flowers is at turning Pazuzu in. That he turned on his best friend haunts him deeply, and the heartbreaking self-destructive behaviour with which we see him engage in the fourth episode, "Another Dead Boy (2019)", is difficult to watch. To see him sitting alone in a bar burning himself with cigarettes and grieving about his involvement in Pazuzu's downfall is almost as dark and upsetting as the show gets. Almost. But not quite.

It's in the fourth and fifth episode that the show really steps outside the mould of multi-episode crime documentaries and becomes something else - an examination of despair, an unflinching look at the dark underbelly of suburbia. The scene where we see Flowers burning himself is intercut with a sequence which sees Jenna nonchalantly turn to prostitution to get money for drugs, and the cumulative effect of such editing is extremely effective, creating a sense of hopelessness that transcends anything individualised. And it's within this general theme where the show features its darkest and most heartbreaking moment. During the fourth episode, Nance reveals that his son has started to mess around with drugs, and there's a scene where he describes working late one night when he looked up and saw his son in the doorway - sweating, pale, shaking, his eyes bloodshot. Nance describes, or tries to describe, the emotion of seeing this person who is his son, but who isn't his son. It's his son's body, but it's not his son's soul. It's deeply upsetting and thought-provoking, and it's not somewhere I was expecting to end up with a documentary about a murderer. So hats off to the filmmakers for having the courage to go that far and yet never for one second have it feel manipulative or irrelevant.

I was impressed with The Devil You Know. The show is not about a Satanist murderer called Pazuzu. It's about the child he once was and how that child was failed. It's about the people who were affected by the murders and how they are trying to get on with their lives. It's about societal indifference. It's about apathy. And as it branches out to take in issues such as addiction, PTSD, guilt, and police incompetence, the wider it casts its net, the better it gets, painting an increasingly complete picture of a community that is either incapable of or uninterested in caring. Genuinely surprising me on multiple occasions, genuinely moving me on others The Devil You Know may disappoint those looking for salaciousness and Satan and gore, but for those more interested in the why than the how, and in the aftermath than the act, this is a richly rewarding viewing experience.

Unspeakable Crime: The Killing of Jessica Chambers (2018– )

A decent overview of a savage murder, a town torn apart, two families destroyed, and the dark side of social media

[7/10 · 29 April 2020]

On the evening of December 6, 2014, in the small town of Courtland, Mississippi (population just over 500), Jessica Chambers (19) was inside a car when it was doused in accelerant and set on fire. Despite having third-degree burns to 93% of her body, she was lucid enough to tell multiple first-responders that "Eric" had set her on fire. But who was Eric? Why did he do this? Why would anyone kill someone in this manner? Jessica died in the early morning hours of December 7, but her death was only the prologue to a story which would rip a town apart, destroy two families, expose both investigative and prosecutorial ineptitude, and highlight a dark and dangerous side of social media.

Inspired by Katie J.M. Baker's June 2015 BuzzFeed article, "Troll Detective" and directed by Joe Berlinger, Unspeakable Crime: The Killing of Jessica Chambers aired on Oxygen in North America and Sky Crime in the UK and Ireland. Originally a five-part series (the feature-length first episode was split in two for international markets), an additional episode was hastily added when the story took an unexpected turn in the middle of the broadcast. Despite its title, however, Unspeakable Crime isn't really a deep dive into why Jessica was killed. Rather, it's a courtroom drama, following the trial of the man who law enforcement believes lit the match - Quinton Tellis (26 at the time). It's a solid enough overview of the case, although some of the more interesting revelations are found, strangely enough, only in the accompanying podcast of the same name. A tad repetitive and not especially interesting from an aesthetic point of view, the show nevertheless does a good job of laying out the facts and illustrating just how many lives this horrific crime impacted, and how profoundly it impacted them.

Hosted by Beth Karas, Unspeakable Crime features an impressive cross-section of people involved with the case, giving us multiple perspectives, including those of both the Chambers and the Tellis families. One of the main themes is the pernicious effects of social media. Within days of her death, without a shred of evidence, some amateur sleuths were suggesting Jessica's father had killed her because he disapproved of miscegenation, and at the time of her death, she was dating an African-American. Others focused their ire on her mother's perceived lack of parenting skills. When Tellis was accused of the crime, his family became the target for hatred and harassment. Some even turned on Jessica herself when it emerged she smoked and sold weed, with some speculating that her death may have been gang-related. In an especially lucid example of the toxicity of online herd mentality, Ali Alsanai, the clerk at the local store where Jessica was last seen before the fire, was forced to leave Panola County when he received death threats after right-wing commentators began to accuse him of the murder. Their evidence? He's of Middle-Eastern descent.

Within the trial, the show's main focus is the same thing that Tellis's defence team focused on - the fact that Jessica said that "Eric" (or "Derrick") had set her on fire. This was the biggest hurdle that the prosecution had to overcome; by suggesting that Tellis was the murderer, it meant that they had to discount the testimony of eight first-responders, all of whom heard her say "Eric" or "Derrick". Prosecutors make the case that the proliferation of the name was a kind of inverted Chinese whisper - one first-responder thought they heard something that sounded like "Eric", and suddenly eight people claimed to have heard it. But as Karas points out, when eight of your own witnesses testify that a murder victim gave up the name of her killer, and it isn't the name of the guy on trial, you've got a serious problem.

With that in mind, the show spends a lot of time illustrating the often gaping holes in the prosecution's case and the inadequacies of the police investigation. There's the second-in-command of the investigation, for example, who claims he doesn't know how long it takes to get from his home to work - a journey he's made twice a day for 22 years. The show is also critical of how the police processed the crime scene, arguing that dogs should have been used to search for ignitable liquids, fire-trained CSI officers should have been called in, the car should have been left at the scene for longer, the surrounding woods should have been searched that night, and Jessica should have been examined for signs of sexual assault.

A big area of criticism concerns DNA found on Jessica's car keys. Although the prosecution says on multiple occasions that Tellis's DNA is on the keys, during cross-examination, their own DNA expert, Catherine Rogers, explains that this isn't entirely accurate. In actuality, Rogers couldn't exclude the possibility that Tellis's DNA was present. Which is, of course, a very different thing than saying his DNA is on them. Karas interviews DNA expert Greg Hampikian about this, and he explains that Rogers used a Y-STR test, which didn't exclude Tellis, when a more prescise autosomal STR test (which did) should have been presented in court; "when you have better information, you defer to the better information, and in this case, the better information is the autosomal STR exclusion, not the Y-STR inclusion - in this case, Tellis was excluded by the autosomal test."

The other major area critiqued by the show is the cellphone data that the prosecution argued proves Tellis and Jessica were in the same place at the same time right before she was set on fire. In short, it doesn't. At all. The investigation into the cellphone data was led by Paul Rowlett, an Intelligence Specialist with the Department of Justice. However, according to telecommunication expert Ben Levitan, "if law enforcement had come to me, and said "can you analyse the cell phone data and tell us were these guys together", I would have said "you're shifting the data to make the evidence for your theory. This is not your guy"...for the most part, they were not together, period. Based on science, based on the cellphone data we objectively looked at, what Rowlett said is not true. I cannot put Quinton Tellis in an area smaller than 14 square miles. That's what the data shows. That it was presented to the jury as "irrefutable evidence" that Tellis was with Jessica is completely false."

So, much like the DNA, not only does the evidence not confirm Tellis's guilt, it actually suggests his innocence. Strangely, however, Tellis defence team don't call a single witness, so there's no one to refute or even challenge Rogers and Rowlett's testimonies. This is something the show skims by, disappointingly letting the team off the hook, which is strange when one considers the length the show goes to probe and present the evidence.

The show also looks at some interesting side-issues, albeit fairly superficially - like Tellis telling police that a registered sex-offender named Derrick Holmes was stalking Jessica, or Jessica telling her mother just days before she died that there were rumours going around that she was working as a snitch, or the mysterious black male who was present at the crime scene. These issues are all glossed over very quickly. Some other criticisms I'd have would include how aesthetically bland the show is and its tendency towards repetition, especially from episode to episode, as each episode tends to repeat material from the previous one. Additionally, too much valuable information is covered exclusively in the podcast.

Unspeakable Crime: The Killing of Jessica Chambers isn't so much about the savage murder itself as it is about the reverberations of that murder - race relations compromised, a town torn apart, families destroyed. And problems notwithstanding, this is a decent overview of the subject.

The Disappearance of Susan Cox Powell (2019)

A solid, if somewhat pedestrian, overview of a case involving psychological abuse, sexual obsession, and murder

[7/10 · 8 April 2020]

Sometime between 5:00pm on December 6, 2009 and 8:00am on December 7, 28-year-old mother of two Susan Powell disappeared from the home she shared with her husband Josh and their children in West Valley City, Utah. She remains missing to this day, no one has ever been charged in connection with the crime, and although the case is still officially open, West Valley Police Department (WVPD) declared it cold in May 2013. It's generally assumed that Susan was murdered and disposed of by Josh (by 2009, their marriage was falling apart), but her exact fate is unknown. He was declared a person of interest within hours of her being reported missing and was the only suspect the police ever had, although he doggedly maintained his innocence despite a wealth of circumstantial evidence. However, as anybody who knows anything about this case will tell you, this brief overview of the main facts doesn't even begin to hint at the dark underbelly - which includes porn, stalking, sexual obsession, the secret filming of minors, domestic abuse, financial control, religious hatred, and some of the worst music you've ever heard in your life.

Created, executive produced, and directed by James Buddy Day and hosted by Stephanie Bauer, The Disappearance of Susan Cox Powell, which aired on Oxygen in North America and Sky Crime in the UK and Ireland, is a fine introduction to the subject, although it had the somewhat unfortunate luck of airing right in the middle of Cold: Susan Powell Case Files - The Untold Story, an exhaustively researched and staggeringly comprehensive podcast by Dave Cawley, an investigative reporter for KSL NewsRadio in Salt Lake City, Utah. And although I think unilateral comparisons between the show and the podcast are a little unfair (the two-part show is under four hours, whereas the podcast is over 20, and that's not counting the various Facebook Live Q&As, the live show, and various other releases), certainly, if you've already listened to Cold, you'll find very little of interest in Disappearance (except for the presence of one, admittedly important, interviewee). Going in the other direction though, if you know little about the case, Disappearance is a very decent overview and introduction. It's got some noticeable aesthetic problems and makes a few rather ridiculous claims, but it's comprehensive, clear, and inclusive.

The person who appears here who isn't in Cold is Alina Powell, Josh's sister. Unlike his estranged sister Jennifer Graves, Alina is convinced of her brother's innocence and maintains that the police painted her father Steve's actions in an overly negative light (Steve was obsessed with Susan to the point of filming her without her knowledge and literally going through her trash, keeping such things as toenail clippings and panties. In 2011, he was imprisoned on unrelated charges of voyeurism, and in 2014 of being in possession of child porn). Her involvement is the one thing the show has over Cold, if for no other reason than it shows the lengths of self-deception to which people are willing to go to defend loved ones. Alina believes that Susan led Steve on, referring to "the version of Susan that the cops don't want the world to see" (a "version" which not a single other person corroborates). She also refers to the police investigations into Susan's disappearance as a "harassment campaign to damage our family that we'll never recover from". She has the second part right.

On that subject, the show does a good job of establishing just how screwed up the Powell family was. One of the first things we hear Steve say is, "she's the most beautiful thing that ever walked the earth", and later he states, "God, I worship her. She just turns me on. I'm in a perpetual state of turned on when she's around". Remember, this is a 58-year-old man talking about his then 26-year-old daughter-in-law as he secretly films her - a man so delusional that he convinces himself that Susan knows he's filming, and when she reaches down to scratch her leg as she gets into her car, she's actually 'performing' for his camera. And the creepiness of the songs he recorded (under the name Steve Chantrey) is matched only by how laughably bad they are.

It's not just Steve that the show paints in a negative light, however. Josh is portrayed as a control freak unable to see any opinion but his own. Judy Cox, Susan's mother recalls a particular conversation with Susan prior to her marrying Josh; "I said, "go out and date like crazy for a couple of years and have fun." And she goes, "well, what about Josh?" I looked at her, and I said, "I'm sorry Susan, I look at Josh and I see darkness." Later in the first episode, we hear that Susan told her friend Tara Allred, "this is not the man I married", and that Josh had told her, "over my dead body will you leave me."

The show also looks at the perceived failure of the police. Not only was Josh never charged for Susan's disappearance, he was never even arrested, and Steve's later arrest stemmed from unrelated charges. The show explains that WVPD's decision not to arrest Josh was partly tactical (they wanted to leave him on the street in the hopes he might lead them to solid evidence), and partly because the DA recognised how easily their litany of circumstantial evidence could have been dismantled by a defence lawyer (not only was there no body, but the police were unable to say where, how, or even if Susan had been murdered). Reading about the case online can be infuriating in terms of what seems like police ineptitude, and although I think the show lets him off too lightly, lead detective Ellis Maxwell explaining some of the decisions helps to put the whole thing in a better context.

We also examine the emotional fallout from Susan's disappearance, especially in relation to Allred, who is an emotional wreck, clearly missing her best friend, but also clearly blaming herself for not attempting to save her. In a story in which the Powells are almost pantomime villains, it's easy to forget these are real people, but the interviews with Allred pack a real emotional wallop and are probably the show's strongest moments.

In terms of problems, the show makes several inaccurate claims. For one, it claims that Alina's interview is the first time she has spoken publically about the case. It isn't - she's given numerous interviews over the years. The show also claims to have unearthed previously unknown evidence (an audio recording of Steve confessing his love to Susan). However, it wasn't unknown. In actual fact, it was discovered by Cawley during the making of Cold, who made it public seven months before Disappearance aired.

Elsewhere, there are some rather ill-advised aesthetic choices. For example, the show has the habit of repeating the same bit of information multiple times; we hear the original 911 call reporting Susan missing on the morning of December 7, for instance, and then, not two minutes later, we hear the same call again for no apparent reason. Every time the show comes back from an ad break, it recaps what was said before the break, which is not only unnecessary, it's distracting and irritating. There is also an omnipresent generic soundtrack running throughout the entire show - as far as I can remember, the music never stops once. And, of course, when compared to Cold, the show is very simplistic and rudimentary. However, as mentioned above, I don't really feel it's an entirely fair comparison - Cold was designed to be exhaustive, Disappearance was designed to be introductory. And that's exactly what it is.

Problems notwithstanding, I enjoyed The Disappearance of Susan Cox Powell. It provides an excellent starting point for anyone interested in the case, and although, despite its claims, there's nothing revelatory here, it introduces the main characters and gives a solid overview of events.

True History of the Kelly Gang (2019)

Is the truth relevant in myth-making?

[8/10 · 25 March 2020]

Based on Peter Carey's 2000 novel, written for the screen by Shaun Grant, and directed by nm2355933, True History of the Kelly Gang is a film about lies. More specifically, it looks at the pivotal role lies play in cultural myth-making, how every myth is a fiction, a subjective interpretation and reframing of real events. Importantly, as with the novel on which it's based, True History is a work of historical fiction which invents characters and incidents, weaving such elements into what we know of the real Ned Kelly. It's rugged, fierce, bleak, sexually ambiguous, and psychologically exhausting, with universally exceptional acting and some quite stunning cinematography. It takes itself very seriously, which will probably put off those looking for the more casual entertainment of nm0429964's rather bland Ned Kelly (2003), but if you're in the mood for something complex, challenging, and esoteric, you could certainly do worse.

Divided into three sections ("Boy", "Man", and "Monitor"), the film is structured by way of a voiceover wherein Kelly (George MacKay) is writing a memoir for his daughter, so she can know the man behind the myth. We begin when he is 12 (played by an exceptional Orlando Schwerdt), meeting his fierce mother Ellen (a ferocious Essie Davis), his perpetually drunk father John 'Red' Kelly (Ben Corbett), his two younger siblings, the lecherous Sgt. O'Neill (Charlie Hunnam proving once again he can't do accents; I think he's supposed to be Welsh), and Harry Power (a Falstaffian Russell Crowe), a notorious bushranger who Kelly spends time with. Years later, the now-adult Kelly meets the hedonistic Constable Alexander Fitzpatrick (a slimy Nicholas Hoult) and the good-natured Mary Hearn (the always exceptional Thomasin McKenzie), with whom he begins a relationship. However, after a disagreement with Fitzpatrick, Kelly finds himself on the run, accompanied by his close friend and possible lover Joe Byrne (Sean Keenan), his brother Dan (Earl Cave), and Dan's friend Steve Hart (Louis Hewison). Recruiting young men fed up with British colonialism, Kelly forms the Kelly Gang, and as their reputation grows, the authorities determine to hunt them down at all costs.

Much of the detail in True History is fabricated, as it was in the novel. For example, Mary is a fictitious character, and as far as we know, Kelly had no children. The depiction of Ellen is also fictitious - in the film, she's a fiercely proud pillar of the community, but in reality, she was disliked and most people shunned her. Another fabrication is the Kelly Gang's tendency to proclaim themselves "The Sons of Sieve", a reference to a fictitious Irish secret society. Perhaps the most controversial fictional element concerns Kelly's sexuality. There's a very strong Oedipal undertone throughout the first act, and later, he's presented in a manner that suggests bisexuality. The scene where we first meet Joe, for example, sees him and Kelly playfully wrestling for a book, and later he and a naked Fitzpatrick have a conversation with unmistakable homoerotic chemistry.

The issue of lies, myth-making, and fabrication is introduced immediately, with the opening caption telling us, "nothing you are about to see is true". Subsequently, one of the first lines of dialogue is Kelly warning his daughter about people who will "confuse fiction for fact", saying that the only account she can accept as true is his own, because "every man should be the author of his own history". The irony in all of this is that in real life, Kelly never wrote such a manuscript for his daughter because he never had a daughter, thus creating more layers atop the dichotomy of calling the film "True History" and immediately asserting none of it is true.

One of the points of Carey's novel, and something very much reproduced in the film, is the malleability of history, the notion that history isn't a fixed monolithic thing, but that it changes with each act of interpretation. The prime example of this is Kelly's status as a symbol, the importance of which grows in a manner relatively divorced from actual events. In this sense, the film shows that in the process of a true story becoming a myth, truth is rarely a priority; as newspaper editor Maxwell Scott (Carleton Young) says in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), "when the legend becomes fact, print the legend". True History is partly about how the legend of Ned Kelly became 'fact'.

What's especially interesting in all of this is that the film sits somewhere between the two extremes of Kelly scholarship - a hero for the common man or a psychopathic murderer. Although Kurzel explains Kelly's violent tendencies by tracing them back to a bad childhood and years of British oppression, he doesn't shy away from depicting the Stringybark Creek incident, when Kelly killed three policemen, all of them unarmed, two of them after they'd already surrendered. The Ned Kelly seen here is a savage - he's nothing like the mythical pseudo-Robin Hood of folktale nor the anti-establishment punk played by Mick Jagger in Tony Richardson's Ned Kelly (1970) nor the charming rogue played by Heath Ledger in Jordan's film - he's a violent blood-thirsty sociopath who kills because he enjoys it.

The film's greatest strength, however, is the mesmeric cinematography by Ari Wegner, which is some of the best I've seen in years. Having already done incredible work on Lady Macbeth (2016) and In Fabric (2018), she's operating in another realm here. Her real pièce de résistance is the climactic shootout at Glenrowan. Look at the shot of the police carrying torches in the pitch dark, which she impressionistically renders as turning the men luminescent. Or the POV shot from inside Kelly's helmet, with only a tiny slit to see through; it's chaotic, confusing, disorientating, and claustrophobic, as it's supposed to be. Or the shot of a raging fire, the flames highlighted against the pitch-black night. If you appreciate good cinematography, you should definitely watch this scene. It's absolutely Oscar-worthy. Which means it has zero chance of winning her an Oscar.

In terms of problems, Hunnam's accent is hilariously bad, and the film is a little slow in places, and could perhaps do with losing 10-15 minutes, as the narrative does sag a couple of times. And, as I already said, those expecting something in the vein of Jordan's film will be sorely disappointed (although that's not the film's fault - it's not trying to be akin to previous Kelly movies).

Starkly beautiful, psychologically taxing, thematically complex, this is very much a return to form for Kurzel. Acknowledging the difficulty, perhaps the impossibility, of getting to the reality of such a widely known symbol as Ned Kelly, the film suggests that in the formation of such myths, truth is jettisoned early. However, if even history itself is open to reformulation, then why not so with myths? Why not let the legend supersede the fact? Does truth really matter all that much when dealing with something as significant as a national mythos?

Sea Fever (2019)

An impressive eco-thriller that could do with more clearly delineated characters

[7/10 · 20 March 2020]

The debut feature from writer/director Neasa Hardiman, Sea Fever examines such issues as humanity's disregard for the size of our ecological footprint, the knee-jerk argument that if something hitherto unknown can't be exploited for profit then it should be destroyed, and Mankind's utter insignificance in the face of the wonders of nature. Heavily influenced by Alien (1979), The Thing (1982), and David Cronenberg's body horror films, it could do with some refinement, especially in terms of characterisation, and the dénouement is a little anticlimactic, but Hardiman gets the atmosphere spot on, and overall, this is an impressive debut.

Siobhán (Hermione Corfield) is an all-work-and-no-play doctoral student studying marine biology. A socially awkward introvert, she's not at all happy with she's told that she needs to get practical experience outside the lab and so her professor has organised for her to join a fishing boat. The boat in question, the Niamh Chinn-Óir, is owned by Freya (Connie Nielsen) and captained by her husband Gerard (Dougray Scott), but it hasn't been doing too well recently and money is tight. However, Gerard has been tracking a huge shoal of fish and believes their luck is about to change. Upon sailing, Gerard sees that the shoal has moved into an exclusion zone, but without telling anyone, he too enters the zone. No sooner has he done so when the Niamh hits something and becomes entangled. Investigating the collision, Siobhán is stunned to see huge bioluminescent tentacles arising from the deep and attached to the hull. Back on board, she's thrilled to announce they may have encountered a creature unknown to science, but when it becomes apparent that the tentacles are secreting dangerous microscopic parasites onto the Niamh, the crew find themselves in a fight for survival, where their greatest enemy is one another.

In a post-screening Q&A with Hardiman at the film's Irish première, she said that one of the main ideas behind the story was to offer a corrective for films which demonise or are critical of the scientific method. In this sense, there's a lot more hard real-world science than you might expect, including some fairly detailed discussions of the possible biochemistry of the creature and hypotheses as to why it behaves the way it does. In the latter half of the film, a lot of time is given over to discussions of whether the Niamh should head back to Ireland, with Siobhán trying to make the others understand the devastating ramifications that could result from introducing the parasites into a population centre. All of this doesn't quite position the film in the realm of science-fact, but it certainly helps to lend the narrative a stronger sense of real-world verisimilitude.

Science is also important thematically insofar as one of the main issues explored is that the creature may not be acting aggressively in attaching to the Niamh; it's simply trying to survive, and even the parasites aren't a form of attack. In this way, Hardiman refuses to demonise the creature, and from the moment of its discovery, Siobhán consistently argues that the crew must protect it, which is not what you expect from this type of film. On the other hand, Gerard sees it in more black and white terms; initially as something to be used for profit, and later as something to be destroyed.

Aesthetically, there's a merciful absence of jump scares and, apart from one scene, there's very little gore. Instead, the film's horror elements are based more in the intricate sound design, Ray Ball's production design, and Ruairí O'Brien's cinematography. The three work in tandem to make it impossible for the viewer to ever forget that we're on a ship isolated at sea - from the constant creaking and sound of lapping water to the claustrophobic quarters (the Niamh is so small, it only has four beds) to the handheld and often dimly lit photography that imbues every shadow with a sense of the unknown.

In terms of problems, the most significant is that even given the small cast, there isn't a huge amount of character differentiation, with the Niamh's crew largely interchangeable. One of the reasons films like Alien and The Thing are considered classics is because of how good the character individualisation is - every person in both of those films is a distinct individual with a clearly defined set of character traits. Their traits aren't painted in minutiae, but they are painted in strokes clearly differentiated from the others. The absence of this in Sea Fever isn't as bad as in, say, the laughably bad Prometheus (2012), but it's still very light on individualisation, which makes it harder to care about these people, which makes them feel expendable, a potential death sentence for a film of this nature. Thankfully, it doesn't come to that here, but with just a little more work on the screenplay, the whole film could really have been elevated into something truly special. Another small gripe I have is that the conclusion is pretty anticlimactic; it works very well thematically, but it's a bit weak in terms of drama or tension, and it feels somewhat rushed.

Mixing body-horror with elements of a creature-feature garnished with some eco-friendly themes, Sea Fever is a very enjoyable film and an impressive debut feature. Although its broader genre beats offer nothing we haven't seen before, it still manages to feel like its own thing with its own things to say. It could do with a better balance in terms of the plot/characterisation ratio, but the unexpected focus on science and ecological themes mean it rises above the monster movie clichés you might expect, which should help it to stand out in a crowded field.

Supernova (II) (2019)

A fascinating study of how a life-altering catastrophe for one person is nothing more than a traffic jam for another

[7/10 · 16 March 2020]

The debut feature from writer/director Bartosz Kruhlik, Supernova is an excellently made and thematically fascinating film that manages to pack a lot into its 78 minutes; multiple well-rounded characters, several well-developed plot strands, socio-political commentary, existential musing, and a dénouement that throws everything we've seen into relief.

The film opens on a Sunday morning in an unspecified area in rural Poland. On a quiet country road, we're introduced to Iwona Matys (Agnieszka Skibicka) and her two young children, Pawelek (Borys Bartlomiejczyk) and Piotrus (Iwo Rajski), who emerge from their home, pursued by her husband, Michal (Marcin Zarzeczny). Even at this early hour, Michal is already drunk, and it quickly becomes apparent that Iwona is in the process of leaving him, taking the children with her. As he loses pace with them, he hails down a passing car driven by Adam Nowak (Marcin Hycnar), an arrogant politician. As Michal leans into the car, he throws up, causing Adam to speed away. However, in his disgust Adam takes his eyes off the road, resulting in a horrifying crash from which he immediately flees. Completely unaware of the collision, however, Michal passes out in a ditch. Meanwhile, two policemen - Slawek (Marek Braun) a veteran known for his calm demeanour, and his young, enthusiastic-to-a-fault partner Mlody (Michal Pawlik) - receive the call to attend the crash. Arriving at the location, they find an ambulance and fire-brigade already in attendance, but when he surveys the scene, the usually unflappable Slawek reacts in utter horror. Soon thereafter Zygmunt (Dariusz Dluzewski), the acerbic but efficient Komendant of the force, arrives with explicit orders to minimise the fall-out for Adam, who has by now returned to the scene. However, as word spreads through the local community, a crowd gathers, and as Adam's role in the crash becomes apparent, the locals' thoughts turn to vengeance. As the police attempt to contain the situation, Michal, Adam, and Slawek find themselves in a situation from which none of them will emerge unscathed.

Kruhlik uses the site of the crash as a kind of representative microcosm, an allegorical melting pot wherein he examines issues such as group mentality, political arrogance, the abuse of law, alcoholism, the difficulties of police work, and the ghoulish curiosity which leads people to take out their phones to record a tragedy before they think to offer assistance. The two main themes, however, are the dissemination of communal anger (the "Supernova" of the title refers to the build-up of emotion that seems like it can only result in a devastating explosion) and the idea that a life-altering event for one person is nothing more than a traffic jam for another. Whilst Michal, Adam, and Slawek are having their entire existence ripped out from under them, others find the situation a mild inconvenience that necessities a slight change in travel plans. Meanwhile, the crowd of onlookers, at first morbidly curious, soon turn aggressive as word of Adam's actions percolate through their number and they realise that he may use his position to worm his way out of culpability. And so the feeling of anger rapidly spreads like a kind of emotional Chinese whisper, with each member of the group influencing the thinking of those around them. It's all very interesting and maturely handled by Kruhlik as we find ourselves getting drawn into this increasingly dangerous and unpredictable situation.

One of the most impressive aspects of the film is how much character development Kruhlik packs in. We learn a lot more about the three main characters than you might expect in such a short film, but others are fleshed out too; Mlody and Zygmunt, for example, both receive some backstory, as does Magda (Anna Mrozowska), a nervous young policewoman unsure how to react to three youths aggressively hitting on her. The screenplay is structurally very simple (it was purposely written to be shot on a shoestring budget), but this simplicity does not preclude thematic complexity or character interiority. The film is also aesthetically impressive, with cinematographer Michal Dymek employing long takes that make use of the geography of the single location. The opening shot, for example, begins on the Matys home, follows Iwona and Michal some way down the road, pauses to show Michal trying to get into Adam's car, and then finally comes to rest on Michal as he falls asleep in a ditch. With the film also taking place in something close to real-time, this creates a strong sense of almost documentarian immediacy.

All things considered, I thought Supernova was an impressive debut. It's fairly slight, but it's very competently made, and it has some interesting things to say about fate and how we are all, naturally enough, each at the centre of our own conception of reality.