‘Year 10’
Ben Goodger’s film starts by informing us that we are a decade into the end of humanity (hence the title) and the few survivors left are resorting to cannibalism. Talk about misleading: The consumption of human flesh barely figures in the movie, which is a relief for those of us who semi-dreaded a postapocalyptic version of “Society of the Snow” or “Yellowjackets.”
The movie — which is entirely wordless — is still plenty oppressive, stifling. Goodger paints a bleak landscape in which peril is constant, survival constantly hangs by a thread and any noise can attract unwanted attention. The action centers on an unnamed young man (Toby Goodger), who is trying to locate medication necessary to keep a gravely ill young woman (Hannah Khalique-Brown) alive. That is pretty much the extent of the script. What matters is mood, which “Year 10” sustains admirably, if gruelingly. It’s rare to see a film in which merely making it through the day feels so, so hard — and all for the privilege of spending more time in a hellscape.
‘My Old Ass’
At the beginning, “My Old Ass” appears to fall in a currently popular field: the liberated, feminist spin on coming-of-age comedy. Elliott (Maisy Stella) is turning 18 and everything is going her way. She finally landed the girl of her dreams and she’s having a fun last summer on a lake before leaving her family’s cranberry farm and heading to college.
As if this weren’t enough, Megan Park’s movie adds another popular element: the metaverse time scramble. After taking mushrooms with her besties (Kerrice Brooks and Maddie Ziegler), Elliott wakes up next to her 39-year-old self (Aubrey Plaza), who sternly warns her to stay away from a certain Chad (Percy Hynes White). Which is a problem since Elliott is falling for him. For the young woman, being in touch with her older self (the pair regularly talk on the phone, which allows for hints of a future world that doesn’t sound all that great) is less head-scratching than being in love with a man when she thought she was gay.
Under its raunchy exterior, “My Old Ass” ponders grave matters like free will and the weight of choices, whether it’s a good idea to know what awaits and accepting hardship. So that’s what was going on: Park set up all those familiar markers only to gently subvert them.
‘Last Night on Earth’
Holly (Leven Rambin) and Ryan (Jake McLaughlin) are a hot couple enjoying the quiet of the Tennessee countryside in their sleek Airstream. But they’re not just chilling — they’re chilling before an asteroid wipes out the entire planet.
The premise of Marcos Efron’s film is not unlike that of Don McKellar’s similarly titled “Last Night” (1999), in which assorted Torontonians live out their final moments before the end of the world. The new movie’s vibe is mellower, calmer — almost New Age at times — even though Efron awkwardly works in a pair of gun-toting menaces with a sinister agenda. “Last Night on Earth” is most effective engaging in quietly upsetting episodes, like a family deciding to radically anticipate the catastrophe or brief encounters with a pious woman (Dee Wallace, from such 1980s classics as “E.T. the Extraterrestrial” and “The Howling”). In the end, Efron seems to say, the only issue we are facing is: What do we want our death to be like?
‘Sky Peals’
When his manager (Steve Oram) calls Adam (Faraz Ayub) a “people person” and ask him to be a greeter, it feels like a practical joke. Adam is nice enough but withdrawn and taciturn. You can’t blame him for not jumping for joy during his shifts at a dreary fast-food joint attached to a no-less-dreary gas station but still, there is a deeper malaise going on. It comes to the fore when Adam learns that his recently deceased father (Jeff Mirza) thought he was “from somewhere else” — as in, not from Earth. What does that mean for Adam, who was already pulled between his paternal Pakistani side and his maternal white British side?
Moin Hussain’s film proceeds at a deliberate pace that creates a hypnotic sense of existential uncertainty. Adam (whom his Pakistani relatives call Umer) is stuck in limbo. He already had a bleak job in a weird liminal space and was unsure where he would live after his mother relocated. Now he also questions his very humanity. But is he an alien or merely alienated? The austere “Sky Peals” is a worthy entry in a growing sci-fi subgenre that draws connections between aliens of the non-Earthling kind and aliens in the refugee/immigrant sense, but also questions the porous, moving borders of mental health.
‘Murphy’
While David (Prabhu Mundkur, who is also one of the writers) is tinkering with his grandfather’s radio, a storm hits and he hears a woman’s voice coming from the old-fashioned box. He realizes he can actually communicate with her, and the two engage in conversation. The woman, Janani (Roshini Prakash), coincidentally attends the same university as David, but the two don’t know each other, so they decide to meet up. They are both upset when the other doesn’t show up, but eventually they realize that they exist in different years: David is in 2024 and Janani is in 1996. (Aficionados of time-hopping romances will spot the same premise as in “Ditto,” a South Korean movie from 2000 that was remade under the same title in 2022, so ditto “Ditto.”)
The director B.S.P. Varma takes his sweet time getting the action going, but the Goa-set “Murphy” is on firmer ground once David and Janani discover what they have in common — a professor named Joe (Mundkur again) plays a key role — and the story switches into a higher gear. The movie digs into the kind of paradoxes that emerge when you start messing with the past to alter the future, which, if you are still following, is the present. As we figure out the connection between David and Janani, which goes beyond airwaves, Varma unabashedly cranks up the romantic implications and the plot twist. And that feels just about right.
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