‘Nosferatu’
F.W. Murnau’s “Nosferatu” (1922) is a foundational vampire shocker that still shoots ice shards through my veins after repeated viewings. Robert Eggers’s chillingly gothic reimagining of that silent film leaves my blood more lukewarm, offering too much romance and not enough monster for my taste.
But thanks to Bill Skarsgard’s terrifying turn as the bloodsucker Count Orlok, Eggers’s drama (nominated for four Oscars) more than justifies its existence in horror cinema’s vampire-saturated landscape. Peacock made the right call to offer the film’s extended cut.
Nicholas Hoult — the only good thing about the soul-sucking “Renfield,” another recent vampire film — plays Thomas, a young solicitor who travels to Transylvania to discuss a real estate deal with the mysterious Court Orlok. Towering over the other characters, Skarsgard plays Orlok as pure menace made human; his heavily-accented, deep bass voice sounds like it’s coming from hell’s intercom. Lily Rose Depp is a delight as Ellen, Orlok’s romantic obsession.
‘Red Rooms’
If the Québécois bad boy Xavier Dolan ever directed a Lifetime thriller, it might look like Pascal Plante’s nutty psychological nail-biter. Last year this movie won over many horror fans for its lurid story of a woman who becomes obsessed with a serial killer. I was taken with it too, less for its terror and more for its camp.
Kelly-Anne (Juliette Gariépy) is a devoted observer at the high-profile trial of Ludovic (Maxwell McCabe-Lokos), a Montreal man accused of slaughtering young women and streaming those kills on the dark web. Kelly-Anne forges a friendship with Clémentine (Laurie Babin), a fellow Ludovic fangirl, until Kelly-Anne shows Clémentine videos of the killings she acquired online. The interaction is an ominous sign that Kelly-Anne’s snuff film infatuations have little to do with whether or not Ludovic is guilty and more with her own loosening grip on sanity.
From its measured beginning, the film hints at being a by-the-book courtroom drama. It is at first, but then the story entertainingly goes off the rails, as Plante asks us to believe that Kelly-Anne is simultaneously a model, computer hacker, financial whiz and diabolical mastermind. It’s when Kelly-Anne launches a cockamamie plan to get Ludovic’s attention in court — a thrilling scene, for sure — that I got the giggles, and didn’t stop until this weird film’s macabre and melodramatic conclusion.
‘The Sand Castle’
A young girl named Jana (Riman Al Rafeea) scavenges for shells on a beach under a hot sun. She and her parents, Nabil (Ziad Bakri) and Yasmine (Nadine Labaki), and her older brother, Adam (Zain Al Rafeea), are the only people on a small remote island. As the radio announces the deaths of migrants at sea, the family patiently waits for a boat that will take them home.
But just how long have they been waiting, and who are they expecting? And who, or what, is making that nervous shadow that skitters around corners? It’s no spoiler to say that the film offers few answers until its heartbreaking finale.
I prefer my psychological thrillers to be more lurid than heartfelt. Not here. The director Matty Brown (who wrote the script with Hend Fakhroo and Yassmina Karajah) upends the conventions of survival horror — natural terrors, sequestration, unseen existential threats — in this moving fable about the physical and emotional tolls of armed conflict, especially on migrant families. The film is dreamy narratively and visually, thanks to Jeremy Snell’s lush cinematography that lets small moments — light skimming across a boat, yellow flares silhouetting a body — tell big stories. The film is dedicated to “all the children who are forced to live in their own imagination in order to survive.”
‘Get Away’
If the Farrelly Brothers had gotten their hands on “Midsommar,” the result would look a lot like Steffen Haars’s twisted, maximalist folk-horror comedy.
Nick Frost stars as the patriarch of a British family who goes on holiday to a remote Swedish destination: an island that’s hosting a festival commemorating an ancient tragedy that turned people into cannibals. Locals warn the unsuspecting family — the mother, Susan (Aisling Bea, fantastic), and the siblings Sam (Sebastian Croft) and Jessie (Maisie Ayres) — to turn back. They don’t, and their decision leads to farcical setups that involve beheaded animals, ancestral curses, miles of corpses and a batch of tainted cookies.
The film sags in the final half-hour as Haars stuffs muddied political metaphors — something to do with imperialism — into a comedy box that’s already overstuffed. But a film that puts Iron Maiden’s “Run to the Hills” to spectacularly grotesque use gets my vote for Best Movie to Watch When You’re Feeling Like Having Silly Fun.
‘Your Monster’
At 23, the writer-director Caroline Lindy was diagnosed with a serious illness and dumped by her long-term boyfriend in the same week. Her depression, she told an interviewer, mutated into “a forbidden feeling — fury.”
The result is her debut feature, an entertaining if unsubtle horror comedy about Laura (Melissa Barrera), an entitled young woman with Broadway dreams who returns to her wealthy family’s New York City brownstone to recover from surgery and from being dumped by her boyfriend (Edmund Donovan). One dark and stormy night, she finds in her closet a remnant from her childhood: a charming, chatty monster (Tommy Dewey) with Geico cave man looks who helps her muddle through trauma.
Fans of the similar (but superior) horror rom-com “Lisa Frankenstein” will enjoy this twist on the meet-cute, protector-creature formula. That goes double for musical theater geeks who might love nothing more than to listen to a longhaired beast melt a beauty’s heart with a Shakespeare sonnet.
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