‘Something Is About to Happen’
For most of its two-hour run time, Antonio Méndez Esparza’s slow-burn thriller doesn’t feel like a horror movie. There’s no gore, evil spirits or gorgons. Yet, as it follows a middle-aged woman who loses her grip on reality, the film chillingly embodies Sartre’s observation that hell is other people.
Life isn’t going well for Lucia (Malena Alterio), a big-hearted but naïve and sometimes prickly woman who lives with her ailing father in Madrid. She has few friends. She lost her job at a dental company and money is tight. She’s heartbroken when her crush — a handsome neighbor who said his name was Calaf, like the prince in Puccini’s “Turandot”— moves away unexpectedly.
To help cure her woes and feel more connected to the world, Lucia starts driving a taxi. Her life brightens after she strikes up a friendship with one of her riders, Roberta (Aitana Sánchez-Gijón), a sophisticated theater producer who takes an interest in Lucia’s troubled past. When a betrayal comes — and there are many in this tender but despairing film — the horror becomes unbearable, for Lucia and, almost, for the viewer, straight through to a horrific ending. Alterio gives a fearless and gripping performance that deservedly won her a Goya Award, Spain’s version of the Oscars.
‘Strange Darling’
Assume nothing: That’s my advice before watching JT Mollner’s dazzling and ingeniously-constructed thriller.
The film opens as a gun-toting, wild-eyed young man named (Kyle Gallner) pursues a bloodied young woman (Willa Fitzgerald), in a truck down a deserted road in the Oregon wilderness. So far, we’re talking standard stalker-slasher film stuff, right? Dead wrong. Because who these people are and how they got to this terrifying moment are the dastardly twists that drive this film, a horror highlight of 2024. I won’t say more because the less you know, the better. But understand this: Its six delirious chapters are scrambled for good reason.
Across the board, the acting is formidable. Fitzgerald is sly, menacing and feral. As in the “Smile” films, Gallner is equal parts vulnerability, menace and sex. As apocalypse preppers, Ed Begley Jr. and Barbara Hershey go low-key nuts. And Giovanni Ribisi shines in his debut as a feature film cinematographer — the guy knows how to make a night at a cheap hotel room look like a date at the devil’s playground.
‘Curse of the Seven Seas’
I almost scrolled past this film when Netflix added it to my recommended queue. The mysterious nautical title suggested I might be in store for a G-rated, Scooby Doo-inspired family adventure film. I’m glad I took a chance on it, because what the Indonesian director Tommy Dewo delivers is a bizarre but entertaining possession film that punctuates its unevenness with seriously sick-in-the-head slaughters.
The story is steeped in Indonesian folklore and gets convoluted, but it boils down to this: Sucipto (Christian Sugiono) is desperate to protect his family from a generational curse in which relatives, including his son Ardi (Ari Irham), see demons. As the living and undead battle it out at the family home and on the streets, Dewo kills off characters in outrageously shocking ways. I lost count of how many times barbed wire plunged through skin and came out trailing blood-slick body parts. (One decapitation doused the camera lens.) The most adorable little boy gets the most gruesome death.
C.G.I. snobs will scoff at the unpolished digital effects, but I found them, and the gnarly, homemade-looking costumes and gross-out prosthetics, to have real VHS-era charm.
‘The Dead Thing’
Swipe after swipe, hookup after hookup, Alex (Blu Hunt) is having no luck dating men in Los Angeles. When she meets Kyle (Ben Smith-Petersen), he seems too good to be true. He’s handsome, kind hearted and enjoys listening to her. The sex is out of this world. But when he ghosts her — literally, in the film’s first of many supernatural twists — his disappearance, or possibly reappearance, sets Alex off on a quest to figure out why, and how, this good guy got away.
Elric Kane’s assured film seamlessly blends elements of science fiction and psychological thriller to thoughtfully examine the human fear of death, using the foibles of modern dating, strangely, to underscore its points. (Some of the script’s woo-woo talk about the human condition left me cold.) Even though the setting is in the now, the film has softer yet still chilly qualities of a grindhouse thriller from the ‘70s, down to Michael Krassner and Robin Vining’s atmospheric score — long live flute solos! — and Ioana Vasile’s shadowy cinematography.
‘The Park Maniac’
Earlier this year, I recommended “The Calendar Killer,” a German psychological thriller that’s best enjoyed for its camp, not its terrors. This month, we travel to Brazil for a serving of similarly trashy luridness.
Based on a true case from the ’90s, the film is about Francisco (Silvero Pereira), a pasty-faced serial killer who the media nicknames the Park Maniac, as he terrorizes young women in São Paulo. The director Mauricio Eça films Francisco’s brutal assaults in close-up, giving us ghastly views of what the creep sees through bulging eyes.
On the madman’s tail is Elena (Giovanna Grigio), an ambitious young journalist who wants to make a name for herself in her boys-club newsroom by finding the psychopath before the cops do. As Elena becomes hellbent on understanding the Park Maniac, he becomes obsessed with his infamy.
Does the plot make sense? Sometimes. Does it matter? Not really, when Pereira (and his curly locks) gives such a consistently creepy performance. Bonus: The film makes hits of the ’90s, from C & C Music Factory’s “Gonna Make You Sweat” to Sepultura’s “Territory,” somehow sound macabre.
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