‘Companion’
The less you know about Drew Hancock’s whip smart thriller-comedy, the harder its sinister detours will hit.
At first glance, Iris and Josh (Sophie Thatcher and Jack Quaid) are a model couple. But Iris isn’t just Josh’s girlfriend: She’s also his emotional support companion robot (and sex partner) who is programmed to feel anger, guilt, sadness, pain — “an imitation of a life,” as Josh tells her. Iris learns of her condition after Josh frames her in a murder scheme during a getaway weekend with a group of friends, sending Iris on a tortured journey to discover what it means to feel, and kill.
Hancock has fun borrowing from other horror-science fiction films about humans in emotionally complicated relationships with robots. This film is like “M3gan” with a heart; “Ex Machina” with a sense of humor; “Westworld” with female robots who have had it with bad men. I wish the film’s satire, mostly centered around a couple (Harvey Guillén and Lukas Gage) who get caught up in Josh’s scheme, had been sharper. Still, as a meditation on desire, codependency and survival in a world reckoning with artificial intelligence, the film is a demented joyride.
‘Snakeeater’
Stream it on Amazon Prime Video.
Rick (Vas Eli), a private investigator, wakes up on a subway one night in an uncanny city that looks a lot like New York. A former detective, Rick meets up with Frank (Isaach De Bankolé), a mysterious man who hires him to figure out whether or not a guy named Tony actually died in an explosion or if he committed insurance fraud. Tony’s sister, Dana (Susannah Perkins), knows what happened but keeps quiet.
From that introduction, Tore Knos’s neo-noir thriller — not to be mistaken with the awesome Lorenzo Lamas action movie “Snake Eater” (1989) — takes on the contours of a dime store detective novel set in a Kafka-esque alternative universe where people are alive or dead and somehow both. (Also: Where is everybody?) The opaque story kept me guessing, a little too much at times, with the only clues to what’s happening coming from quick white-light flashbacks.
The real star here is Tim S. Kang’s eerily gritty cinematography. A decrepit hotel room, darkened city alleys, an empty morgue: In Kang’s world they exist but don’t, and watching how he unsettles these spaces is a spooky treat.
‘Haunted by Her Name’
What this slow-burn indie thriller lacks in budget and polish, it more than makes up for in originality.
Directed by Jaron and Olivia Lanier, it’s centered on Jaron (Lanier himself), who heads out on the road after his ex-girlfriend’s funeral. He strikes up a friendship with Judah (Judah Relly), a kindred spirit and fellow musician who helps Jaron fix his van when it breaks down. The film’s highlight is a bravura, 23-minute conversation the two men have around a campfire, parts of which are filmed, brazenly, almost entirely in darkness, isolating voices and actors. It’s entrancing, as is Relly’s slowcore score that adds to the mystery of why these two men meet.
A twist at the end, filmed found footage style, doesn’t totally add up. But who cares when what comes before is so bracingly out of the ordinary. It’s refreshing to see a film that trusts its actors, and the audience, to get what it’s trying to do with a sinister coming-of-age story, especially in a year that so far has offered few fresh horror ideas.
‘Bloody Axe Wound’
The writer-director Matthew John Lawrence puts playful queer and feminist twists on horror comedy in this gross-out yet tender slasher film about a protective dad and his identity-seeking daughter.
The set up is meta and novel: Roger (Billy Burke) is a disfigured killer whose grisly cinematic murders make him popular with horror geeks who seek out his films at the local video store. He’s proud of his notoriety, but he’s worried that his teenage daughter, Abbie (Sari Arambulo), wants to follow in his butcherous footsteps, even if it means she has to kill her friends. (This makes more sense onscreen than it does here.)
Throw in a romance between Abbie and Sam (Molly Brown), a victim who instead becomes a crush, and the film made me think of what a queer slasher film from John Hughes might have looked like. Only about half of the comedy lands, but Arambulo and especially Burke are such sympathetic leads that the flat jokes get a pass.
‘The Visitor’
I discovered the queer Canadian auteur Bruce LaBruce around 1991, when his debut feature film “No Skin Off My Ass” shocked the indie film festival circuit with its low-fi story of a gay hairdresser’s obsession with a skinhead.
Since then, LaBruce has continued making renegade films about outlaw obsessions. His latest agitprop is a dystopian, techno-grindhouse porn film that doubles as a radical manifesto for the eradication of borders, between countries, sexualities and genders.
It opens as a creature with a signature LaBruce look — buff, bald and nude, except for a hint of blue eye shadow — emerges from a suitcase on a shoreline somewhere in the United Kingdom (The being is played by the British performer Bishop Black.) The possible alien finds its way to an estate where he seduces a family and engages in strange desires and blasphemous depravity, including various kinds of penetrative sex and one of the most stomach-churning dinners you’ll ever see. That’s the movie.
For those of us who have enjoyed LaBruce’s risk-taking career, this messy but mannered, juvenile but adults-only, pretentious but self-effacing film is welcome and disgusting entertainment.
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