‘Best Wishes to All’
Vampires usually lust after blood. But in Yuta Shimotsu’s delightfully warped debut feature, the suckers are after a different precious resource that’s even trickier to attain: happiness.
Yearning for a getaway from the city, a young Japanese nursing student (Kotone Furukawa) travels to the countryside to visit her grandparents (Masashi Arifuku and Yoshiko Inuyama), who almost immediately start grilling her about her personal happiness. (The characters are unnamed.) The young woman gets a reprieve from her relatives’ probing questions when she reunites with a handsome young farmer (Koya Matsudai) she knew as a child. So far, nothing weird.
It doesn’t take long before our heroine notices odd things at her grandparents’ house, including a childhood photo with a face scratched out and thumps coming from the second floor. During a meal, her grandparents start oinking like pigs. But then a guy in underpants with his eyes and mouth sewed shut starts crawling across the floor and — I won’t say more. But it’s here that Shimotsu takes a sharp turn into Yorgos Lanthimos territory, finding vivid horror and dark humor in a fable about family values gone haywire. It’s a sick hoot.
‘Sinners’
A hot summer day is a good time to be inside and (re)watch Ryan Coogler’s blockbuster mash-up of bloodsucker thriller and engrossing historical drama, set one day in a small Mississippi town during Jim Crow.
An electric Michael B. Jordan stars as the twin brothers Smoke and Stack who, along with a blues musician named Sammie (Miles Caton) and other townsfolk, fight off a band of vampires led by Remmick (Jack O’Connell), an Irishman. Coogler deftly draws on classic action-horror films — “From Dusk Till Dawn,” “Salem’s Lot,” “Assault on Precinct 13” — to tell a gore-forward story about American racism, with “Beloved” and its Black considerations about the afterlife haunting the perimeters.
Too bad Coogler repeatedly links vampirism and racism with a bullhorn instead of a whisper. “I want your stories and I want your songs,” Remmick says, his teeth bared, belaboring the obvious.
Bonus: The film comes in a Black American Sign Language (BASL) version, which HBO Max notes in a news release, is “a distinct dialect of American Sign Language with its own dynamic history and unique grammar.”
‘So Fades the Light’
Rent or buy it on major platforms.
It’s been 15 years since Sun (Kiley Lotz) survived a deadly raid on the compound of the Iron and Fire Ministry, an end times cult that worshiped and feared her as a girl god-queen. The group’s Jim Jones-like leader (D. Duke Solomon), is freshly out of jail, and with a van and a plan, Sun drives across Michigan to confront him and the trauma he left behind.
That’s the setup to this slow-burn, hallucinatory revenge drama by Rob Cousineau and Chris Rosik, a filmmaking duo from suburban Detroit who go by Get Super Rad. Their scrappy and smart movie is a wonderful example of regional horror filmmaking made on a dime that nonetheless feels rich with understanding, especially about forgiveness. Sun’s vengeance quest takes her to old-school diners and past shuttered factories, locations that the cinematographer John Anderson Beavers renders handsomely.
Cousineau’s script is unusual for a cult thriller in that its earthly deity is an innocent young girl, not a power-hungry man, giving the film’s religious concerns a refreshingly feminist bent. The ending feels too tidy, but the trip there is a doozy.
‘The Human Hibernation’
The Portuguese director Pedro Costa isn’t a name you’d associate with horror. But the formal elements that make Costa’s films so singular — languid scenes, neorealist casting, painterly composition — kept coming to me as I watched this beautiful and malign feature debut from the Spanish filmmaker Anna Cornudella Castro.
The film opens as humans emerge from a below-ground hibernation, their hands emerging through dirt. Back on land, they return home to shoo away the animals that took over their living rooms, in hopes of returning to life as they knew it before some kind of disaster hit Earth. Like cultists, these humans dress in the same dark uniforms, signaling that a new world order is in place. Their attempts to communicate with animals through silent screams suggest that the laws of nature have been upended too.
As this meditative and mysterious film inches along — serving science fiction atmospherics, lots of despair and almost no discernible plot — the horrors of living on its uncanny planet become disturbingly clear. I watched this movie around midnight on a rainy night. For maximum unease, I suggest you do the same.
‘Found Footage: The Making of the Patterson Project’
Rent or buy it on major platforms.
From the director Max Tzannes, who wrote the screenplay with David San Miguel, comes this goofy, from-the-heart love letter to indie horror moviemaking, complete with shot-for-shot nods to “The Blair Witch Project” and to “Waiting for Guffman”-style ensemble improv comedy. It’s a charmer.
Chase (Brennan Keel Cook), a young filmmaker from Milwaukee, treks to a forest in the middle of the California nowhere with his eager cast and crew to make a Bigfoot found-footage movie called “The Patterson Project,” which sounds a lot like a certain groundbreaking found footage film set in the Maryland woods.
Unfortunately, what Chase and the French documentary crew following him find is a remote cabin with spotty power, occult-looking trinkets and a leading actor named Danielle Radcliffe, not the Radcliffe they were expecting — foreshadowing a tough road ahead for their scrappy shoot. But those hiccups are nothing compared to what happens when someone opens a book of necromancy, and this entertaining horror mockumentary takes a tonal detour in which laughs give way to the creeps.
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