‘What Remains’
Andrea Riseborough and Stellan Skarsgard star in Ran Huang’s devastating feature debut. It’s a psychodrama inspired by Thomas Quick, who confessed to more than 30 murders in the 1990s while detained in a Swedish mental institution, only to later admit that he fabricated them.
Mads (Gustaf Skarsgard, a son of Stellan) is desperate for a fresh start after being discharged from a psychiatric facility. As Mads acclimates to the outside world, he gets acquainted with Anna, his magnanimous therapist (Riseborough, perfectly icy yet still kind), and Soren (the elder Skarsgard), a seen-it-all detective assigned to the case after Mads confesses to killing a boy.
In a heartbreaking scene, Huang films one of Mads’s confessions through rain-soaked car windows, softening a horrific monologue and making me feel compassion for someone who is admitting to being a pedophile serial killer — an uneasy feeling from a horror movie (or any movie) that’s far scarier than watching a masked butcher stalk teenagers.
Is Mads a real monster? Or is he monstrous for untruthfully confessing to being a heinous human? These and other questions — of morality, forgiveness, redemption — get no easy answers in this deeply affecting film.
‘The Conference’
At a conference center in the middle of the woods, co-workers gather for a day of team-building before the ceremonial first shovel hits the dirt on a new mall project they helped bring to life. But who’s the mysterious figure making his way there by canoe? And what is taking the chef so long to make lunch? That’s the setup to Patrik Eklund’s entertaining Swedish horror comedy that’s equal parts slasher film and eco-political farce.
Eklund elicits delightfully unhinged performances from his game ensemble, including from Adam Lundgren as an unscrupulous finance bro and Maria Sid as the retreat leader who doesn’t understand why her co-workers think the mall is anti-environmental capitalist depravity at its most brazen. But the real treat here is the killer: a hulking but calculating Jason Voorhees-like monster who wears the headpiece of Sooty — the developer’s smiley-faced mascot — as he turns the grounds into a landscape of corpses. It’s 100 minutes of silly, way-gory fun.
‘Thine Ears Shall Bleed’
The horror Western is a subgenre I’ve never warmed to much. So what a pleasant surprise to be wowed by Ben Bigelow’s low-budget supernatural drama about a 19th-century American family that mistakenly thinks divine forces are behind the earsplitting sounds they hear while they’re trapped in a forest.
Set in the 1860s, the film finds Ezekiel (Andrew Hovelson) stopped at a fork in the road as he travels in a covered wagon with his family: his wife Sarah (Hannah Cabell), and children Abigail (Lea Zawada) and Luke (Duke Huston). Hitting a dead end on their path, their fear turns to hope when Luke, who is blind, regains his sight and a burn on Abigail’s hand heals — signs, they assume, that God wants Ezekiel to establish a church on the spot. When a stranger (Lucas Near-Verbrugghe) suddenly appears through the trees, the film, and the family’s faith, take death spirals.
What could have been an unintentionally comedic, “Drunk History”-like film — the script is in period-sounding dialogue, a la “The Witch” — is instead a thoughtful and unnerving exploration of how unquestioned religious belief can make nice people do horrible things. Bigelow is an assured director with a keen eye for how to steadily mount dread, and his actors are believable across-the-board, especially Hovelson and Cabell as believers navigating the line that divides faith from truth.
‘Exhuma’
The latest feature from the writer-director Jang Jae-hyun was a huge hit in South Korea, and it’s easy to see why. It’s a seamless blend of supernatural thriller, folk horror cautionary tale and old-school creature feature. It’s also a deeply-felt meditation on how “the dirt and earth connect and cycle everything,” as one character puts it.
Choi Min-sik (the star of Park Chan-wook’s “Oldboy”) plays a diviner who teams up with a young shaman (Kim Go-eun) and other spiritualists to protect the baby of a rich Korean American family from a generational curse — a “grave’s calling,” as it’s known, in which a dead ancestor throws a fit from the beyond. Jang ricochets between a hospital room in Los Angeles and an unmarked gravesite on a South Korean mountaintop, where rituals involving pig carcasses unleash a seemingly unstoppable evil entity that shape shifts from sky-sweeping fireball to towering warrior.
Narratively, it’s a lot, bordering on too much. But Lee Mo-gae’s cinematography and Jang’s zeal for folklore — he films rituals like they’re Olympic bouts — counterbalance the dense storytelling, finessing the film into a maximalist romp.
‘Somewhere Quiet’
Strange things are happening at the cabin where Scott (Kentucker Audley) and his wife, Meg (Jennifer Kim), have gone to help Meg recover from a traumatizing abduction. She’s having nightmares. He’s sleepwalking, and neither wants to talk honestly about what happened. When Scott’s sardonic cousin Madeline (Marin Ireland) unexpectedly shows up, the couple’s relationship sours to the point where Meg questions if her husband and Madeline are even related. As Meg becomes increasingly estranged from her husband, she, and we, start to wonder: Who’s the crazy one?
This film from the writer-director Olivia West Lloyd is only moderately unsettling, which makes it the right psychological thriller for people who don’t like horror or for people who do but want a good night’s sleep. A three-hander with the feel of an intimately staged play, it’s most effective when the excellent Ireland lurks across the screen, speaking in a lower register through a deeply creepy smile on a pale face framed by a garish red wig. She’s chilling and electric.
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