‘CAMP’
Rent or buy it on major platforms.
Trauma, belonging and witchcraft wrestle with each other in this strange and sublimely supernatural summer camp drama from the writer-director Avalon Fast.
Haunted by a tragic accident in her past, Emily (Zola Grimmer, wonderful) takes a job as a counselor at a Christian camp “for damaged kids kinda like you,” as her father puts it. There, she meets a group of young weirdo women — a terrific ensemble played by Alice Wordsworth, Cherry Moore, Lea Rose Sebastianis and Ella Reece — who take Emily under their wing. They’re more interested in getting buzzed than in living for the Lord, which suits Emily fine. When the group initiates Emily into a secret circle, it dawns on her that what she’s joined isn’t a friend group. It’s a coven.
Fast’s film may sound like “The Craft” redux but it’s far more rebelliously Sapphic and surreal. (Eily Sprungman’s cinematography is downright spectral.) Stylistically, the film sits at the intersection of uncanny naturalism and otherworldly menace, similar to Kate and Laura Mulleavy’s unnerving “Woodshock.” Max Robin’s fantastic ambient-drone score is the perfect soundtrack for a disorienting coming-of-age story about the perils and rewards of finding your tribe.
‘Lurker’
“Obsession” sucked up a lot of horror movie air this year. But I got way more out of another obsession: the one that drives this taut and dark-sided thriller, the debut feature from the writer-director Alex Russell.
Matthew (Théodore Pellerin) is a Gen Z nobody. Oliver (Archie Madekwe) is a Gen Z pop star of modest acclaim who’s eager to hit the big time. When the two meet at the Los Angeles clothing boutique where Matthew works, they become fast friends, and Oliver asks Matthew to join his team. Among that group is Oliver’s business manager Shai (Havana Rose Liu), who sees immediately what Matthew doesn’t: that Oliver will be done with Matthew soon. Apparently none of the characters in this film watched “All About Eve.” Because if they had, they would have realized that the more unassuming the aspirant, the darker the ambition.
Russell smartly underplays the homoeroticism between Oliver and Matthew, the better to position his formidable film as an Everyman cautionary tale. Pellerin is mesmerizing, effortlessly convincing us that Matthew is kindly and likable but also monomaniacal and weaselly. The real monster here isn’t Oliver or Matthew. It’s the scent of fame.
‘PH-1’
Payton Burnham (Mark Kassen, excellent) is like any ambitious U.S. senator. He’s got big plans to clean up Washington and has his eyes on the presidency. He’s handsome and has a beautiful wife and kids who love him.
But that’s all put in danger one morning when, home alone at his luxurious high-rise apartment, he gets a phone call from a stranger who says he’s hijacked Payton’s phone and email and is watching him from afar. Worst of all, this maniac threatens to hurt Payton’s family unless the senator publicly admits that he had an affair with his communications director and covered up a sexual assault when he was in college. It’s here that Kassen, as both the star and director of this wild and propulsive political thriller, hits the gas.
The script, which Kassen wrote with Cheryl Guerriero, kept me guessing from start to finish about every character, every conversation and every path, taken and not. The biggest question mark is the most disconcerting and entertaining: Is Payton a good guy or not? My advice? Don’t trust anybody.
‘Yellow Eyes’
Brad (Michael Kunicki) and his wife, Julia (Nena Martins), move into a house that Brad inherited from his reclusive uncle (Bruce Spielbauer). The place needs work, especially a paint job to cover up the giant eye on one of the doors. When Brad knocks on it, he hears a knock in return — sign numero uno that something’s not right.
What’s worse is what Brad finds behind the door: a knife-wielding statue with bulging, beady yellow eyes that shed dark, gooey tears. Mesmerized by the figure, Brad tastes one of the tears, an ill-advised sampling that turns his eyes the color of a jaundiced sunflower. As he becomes a host for an ancient entity, Brad’s possession spreads to others.
Jesse Korman’s freaky film doesn’t entirely click; Mickey Solis’s script gets nutty and the acting is uneven. (Except for Kunicki, who wore me out with his intensely physical performance.) But Korman and the cinematographer Kevin Veselka aren’t playing around when it comes to the scary stuff. In one of many bravura scenes, Korman’s camera slowly creeps toward Julia and Brad in bed together. His eyes are phosphorescent and his voice a slow growl in her ear. She’s frozen with fear. I was too.
‘A Grand Mockery’
“Strange people come to the movies,” observes Josie (Sam Dixon), an eccentric young schmo who works at a Brisbane indie movie theater when he’s not caring for his ailing grandfather or hanging out at his favorite cemetery.
Strange people also make movies. I don’t know if Dixon and Adam C. Briggs — the filmmakers behind this psychodrama about a man’s descent into madness — are themselves strange. But their movie is, uncategorizably so.
As Josie slowly loses his grip on reality, strange growths appear on his neck. We watch this and other signs of his downfall through experimental means: jarring jump cuts, beautifully scratched film sequences, whispered overlapping dialogue that sounds like it was taped on a cassette. The cinematographer Charlie Hillhouse does a bang-up job coating Super 8 film with the dust-bunny textures of a No Wave-era midnight feature.
The film’s slow pace and hallucinatory storytelling may tax the impatient horror fan. For those who hang tight, the macabre payoff is worth the wait.
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