Leeds International Film Festival
Here Comes the Devil
When I spotted Here Comes the Devil (AKA Ahí va el diablo) was showing as part of the Leeds International Film Festival’s horror and genre film strand I was more than a little excited. Earlier this year it screened to audiences in Austin’s Fantastic Fest and to say that it had done well there is something of an understatement: Here Comes picked up awards for best actor, best actress, best screenplay, best director and best picture in the horror category. There are only two explanations for this: either the other films in competition were hardly strong, or Here Comes is really something quite special.
**So of course I had to go and see it. **
Some hours later, I’m still not quite sure what to make of it. It’s a solid little film, it ticks a lot the boxes you’d expect and a few you might not, but it doesn’t really offer much by way of surprises. I definitely came out grinning, but I don’t think it made my jaw drop.
The premise is pretty familiar. Some children disappear and then turn up the next day. Only, when they re-appear they’re… different. Cold, unemotional, quiet. I don’t think I’m spoiling anything if I tell you there’s some supernatural/possession stuff going on. Most of the rest of the film focuses on unravelling the changes that have taken place, whilst Sol and Felix (the parents) struggle to cope with what has happened.
Director Adrían García Bogliano (I’m definitely going to check out more of his films) has explained that he was keen to step away from the slasher/giallo genres that he was comfortable in and embrace the challenge of supernatural horror. It’s an interesting challenge, one that wasn’t entirely successful but is never dull. Here Comes has the prints of giallo and slasher all over it: in often seems to reveal too much visually, keeping hold of the mystery but losing a lot of the horror atmosphere in shock scenes. Similarly, it never quite escapes from the clichés of supernatural horror: the darkened eyes, the creepy man, the local legend, the levitating body - they’re all here. At times, this all seems laid on a little too thick.
But these are minor gripes. Genre film is - by its very nature - bound to be somewhat generic. And the collision of giallo, slasher and supernatural is not really a bad thing (although perhaps some of the scenes are too implausible or too obviously gratuitous). It’s a fun film. The real problem is that it suffers from what I have termed Stupid People in Horror Syndrome (SPiHP). Some of the characters are just way too dumb. None of them talk to each other, none of them just talk to the police, none of them think about what they’re doing. There are only two things you should feel for the sufferers in horror movie: you should either identify with and feel sorry for them, or you should just look forward to them dying. Here Comes does work hard to make you care about its lead characters but my will to see Sol live, as she repeatedly went off alone to do stupid things, was crumbling. Which was a shame.
None of this should detract from the fact that Here Comes is a good fun film to watch. I’m not usually much of a fan of possession-type films but I thoroughly enjoyed this and would definitely call it one of the better modern horror’s I’ve seen recently. A solid, exciting genre flick for sure, although I’m still not sure quite how it won so many awards…
Argo
Last night the Leeds International Film Festival kicked off with Argo, which Ben Affleck both directed and starred in. Now, I don’t really pay that much attention to Hollywood projects very often, so I’ll admit that I knew almost nothing about it beforehand, even though it’s apparently big news.
I was pleasantly surprised. Sort of.
Argo has at least two films in it, and at least one of them is quite good. It dithers a bit between whether it wants to be serious or comic, commits to neither and kind of crosses back and forth somewhat awkwardly. The opening, in which the (real historical) Iranian hostage situation unfolds suggests the film was keen to take quite an interesting approach, treading quite carefully in what it did. There does seem to be a degree of sympathy towards both the American embassy staff and the rioting Iranians, neither side being explicitly vilified. The behaviour of the embassy staff, whose first priority when the building is attacked is to shred all their documents, gently suggests that possibly they were doing work that went a little beyond their diplomatic roles.
All this nuance and subtly vanishes, however, almost immediately after the scene is set. From about 20 minutes into the film we revert into classic thriller mode: there are good guys and there are bad guys. The good guys are threatened by the bad guys. The good guys must try to escape. This, in itself isn’t really a problem. Argo is billed as a thriller and absolutely delivers on its promise. The film is tense, exciting and well-paced, scenes of life-or-death suspense alternating with gently comic moments. As a thriller it ticks a lot of boxes.
Sadly, having set the scene very firmly in Iran and very explicitly as ‘based-on-true-events’ story, the humorous-thriller tone of the film is, to my mind, slightly at conflict with the political side of things. There’s no escaping or forgetting the fact that Iran and America are still far from good friends and that the West is decidedly prone to Islamophobia: in Argo it seems that pretty much anyone with a beard (or at least, a beard longer than Affleck’s own) is an enemy. From about halfway through it has become very clear that anyone who approaches the heroes who looks even slightly a bit like a Muslim is absolutely bound to be a murderous, brutal agent of the state. Which is a bit of a shame.
Really, they ought to have pushed it one way or the other. This could have been a good, serious (though possibly rather weighty) look at relations between Iran and the US or it could have been a kick-ass entertaining thriller with no need to be grounded in the real East-West conflict that it patently doesn’t really care about. Instead, it staggers between the two, reassuring audiences that America are the good guys, Iranians (real: anyone vaguely middle-eastern) are the bad guys and the US will surely triumph.
For all that, it is still quite a lot of fun.
Leeds International Film Festival
This week sees the return of the UK’s biggest film festival outside of London! Hurrah! I’ve enjoyed lots of pretty great films at LIFF over the last couple of years (and have regularly promised far more reviews than I’ve actually written), so I’m looking forward to some more.
This year I’m lucky enough to be doing some work there - which sadly means I won’t get to see half as many films as in previous years (booo!). So I’m going to preview a few I’m looking forward to (and might actually get to see) here. Over the next couple of weeks I also plan on watching a handful of the festival films I can get my hands on and putting them up here. Obviously these will mostly be the older one - I’m not likely to find a DVD copy of Russian zombie flick Meteletsa, which is getting it’s world premiere here in Leeds - but there should be a few interesting things to watch. My very own festival outside the festival.
In terms of things to look forward to, though, I’m spoilt for choice. The most alluring horror treat, to my mind, is the sinister looking Mexican flick, Here Comes The Devil (Ahi va el diablo), which swept the horror awards at the last Fantastic Fest. I might actually get to see this one and am already pretty excited. There’s a decent spread of homegrown horror too: Heretic and Before Dawn both look particularly exciting. The latter is a straight-faced zombie movie - something all too-rare since Shaun of the Dead. Whether either of them can possibly match last-year’s glorious bloodbath of nastiness, Inbred, remains to be seen…
In terms of classics, there’s Django, The Shining, King Kong vs. Godzilla AND Return of the Living Dead. All on a big screen! Coo! Sadly, I think I’ll miss all of them. I might get to see Matango: Fungus of Terror though, which should probably make up for it somewhat.
Actual film reviews coming soon. Expect Belgian wheelchair-bound comedies and Canadian SciFi oddities amongst other things.
Repulsion and Happy People
Three Two more from the Film Festival! Something old, something new, and something informative…
[Bellflower was going to be included in this group… It’ll be coming soon instead…]
Repulsion
Repulsion is early Polanski and definitely ‘classic’ enough that it’d usually fall way outside the focus of this blog: I tend to lean away from writing about the classics, if only because plenty of people have already written plenty of words about these films - what’s left for me to add? So I’ll be brief…
[There are a couple of nice reviews to be found at Korova Theatre and Radiator Heaven]
Repulsion is a thriller in the old, almost forgotten sense of the world. It thrills. Every single person watching jumped at least once in the film, as poor Carol’s hallucinatory nightmare threw shocks and scares at her in fits and starts. Polanski throws in a wonderful mix of the increasingly repulsive - an uncooked rabbit left out to gather flies and rot - the imaginatively uneasy - a crack in the wall that threatens repeatedly to burst apart - and the threat of real violence - sexually aggressive men pounce at Carol from every corner, some real, some imaginary. It’s edge of the seat stuff that is propelled by a pulsing score and a camera that hovers voyeuristically around doorways and windowframes, beckoning the viewer into Carol’s paranoid fears.
So little of her condition or the realities or origins of her fears is explained that you leave the cinema desperately untangling plot elements in your head, guessing and re-guessing which of the more plausible elements were imagined and which of the more outlandish were real. Great stuff.
Happy People - A Year in the Taiga
This documentary of Siberian life came with a “Narrated by Werner Herzog” tagline - surely as good a guarantee of an interesting film as there can be. Thankfully, it doesn’t disappoint. We are taken, in a fairly straight-forward manner, through a calendar year in the lives of the trappers/hunters of a a Siberian village in the Taiga. Herzog contributes, as you might imagine if you’ve seen his (fabulous) Encounters at the End of the World, some perfectly dead-pan humour and a fair bit of admiration for the trappers. Occasionally, his wistful reminders that, out in the wilderness, they are free of government, free of taxes, free of bureaucracy, etc. etc. is a little too heavy-handed, but for the most part, his narration fits the documentary well.
Far more impressive than anything Herzog can provide are the demonstrations of traditional skills (especially the making of skis and the hollowing of a dug-out canoe), the rugged philosophy of the trappers and, above all, the sheer beauty of the landscape. The rive they live by and hunt around is an enormous sheet of ice for most of the year and comes slowly to life around May, looking something like a glacier rolling down a valley but much, much faster, carrying enormous chunks of ice as it flows. For the next couple of months it’s navigable by boat, but after that it turns back to ice and becomes the domain of the snow-mobile. Happy People is a fabulous watch and, although occasionally too sentimental, it’s a fascinating window into lifestyles we rarely see.
LIFF25: El Sicario, Budrus and I Am Jesus
Ok then! Here come a few more review from the Leeds International Film Festival. I’m currently seeing more films than I can write about, so a review of Fanomonen’s Night of the Dead will have to wait a day or so. For now, here are three documentaries from Monday and Tuesday…
El Sicario
This is certainly not a cheerful one! El Sicario can be summed up pretty quickly as one man in one room talking about the horrible things he has done. In a bit more depth, it is an ex-hitman in a hotel room in Ciudad Juarez, explaining over the course of 80 minutes what his life has contained. With his face masked throughout the film and no props other than a pad of drawing paper and a squeaky black marker, the hitman proceeds to explain the procedures of induction to the Mexican drug cartels and the jobs he had to carry out.
It is, as you can probably imagine, pretty gruelling stuff. He talks us through the day-by-day plan of a typical kidnapping, explains how the narcos (cartels) ensure there is at least one policeman in their pay amongst every group of new police recruits and recounts stories of strangling kidnapped people on the orders of the boss (if you strangle them before cutting them up, they bleed less, he explains).
Whilst this would all have worked equally powerfully (and in less time) if it were a written interview, his stories are compelling (and gruesome) enough to ensure that the time flies by. It’s a grim but fascinating account of a lawless, dangerous life in a dangerous part of the world (Ciudad Juarez is now, apparently, the most violent city on the planet!)
Budrus
Although you might not expect it from merely glancing at the subject matter, Budrus is a much more uplifting film than El Sicario. We’ve moved from Mexico to Palestine and are witnessing the residents of Budrus’ attempts to prevent the Israeli fence from going through their lands, particularly their cemetery. In the face of the Israeli army’s tear-gas and barricades, this is a film about people coming together to protect what they love (and, thankfully, succeeding).
An especially powerful moment comes when a large group of Israeli peace-activists join the Palestinians in their village in opposition to the army. The interviewed army leader’s claim that the destruction of this Palestinian village’s cemetery was necessary for “Israelis to sleep soundly at night” rang somewhat hollow as a line of Israelis stood face-to-face with their own army. Perhaps even more shocking was the grumbled complaint from the army captain that they could no longer “use force” to crush the (nonviolent) opposition because “there were Israeli Jews in the group” - the implication that it was absolutely fine to violently crush peaceful Palestinian opposition remaining unspoken but unmissable…
I Am Jesus
From the serious to the ridiculous: I am Jesus is a wonderfully straight-faced documentary about three different people who fervently, honestly, astonishingly believe themselves to be the second coming of a certain Jesus Christ…
From mental ex-secret-service hippy David Shayler (“I first realised I was Jesus whilst tripping on mushrooms…”) via the bearded, robed Brazilian Inri Christo, to the messianic monk of the Siberian wilderness Vissarion, I have no hesitation at all in labelling these people as deluded, ego-centred freaks. For all that, little of what any of them do could possibly hurt anyone, so they’re probably just best left to it really.
Great fun to watch and worth the ticket for the followers of Inri Christo’s “mystical version” of Eye of the Tiger alone…
Oh my…