Cobweb (2023)

Little Peter (Woody Norman) is not having a happy life so far. Being without friends and bullied in school is bad enough, but his parents (Lizzy Caplan and Antony Starr in wonderfully strained and nervy performances) are a very special case as well. On the surface, they seem to go through all the right motions and say all the right words you’d expect of loving parents, but they do so in a curiously stilted and dramatic manner, like actors trying way too hard. They also don’t seem to have heard about the glorious invention of lightbulbs stronger than a weak nightlight, going by the lack of lighting inside their home. Though they do have a huge thing for pumpkins, which is certainly a point in their favour. As we’ll quickly see, the couple is perfectly willing to go from being creepy to actual emotional abuse when they find a reason for it.

And a reason they’ll find, for this October, the girl living in the walls of the home begins talking to Peter, suggesting some rather radical methods to keep away his bullies, and clearly angling to be set free by the boy. At the same time, new substitute teacher Miss Devine (Cleopatra Coleman) starts noticing Peter’s behaviour, suspecting abuse, and becomes emotionally attached (which you shouldn’t do, apparently).

For the first two acts, I had a lot of fun with Samuel Bodin’s Cobweb. There’s a wonderful build-up of a creepy Halloween mood where Peter’s home takes on the quality of a haunted castle right in suburbia, with his parents as the local Bluebeards. The visual palette is dominated by the colours of a rather sickly autumn, and there’s much here that feels genuinely creepy. The first two acts really work like a particularly dark fairy tale, even though it is desperately obvious where all this is going to go.

In fact, the third act makes it very clear the filmmakers didn’t really intend this to be the mood piece the first hour makes one hope the film is going to continue to be, but rather a mix of at least three of the more popular horror movies of the past couple of years, Barbarian, The Black Phone and Malignant. Alas, two of these three films have brains, a theme, and the willingness to actually think about the stuff they are showing, where Cobweb’s script (by Chris Thomas Devlin, of the last Texas Chainsaw Massacre screenplay credit) just reproduces clichés without sense.

That’s a failing I could still cope with in a film as moodily shot as this one, if not for the horrors of a third act when the film leaves behind all semblance of logic, art, or even just good structure. Instead, it’s one badly thought out plot point hit artlessly after the next, with characters only brought in because the filmmakers seemed to have panicked about the low body count, and plot holes so big, even I care. That the film implicitly says that locking up your disfigured child in some secret room in your house is okay because ugly means evil isn’t exactly helping there either, in a movie made in this decade. Nor is Bodin’s sudden love for not using light sources at all, so that much of the “action” of the final act is more guessed at than seen. On the other hand, the design and execution of the film’s monster will turn out to be so amateurish, I would have wanted to hide it as well.

Despite how bad the final act is, I’d be rather interested to see what Bodin could do with a proper script instead of whatever the third act of Cobweb is supposed to be. But given the weaknesses of his Netflix series Marianne, this may be a James Wan-like case of fear of decent scripting.

Three Films Make A Post: A Disgrace to Criminals Everywhere.

Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998): After more than two decades, I’m still not sure if I exactly like Guy Ritchie’s debut movie, but then, I’ve been known to have problems with movies whose main characters are all arseholes and idiots, particularly when  the film they are in appears to loathe them (see also, Thor: Love & Thunder). What has endeared the film to me from the perspective of today is how insanely it is of its time: starting with the piss-coloured non-colour scheme, the showy editing, the post-Pulp Fiction ideas about coolness, and certainly not stopping with its very specific kind of digressive storytelling. As a time capsule, this is about as pure as it gets, and when the inevitable late 90s revival is coming around, this will be one of the aesthetic core texts.

Infinity Pool (2023): I was a great admirer of Brandon Cronenberg’s Possessor, but this sometimes body horrific critique of the late-capitalistic mindset which is here exemplified in extreme hedonistic exploitative tourism doesn’t work too well for me. Often, it appears to be rather too in love with exactly the things it wants to criticize, but my main problem really is how little I found myself caring about anything and anyone in it going through their surrealisted-up version of rich people problems: Alexander Skarsgård’s doing his by now usual “weak man” shtick without ever finding a note from which to empathize with the guy, and Mia Goth’s ultra femme fatale is certainly riveting to watch but also empty of any nuance or humanity. The only actual identifiable human being, Cleopatra Coleman’s Em, is shelved relatively early, and from then on out, the movie is all about rich people being surrealistically horrible. The rather more interesting elements of the film concerning Philip K. Dick-style identity problems never really go anywhere interesting, so I found myself a bit bored by a very well shot film that uses the most obvious metaphorical systems in the most obvious manner.

Re/Member (2022): What would we be without time loop movies? Because you can time loop anything, Eiichiro Hasumi’s example of the form unites some typical YA business with ghosts and the fascination of Japanese pop culture with weird rules. Which does at least lead to a bit of originality, for there are very few movies about a group of teens bonding while time-looping through the experience of searching for the body parts of a dismembered little girl while being hunted by a monster.

The character work is very much like you’d expect in a Japanese teen movie, and Hasumi does tend to lay it on a little too thick in melodramatic sequences, but on the other hand, there’s also a sense of playfulness and fun on display when it comes to changing up the ways in which a group of teenagers might be ripped to pieces, farting around with game rules, or making third act twists entertaining.

James vs. His Future Self (2019)

Nerdy scientist James (Jonas Chernick) is so obsessed with striking a path towards a theory that would make time travel viable, he might as well be one of those self-centred assholes who are generally the lead characters in male-centric romantic comedies for all the difference it makes. Which is rather fitting, for this is indeed a romantic comedy. For, you see, James has somehow managed to acquire a best friend in form of scientist and colleague Courtney (Cleopatra Coleman). These two are of course the sort of friends who are actually “meant” to be in a romantic relationship, James is just too fixated on developing his theories to notice. To be fair, he clearly dreams of using time travel to save his parents from dying in an accident, so calling him egotistical wouldn’t be quite correct.

James is living with his sister Meredith (Tommie-Amber Pirie) right now, but it is only a question of time until she’ll have enough of mothering him while getting nothing back from him.

And wouldn’t you know it, one evening, an older man, let’s call him Jimmy (Daniel Stern), appears, telling James – and eventually convincing him too via the power of penis comparison – that he is James’s future self, using his own time travel invention to dissuade his younger self from turning into a lonely old man who lost all of his human relations to his scientific obsession, and thinks it’s a good idea to go back in time to fix things this way.

Young James is a difficult case, though.

Generally, male-centric romantic comedies with their fixation on asshole protagonists who are taught to be a little nicer and are then rewarded by this with a pretty new girlfriend are the least interesting part of the sub-genre to me. Too often, these guys are just too crappy human beings to actually care about their fate, and their changes tend to be so minimal and irrelevant, their redeemed state is still pretty low on the human being scale, which does not exactly suggest romance to me. Nor does these films’ tendency to treat their female characters as anything but prizes to gain improve matters on the romantic scale. Jeremy LaLonde’s James vs. His Future Self does rather better here.

It starts with James not actually being a total human wreck yet, but standing right on the cusp of it, still having understandable reasons for his flaws and a personality that actually seems worth saving even if you are not his future self. And Courtney, while not being an actual co-lead, does have a personality, agency, and a life of her own beyond being James’s love interest; why, the film even has her keep her own professional goals in the end, and it’s James who gives up on something that’s important to him. It’s also a rather clever move to also include the brother-sister relationship as more than a plot crutch or a source for snarky dialogue, relating James’s change to more than just his love life and suggesting that he’s actually improving other people’s lives with his change instead of only himself.

The film is often genuinely funny, with Stern’s interactions with basically anyone turning scenes that would be too pat and functional otherwise a bit less easy to foresee, and adding a degree of (still funny) pathos to proceedings James alone couldn’t provide, the time travel angle really adding to the film’s emotional resonance here.


Of course, you could argue that the film’s focus on James living “in the moment” instead of completely in his head, and the way it frames doing science and having a personal life as completely antithetical for him (but apparently not for Courtney) is really a bit too simple, but I don’t think it would improve as a romantic comedy if it got into this too deeply. And a romantic comedy, and a pretty good one, James vs. His Future Self is and wants to be.