Three Films Make A Post: Can you keep a secret?

The Housemaid (2025): On paper, I absolutely appreciate Paul Feig’s attempt to update the old erotic thriller formula for the 90s, but in practice, I found the resulting movie mostly dull. It is much, much too long for what it is – there’s at least half an hour of redundant repetition in here – and its self-conscious trashiness neither reaches the joys provided by simple, actual trashiness nor does it do much that’s really surprising in any way in its twists on the formula.

I also wish Feig had found a shared tone for his actors: Amanda Seyfried is all turned up to campy eleven, Sydney Sweeney aims for slightly zoned out naturalism, and Brandon Sklenar stays on “sleepy” even when he’s supposed to become anything but.

Blood Beast of Monster Mountain (1975): This is its very own, one-of-a-kind type of nonsense: one Donn Davison (“world traveller, lecturer and psychic investigator”) tries to bend a ten years old unfunny bigfoot comedy into a Legend of Boggy Creek shaped form. He can’t, so the audience is threatened by everything that’s horrible about bad low budget comedy – the film’s “funny” protagonist is called “Bestoink Dooley” as a marker of the ensuing horrors – with the added frisson of watching multi-un-talented Davison “interview witnesses”.

If you’re suffering from the same kind of movie sickness as I do, this probably does sound at least somewhat fun, but in actuality, you’re better off gazing into the abyss than at this one.

We Bury the Dead (2024): On the other hand, I was very positively surprised by Zak Hilditch’s treatment of a localized zombie apocalypse as an excuse to explore grief and guilt. Daisy Ridley is actually a fine actress for this sort of thing, and while this is not going to make anyone happy who is looking for a gory zombie apocalypse film, this is a very pleasant example of a a movie about a personal apocalypse.

In short: Things Heard & Seen (2021)

I know that this overlong tale of marital trouble and visually really badly realized ghosts has quite a few friends among writers online and off, but I very much suspect it’s mostly those people hanging the term “elevated [insert genre here]” on perfectly innocent and great films, a group of critics I find myself very unkindly disposed towards. On a critical level, obviously; on the personal level, one shouldn’t loathe people one doesn’t know as if they were people to actually give one reasons to hate them in the life outside the mind. As happens often enough, I’m showing my age in my digression.

But back to the movie at hand. This thing must be one of the most bourgeois pieces of filmmaking I’ve encountered in a long time, one that clearly wants an audience that understands the sheer horror of being a failed artist having to have turned to teaching (gasp!), and not even getting a cushy job at Cornell (double gasp!) but having to teach at a more provincial (triple gasp!) place. And no, the film isn’t a Chabrol-style dissection of the kind of life that thinks that’s an actual problem an audience will easily empathize with but really seems to want us to nod sadly to the male protagonist’s plight. Female protag (Amanda Seyfried doing her best to make gold out of crap, as the poor woman so often seems to be tasked with, and really making her co-lead James Norton’s performance look even blander than it already is) has a vaguely defined eating disorder that’s so generically realized, nobody should ever confuse her with an actual human being suffering from such a thing.

Of course (unless you’re that kind of Marxist) you don’t need to skewer the bourgeoisie in your movie to use so deeply bourgeois characters as these, but if you want to go the other route, you really need to turn them into actual human beings with specific human character traits and sorrows other human beings not exclusively of their own class will believe in and understand. Unfortunately, specificity and depth are not the forte of director/writer duo Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini here at all. Characters are flat and feel nearly abstract in their lack of actual humanity; they’re there to make the impression of humans, that’s all.

Keeping to form, the supernatural parts of the film seem to be very proud of someone involved having read Swedenborg but do very little with their reading, instead using Swedenborg, his version of spiritualism and the ghosts (well) as the bluntest metaphors you an imagine, turning all of this into intellectual posturing with little more than the pretence of weight and depth.

Does it surprise that the film looks slick but is also devoid of any stylistic personality?

In short: You Should Have Left (2020)

Warning: there will be spoilers for those readers named David Koepp or those who have never seen a movie before!

Tell me if you’ve heard this one before. Because of tensions in their marriage, the married couple of Theo (Kevin Bacon) and Susanna (Amanda Seyfried) are trying to work out some of it by taking their little daughter Ella (Avery Tiiu Essex) for a couple of weeks in a rented house in Wales, before successful actress Susanna has to pop off to London for a shoot. Those tension are mostly pretty much what you’d expect: he has anger issues and feels hurt in his manliness by the age difference (which I am apparently bound by law to call “icky” these days, but most certainly won’t), while she is as shallow as she is cute. Also an actress with all the cliché stuff this brings in lazy scriptwriting land (plus cheating on him, as it will turn out, because of course she is). Theo’s anger issues have a somewhat deeper dimension because he was once accused of having killed his first wife but was acquitted in court, and we all know that nobody acquitted of a crime in a movie ever was innocent (unless it’s a courtroom drama).

They have chosen a pretty bad place for their attempt at playing happy family, and soon a lot of mildly spooky stuff happens. You pretty much know the rest.

Which is of course the main problem of David Koepp’s movie: you have seen all of this before, often in visually much more inventive manner, and written with actual verve and insight instead of Koepp’s strictly mechanical interpretation here. And sure, if you simply go by the mechanics, there’s nothing exactly wrong with the way Koepp approaches this story here, but the mechanics of a script are only ever the point in film school.

On this side of the screen, it’s rather more problematic for the psychologically based horror film this is supposed to be how flat and trite the characterisation is. Despite Bacon and Seyfried both being perfectly capable of inhabiting more lively characters, everything about them here is absolutely obvious and simply not terribly interesting, the film never finding a way to explain why exactly one should care about the marriage problems of these cardboard cut-outs. The so-called reveals about the couple the film gets up to in the final act have been bleedingly obvious from the first couple of scenes, and the film’s practically delusional insistence it’s a surprise to the audience that Theo is indeed responsible for the death of his first wife borders on the absurd. None of the plot developments surprise; worse, none of them put anything about the characters into a new or more complex light. It’s just clockwork mechanics pretending to be a movie.


To be fair, there are a couple of decent moments of weirdness in the last third of the film, using irrational shift of space and time to produce hopes of the film going somewhere more interesting for its end, but that fizzles out pretty quickly. Eventually, everything ends exactly as you expected it to end right from the start, without insight, without strangeness, and with an idea of guilt and punishment that’s as old-testament as it is simple-minded and deeply unsatisfying.