Three Films Make A Post: Do not overlook any anomalies.

Exit 8 (2025): A man (Kazunari Ninomiya) finds himself trapped on an ever-repeating subway station floor. He learns he has to identify anomalies in his surroundings to find his way out, and learns some valuable lessons along the way.

I’m just a few years too old to have ever gotten into the habit of watching other people play video games on the Internet, and never found enjoyable watching people doing something fun instead of doing it myself. Thus, Genki Kawamura’s videogame adaptation’s approach of being pretty much exactly that doesn’t work too well for me, especially with the highly repetitive set-up it uses.

Eventually, the film does some mildly more ambitious things than have a guy wander around the same corridor, forever, and it is certainly well shot for what it is, but the constraints it put itself under just don’t do much to this viewer. Additionally, the ham-fisted way it attempts to speak of alienation in the modern world is one of those cases where I agree with the thesis, but find the artistic execution lacking.

The Accountant (2016): If I were in a snarky mood, I’d congratulate director Gavin O’Connor for finding a way around Ben Affleck’s problems with being expressive by having him play a man whose form of autism sees him finding expressing feelings difficult, but really, that would be selling an action movie short that’s clever, inventive, fun, and uses its main character’s neuroatypicality and how it makes him relate to the world and the world to him in more nuanced and interesting ways than movies, and certainly genre movies, usually do. It is also still often joyful action movie nonsense, but the kind of nonsense carried by an actual heart and a brain for other things.

The Accountant 2 (2025): Whereas this belated sequel written and directed by the same people suggests that nobody involved in the first part actually had any clue about what made it work.

Here, we’re back with autism as a superpower and nothing but, and you can most certainly cut the clever, inventive and fun from the first movie’s description as well. For some reason, this is now also a comedy, just one of those comedies nobody bothered to actually make funny, or write any jokes for. That it’s also unpleasant, aggressively stupid and without any charm does not exactly help it in any way.

In short: Hypnotic (2023)

Police detective Danny Rourke (Ben Affleck) stumbles upon a very curious case: a sinister looking gentleman (William Fichtner) somehow convinces random civilians into helping him commit complicated and suicidal robberies. Even more curious: all of this seems somehow connected to the kidnapping of Rourke’s little daughter by another random stranger some time ago.

Before Rourke knows it, he is teaming up with a backstreet hypnotist (Alice Braga) and starts following the trail of a weird conspiracy surrounding an operation of government mind controllers with a deep love for red blazers.

Clearly, Robert Rodriguez didn’t go into this trying to make your bog standard contemporary action thriller but mixes it up with the traditions of the 70s paranoid thriller, as well as some X-Men style not quite superhero psi stuff. In the film’s good moments, this works out rather well. Particularly early on, before the film starts to explain way too much, Rodriguez regularly reaches an un-real and somewhat nightmarish mood of paranoia – the culmination here is certainly the scene in the police station where our hero gets in trouble with his partner, though there is also a really nice bit where Rourke finds himself mind-whammied into a murder attempt.

The more standard big budget action thriller elements never work out quite as well: the action is – atypical for Rodriguez – more competent than great, and the plot never quite has the drive it should have. On the other hand, Hypnotic pulls off its two big twists rather well, including a pretty clever sequence of reveals too fun to spoil here. I can take or leave the final one, however.

I do believe Hypnotic’s main problem is its lead actor. Affleck’s unwillingness or inability to express any human emotion beyond indigestion is of course legend by now, but it’s poison for any emotional effect the film should have on its audience. On paper, Rourke goes through a psychological and physical wringer, and it should be easy to make us sympathize with him and his plight, perhaps admire his gumption. Alas, Affleck doesn’t express any of this, leaving a vacuum where Hypnotic’s emotional heart should be.

That the film stays watchable throughout is a little wonder; though the kind of wonder that makes me particularly wistful for a better casting decision.

Three Films Make A Post: The Love Story is Never the Whole Story

Deep Water (2022): Adrian Lyne’s attempt at adapting Patricia Highsmith is most definitely the worst Highsmith adaptation I’ve seen. It’s not a terrible film, exactly, but Lyne, as is the director’s wont, is all about the surface level thrills, without any of the depth and insight into broken and often horrible people you get from Highsmith and most adaptations of her work. So there are many slick looking scenes of Ana de Armas being naked and Ben Affleck repeating his performance in Gone Girl, but worse in so far as Affleck mostly goes for constipation than actual acting. There is, alas, little to see on screen that ever provides any insight into why the characters here are the way they are, the way they explain themselves to themselves when they are alone; I’d love to believe the film is supposed to be about exactly that inner emptiness, but neither film nor actors do anything to convince me.

Even less well realized is the portrayal of the social connections between these bored rich people. Most of the time, you can’t even tell in whose house these bores are partying.

Strawberry Mansion (2021): There’s quite a bit of positive buzz about this twee SF indie arthouse comedy thing directed and written by Kentucker Audley and Albert Birney (who also star and act a little in here, respectively) in mid-brow critical circles (we are of course always low-brow around here). It is, admittedly, difficult to hate a film that’s so clearly made with as much blood, sweat and tears as this one is, and that has an aesthetic so genuinely its own. My problem is, said aesthetic is so unbearably, relentlessly twee (and I’m someone who loves Gondry, Wes Anderson etc), and the film’s main “they are putting ads into our dreams, maaaaan!” metaphor so simplistic and half-baked, I found myself reacting to the movie mostly with pained annoyance.

Lux Æterna (2019): This is never going to be my favourite Gaspar Noé movie. There’s a bit too much of the whiny tone particular arthouse filmmakers love to take on when speaking about the filmmaking process, not made better by couching it in irony, which ruins the middle part for me. What stays with me, however, are the early sequence of Béatrice Dalle and Charlotte Gainsbourg talking – clearly improvising – about an actresses’ life in filmmaking country and witches, and the climax, when the whole film breaks down into its director’s beloved epilepsy inducing visual and acoustic drone and the leads have rather fantastic breakdowns, swallowed by art, the shittiness surrounding it, or the whims of their director.

In short: Gone Girl (2014)

I rather want to opt out of the discussion if this film is horribly misogynist and David Fincher consequently a monster or if it is actually a feminist movie (the former interpretation needs one to ignore the actual tone of large parts of the movie, the latter that Amy is a sociopath, just a more effective one than the creeps around her), mostly because I could write a short piece about the film arguing either way but also because I really read this as a film about how horrible people at large are, a cynical and rather bitter attack on the institution of marriage, romance, the contemporary media circus, and the horrors of a culture based on lies and appearances and the horrid shapes people might grow into through it inside.

This is a film where nearly every single character is so heavily flawed he or she tends to the monstrous, the disgusting, or the plain creepy (with Kim Dickens’s Detective Boney and Carrie Coon’s Margo the obvious exceptions that very pointedly aren’t able to do much about anything here). Which might have gotten rather tiresome over 150 minutes of running time if not for Gillian Flynn’s pitch-perfect, intelligent and involving script that never does something boring and nice when it can do something clever and nasty and that is also pretty damn funny in its own dark way, Fincher’s in this case atypically undemonstrative yet highly effective direction, and so much good acting the concept of Oscar nominations actually makes total sense for once. Why, even Ben Affleck (who is quite perfectly cast) gives an nuanced performance here, though of course, Rosamund Pike’s the true stand-out, turning Amy into what I think may be the most frightening sociopath I’ve seen on screen while still acknowledging she’s an actual human being, just one on the borders of what we tell ourselves human beings are supposed to be.

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Phantoms (1998)

Dr Jennifer Pailey (Joanna Going) has left her small town practice in Snowfield, Colorado just long enough to whisk her younger sister Lisa (Rose McGowan) away from L.A. and the influence of their alcoholic mother. When the sisters arrive back in Snowfield, they find the town curiously deserted. Closer inspection reveals many empty houses but also a lot of corpses. Some of them are in a state suggesting some kind of chemical incident or a strange infection, while others have clearly been victims of the tender mercies of someone who likes to play peek-a-boo with body parts.

Even before Jennifer and Lisa can call for help, it already arrives in form of Sheriff (and former FBI agent) Bryce Hammond (Ben Affleck) and two of his deputies (Liev Schreiber and Nicky Katt). At about the same time, things begin to turn a bit weirder in town, going from strange noises and screams coming from the drains to rather more horrifying things like a giant face-eating moth. Whatever is responsible for the circumstances in Snowfield isn't willing to let our protagonists go, but curiously, it has no problem with letting them contact the outside world for help.

Thanks to a message written on a wall in town mentioning him by name, the government response to the situation does not only consist of military personnel and scientists but also of paleobiologist turned tabloid columnist Timothy Flyte (Peter O'Toole) who has some rather peculiar theories about an organism being responsible for all kinds of historical disappearances; and now, that organism seems to want him to write its bible.

For my tastes, Joe Chappelle's Phantoms, based on a novel by the dubious Dean R. Koontz, with a script by the author, is one of the more unfairly overlooked horror movies of the 90s. People were probably not too interested in mainstream horror films that weren't all ironic at that point in time; as with most things in horror film history, I'll just blame Scream.

Phantoms is of course a supremely silly film. Its monster is after all an oil-based organism suffering from the delusion of being Satan, and the way to get rid of it turns out to be nearly hilariously convenient. However, the implausibility of a plot has never stopped me from enjoying a film when it treats its silly ideas with the proper earnestness, particularly not when the silly ideas are also cool ones, as is the case with Phantoms.

The film starts out on a rather creepy note, with Chappelle (a future director and producer on rather good TV shows like The Wire and Fringe) getting quite a bit of mileage from the isolation and confusion of the protagonists, and creating the feeling that something quite horrible must have happened in town without showing his hand too early. Once Chappelle does show his hand, we get a few imaginatively staged scenes of protoplasm-based murder of the kind I'd love to see in a Lovecraftian movie, some eerie shots of dead-yet-walking people in broken hazmat suites, a dog very threatening in its lack of threat (excellent dog acting, believe it or not), and the sudden appearance of a mass of not-people that are near archetypal. These moments and images hit that easy to miss spot where the theoretically silly becomes the practically creepy.

The film's actual climactic action is a bit of a disappointment, though, with our pretty protagonists doing a bit of perfunctory action hero stuff (and encountering the bane of all horror films, the quipping monster) before the usual kicker ending wraps things up.

Fortunately, Phantoms is a movie where the ride itself contains more than enough worthwhile moments to make up for a merely competent ending, so I didn't find the film ruined by its end (films only are in very particular circumstances). Plus, said ending does at least show Peter O'Toole sitting on an armchair while holding forth about The Ancient Enemy on TV, and that's not something I can say about the ending of many movies.

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