In short: Bullet Train (2022)

Half a dozen characters of the violent criminal persuasion converge on the same bullet train in Japan. Their diverse missions turn out to have rather more connective tissue than they are first led to believe, so it’s a good time to team up and betray or murder one another in various, changing constellations, while the laws of physics turn increasingly optional.

One could snark about how few Japanese people seem to populate the criminal underworld of the Japan of David Leitch’s adaptation of a Japanese novel by Kotaro Isaka that features rather less white people. But then, I find it difficult to argue with a film that casts Brad Pitt as the Big Lebowski of killers, and has quite as much fun pitting him and the other comical grotesqueries populating the film against each other as this one has.

Like most of Leitch’s other films, this wants to be action cinema as POP! (a curiously British feeling idea of POP! for a guy from Wisconsin to boot); unlike most of Leitch’s other films, it actually achieves this goal with a kind of gleeful enthusiasm that I can hardly read as anything but a pure joy at creating cinema that’s absolutely free from all pressures to be serious and thereby can feel curiously freeing and subversive. Bullet Train clearly knows all the rules of character building and plot structure, when and how a film is supposed to use flashbacks, how much an action scene is allowed to break the laws of physics and logic. Having realized them, it then goes about very consciously breaking all of them in clever (sometimes clever-dumb) ways that’ll either leave an audience cheering, giggling madly, or throwing tomatoes at the screen. I found myself on the side of the gigglers here, more than a bit astonished about how seeming randomness can feel free and freeing when applied with as much thought as it is here.

The Woman in the Window (2021)

Warning: there will at least be structural spoilers

Child psychologist Anna Fox (Amy Adams) is going through a very rough patch. Separated from her husband and child, she is holed up in her house in New York, unable to go out due to her agoraphobia, and heavily medicated with a potent mix of psychopharmacology and alcohol. Her main hobby apart from falling down drunk while watching Hitchcock movies is watching her neighbours, all of whom seem completely oblivious to the strategic use of curtains to protect one’s privacy.

The closest actual human contact Anna seems to have is the tenant in her basement, David (Wyatt Russell), a bit of a shady character. That changes once Anna gets to know the new neighbours from across the street, the Russells. She is visited in turn by the family’s teenage son Ethan (Fred Hechinger), and his mother Jane (Julianne Moore), whose behaviour very much suggests that husband Alistair (Gary Oldman) is an abuser.

Anna can’t help but want to get involved, and once she witnesses what she believes to be the murder of Jane, she also gets the police involved. You know how that’s going to work out for her in a thriller of this type in any case, and that’s before we come to the moment when Russell introduces a completely different woman (Jennifer Jason Leigh wasted on a complete nothing of a role) as his wife. And let’s not even speak about Anna’s traumatic past and what that says about her state of mind.

For its first hour or so, I really bought into Joe Wright’s The Woman in the Window as a very interesting, clever and visually satisfying variation on Hitchcock’s Rear Window that centres – as per the rules of modern revisionist thriller filmmaking – on the female experience instead of on that of a pretty shitty man played by James Stewart (who seemed to realize his characters’ shittiness in Hitchcock movies much more so than his director did, but I digress). At that point the film also recommends itself as visually schooled not only in Hitchcock but also in all the favourite colours of the giallo, and featuring a pretty insane cast circling around a great, big (this is never a film for subtlety) performance by Amy Adams. Until the hour mark, the film additionally seems to do its best to use its protagonist’s mental illness as a part of its plotting but also respect mental illness and treat it loudly but humanely.

Unfortunately, all of this is thrown out of the window at the hour mark, when the whole film turns into a real shitshow of idiot plot twists, stupid revelations and clichés about mental illness most contemporary slasher movies would think twice to use. Also there to annoy me and ruin my fun are a budding serial killer (because nothing is so great for a psychological thriller as a villain who doesn’t have much of actual psychology, apparently), and the kind of whoa, twist! plotting that gives up on everything that has been interesting before in a movie just for the cheapest and tackiest effect, pissing on established character psychology in service of the laziest plotting and storytelling imaginable (script by Tracy Letts). That the ridiculously overwrought happy end also suggests the best way to get rid of one’s trauma induced mental illness is to suffer through even more trauma does not exactly help the film’s case either.