Three Films Make A Post: Children can be such monsters.

Abigail (2024): In Matt Bettinelli-Olpin’s and Tyler Gillet’s new directorial outing, yet another hapless gang of criminals (among them characters played by Melissa Barrera, Dan Stevens, Kevin Duran and Kathryn Newton) kidnaps a little girl (Alisha Weir) that turns out be rather more dangerous than anyone could have expected.

Once the kid vampire ballerina is revealed, things turn into the typical chase through a mildly creepy location, with a couple of decent twists and betrayals added to the mix. It’s all decent enough, but also not terribly creative on the scripting level: Barrera’s character, for example, is supposed to be the likeable one because she has a child she loves and hesitates about five seconds when it comes to kidnapping another child, which assumes an audience willing to cut a pretty face rather a lot of slack. Fun fact: Hitler really loved dogs.

I’m also less than enthused about the movie’s absolute fixation on that vampire ballerina thing, something that stops to be as funny or creepy as the filmmakers seem to believe long before she starts on the vampire ballerina kung fu.

Late Night with the Devil (2023): The first half or so of Cameron and Colin Cairnes’s (what’s it with all these directing duos these days anyhow?) is a wonderful little horror film, a lovingly created exaggeration of a late 70s TV talk show that turns increasingly bizarre in its supernatural shenanigans. Unfortunately, that’s not enough for the film, and it begins to turn into an oh so 2024 series of “twists” and unnecessary reveals that I began feeling I was watching a scriptwriting rulebook come to life instead of the film the first acts promise.

It’s still a pretty interesting movie, with some effective performances – David Dastalmachian is particularly great at the talk show host – but I found myself increasingly bored by its screenwriting 101 approach to narrative.

Dune: Part Two (2024): I really didn’t expect Denis Villeneuve’s second Dune movie – adapting the second half of the first book - to go quite this consequently and ruthlessly down the road of deconstructing the idea of the chosen one Frank Herbert mostly left for his second novel. Yet here it is, with Villeneuve doubling down on this element of the books early – perhaps because a third film wasn’t guaranteed or simply to set up more physical conflicts for that film – making this the central point of the film.

This doesn’t mean this second film loses any of the visually visionary power of the first one – in fact, here, too, the director seems to be doubling down, making his future even stranger and awe-inspiring than that of the first.

In short: Dune: Part One (2021)

As regular readers will know, I’m not as big of a fan Canadian director Denis Villeneuve as most of the critical caste seem to be. Instead of the intelligent and deep filmmaker others see, apart from the Blade Runner film I’ve mostly encountered movies I found pompous, painfully slow and self-serious, and lacking a spark of humanity, exclusively populated by characters who never smile or laugh and really love staring off into the distance dramatically. And please don’t ask me about what Arrival did to its source novella.

However, this time around, I’ve come to praise Villeneuve and not to make fun of him. Ironically, you can still use most of the points of criticism above against Dune: the characters certainly seem to be lacking in any sense of humour whatsoever, the film moves slowly, and Villeneuve takes things so very seriously indeed it could border on the ridiculous. It’s just that all of this works in the context of Dune in a way it very much didn’t in something like Sicario or Arrival. For once, the heightened tone is actually perfect for the source novel’s still peculiar and wonderful mixture of very old and very new (at least at its time) ideas and themes, something that aims for the mythical while at the same time trying to show how myth is a constructed thing.

Villeneuve is certainly better when it comes to constructing myth than criticising here, but then, pulling things down to Earth was really the job of the second novel and need not concern us with this film (or its sequel).

The film is most certainly a masterpiece of visual worldbuilding, creating the mood and feeling of its far future made out of things taken from many different pasts through fantastic production design, an often pleasantly peculiar Hans Zimmer score, and camera and editing rhythms that take their time to create the heft of reality.

Really, the only thing I’d wish I could change about this Villeneuve movie is the casting of Thimothée Chalamet as Paul; his range seems to lie exclusively between mopey, super mopey, and extra special mopey, which could become a bit of a problem in the second film when the kid’s supposed to be charismatic.

But then, nothing’s perfect.

In short: Arrival (2016)

Warning: A minor degree of spoilers is inevitable in this case

Usually, I have little trouble to entangle a movie adaptation from a superior more thoughtful source and take it for what it is. No such luck for me with Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of Ted Chiang’s “Story of Your Life”. It’s too bad too, for I suspect if I could, I would find a little bit more to like about the film at hand.

Part of this difficulty certainly lies in the fact that the film’s first half or so is a more than decent movie version of the story, given a glossy Hollywood sheen through impressive camera work, special effects that recommend themselves by never pointing to themselves, and expectedly good acting by Amy Adams, Jeremy Renner and Forest Whitaker. Adams’s Louise’s first visit to the alien spaceship is a fantastic moment that demonstrates the wonder, the awe and the terror of an encounter with the utterly alien. Alas, the aliens become increasingly less alien the longer the film goes on and the further it moves away from Chiang’s novella. In the end, the film’s aliens are just another band of outer space big daddies who have come to wag their fingers at humanity and unify it by force instead of the much more ambiguous and truly alien aliens of the novella to whom we and our ways are as alien as they are to us.

Of course, if the film did otherwise, we couldn’t have a last half hour mostly consisting of lame, clichéd ticking clock scenarios and been there, done that plot events. Keeping with this dumbing down, Villeneuve (or Eric Heisserer’s script) also turns the story’s central philosophical conceit into a plot-practical way to see into the future that is infuriating in its simple-mindedness, falling into the usual trap of expecting a film to play well to the dumbest audience member a Hollywood filmmaker can imagine.

All this does add up to the perfectly respectable kind of science fiction film that can play well with the Academy Awards audience (see also the loathsome Gravity), the sort of film that pretends to be deep and emotional but mostly makes empty gestures to hide how cynically manipulative it is. Which is in general what the big mainstream film awards still prefer from their films, the last bunch of Academy Awards nominees and winners notwithstanding.


Now, I’m not at all against spectacle with a hint of heart as my love for the output of Marvel Studios should prove, but the way Arrival handles these things really sticks in my craw, the series of pretentious gestures that never become anything more than gestures that is the final act, hiding emptiness behind the still fantastic effects and production design and an increasingly schmaltzy score by Jóhann Jóhannsson (who could do so much better), adding up to very little but presented with the grandest gestures possible.