Three Films Make A Post: A Killer Comedy

Louder!: Can’t Hear What You’re Singin’, Wimp (2019) aka  音量を上げろタコ！なに歌ってんのか全然わかんねぇんだよ!!: I’ve seen and enjoyed most of director Satoshi Miki’s other comedies, but I have to admit, those films did leave me somewhat less puzzled than this one does. This is one of those Japanese comedies that often leave one confused if one doesn’t get a joke (or a whole scene) because one lacks sufficient cultural grounding for it, or because the film’s just frigging weird. It’s certainly never boring – Miki’s incredibly nervous direction alone is proof against that - and some of the things I do indeed get are pretty funny, as some of the film’s more earnest bits (or are they ironically earnest? who can tell?) seemed to be somewhat moving. I’m still not sure what the story of a rock singer (Sadao Abe) with doped vocal cords and a street singer (Riho Yoshioka) who can’t sing other than quiet as a mouse is trying to tell me except that making loud stadium music is better than making soft, intimate one. I am pretty sure it does want to say something, but hey, them’s the breaks.

Adventures in Babysitting (1987): Whereas this PG-13 80s US teen comedy by Chris Columbus is pretty obvious as to what it wants to do and be and why, leading to as fun a time as a film quite this fluffy can be. It’s the kid-friendly version of those 80s and 90s movies about a guy from the suburbs having weird adventures in the Big City (in this case Chicago), just that in this case, the guy is an incredibly charming young Elisabeth Shue dragging a bunch of kids (among them a Marvel-Thor-loving little girl) around. The whole thing is about as deep as a puddle, but as charming and likeable as its heroine, really putting effort into skirting around racism and unpleasantness in tone while not becoming too harmless. Plus, there’s a fun cameo by blues man Albert Collins (leading into an absurd and excellent musical number), and one Vincent Phillip D’Onofrio as (sort of) Thor.

Lying and Stealing (2019): This crime comedy by Matt Aselton that plays out like a heist movie without a proper heist – the thievery committed by Theo James’s character isn’t really interesting enough to be called heists – a bit of romance and just enough of the nasty stuff nobody would want to call it harmless. Aselton’s direction is capable, stylish, but a bit too light in moments that should have an emotional impact, the smaller roles are cast very well (including house favourite Ebon Moss-Bachrach as the protagonist’s bipolar drug-addled brother), and the film’s generally likeable, clever, and certainly not boring.


My problem with the film is that neither James nor female lead Emily Ratajkowski are quite up to the challenge of bringing their characters and their romance to life, and seem to be cast more for their ability to look hot in designer clothes (which they undoubtedly do) than to bring nuance to what they do.

In Darkness (2018)

Warning: I’m going to spoil the final twist and a lot of what comes before it, but it’s the film’s own damn fault!

Blind pianist Sofia (Natalie Dormer) leads a rather solitary life in London, clearly not having any close friends or family. One can’t help but get the impression that – outside of her work in an orchestra – stumbling onto her party girl upstairs neighbour Veronique (Emily Ratajkowski) from time to time is the closest human contact she’s got.

So it might come as a surprise to the audience when Sofia acoustically witnesses what sounds very much like the murder of Veronique and pretends neither to have known the girl nor to have heard the murder when questioned by the investigating policeman Mills (Neill Maskell). She also doesn’t mention how Veronique managed to get her a gig playing at a private party of the girl’s Serbian war criminal turned politically protected philanthropist father Radic (Jan Bijvoet).

Clearly, Sofia has some secrets of her own that somehow connect to the Yugoslavian Civil War - secrets so big, she doesn’t even come clean when she’s hunted for a USB stick Veronique managed to hide with her without her noticing. Also involved will be Radic’s right hand woman (Joely Richardson) and her brother and private hitman Marc (Ed Skrein). But we all know how professional killers are with blind women.

For the longest part of its running time, I was rather enamoured with Anthony Byrne’s In Darkness, particularly the immensely stylish ways the director finds to acoustically but also visually impress the importance of sound to its lead character, emphasising the sources of sounds and the way sound travels in the staging of many scenes.

It’s a visually rich and striking film, turning nights strangely colourful while still emphasizing the shadows at the core of its complicated and emotionally somewhat twisted plots, while never seeming to overindulge in technical trickery, creating an often dream-like world for its thriller plot to take place in instead of the surface realistically one many examples of the genre prefer. In this it shares – at least in my eyes – the feel of the best giallos, though there is, of course, a lot of Hitchcock visible too. Hitchcock is a rather unavoidable influence, really, for In Darkness doesn’t just wallow in the creation of atmosphere but is also equally adept at classicist suspense scenes, even sharing Hitchcock’s ability to turn moments that should be absolutely silly (the scene where Sofia attempts to hide a poison vial so that Radic doesn’t see it doesn’t make any sense whatsoever when you think about it, for example) into little nail biters. Some blind main character standard thriller scenes also make an appearance, but in Byrne’s hands, these turn out to be just as thrilling as they were the first time, many decades ago. There are also some wonderful action sequences, like the one where Marc saves Sofia from a bit of torture and murder, the film keeping the focus on the matter of factness with which Marc uses violence, showing instead of telling that he must do this sort of thing every day.

Dormer’s (who was also involved in the script) performance is wonderful too, at first suggesting all kinds of things going on behind a very calm facade, then always finding just the right measure for cracks in the facade to appear. She also manages – something that must be particularly difficult because this is the point where many a good performance in a thriller of this sort falters – to convince the audience that the moments when Sofia breaks down completely (and the film provides her with some psychologically nasty reasons for breaking down) are logical consequences of her character, her past, and what is happening right now, and not just the moments when the plot needs her to break down. The film has good performances all around, anyway. Especially Richardson’s Alex is a wonderfully sarcastic and ambiguous presence. Why, even Ed Skrein is sort of okay in this one.

As a movie about vengeance, In Darkness is a surprisingly complicated film too, never trying to convince the audience Sofia’s plan is either right or wrong, only that it feels like an emotional necessity to her, yet also acknowledging that she might very well be lying to herself there too. She is after, all lying to everyone else all of the time, too.


Which brings us to the film’s final plot twist, a moment so self-sabotaging and plain stupid it is difficult to reconcile it with the slick, self-assured and intelligent rest of the film. For, you see, Sofia isn’t actually blind, but apparently so deeply into The Method she’s even pretending to be blind when she’s home alone with only the camera to see her, able to block all her natural reflexes connected to her eyesight completely. Why she’s a real life Natalie Dormer, and Matt Murdock’s got nothing on her! Apart from the stupidity, needlessness - there’s no reason for her not to be blind apart from the film just wanting another plot twist – and somewhat ableist (never thought I’d use that word, but here we are) vibe of the twist, it also retroactively dumbs down what came before. Suddenly, at least half of the suspense sequences I enjoyed so much make now no sense whatsoever. The film’s concentration on sound? Just a distraction instead of a meaningful expression of its protagonist’s world through style. Half of Sofia’s actions? Utterly preposterous now. It’s as destructive a final plot twist as I’ve ever suffered through as a viewer; perhaps even worse is that I can’t even imagine why anyone involved might have thought this to be a good idea.