Warning: there will be structural spoilers!
Jackie (Kate Dickie) is working as a CCTV operator in Glasgow. Apparently,
she lives a lonely life, a fortnightly appointment (one really doesn’t want to
call it a date) with a married man for some of the most loveless sex I can
imagine looking like the only regular social encounter in her life.
Things change when she sees a man we will later learn is named Clyde (Tony
Curran) on one of her monitors. Clyde must have been involved in some sort of
crime against her – a rape would be the most obvious assumption – so Jackie at
first seems panicked and desperate. However, she quickly begins to do more than
panic, watching Clyde, following him in person, and getting close enough for him
to touch, or for her to touch him.
Andrea Arnold’s Red Road is apparently part of some kind of filmic
round-robin in which Arnold and two other directors used the same group of
characters, but I don’t think one needs to know that or have seen the other
films to be able to appreciate the film as what it is: a study of alienation and
fear; a film about recovering from loss and guilt; and a brilliant revenge flick
that doesn’t play by the rules of its genre most of the time.
Despite a colour scheme dominated by grey that suggests some sort of nearly
documentary approach to filmmaking, Arnold is incredibly good at a lot of
techniques very much unlike a documentary. There’s expressive editing that
mirrors the mental state of Jackie, a camera that seems calm and distanced until
it isn’t anymore, and little moments when the greyness and the drabness (that is
as much outside of Jackie as it is inside of her) subtly clear a little. Further
adding weight to the film is the strength and complexity of Dickie’s and
Curran’s performances in the roles of two very difficult and very complex
persons who are emotionally close in a way that is so ironic it is nearly
perverse.
The film’s structure is admirable – as well as highly disciplined - including
a revelation about the actual nature of the relation between Jackie and Clyde I
wish scriptwriters trying to use plot twists would take a look at and learn
from. Not, mind you, that it feels like a plot twist (which is more often than
not a cheap surprise effect) – it is a revelation of truth that is also built to
shake an audience’s assumptions.
As it goes with films quite this good, I don’t really think talking Red
Road up – at least my way of doing it – does the film the justice it
deserves. It’s a film to be watched with an open mind, with patience and with
the greatest attention; to me, it felt very much like a revelation.
Showing posts with label kate dickie. Show all posts
Showing posts with label kate dickie. Show all posts
Tuesday, November 7, 2017
Sunday, October 30, 2016
The Witch: A New-England Folktale (2015)
New England around 1630. The family of William (Ralph Ineson) and Katherine
(Kate Dickie) goes into voluntary exile from their main settlement for
theological reasons I never got a grasp on and which the film might have kept
purposefully vague, given how focused and clear everything else about it is,
even its ambiguities.
In this place and time, this means the family goes right into the wilderness, settling down near a patch of woods. Things don’t go well at all for the family. Katherine’s baby disappears into the woods while Thomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy), the family’s eldest and the closest we have to a main protagonist, is playing with it near the woods. The child is just silently taken when Thomasin closes her eyes while playing peek-a-boo with it. William tries to explain the inexplicable with what we must imagine to be the sneakiest wolf in existence, but in truth, it was taken by the witch living in the woods to do what witches traditionally do with babies.
The loss of the child throws Katherine into deepest depression and certainly doesn’t make for an easy relationship between her and Thomasin. All the while the family’s crops are hit by some kind of sickness and during his attempts at providing meat, William doesn’t turn out to be much of a hunter – or the woods are against him. There’s even worse waiting for the family, and things will truly fall apart.
Generally, stating that a film isn’t for everyone is stating pretty much the obvious, yet I still feel the need to explain that Robert Eggers’s The Witch will most certainly not be for everyone, though for those of us who can appreciate it, this is an incredibly affecting and effective movie. If you’re going into the film expecting something even vaguely following the rules of modern mainstream or the slightly different ones of much of modern indie horror, you might be sorely disappointed, for this is a film that seems very little interested in genre conventions good or bad. In fact, for parts of the running time, The Witch approaches its horrors from the perspective of a historical psychodrama, though one that tries its hardest to share in the historical views of its characters concerning the supernatural.
Herein lies one of the film’s biggest strengths: while all of the supernatural or possibly supernatural occurrences here can be explained as outward manifestations of/metaphors for all the fears the characters’ faith brings with it and/or (the film is very conscious of the fact it is both) just barely helps them cope with, and everything they repress and leave unsaid, they are also presented through the mind set of the film’s characters. For them witches do exist as a matter of course and a black he-goat might in fact be the devil, so the film does indeed show us witches and the supernatural the way the family sees them. Eggers keeps to this approach stringently, successfully putting quite a bit of effort into making beliefs that are a difficult pill for most of its prospective audience to swallow real, even trying to keep the film’s dialogue as close to the written sources of the time to add a further level of authenticity and strangeness.
At the same time, the film – clearly very consciously – avoids treating characters who are deeply religious and superstitious in a way that can sound just plain insane to you or me as the Other, people for us to gawk or snigger at and feel superior to. Not just by sharing their view of the supernatural world for ninety minutes, but also by approaching them with a psychological realism that turns what might be difficult to relate to into something deeply human, with this only further pushing the audience into nearly sharing the characters beliefs and world view and understanding them for ninety minutes or so. These people may believe in things that sound strange or outright insane to us, yet there’s quite a bit less dividing them and us than we might pretend. With this understanding quite naturally also comes empathy, and with empathy comes an intense emotional wallop once things become increasingly intense and horrifying for the characters, who are not only beset by a witch but also their own failings. And, going by William’s Puritanical conviction of the essential sinfulness of everyone, those failings are as myriad as they are painfully human.
In this context, as a (non-New) atheist, I found it incredibly refreshing that the film neither just assumes an audience will (or needs to) share its own spiritual assumptions nor goes the route where beliefs we don’t share are things made for ridicule that make those carrying them less than human. It is very uncommon for a film to show characters like these as anything other than mere fanatics, and fanatics exclusively, so it is particularly affecting how clear the The Witch is about this being a loving family, with William not the clichéd religious patriarch who rules with an iron fist, but a decent man who truly loves his family and cares for them while struggling to keep with the demands of his faith and the harsh life he has damned them to. Of course, love doesn’t necessarily save anyone or anything.
I was also deeply impressed by the actors, who have to bring life to dialogue written in – and at least partially quoted from – the style of the time and place as it has come down to us in primary sources and need to go through intense, often painful, emotional scenes without sliding into the melodramatic or overly artificial. Anya Taylor-Joy is absolutely brilliant, and even the younger kids – Harvey Scrimshaw in particular - do some fantastic tour de force stuff here.
Eggers’s direction is on the same level as his script and the actors are, bringing all kinds of feelings to life – the loneliness and oppression of the woods (a place that can’t help but suggest the supernatural), the hard life the characters live even without folkloric witches besetting them, but also the moments of joy and love. There’s so much going on here without the film ever feeling overloaded that it’s a joy to watch. Or rather, a harrowing experience full of emotional tension and horrors, but you know what I mean.
The Witch also happens to be rather brilliant at being a horror film, creating a world so real – even if it is very much un-real – its horrors become just as real, even if they are as strange as those in the film’s folkloric sources. I, at least, won’t forget this one quickly.
In this place and time, this means the family goes right into the wilderness, settling down near a patch of woods. Things don’t go well at all for the family. Katherine’s baby disappears into the woods while Thomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy), the family’s eldest and the closest we have to a main protagonist, is playing with it near the woods. The child is just silently taken when Thomasin closes her eyes while playing peek-a-boo with it. William tries to explain the inexplicable with what we must imagine to be the sneakiest wolf in existence, but in truth, it was taken by the witch living in the woods to do what witches traditionally do with babies.
The loss of the child throws Katherine into deepest depression and certainly doesn’t make for an easy relationship between her and Thomasin. All the while the family’s crops are hit by some kind of sickness and during his attempts at providing meat, William doesn’t turn out to be much of a hunter – or the woods are against him. There’s even worse waiting for the family, and things will truly fall apart.
Generally, stating that a film isn’t for everyone is stating pretty much the obvious, yet I still feel the need to explain that Robert Eggers’s The Witch will most certainly not be for everyone, though for those of us who can appreciate it, this is an incredibly affecting and effective movie. If you’re going into the film expecting something even vaguely following the rules of modern mainstream or the slightly different ones of much of modern indie horror, you might be sorely disappointed, for this is a film that seems very little interested in genre conventions good or bad. In fact, for parts of the running time, The Witch approaches its horrors from the perspective of a historical psychodrama, though one that tries its hardest to share in the historical views of its characters concerning the supernatural.
Herein lies one of the film’s biggest strengths: while all of the supernatural or possibly supernatural occurrences here can be explained as outward manifestations of/metaphors for all the fears the characters’ faith brings with it and/or (the film is very conscious of the fact it is both) just barely helps them cope with, and everything they repress and leave unsaid, they are also presented through the mind set of the film’s characters. For them witches do exist as a matter of course and a black he-goat might in fact be the devil, so the film does indeed show us witches and the supernatural the way the family sees them. Eggers keeps to this approach stringently, successfully putting quite a bit of effort into making beliefs that are a difficult pill for most of its prospective audience to swallow real, even trying to keep the film’s dialogue as close to the written sources of the time to add a further level of authenticity and strangeness.
At the same time, the film – clearly very consciously – avoids treating characters who are deeply religious and superstitious in a way that can sound just plain insane to you or me as the Other, people for us to gawk or snigger at and feel superior to. Not just by sharing their view of the supernatural world for ninety minutes, but also by approaching them with a psychological realism that turns what might be difficult to relate to into something deeply human, with this only further pushing the audience into nearly sharing the characters beliefs and world view and understanding them for ninety minutes or so. These people may believe in things that sound strange or outright insane to us, yet there’s quite a bit less dividing them and us than we might pretend. With this understanding quite naturally also comes empathy, and with empathy comes an intense emotional wallop once things become increasingly intense and horrifying for the characters, who are not only beset by a witch but also their own failings. And, going by William’s Puritanical conviction of the essential sinfulness of everyone, those failings are as myriad as they are painfully human.
In this context, as a (non-New) atheist, I found it incredibly refreshing that the film neither just assumes an audience will (or needs to) share its own spiritual assumptions nor goes the route where beliefs we don’t share are things made for ridicule that make those carrying them less than human. It is very uncommon for a film to show characters like these as anything other than mere fanatics, and fanatics exclusively, so it is particularly affecting how clear the The Witch is about this being a loving family, with William not the clichéd religious patriarch who rules with an iron fist, but a decent man who truly loves his family and cares for them while struggling to keep with the demands of his faith and the harsh life he has damned them to. Of course, love doesn’t necessarily save anyone or anything.
I was also deeply impressed by the actors, who have to bring life to dialogue written in – and at least partially quoted from – the style of the time and place as it has come down to us in primary sources and need to go through intense, often painful, emotional scenes without sliding into the melodramatic or overly artificial. Anya Taylor-Joy is absolutely brilliant, and even the younger kids – Harvey Scrimshaw in particular - do some fantastic tour de force stuff here.
Eggers’s direction is on the same level as his script and the actors are, bringing all kinds of feelings to life – the loneliness and oppression of the woods (a place that can’t help but suggest the supernatural), the hard life the characters live even without folkloric witches besetting them, but also the moments of joy and love. There’s so much going on here without the film ever feeling overloaded that it’s a joy to watch. Or rather, a harrowing experience full of emotional tension and horrors, but you know what I mean.
The Witch also happens to be rather brilliant at being a horror film, creating a world so real – even if it is very much un-real – its horrors become just as real, even if they are as strange as those in the film’s folkloric sources. I, at least, won’t forget this one quickly.
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