Three Films Make A Post: The old flesh is dead, long live the new!

Darklands (1996): What starts out as if it could become a considerably interesting piece of post-industrial folk horror (the sub-sub genre still waiting on its day) becomes less and less so the longer it goes on, the film wasting some promising ideas on occult conspiracy by the numbers plotting. On paper highly interesting elements like the connection between a “back to our Celtic roots” right-wing politician and a revived druid cult are wasted on barely competent suspense scenes; the filmmakers clearly didn’t do any research on actual pagan practices and most certainly couldn’t come up with anything exciting on their own. The conspiracy plot only manages to remind one of films who are much better at this sort of thing. There’s really little there apart from the initial promise, this being the first Welsh horror movie or not.

Project Power (2020): On one hand, I really think superhero cinema could use more of Henry Joost’s and Ariel Schulman’s focus on POC characters, and featuring among others a plot line that’s explicitly about empowering a young, poor, black teenager is a fine thing to have in this sort of thing. But the film’s not terribly good at integrating these aspirations into its more typical superpowered business, the action movie parts never feeling actually informed by the rest of the film. It doesn’t help that the film is one of those films that believe replacing superhero tropes with action movie tropes somehow makes its view of the world more realistic, when in fact, it’s just blowing up its body count.

Generally, the film has a bit of a meandering quality, its plot lines taking too long to come together (and I would argue that excising Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s character completely would have cost the film nothing but an actor working below his abilities), and the big dramatic beats never quite having the heft the film seems to think they do.

Visually, the Netflix production is a bit of a middling affair where ugly colour schemes meet competent but often slightly bland action.

Ava (2020): Also perfectly watchable but not exactly great (or even good) is Tate Taylor’s tale of a killer for a weird organization with the least believable procedure finding herself in the crosshairs of her own people while also trying to solve some family business I could care less about. The cast – with Jessica Chastain, John Malkovich, Geena Davis, Common and Colin Farrell among others – is great, but the script loves to go through the most generic plot beats available at any given time, leaving these poor people to pretend the way that organization does business (from its boss doing business at his home next to his playing children to the bizarre assassination plans) makes any kind of sense even for an action movie or allude to not terribly interesting backstories.


All of this would be perfectly forgivable if the action were actually impressive, or the family drama all that riveting, but the former is competent (with action-inexperienced Chastain sometimes struggling to go into the action heroine poses) at best, the latter simply not very interesting.

In short: Nerve (2016)

High school senior Vee (Emma Roberts) is the sensible – and decidedly too pliable - one in her small group of friends, hiding behind her extroverted friend Sydney (Emily Meade), ignoring the mute pining of her friend Tommy (Miles Heizer), and pining for some quarterback guy herself. She’d never actually say something, of course.

However, things change when her peers pressure Vee into playing a new, mysterious online game named Nerve. Nerve pays its players for filming themselves fulfilling increasingly difficult dares, while another part of its customer base pays to watch and vote and judge. Riding on an adrenaline high, driven on by all filmmakers’ love for the classic cliché of the inhibited person losing all measure of control once she steps out of her rut, and by the fact that the game throws her together with mysterious, brooding hottie Ian (Dave Franco), Vee keeps playing and playing, going from silly to problematic to outright dangerous and cruel dares, only realizing what she’s doing when it is perhaps already too late.

There have been quite a few films attempting to use and/or exploit contemporary social media youth culture (man, do I feel old writing this) for horror and thriller plots, but quite a few of these films fail because it is all too obvious – even to a guy like me born in the late 70s of the last century – that the filmmakers have little clue about how actual teens live their online lives (“Something about the Bookface, right, Jim?”), and therefore can’t but fail trying to comment on it. Going by their filmography, Nerve’s directors Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman and their screenwriter Jessica Sharzer are much closer to contemporary teen culture, and are consequently much better suited to evoke it as the basis for their film and comprehending what might be good or problematic about it.

This doesn’t mean that the film has any ambitions at being documentary or being “realistic”; it is more interested in grounding its thriller plot in something close to actual teen experience and then to exaggerate certain elements of it to comment on them. This grounding of course helps the film work as a thriller, too, building a reality whose boundaries can then be tested. Having said that, Nerve’s final act leaves any of that grounding business behind, solving the characters’ problems in ways that are certainly thematically appropriate but have nothing whatsoever to do with how computers are used, programming works, or what “open source” means. However, at this point, the film’s generally clever approach has earned it enough brownie points I feel it has also earned itself the right to leave the realm of plausibility behind.


Particularly since the film happens to be a solid teen thriller, with good acting, excellently paced escalation that usually also resonates thematically, beautiful, pretty damn eye-popping use of 2010s style neon colours and a slick but not vapid direction style. Now, Nerve’s finale is rather too on the nose for my taste (and would have utterly infuriated me by being so on the nose when I was a teenager) but I really think it is an honest and logical part of the film as a whole.