Becoming (2020)

A side trip on the way to her parents turns out rather differently for the couple of Lisa (Penelope Mitchell) and Alex (Toby Kebbell) than they probably would have hoped for. Alex has no family left anymore, but Lisa has managed to find his single living relative Glen (Jeff Daniel Phillips), and has talked Alex into a visit while they are out and about on the highway anyway.

Something’s not at all right with Glen, though. It’s not “just” that he seems to be abusive towards his wife Annie (Melissa Bolona), there’s a vibe of even greater wrongness surrounding him. As it turns out, he is possessed by a non-corporeal entity I’m just gonna call “Mr Toxic Masculinity” from now on, a thing that simple jumps from his old host to another one when the old one dies. And the thing clearly sees Alex – particularly with Lisa as a bonus victim thrown into the mix – as a rather more attractive proposition, so a murder-“suicide” later, Alex starts to slowly but surely change into a much nastier man.

It takes some time of pretty surreal encounters until the change is complete and Alex, who was a much less than perfect guy already, as Lisa will also learn, turns into a complete monster.

Lisa does manage to acquire some useful exposition via the son of one of Mr Toxic Masculinity’s former victims (Jason Patric), but it will take some time and suffering until she can go through with the rather radical method of getting rid of the thing at least for a time he proposes.

I am rather pleasantly surprised by Omar Naim’s Becoming. It’s certainly not a perfect film – especially the third act suffers under a not terribly climactic finale and a dissatisfying open ending – but there’s a lot of good in the film too. Its use of a monster that’s basically all that’s wrong with certain men but even worse than that because it corrupts and destroys those men who aren’t like it and then in turn abuses their wives and girlfriends using their bodies is very strong, and certainly further improved by using a female perspective to look at this shit, trying not to exploit domestic violence for cheap thrills but to evoke audience identification with its victims.

Naim’s decision to make the relationship between Lisa and Alex not perfect and simple (which is mostly Alex’s fault, it seems) is rather well thought through too. This way, the film’s not pretending that men need to be possessed by malevolent forces to do bad things.

Being me, I did of course particularly enjoy the phase of the film when Alex is slowly hollowed out by Mr Toxic Masculinity, which provides rather a lot of the good kind of emotional pathos, but also gives Naim the opportunity to create a couple of very cool scenes in which the world around Alex and Lisa stops working as it usually does, and identities shift in disturbing and un-real ways.

Mitchell and Kebbell give some properly great performances for this sort of thing too, Kebbell effortlessly selling the shift between Alex the flawed but human guy and Alex the monster out of Miramax’s producer suite, while Mitchell is tasked not only to be the heroine of the piece but also to sell us on the threat the new version of Alex is, as well as her slow recognition of what she’ll need to do to survive and needs to play over the weakness of the final act.


However, despite those landing troubles and Naim’s not terribly creative visual style, Becoming is still a very interesting piece of modern horror, certainly one worth watching, and most certainly one that makes me very interested in the director’s next movie.

Three Films Make A Post: Fight back or die.

Harry Brown (2009): For a time there, Daniel Barber’s film about an elderly ex-marine turning vigilante played by Michael Caine, had me thinking it was trying to say something actually interesting about the rights, wrongs and consequences of vigilantism but in the end, it all turns out to be your usual reactionary fantasy about killing the poor and the supposed inefficiency of the law in doing that, not exactly something I have much of a taste for when it doesn’t go so over the top I can stop taking it seriously. This one doesn’t go over the top, but it is also just not terribly great as a crime thriller. The only truly memorable thing is a performance by Caine that suggests a load of emotions and ideas that don’t actually seem to be in the script, Caine showing a touching vulnerability that doesn’t often ring this true in movies about aging and elderly men of violence.

Gosford Park (2001): Keeping with great old men, this is one of Robert Altman’s final films as a director (and his last truly good one, I believe). Usually, the idea of an American playing with elements of the British country house mystery suggests a bumbling tourist not getting anything about class, but this being Altman, that fear didn’t even come up for me. And rightly so, for Altman uses the form (well, the parts of the form that interest him – this is a film that’s half over before the murder happens, and rightly so) to not just explore the British class system between the wars, or the way it already shows cracks, but is most concerned about the way the lives of people intersect in a society that puts the borders between the rich, the poor, and the working rich particularly high, finding heart-breaking moments that prove a murder to be much less important than basically everything else going on around it. Altman also has time for moments of acerbic whit, nods to popular culture of the age (Ivor Novello is one of the characters, as well as a fictionalized producer of Charlie Chan films), all filled with life by a thoroughly brilliant cast and by his accustomed way with organizing large numbers of characters in an intellectually and emotionally impactful way.


Narc (2002): Joe Carnahan’s neo noirish crime film about a former undercover cop (Jason Patric) who accidentally killed a baby during a wild shoot-out pressed into investigating the murder of another undercover cop, and teaming up with the other undercover’s former friend (Ray Liotta), a man even more damaged and violent – and possibly worse – then himself is certainly not a Robert Altman film in style or thought. Apart from a handful of scenes when Carnahan falls into the worst kind of “hey, look at me! I have a digital editing suite” filmmaking, this is a wonderful film. Heated, grim, and appropriately violent, Narc portrays the characters’ world as a cesspool of cruelty and corruption yet also finds time to give even the most minor drug dealer a human personality, does good by fantastic lead performances and also has a really well-constructed mystery at its heart whose solution plays expertly with the audience expectations of the genre savvy without feeling smug.