Three Films Make A Post: A dangerous land breeds a dangerous man.

Siberia (2018): I’m pretty sure Matthew Ross’s Siberia was meant to be some sort of neo noir, using its Keanu Reeves protagonist’s misadventures in shady diamond dealings and cheating in Russia as a means to show his alienation and probably say something about the US’s standing in the world right now too. Alas, what we actually get is a film whose characters are as clichéd as they are uninvolving, and played with little conviction by a cast that seem to have been provided with little usable direction. What little there is of a plot moves with all the verve of a dead snail, lacking any and all interesting detail. Direction-wise, this is a slick, personality-less concoction that looks pretty but doesn’t create a mood, or a world for its characters to inhabit, nor does it create much of a point for anything going on in it, very slowly.

Sequence Break (2017): Equally unsuccessful but at least more ambitious is this Cronenberg without the philosophy but with arcade consoles bit by Graham Skipper (whom I know better as an extremely dependable indie genre movie actor). Stylistically, this really wants to be a Panos Cosmatos movie – or at least loves the same things about Cronenberg movies Cosmatos loves – but it never quite manages to create the proper mood of dream/nightmare/insanity, and is at its heart too friendly and romantic to really hit the philsophical and aesthetical extremes of its models. It is borrowing their surfaces instead of their cores and never quite manages to convince me of its own core.

Blood and Money aka Allagash (2020): Also dwelling completely in very traditional genre structures, character types and ideas, John Barr’s movie concerning an old hunter (Tom Berenger) stumbling into conflict with a brutal gang of robbers in the Allagash is much better at bringing them to life than this week’s other films. In part, that’s thanks to Barr’s slow yet focussed direction style, in part thanks to a performance by a Berenger clearly happy to get a role with a bit of substance his late work isn’t exactly full of, and in part simply because Barr (who also co-wrote this with Alan Petherick) knows how to flesh out tropes and connect them to actual life.


It’s also a film very clear about the utter, existential uselessness of its characters’ struggles, Berenger making one bad decision after the other in a mixture of bad habit, bad luck and an ill-understood idea of redemption that’s going to redeem nobody and improve nothing in the world.

Three Films Make A Post: This is the moment when 32 lives are laid bare!!!

Frank & Lola (2016): Matthew Ross’s sort of psychological thriller (in the way certain Chabrol thrillers position themselves to the genre) is a rather frustrating film in so far as the film nearly comes together as something very special but instead ends up as a demonstration of talent that doesn’t quite take on the shape of a successful film. Certainly, Ross has visual style yet also – not always a given for stylish directors – trusts his actors to do their work, getting fine performances out of Michael Shannon and Imogen Poots, and then applying his powers of pizazz to enhance them. Yet still, the film never quite comes together as the psychosexual noir love story it is selling itself as, never quite making its characters coherent enough to work. The film makes a habit out of leaving just the wrong things ambiguous, emphasizing just the wrong moments; it’s like an instrument that’s always just a little bit out of tune.

Sweet Virginia (2017): Turning this into an inadvertent double feature, Poots also features in Jamie M. Dagg’s rural neo noir about murder plans gone wrong, love hidden, and friendship betrayed that among other things teaches us that you probably should not hire a random crazy fuck-up to murder your husband, nor do so before you are actually sure there’s any money to pay the guy. While Poots’s husband murdering ways are getting the film’s plot going, it actually concentrates on Christopher Abbott as Elwood, the guy she hired to do the deed, and Jon Bernthal as former rodeo rider turned broken (with so much rage and violence locked away) motel owner Sam Rossi. There’s not much here anybody looking for an original plot will find interesting, but that’s really not the point here; rather, this is a film interested in exploring its characters together with its audience, turning the rote clichés they could be into people, and then telling its dark story about betrayals and violence in an off-handed manner that never quite hides how dark some of the undercurrents here are. That much of what happens is obvious and feels inevitable isn’t a flaw but part of the film’s point.


La peau blanche aka White Skin (2004): This French Canadian arthouse (in the slow French style) horror film directed by Daniel Roby about two students encountering what you can read as female vampires, succubi, or cannibals is a bit of a mess. At times it seems to want to explore the meaning of Blackness in French Canada, 2004, while keeping its main black character in a supporting role; at other times, it seems to try to explore the idea of obsessional love, and the terrors and joys of the love of family; there may also be something about the morals of cannibalism in it. However, while Roby’s direction is generally artful, he never actually decides what exactly it is he is talking about, going off in different directions for little reason and never really arriving anywhere concrete, resulting in a feeling of insubstantiality that fits a film that acts so cerebral rather badly.