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.

Between Worlds (2018)

Long haul truck driver Joe (Nicolas Cage) is at the end of his rope. Following the death of his wife and kid, he has lost whatever grip he had on life – it clearly wasn’t terribly tight to begin with - and turned into a (probably unwashed) alcoholic who’s bound to even lose his truck soon enough. And, as Joe will explain, a man without a truck isn’t a man. No, seriously.

Anyway, while at a rest stop, Joe saves a woman we will soon enough learn is called Julie (Franka Potente) from being choked to death. His rescue attempt was a bit misguided, though, for Julie wanted to be choked. You see, she can contact the spirit world, but only when she is suffocating. So says the script, and who are we to roll our eyes? And right now, Julie needs all the suffocation she can get, for her daughter Billie (Penelope Mitchell) has fallen into a coma following an accident. As you do in this sort of situation, Joe helps Julie by at first driving her to the hospital, and later getting on with some helpful hospital stairway choking. Lo and behold! It helps, and Julie seems to have gotten her daughters spirit back into her body.

She also gets Joe into her pants right quick, and things could be fine – as much as any relationship with a character played by Cage can be fine – with Julie having a new horrible relationship obviously doomed to crash and burn and her daughter being alright again. But as it turns out, Julie didn’t get the spirit of her daughter back into her body, but somehow opened up the body to the ghost that had been hanging around Joe, his dead wife Mary (sometimes played by Lydia Hearst). Of course, Billie manages to convince Joe soon enough she is indeed his wife, and he does what any rational guy played by Cage would do, and starts an affair (including very special sex techniques like reading poetry aloud during sex) with the spirit of his dead wife inhabiting the body of his new girlfriend’s daughter. As you can imagine, nothing can go wrong there.

You may or may not believe it, but that is indeed the plot of writer-director Maria Pulera’s Between Worlds, following a script that somehow must have convinced someone wearing a suit to provide enough of a budget to hire Cage, Potente and Mitchell and have enough money left to shoot a film that looks perfectly professional, if haunted by a tendency to stage everything in the most trashy way possible. The sex scenes alone, with Cage huffing and puffing, and mugging and reading poetry, and the director thinking it a great idea to intercut various sex adventures into one single scene of epic weirdness are a thing to behold; Dutch angles crop up; suspense is based on the big question of Joe being able to get his pants back on quickly enough.

And if all of this sounds to you like a Lifetime movie gone mad(der than typical), that’s what the film suggests to me too, just with a bit more (and perfectly unappetizing, because who the hell wants to see Cage do this?) sleaze, and a script that throws out bizarre and goofy ideas by the dozen. Whereas the modern Lifestyle movie defaults to camp as its tone, though, I never quite understood what tone the film at hand is actually going for. Am I supposed to take any of this seriously? Is the director? The actors apparently don’t know either, with Potente (who doesn’t work great with Cage here) looking as if she’s just barely holding off giggling fits, Cage doing that thing where he’s making perfectly sensible acting decisions for the bizarre material he is given about half of the time, but going all-out Cage-crazy for the other half, and only Mitchell seeming to be able to decide on a tone and keep to it. Is that what the filmmakers wanted? Who knows?


What I do know is that, even though the film obviously is a bizarre mess of curious ideas, dubious execution and Nicolas Cage cageing out, it is also highly entertaining. I might not have cared about the supposed psychological damage of any of the freaks on screen, and never found myself pondering the conundrum of a guy wavering between hot sexy times with the spirit of his wife in the hot young body of the daughter of his girlfriend and said girlfriend, but I sure as hell was always looking forward to the next bit of strangeness Between Worlds came up with. For like its male lead, the film may have a tendency to dubious decisions (some may call them “bad”) but those decisions are always interesting, surprising and genuinely entertaining. Also, in terribly bad taste, but who cares?