Three Films Make A Posthouse

The Eternal Daughter (2022): I generally tend to avoid the style of arthouse movies concerning the horrible suffering of posh people from some Freudian bullshit or other or moaning about the oh so terrible emptiness of their lives Joanna Hogg deals in, but when a film is supposed to conjure up the shadow of the 70s Ghost Stories for Christmas, I can’t really resist. And yes, there are some inspired moody shots of the kind Lawrence Gordon Clark dealt in to be found here, and those are certainly artfully done. But there’s also the fact this thing purporting to be a ghost story about grief often seems more like one about a rich person suffering from a bad experience with the hotel staff, which, personally, mostly makes me grief the lack of a guillotine in the hotel’s backroom.

At least Tilda Swinton must have been happy, for she gets to play one of those double roles she clearly relishes.

Summer of Demon (1981): While I’m complaining about ghost stories that don’t build an emotional connection to me as audience, Yukio Ninagawa’s version of Yotsuya Kaidan manages the unthinkable, namely, to make me feel nothing about the tale of Oiwa’s ghost. Coming from a successful career as a director of plays – apparently particularly Shakespeare – Ninagawa overcompensates for his inexperience in screen direction with a lot of distracting, busy camerawork that typically adds nothing to a scene and a lack of focus on the core of the story he’s telling. Kenichi Hagiwara makes a flat Iemon, and Keiko Takahashi’s Oiwa isn’t interesting alive or as a ghost here.

It doesn’t help Ninagawa’s case that I have seen Tai Kato’s much superior version just some months ago, and so have ample comparison points to the detriment of this one.

Posthouse (2025): Thus, the best of this entry’s bunch of movies is Nikolas Red’s tale of an (actually real) lost Pinoy silent horror movie, bad family business, and the danger of obsessing about art. You do need to have some patience with this one, though: the acting is never quite sharp enough for the complex emotions the script suggests, the visual side has a rather cheap, digital look, and the fake silent movie pieces are creepy but never convince as what they are supposed to be.

Still, there’s something genuine, serious and interesting about this one that makes it well worthy of some attention and some thought.

In short: Last and First Men (2020)

Last and First Men is the only full length (or thereabouts) feature directed by well-loved around here as well as elsewhere composer Jóhann Jóhannsson. Completed after his death, this is a fascinating bit of poetical, experimental narrative cinema, certainly influenced by Chris Marker in the way it mixes its sources visual and audio-visual to create something new.

In practice, this consists of Tilda Swinton (always up to any interesting project offered) calmly and carefully reading parts of the final chapters of Olaf Stapledon’s titular wonderful far future history, underlaid by swelling and descending drones by Jóhannsson and Yair Elazar Glotman, while the camera pans over – sometimes strangely angled – black and white shots of spomeniks, those brutalist-abstract World War II monuments built throughout what was then Yugoslavia, here meant to evoke the ruins of a future past; additionally, there’s an oscilloscope.

It all combines into something highly evocative, suggesting dimensions of time, as well as a feeling of nostalgia and melancholia for all the things we can’t experience that will already have been lost in the far future from where our narrator speaks, which is the place where nostalgia gets weird as in Weird Fiction. There’s horror for the future terrors and the inevitability of the end of everything (us, the universe and everything in between) yet also awe, awe for the now, the times in between, and even the wonder and terror of our end.

In other words, this film’s basic concept, mood, and execution seem to be directly made for me, seeing as it involves Cosmic Horror and Cosmic Awe (see also Lovecraft for the pessimistic version and Arthur C. Clarke for the optimistic one), drones, weird art shot weirdly (that’s a compliment), and one of the best novels of one of the great underread SF writers. If you’re in the proper mindset to appreciate this sort of thing, you may very well be moved as much as I was watching it.

In short: The Dead Don’t Die (2019)

Centerville, an American small town populated by Jim Jarmusch characters played by Jim Jarmusch’s actor and musician friends (Bill Murray, Adam Driver, Tilda Swinton, Chloë Sevigny, Steve Buscemi, Eszter Balint, Danny Glover, Tom Waits, Zombie Iggy Pop, Caleb Landry Jones, RZA, Larry Fessenden, Selena Gomez and so on and so forth), suffers under the results of slight changes in the Earth’s axial rotation certainly not at all caused by polar cap fracking, no sir. Namely, some ever so slight troubles with electronic devices, the day night cycle, Sturgill Simpson’s theme song to the film, and the return of the deceased as flesh eating zombies. Needless to say, things are going to end badly.

Even among fans of the great Jim Jarmusch’s late-ish – the kind of late that makes a boy hope the director’s gonna live long enough this will actually turn out to be the mid-period of his career – period, this expedition into the realm of the horror comedy (or really, the realm of what a horror comedy would look like when made by Jarmusch), has a bit of a marmite effect. Also, there’s the “The Dead Don’t Die” by Sturgill Simpson. It’s great.

It’s no surprise, really, for here, Jarmusch’s typical love for the laconic and the dead-pan turns even deader (which seems curiously appropriate for a zombie movie), exclusively featuring humour so dry, it’s situated in one of the world’s great deserts. This extra dry approach feels pretty hilarious in itself, like an attempt to really dance on the edge where something can actually still be called humour and not just the in-jokey product of a bunch of friends who somehow got paid for farting around in front of a camera. Me, I found myself amused by this approach more often than not, chuckling quite regularly about some of the running gags, even finding myself snorting about the many, many scenes of Murray and Driver trying to out-dead-pan each other (Murray’s winning, of course, because he’s not been moving his face or his voice much for a few more decades than driver), the throw-away side gags, and of course, Sturgill Simpson’s “The Dead Don’t Die”.

Plus, how many other films do you know in which Tilda Swinton is playing a perhaps somewhat weird Scottish coroner with an old school samurai thing and turns out to be…something spoilerish? Or whose theme song is Sturgill Simpson’s “The Dead Don’t Die”?


Seriously, I love the film dearly, but I can’t really blame anyone coming out of this with a puzzled and mildly annoyed expression on their face, because that’s just the kind of horror comedy The Dead Don’t Die is.

Some Thoughts On Suspiria (2018)

Now finally having seen it, I am a bit confused by the lukewarm critical reception Luca Guadagnino’s “remake” (really, it’s a film that uses some motives and character names and does its very own thing with them) of one of Dario Argento’s masterpieces got. Sure, the “this isn’t real horror” brigade, I can understand, even if I disagree, but the other critical main tenor about this being “self-indulgent” and difficult to understand? Nope. Although the film’s two and a half hour running time isn’t for the faint of heart. And for the kind of viewer that can’t cope with films eschewing irony and winking self-consciousness, a film taking itself and what it is doing quite as seriously as this one does even though a lot of what it is doing is inherently strange will not be the thing they’ll be able to appreciate. So, now that I think about it, I indeed do understand the reception, I just don’t share it.

The thing is, this view of Suspiria feels so alien a reaction to the absolutely riveting, aesthetically thoughtful and intelligent, and thematically rich film I’ve seen, I find myself shaking my head a little. This isn’t really an attempt of a deep dive into the film at hand at all, for I believe this one’s really better off seen without too many preconceptions and a willingness to go where it leads.

So, let me just gush a little about some things I loved about the film. There is, for one, Dakota Johnson’s intense, physical performance at the film’s human core that finds ways to express states of mind and personality and intensity through body language even in a film as heavily stylized and aestheticized as this one; she also keeps up with Tilda Swinton in wonderful form, without ever letting any strain show. Speaking of Swinton, in one of the film’s seemingly more eccentric decisions, she is playing – one under heavy make-up – both parts of the film’s inimical witch cult leaders, as well as pseudonymously that of grieving old psychiatrist Klemperer. I say seemingly because on the film’s metaphorical and occult level, a single actress portraying the three poles of the film’s thematic discussion concerning guilt, innocence, the kind of dances you can dance after Auschwitz (to paraphrase Adorno now surely rotating in his grave), and change and the manner in which to achieve it, is actually a brilliant decision.

Also rather brilliant is Guadagnino’s handling of the film’s setting in Berlin, 1977, which at first seems like a gimmick but quickly turns out to be deeply important for the concerns I just mentioned. Guadagnino quite correctly understands divided Berlin and West Germany in this stage of RAF terrorism as still lying under the shadow of Nazism, the political state of the times still a consequence of World War II. In fact, the division in the film’s coven and what is happening in the Berlin surrounding it are very much coming from the same place, still working through the same things, which to me is a huge part of the film’s point.

All of this and quite a few things more concerning female awakening in sexual, political and spiritual ways the film expresses through an often brilliant visual language that, when taking place outside of the dance academy has a wonderful grip on how to present a time and place in telling detail without overindulging in said detail, and when taking place inside uses crosscuts, gliding camera work and moments of sudden surrealism to create a nightmare mirror of the outside world. It is, and I suspect very much on purpose, a bit of an as above, so below approach to speaking of the world, though I leave it to any given viewer to decide what here is above and what below.


And if that sounds like the sort of thing that will float your boat, you owe it to yourself to run, not walk, and watch Suspiria.

In short: Only Lovers Left Alive (2013)

I didn’t at all expect to like Jim Jarmusch’s vampire movie, much less be as delighted by it as I turned out to be, because the fantastic generally seems to bring out the worst in Jarmusch, the old-mannish cultural critique, and the use of metaphors that only ever are metaphors but never feel real as part of the world of a film.

None of these things actually apply here, the cultural critique is wry, the metaphors work on the level of the film’s reality too, and most of what sometimes feels pretentious about Jarmusch’s work is charming and seems perfectly placed in context of a film that follows various ideas of romance, examines diverse concepts of bohemianism and love, digs up echoes of drug culture, and makes a lot of wry jokes about it all; well, expect for the love but then Jarmusch, like me, seems to be the kind of romantic who doesn’t find love very funny - but sometimes life-saving.

Visually, this might be the most attractive Jarmusch film I’ve seen, dominated by a sense of fluid movement, the camera dancing to the film’s (impeccable) soundtrack, and colours of intense expressivity and beauty that belie the idea a film only taking place by night couldn’t make this kind of use of colours, particularly in the times of the orange and teal filters.There’s a sense of romantic poetry about it all, though not the po-faced kind (the film dutifully makes fun of Byron and Shelley) but the one that can and will laugh about itself from time to time. This being a Jarmusch film, there’s not much of a plot – though there’s so much going on on every other level I’m not sure who would mind the absence – and there’s time for the film to just swerve off into various directions and talk about various ideas and things its director/writer is interested in. Though, I would argue, these seeming detours actually belong into the particular argument about the importance of art and science the film also makes, and the film and the argument would be much weakened without them.

Tilda Swinton and Tom Hiddleston are pretty fantastic here, Swinton really playing on the otherworldliness of her looks and her very individual kind of beauty without the cliché using her instead of the other way round; there’s also a nice ironic juxtaposition in the fact she’s actually the more down to earth of our central vampire couple.

And as if all that weren’t enough to make at least me all kinds of happy, John Hurt plays Christopher Marlowe, who is a vampire, and alive, and…but that would be telling what is rather more usefully experienced.

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