In short: In Your Eyes (2014)

I’m not completely happy with Brin Hill’s Fantastika Romance based on a script by Joss Whedon, perhaps because I expect a bit more than this film’s finale based on artificial outside threats that really doesn’t fit the calm tone of the rest of the narrative very well.

There’s also the sad presence of one of these generic indie rock soundtracks too many indie romances suffer from, you know the kind, where every song is just as characterless as any given piece of truly bad charts pop. Which would be less of a problem if the film didn’t push the music on its audience quite as hard as this one does at times.

On the positive side, and despite the music, the film’s first two thirds are often quite lovely, with many a scene that’s clever and emotionally honest, and fine acting by Zoe Kazan and Michael Stahl-David. But even here, the film’s missing something, be it whimsy, be it depth, that would turn it from something comfortably watchable into something a bit more emotionally involving. I’m not so much looking for nihilist philosophical monologues here (though I’d certainly be game for that), as for any sign the film actually has a philosophy, or emotional politics, beyond what the genres it belongs to ask of it. It looks like the comparative glut of more or less quirky indie romances with fantasy plot base that went on when this was made has resulted in heightened expectations from me for these films to go beyond well-made button pushing and highly competent filling of expectations. I suspect if this had been made a decade earlier, and I would have seen it then, I would not have the same complaints about In Your Eyes.

Three Films Make A Post: Seduction. Submission. Murder. Tonight . . . evil goes over the edge

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005): Despite being a friend of the darker kinds of humour, I often find myself nonplussed with comedies when they become too cynical, or rather, when they seem to dislike their own characters so much they can’t seem to find any shared emotional ground with them. Consequently, I have a complicated relationship with Shane Black’s stuff as a writer as well as a director. Here, at the start of the man’s career in the latter role, I find myself rather taken with what he produces. While the characters are certainly not all around loveable, Black doesn’t only wallow in their misfortunes, and his tendency to fourth wall breaking and ironic distance is very controlled and indeed responsible for many of the film’s funniest scenes. It’s also remarkable how good Black here is at scenes that are at once playing with genre conventions in funny ways and actually highly effective expressions of genre.

Add to that charming performances by Robert Downey Jr., Michelle Monaghan and Val Kilmer, and a lovingly absurd mystery plot kinda-sorta based on a Brett Halliday story, and you’ll find me with very uncomplicated feelings towards this particular Shane Black film.

The Big Sick (2017): Staying with comedies for a bit, Michael Showalter’s film based on a script by Kumail Nanjiani and Emily V. Gordon that’s based on their own early relationship, with Nanjiani playing himself and eternal indie romance heroine Zoe Kazan as Emily should by all rights be a mess of a film, or a terrible tear-jerker. As a matter of fact, it is anything but, and rather ends up being a highly successful quirky romantic comedy where that “quirky” isn’t code for “too twee”, a film about the specific problems of the children of immigrants, a sometimes drama about family, and a film that may on paper sound like a bit of an ego trip but that’s very much about people not called Kumail Nanjiani too, showing every character as complex and complicated trying to manoeuvre through the messes of life, love and so on.

It’s a fantastic film. The script is funny and moving and clever and so well plotted it feels completely natural, the acting (with people like Holly Hunter and Anupam Kher giving support) is great, and Showalter’s direction is all brilliant pacing and timing, so much so you might forget it’s there – which is an art to achieve.


The Guard (2011): And while I’m at it, why not finish up on another comedy, this time around John Michael McDonagh’s very Irish homage to buddy cop movies – or is it his answer to 80s action movies as a whole? Anyway, the film’s a showcase for the copious talents of Brendan Gleeson, Don Cheadle and others, and feels like a bit of an ode to the virtues that might be hidden under very dubious surfaces, with some excursions into actual tragedy (the scenes between Gleeson’s character Gerry Boyle and his dying mother played by Fionnula Flannagan are absolutely heart-breaking; also funny), realpolitik, and the sad fact that in some places, the abrasive, politically un-correct man of dubious morals in little things might just be the only moral guy in big things around.

In short: The Monster (2016)

Kathy (Zoe Kazan), a young alcoholic who is fucking up in her role as mother pretty badly, is taking her young daughter Lizzy (Ella Ballentine) to her ex-husband (or possibly ex-boyfriend). She’s pretty sure Lizzy’s going to stay there too, their relationship having hit the point where something clearly has to give. Kathy is deeply unhappy with the situation while also unable to go about changing it in any productive way but she clearly loves her daughter and wants something better for her.

These problems will have to take a bit of a backseat belonging to occasional flashbacks, though, for somewhere on a road in a patch of woods right in the middle of nowhere, the car crashes into a wolf. Worse, it won’t start up again. Now, our protagonists manage to contact help but its arrival will take some time. They are, after all, not exactly on Broadway, there’s a heavy rain storm going on, and they are not the only people in trouble right now.

Unfortunately, the wolf didn’t cross the road to protest chicken jokes – it was hounded by a monster. Said monster might just be all too interested in taking a bite or ten out of Lizzy and Kathy.

Director Bryan Bertino’s earlier films – The Strangers and Mockingbird – never did much for me, so I found myself pleasantly surprised with The Monster. It’s a film that tells a small-scale story in a highly focused, and very atmospheric way, avoiding side-tracks and byways, and ending up wonderfully concise.

The titular monster isn’t a terribly interesting design, to be sure, and does look rather fake in some of the later sequences once we are getting a better look at it, but Bertino presents it very effectively as an unrelenting and uncaring threat (which you can of course read as an externalisation of what’s going wrong between mother and daughter, though really, it’s a monster), the sort of thing that won’t care if you deserve the horrible things it’ll do to you, or not.

It’s the ideal monster for a film that thrives on using very archetypal fears – darkness and the things in it, the loss of a loved one – to create a feeling of suspense and disquiet.

A large part of The Monster’s emotional effect – and it packs quite a wallop – is the authentic way it presents Kathy’s numerous failings and the things they do to Lizzy without becoming moralizing. Probably because it understands that being a bad parent, and an alcoholic, and a partaker in the worst boyfriends possible doesn’t mean you don’t love your daughter, nor that you ever set out to fuck up your own life. As it also understands that love isn’t necessarily enough, yet still has its dignity.

Which of course leads to a film that actually works for its emotional beats, hitting the audience (or at least me) not through emotional manipulation but through a kind of emotional truthfulness. All the while, The Monster also stays just a damn good film about a monster.