After a weekend trapped indoors, I have some interesting movies to review.
Goodnight Mommy
Woof. This was a freaky movie. Directed by Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz, Goodnight Mommy is an Austrian horror film that layers the dread on thickly. Susanne Wuest plays a woman recovering from a car accident. She is released from the hospital and returns home, where her twin boys, Lukas and Elias (played by real life twins Lukas and Elias Schwarz) await. They are understandably freaked out by the bandages obscuring her entire face, and become more suspicious of her when she ignores Lukas completely, only setting out one dinner for Elias.
The twins begin to seriously suspect that this woman is an imposter and is not their mother at all.
Goading each other on, the twins eventually tie their mother to her bed, and using torture methods that seem quite appropriate for 9 year old boys (a magnifying glass, floss, super glue...) try to get the woman to either prove to them that she's their mother, or confess that she isn't.
*/spoilers*
The last third of the film is incredibly intense and horrifying, but it's also a bit of a relief after the slow build up of tension in the first two-thirds. Some reviews have argued that Goodnight Mommy is one of the scariest movies ever made, but I found it more unnerving than anything else. The scariest thing about this movie is that the "monster" in Goodnight Mommy isn't a serial killer or a boogey man hiding under the bed, but the disintegrating relationship between a mother and her children.
Grade: B
***
The Overnight
It's hard to fit Patrick Brice's indie movie The Overnight into one category or genre. It's both a sex comedy and a relationship drama. It's both intriguingly kinky and cringe-worthy. But it's definitely memorable.
Adam Scott and Taylor Schilling play Alex and Emily, a married couple in their early 30's with a young son. They have just moved from Seattle to Los Angeles and are trying to make new friends. While taking their son to the playground, they're approached by Kurt (Jason Schwartzman, who's pretty much perfect in this role), a hipster-dad type who also has a young son. Kurt chats them up and invites them over for pizza night with him and his wife Charlotte (Judith Godreche). Alex and Emily are impressed by Kurt and Charlotte's artsy-bohemian lifestyle, and when Kurt and Charlotte suggest putting the boys to bed so that the adults can continue to have fun, they readily agree.
I have to hand it to the actors: they are all in for this crazy ride, especially Scott, who typically plays nice, vanilla dudes. Halfway through the film, his character Alex reveals a deep shame he's been carrying around his whole life, and it's both eye-rollingly silly and deeply moving.
The Overnight can be uneven at times, swerving from silly to sexy and back again, but it's a LOT of fun and, hey, it's streaming on Netflix. Why don't you check it out? You know you're curious.
Grade: B+
***
Locke
Locke has a compelling premise, but is ultimately not as substantial or satisfying as I thought it'd be. It's like the movie equivalent of a bacon and peanut butter sandwich: you think, "now there's an intriguing idea!" but after you eat it, you're just like, "well, that was different, but a regular peanut butter and jelly sandwich would have been better."
Locke is a movie where a guy, Ivan Locke (Tom Hardy), drives around for an hour and a half making phone calls and trying to put to rights a few things he has majorly fucked up. Literally, that is the movie. A guy in a car making phone calls.
I'm going to put a Spoiler warning here in case you don't want to know any of the details of these phone calls before you see it.
Meanwhile, Locke is planning to tell his wife about this blessed turn of events over the fucking phone as he is driving to see the birth of his, well, not love child...wine and loneliness child, I suppose. Locke seems to have convinced himself that he's doing the right thing by dropping this fucking nuclear bomb on his wife over the phone. So there's that.
So, basically, this dude is juggling calls from wife, mistress, guy he's the boss of, and his own boss for the entire film, trying to stay in calm control while his life falls apart around him. He also occasionally talks to his "dad"--the empty backseat---berating the presumably dead old coot and telling him exactly how different a man he, Locke, will be. Unlike dear old dad, Locke will take responsibility for his actions!
It sounds pretty hackneyed, but it's actually not a bad movie. Locke really does make you pay attention, especially since it's an entirely dialogue based film. But the more I thought about it, the more I was like, really? The film seems to want to be a redemption movie: Locke is doing the right thing by telling his wife of his indiscretion, skipping the most important job of his career, and being there for the woman who is giving birth to his kid. But it also seems to suggest that he made the decision to do these things at the last possible minute/on a whim, suggesting that he hasn't actually learned anything or redeemed himself so much as just made a spontaneous, potentially career-and-marriage destroying move. Are we supposed to see Locke as a hero, or a guy trying to do his best? Because he's seems more like a fuckwit to me.
Tom Hardy is great in it though.
Grade: C
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