There is little in Bottoms that breaks the formula of the classic high school teen comedy, though it is in this familiar realm that Emma Seligman is most comfortable sending up its Gen Z archetypes with their own brand of self-deprecating irony and dark humour. On its surface, the premise of two unpopular lesbian students beginning extra-curricular self-defence lessons for their fellow female students subverts the hyper-masculinity of its most obvious influence in Fight Club, though its narrative calls back even more distinctly to the sex-driven quest of Superbad and the violent black comedy of Heathers. After all, behind Josie and PJ’s mission is the simple objective to lose their virginities to cheerleaders Isabel and Brittany, and it is apparent that there are no lows too depraved for them to stoop to along the way.
The comic timing that Rachel Sennott and Ayo Edebiri share in these lead roles is sharp, positioning them as socially awkward and morally dubious misfits ready to exploit whatever good cause or convenient lie presents itself to them. They didn’t start the rumour that they spent summer in juvenile detention, but they are happy to capitalise on the clout it gives them, and local concerns around recent attacks from rival school Huntington provides the perfect feminist justification for their self-defence lessons. Of the two, Edebiri delivers the more sympathetic performance, though Sennott’s bratty egotism even more effectively underscores the hypocrisy of high school politics – regardless of where one sits in the hierarchy, everyone is as equally cruel.
This isn’t to say that Bottoms lacks sincerity, as Seligman pays real attention to the development of each fight club member towards a united empowerment, but even this comes by complete accident through PJ and Josie’s misguided leadership. Much like Seligman’s debut Shiva Baby, Bottoms is at its strongest when it embraces the chaos and savagery of the ensemble’s wildly conflicting personas, but also successfully turns the goofiness up a notch when painting out the meathead jocks as the broadest caricatures of them all. Outside of the fight club, quarterback Jeff is the greatest source of physical comedy, theatrically keeling over in extreme pain when PJ’s car gently bumps his knee, and submitting to his role as a damsel in distress at the film’s marvellously choreographed climax.
By the point that the full force of Seligman’s cinematic excellence is unleashed in this heightened, Tarantino-esque finale, it is a little too late to save the relatively dull visuals that pervade the rest of Bottoms, but if there is any scene which deserves such a remarkable set piece it is this. The stunt work is complex and dynamic, turning the football field into a battleground between two schools literally fighting for their lives in dramatic slow-motion and high-contrast while spectators watch in awe from the grandstand. Any remaining shred of realism that had previously lingered is gone, and in its place is a full-throttled commitment to bizarre spectacle exposing the absurdity of teenage politics, and the carnal desire for sex and violence that lingers beneath. In her deft balance of conflicting tones, Seligman smartly realises that there is no point choosing between sharp-tongued irony and lowbrow slapstick. Like so many real-world teenagers she is levelling her playful satire at, the high school students of Bottoms are as brilliantly quick-witted as they are disastrously stupid, and are all too happy staying that way.
If one were to ask Andrei Tarkovsky, applying literal interpretations to his semi-autobiographical film Mirror is about as futile as discerning the past through rigorously objective methods. After all, factual history cannot possibly take any tangible form that may be touched, smelt, and tasted by future generations the same way it could for those who were there. The moment it disappears from the present, it no longer exists even in the minds of firsthand witnesses, who now filter it through their own subjective recollections. To then attempt a faithful reconstruction of its events through whatever form of media they deem most effective only separates our current understanding of the past further from whatever truth once existed.
This is no reason to give up entirely on such an endeavour though, Tarkovsky asserts, but rather to appreciate the reflection of our imperfect humanity that is found in such evocative illustrations. It is through his cinematic manipulation of time’s subjective flow that Mirror escapes the false impression of constructed reality, and instead becomes a portal into his pre-war childhood memories warped by the dreams, doubts, and desires that have emerged in the decades since. No decent film should be interpreted purely through a literal lens, but Mirror least of all ought to be taken as such, lest one finds themselves misguidedly rejecting Tarkovsky’s profoundly spiritual meditation on family, nostalgia, and humanity’s flawed consciousness.
The elderly Maria is played by Tarkovsky’s real-life mother, emphasising the autobiographical nature of this surreal study of memory.The setting of Alexei’s family cottage on the edge of a forest suggests an ominous tranquillity, framing his childhood as a fairy tale where things that were once deemed impossible manifest with ethereal wonder.
It quickly becomes apparent that the first-person perspective taken by Tarkovsky is a surrogate for his own, as we realise our protagonist Alexei is never quite visible in the post-war timeline. He is the source from which these memories spring forth, his face always sitting just outside the frame while he commands the non-linear narrative with pensive voiceovers and conversations, and only ever appearing onscreen as a child in the story’s pre-war timeline. That he seems to be recalling the past as an out-of-body experience is the first clue that these flashbacks aren’t quite accurate renderings, but as Tarkovsky sinks us deeper into Alexei’s pool of dreams, we come to recognise it as the mirror upon which this unseen man’s life is reflected and distorted.
It is revealing too that the figure who looms largest here is his mother. Being named Maria after Tarkovsky’s real-life mother, and thus drawing parallels to the Blessed Virgin Mary, she becomes an icon of sacred veneration in Mirror, yet also a woman with a vividly complex life just beyond the periphery of Alexei’s view. In our first meeting with her, Tarkovsky even painstakingly recreates an authentic photograph of the real Maria sitting on a roughly erected fence of sticks, gazing towards the green fields beyond her home as if expectantly waiting for an important arrival. With her face totally hidden, she seems to exist in a world inaccessible to the young Alexei, her thoughts preoccupied by ideas and emotions beyond his naïve understanding. Still, the camera pushes forwards past rustling branches and into her orbit, where we can finally see what she sees – a man approaching from the distance.
Tarkovsky painstakingly recreates a photograph of his mother sitting on a fence, though here he dollies the camera forward past branches and leaves into her orbit, compelled to understand her world that has been kept secret from her children.
He is not her husband, we discover, but rather a passing doctor who carries a warmer demeanour than Alexei’s actual father, and who on this day happens to be walking the same path. In the grand scheme of Alexei’s childhood, this man holds very little significance, and yet it is notable that this memory stands out in the absence of the family patriarch. Though his appearances are rare, the void he leaves behind is often filled with the poetry of Tarkovsky’s own father, Arseny Tarkovsky, standing in for a traditional film score.
With evocations of Greek tragedy, physical death, and spiritual transcendence emerging from one poem ‘Eurydice’, new impressions are drawn from Maria’s reluctant slaughter of a cockerel at her neighbour’s house and her guilty departure. Though the scene eventually comes to an end, the poetry continues its gentle contemplations through black-and-white, slow-motion imagery of a mighty wind running through dense vegetation, rolling a brass ornament off a small wooden table, and billowing through translucent white drapes hung in Alexei’s home. Whether expressed in spoken word or moving image, the romantic abstractions of both father and son run strong, and merge to create a cinematic lyricism.
“I dream of a different soul dressed in different garb,
burning up like alcohol as it flits from timidity to hope,
slipping away, shadowless,
leaving behind lilacs as a memento on the table.
Run, my child, and mourn not for poor Eurydice,
but drive your copper hoop through the wide world,
while in response to every step, you hear the earth reply, its voice joyful and dry.”
An excerpt from ‘Eurydice’ by Arseny Tarkovsky
Though Arseny Tarkovsky’s words encourage his son to move on from the lost love of Eurydice, the actual struggle is far more burdensome with the weight of memory holding him down. Does the mythological figure of Orpheus’ deceased wife stand in for Alexei’s childhood, his ex-wife Natalia, or perhaps even his mother? Andrei Tarkovsky would never claim such a direct correlation, though given his Oedipal casting of Margarita Terekhova as both Maria and Natalia, the two women are tied very strongly to Greek legend. Where they split is in their characterisations – where Maria embodies divine grace, Natalia is cold and cynical, suggesting a spiritual corruption that has degraded with time.
An inspired Oedipal casting of Margarita Terekhova as Alexei’s mother and wife, drawing a sharp division in their personalities – and of course Tarkovsky creates doubles of her in this mirror.
At least, this is how Alexei perceives them, and Tarkovsky is fully aware that he is far from a reliable narrator. It is more than likely that Maria never had the face he recalls now, instead letting her take the appearance of the other most significant woman in his life, and when Alexei even admits this to Natalia he also expresses a slight suspicion of why this is the case.
“I pity you both, you and her.”
He is not alone in seeing these echoes across past and present either, as the double casting of both a young Alexei and his son, Ignat, reflects the patriarchal side of the Oedipus allegory that Natalia bears witness to. Just as Alexei’s father grew distant from his son, so too is Alexei failing to connect with Ignat, who Natalia notes in horror “is becoming like you.”
Tarkovsky does not seek so much to explain these repeated generational patterns though as he wishes to capture the raw essence of time as it passes through them, cycling in rhythms that may be more richly experienced from outside history’s traditionally linear progression, and beyond the limits of conscious thought. As Tarkovsky intercuts Alexei’s reluctant rifle training during World War II with archival footage of Soviet battles, time is compressed into a single point that weighs on the young boy’s mind. Meanwhile, those long, slow camera movements which gently drift through uninhabited rooms stretch it out into eternity, offering a retreat into the soothing reverie of his frozen dreams.
Tarkovsky intercuts archival footage of Soviet battles, interrogating the notion of memory from historical artefacts as well as subjective recollections.Tarkovsky’s camera drifts through the hallways and rooms of Alexei’s childhood home, offering a retreat into the soothing reverie of his frozen dreams.
Perhaps the greatest manifestation of time’s transient passage though is in Tarkovsky’s observation of nature’s effervescent, primordial elements, moving independently of any human influence. As if brought to life by some invisible creator, a gust of wind sends a single rippling wave through a field of long grass while Alexei’s neighbour walks away, and the frequent emphasis on grass, snow, dirt, mud, and stone on the ground imbues Tarkovsky’s mise-en-scène with distinctly earthy textures. Even the setting of this cottage on the edge of a forest suggests an ominous tranquillity, framing Alexei’s childhood as a fairy tale where things that were once deemed impossible manifest with ethereal wonder.
Elemental imagery as a sudden gust of wind ripples across a field of grass, as if touched by some invisible hand.Snow, ice, and wood – so much of Tarkovsky’s imagery is connected to the earth and its seasonal changes.
Somewhat paradoxically, fire and water frequently co-exist in the same spaces throughout Mirror too, creating a subtly incongruent dreamscape where candles light the room of Maria’s self-baptism, while rain simultaneously trickles in from cracks in the ceiling. The water which consecrates her as a divine entity in Alexei’s mind is the same which eventually caves in the room’s ceiling, wielding an equally immense power over life and death.
Water drips from the ceiling and down walls even while candle flames burn around the room, making for an eerie visual paradox.
Elsewhere, Tarkovsky’s floating camera pauses on a dirtied mirror reflecting the burning of Alexei’s family barn, but as it turns around and directly approaches the disaster, we note the quiet patter of rain dripping from the wooden roof. Like the grand final set piece of Tarkovsky’s later film The Sacrifice, this fiery structure becomes a theological icon of divine destruction in stark contrast to the nourishing waters of life. On an even more fundamental level though, he is composing a surreal image of primal elemental power that we, like the characters, are simply forced to gaze at in helpless awe.
The camera first catches sight of the burning barn through a dirtied mirror in the house, concealed from our view as the family watches on. The camera slowly spins around and moves outside to the porch, and suddenly the rain becomes audible and visible – another visual contradiction revealing either an impossible spiritual force, or an unreliable memory.
From within the fragile bubble of Alexei’s dreams, we can easily see why he pities those like Natalia who claim to have never witnessed a true Old Testament miracle. For Alexei, such miracles are impossible to escape. One strange visitor disappears mid-scene, leaving no trace of their existence besides the condensation of their absent teacup, and in what may be the defining shot of Tarkovsky’s filmography Maria levitates several feet above her bed, draped in white bedsheets. “Here I am, borne aloft,” she tenderly whispers to Alexei, becoming an angelic image of maternal transcendence in the eyes of her child.
One of the defining shots of Tarkovsky’s career, transforming the mother into an angelic figure levitating several feet above a bed, spiritually elevated in the eyes of the child.An unexplained miracle as one strange visitor disappears mid-scene, leaving no trace of her existence besides the condensation of her now-absent teacup.
As much as sequences such as these feel like a total departure from reality, their roots in mid-century Soviet Union history remain incredibly relevant. We see them not just in the grainy newsreels of the Spanish Civil War, nuclear explosions, and the launch of a USSR balloon that tangentially connects Alexei to a broader cultural context, but Tarkovsky even takes the time to examine a portion of Maria’s life working in a printing press for propaganda under Stalin’s totalitarian rule. Her fear that she may be responsible for a misprint is understandable when considering the consequences of such an error in this oppressive era, which may see her accused of treason. Though the young Alexei is absent from these scenes, touches of an almost imperceptible slow-motion continue to suggest that they are similarly being lifted from outside their original time frame – perhaps some attempt from an older Alexei to reconstruct an alternate image of his mother through second-hand stories.
Black-and-white flashbacks to Maria’s work at the printing press are weaved into the split timelines, infiltrating Alexei’s childhood with the politics of 1940s Soviet Union under Stalin’s totalitarian rule.
It is not uncommon for hazy memories such as these to come flooding back when one reaches the end of their mortal life, though Tarkovsky suggests that Mirror is in fact depicting the complete inverse of this. Alexei is not revisiting his past because he is dying, but as the doctor mysteriously hints after his death, he rather wasted away due to his heavy conscience. Tarkovsky’s pain can be felt acutely here, trying to resolve his guilt over perpetuating those cycles of distant fathers and overburdened mothers that were ingrained in him as a child. Even as the mysteries of the human mind continue to elude us throughout Mirror, his precise control over the raw elements of time, memory, and life keep sinking us further into its surreal depths, not so much crafting an artefact of absolute historical truth than revelling in the extraordinary impossibility of such a task.
Mirror is currently streaming on The Criterion Channel, can be bought or rented on Apple TV, or you can buy the Blu-ray on Amazon.
The task of cinematically adapting a historical legacy as immense as Napoleon Bonaparte’s is not one to be taken lightly, especially when densely packing a feature film with several decades’ worth of his conquests. Although Ridley Scott’s interpretation of the French leader’s life covers an enormous span of time from the French Revolution to his eventual exile, it does not carry the same dramatic weight as Abel Gance’s more focused 1927 epic, which ends its story much earlier with Napoleon’s grand triumph at 1796’s Battle of Montenotte. A great deal of room is allowed there for the sort of historical detail which Scott merely skims over in title cards announcing new characters, events, and years – and even with a shorter length on his side, his Napoleon rarely carries the same vigorous energy as its five-and-a-half-hour counterpart.
To be fair, this comparison to one of France’s most celebrated cinematic masterpieces does not give Scott credit where it is due, and only serves to emphasise how thinly he spreads this story across a vast scope. The strength of his direction here lies not so much in its loosely sprawling structure as it does in the humour, blocking, and spectacle of individual moments, offsetting Napoleon’s legacy as a military commander and tactical genius with scenes of his childish petulance. The sense of divine purpose which imbues him with regal confidence is the same which drives him into entitled tantrums at the dinner table, as he amusingly proclaims that “Destiny has brought me this lamb chop!” with an absurd lack of self-awareness.
Scott does not go so far as to probe the psychosexual depths of Napoleon’s emotionally stunted nature, though his inability to connect intimately with others is all too apparent, especially when his wife Joséphine enters the picture. Their sex is profoundly dispassionate at first, though an awkward intimacy soon develops which only further underscores his strange infantilism. Tied in with that as well is an egotistic dependence on her admiration, forcing her to declare that he is the most important thing in the world, and conversely seeing him admit with far greater truth that he is nothing without her. After all, he needs an heir to carry on his legacy, and the prospect that he may be infertile threatens the foundations of his entire reign.
Perhaps this is why Joaquin Phoenix slips so naturally into this eccentric vision of the French emperor, despite being much older than Napoleon actually was at the height of his power. This is not a young, virile man with boundless charisma and masculine poise, but a cagey strategist who cannot translate his sharp mind on the battlefield to his own personal life. This is not the Napoleon that history remembers, and given the accusations of historical inaccuracy that Scott has brushed off with disregard, it may not even be the Napoleon that existed. Creative licence is a powerful tool in the right hands though, and the line that Scott draws between male leadership, ego, and impotence is vivid, demonstrating that the insecure fool and the impressive military leader are not mutually exclusive identities.
After all, when it comes to the latter Scott relishes shooting Phoenix’s Napoleon against backdrops of remarkable spectacle, starting with Marie Antoinette’s execution at the Place de la Révolution in front of riled-up masses, and later seeing him win extravagant battles in Austria, Russia, and Egypt. The siege of Toulon is his first great success as an artillery commander, and also Scott’s first real demonstration in Napoleon that his deft control over giant set pieces has not faded over the years, borrowing a few visual and editing cues from D.W. Griffith as soldiers scale colossal walls and fires light up the night.
It is no coincidence that the detail of Napoleon’s tactical manoeuvring directly correlates to the brilliance of Scott’s technical direction either, as both reach their peaks upon the frozen wastelands where the Battle of Austerlitz unfolds. Using its natural geography of hills, trees, plains, and fog to his advantage, Napoleon lures the united Austrian and Russian forces into an ambush, drives them to retreat over a frozen lake, and shatters the ice with cannonballs, thereby winning one of the most significant battles of the Napoleonic Wars. Scott’s visual storytelling is remarkable here, coordinating complex interactions between enormous numbers of extras through hostile landscapes, and intercutting the action with visceral underwater shots of drowning, bleeding soldiers desperately fumbling to escape their fate.
Elsewhere, Scott imbues scenes with a dramatic weight in his slow-motion photography, and curates handsomely muted colour palettes with soft blue filters and the dim, golden lighting of candles. Napoleon’s greatest weakness though is its unevenness, inconsistently letting these soaring visuals come and go, and eventually dropping the focus on the French emperor’s personal life as the Battle of Waterloo approaches. In place of his emotional immaturity, an even greater form of egomania becomes apparent, seeing him boldly charge into combat with blazing confidence before witnessing the demise of his entire life’s work. For once, it is the opposing side that Scott captures with noble admiration, watching the Duke of Wellington’s army form infantry squares in rigorous uniformity and take the higher ground over Napoleon’s men.
Even with everything lost though, this is a man who will still carve out his own version of history. Was it the Russians who burnt Moscow to spoil the French victory, or was it part of Napoleon’s plan all along? Was it really his fault that he lost the Battle of Waterloo, or was it his incompetent marshals? Is the image of a mighty leader and master strategist really all there is to the first emperor of France? Scott does not so much seek truth in that matter as he uses it to underscore a modern scepticism towards our male leaders, and especially those whose meagre wisdom and childish convictions are undeserving of such enormous egos. If only this film was a little more refined in its focus, then perhaps he might have reconciled these distinct features into one character with greater formal acuity, backing up his technical brilliance with the sense of purpose that Napoleon himself was so blinded by.
Whoever or whatever Oliver Quick may be in Saltburn, he is not human. He wears the skin of a lower-class outsider from a troubled family, but his instincts are sharp like a spider’s – or perhaps he is a moth banging up against a window, trying desperately to infiltrate the wealthy Catton family who he is staying with for the summer. “Lucky for you I’m a vampire,” he purrs to Venetia Catton as he grotesquely licks her period blood off his fingers, and when he suits up for an Oxford ball, a classmate lightly jokes that he’s almost passing for “a real human boy.” Perhaps his eccentric hosts sense some animalistic depravity in their son Felix’s new friend, though for the time being they are happy to keep him around like a trophy proving their own generosity.
Emerald Fennell’s follow-up to Promising Young Woman delivers yet another subversive interrogation of power and privilege, and yet Saltburn proves to be far more obscure in its formal construction than that tightly plotted revenge thriller, layering mysteries upon secrets within the titular country estate. With a strong set of creature metaphors at her disposal, Fennell weaves a monstrously sinister fable around Oliver, stealthily wandering through a maze not unlike that which sits in the Catton family’s enormous garden. To those souls unfortunate enough to reach its centre, a giant minotaur sculpture awaits, frozen in the act of ripping apart a victim as it proudly bears its naked manhood. The visual parallels between this mythical creature and Oliver in his truest form are striking – in the absence of wealth and social influence, sex becomes his greatest weapon, and clothes are shed to reveal the aggressive masculinity lurking beneath.
The convention and order of the Saltburn estate slips into perverse chaos.Fennell illuminates her scenes with a David Fincher-style lighting setup – dim golden lamps and candles drenching these scenes with a haunting atmosphere.
Through Fennell’s elegantly dynamic camerawork, we too find ourselves trapped in these characters’ magnificent habitats, following behind them in three long tracking shots which formally mark our introduction to Oliver, our introduction to Saltburn, and the brilliantly twisted final shot of the film. Especially in the latter two, Fennell relishes the classical architecture and production design that could be straight out of Pride and Prejudice, traversing cavernous ballrooms and lavishly decorated corridors that essentially form a maze of their own.
The severely narrowed aspect ratio contributes to this claustrophobia too, making for some particularly disorientating compositions of an upside-down Oliver reflected in ponds and dinner tables, and wide shots that close in Saltburn’s walls around us. Within these opulent interiors, Fennell draws a haunting beauty from the dim, golden lighting of lamps and candles, setting us up for jarring shocks each time she switches to a blood-red wash that encases its residents in mortal peril.
One of Saltburn’s most striking compositions – perfect lighting, symmetry, framing, and yet totally disorientating.Blood-red lighting encompasses the residents of Saltburn in madness, anger, and grief.
This danger does not simply emanate from Oliver though, as Fennell also prompts us to question whether the Cattons’ peculiar traditions and behaviour are truly as innocuous as they seem. From this angle, Saltburn appears to be in direct conversation with Jean Renoir’s class satire The Rules of the Game, underscoring the complete absurdity of the family’s black-tie dress code for dinner, and the strange request to remain cleanshaven so as not to incite Lady Elsbeth’s irrational fear of beards.
Rosamund Pike offers brilliant comic relief in this role, right next to Richard E. Grant’s maddeningly gleeful Sir James, though the greatest achievement here belongs to Barry Keoghan. Looking back at his collaborations with Yorgos Lanthimos and Martin McDonagh, it seems as if his career of playing unconventional misfits has built to this unrelenting portrait of obsession, perversion, and manipulation. Whether at Oxford or Saltburn, it is impossible for Oliver to blend into crowds, though he doesn’t exactly try hard either. His choice to wear a pair of stag antlers at his Midsummer Night’s Dream birthday party is subtly symbolic, asserting his primal masculinity in stark opposition to the men and women who dress in fairy costumes. When his outward meekness isn’t shrinking him in the frame, Keoghan confidently dominates Fennell’s compositions, most prominently while seducing his hosts. Venetia may be the one luring him out into the gardens late at night, but as he lines up his facial profile behind hers in a close-up and whispers commands into her ear, the link between his physical and psychological influence visually manifests onscreen with invasive intimacy.
Saltburn marks a prime achievement for Barry Keoghan, who after many years of playing supporting roles takes the spotlight with disturbing relish.
If we are to believe his voiceover’s claims that such actions are genuine expressions of love, then we would be severely underestimating the depth of his inner emotional turmoil, and the extent to which it robs him of the control he desires. To make matters even more complicated, the Cattons still view him as a lowly child of the working class, and so he must make certain capitulations for the sake of his hosts’ egos and sensitivities. Felix and Venetia are happy to exploit his insecurity when they demand he strip to join them sunbathing, and later when he is tricked into performing a demeaning karaoke song, his resentment only continues to build.
With a narrow aspect ratio, shadows, and sharp lighting, Fennell composes a shot that could be from F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu.
Perhaps then Oliver’s love of Felix is not so much a romantic or sexual attraction, but a desire to inhabit his very being, and to access the privilege that comes with it. In this way, Saltburn’s intricate examination of power plays within a rigid social hierarchy bears many similarities to other contemporary class satires such as Parasite and The Favourite, though Fennell’s eccentric characters have nothing to hide but repulsive, hollow hearts. Some may mask it with lavish displays of charity, and others with a superficial subservience to their superiors, but as Saltburn reveals at the centre of its brilliant maze, this twisted game of exploitation will only be won by whoever is prepared to sink the lowest.
There is a perverse ritualism to the physical and psychological torture that strangers Paul and Peter exact on the Schober family in Funny Games. Personal motivations appear to be non-existent, and Michael Haneke even mocks the idea that some tragic backstory might explain their desensitised hostility. Truth is, there is no satisfying justification for the events that unfold over what was supposed to be the first night of the Schobers’ vacation at their lakeside getaway. Paul and Peter are completely void of any individuality, and rather serve a purely functionary purpose in Haneke’s disturbing piece of metafiction. They are simply acting on behalf of another invisible presence that exists just outside the boundaries of this story – us, the audience.
Within this self-aware framing device, it stands to reason then that Georg, Anna, their son Georgi, and their dog Rolfi are the sacrifices, satiating our desire for gratuitous entertainment. They too lack any specific backstories which might define them as individuals worth our sympathy, and yet when faced with Paul and Peter’s sadistic games, we naturally hope that these archetypal victims might triumph over their adversaries.
Haneke’s characters are deliberately written very thinly, standing in for archetypes of the horror genre, but this only makes room for a magnificent subversion of expectations and form.
Still, Haneke knows us better than that. This family’s torture is the reason we are watching to begin with. We don’t care about them as human beings with rich, interesting lives. When the movie is over, we will immediately forget about them and move onto another set of characters whose trauma will entertain us for another two hours. We don’t have any right to complain when we see Paul and Peter brutally pick off each victim one by one. Isn’t that what we came for?
As such, the invitation that Funny Games offers into an entertaining story of visceral sensationalism unexpectedly turns the mirror back on us. In its reflection, we don’t just see ourselves, but an entire culture that thrives on the suffering of others, blurring the lines between fiction and reality until the distinction barely matters anymore.
When it comes to Haneke’s actual depictions of the film’s brutality though, it is surprising just how much he holds back from explicitly displaying it onscreen, and how much more gut-wrenching it is as a result. What we are left with is violence minus the thrill factor, hearing the snap of a leg breaking as it is hit with a golf club, or a gunshot go off in the living room while Paul nonchalantly fetches food from the fridge, leaving us to desperately wonder which of our main characters has been killed.
The first act of violence sets a precedent for the rest of Funny Games, with Georg having his leg broken by a golf club just out of shot.Later, Paul fetches food from the fridge as Peter is left to determine the fate of a family member. Haneke deliberately removes us from the violence itself, but tortures us even more when we hear the gunshot from the next room over.
In truly torturous fashion, it is of course the most innocent who are offed first, with Paul leading Anna to Rolfi’s body in a cruel game of ‘Hot and Cold’, and Georgie suffering the fatal consequences of Peter’s random selection. On a broader level though, the dehumanisation of these characters has been in motion from the very start, with Haneke’s camera largely averting its gaze their faces, or otherwise refusing to budge from long, static shots that resist any emotional engagement. At its most devastating, his camera spends ten minutes painfully hanging on the immediate aftermath of Georgie’s death, though the image is composed in such a way that it takes a few seconds to notice his body on the floor, his blood splattered on the wall, and his parents paralysed with catatonic grief. Where so many other directors would draw out a visceral horror here, Haneke rather underscores its inert dread, and the chilling mundanity which begins to emerge in the absence of any cuts or action that might move the story along.
Haneke delivers the longest take in the film with the death of Georgie – we are doomed to a catatonic shock with both parents. Funny Games does not aim for beauty in its composition, but there is an attention to detail in the framing of the three bodies spread across the frame and concealed behind furniture.
This is the state of gratuitous modern entertainment, Haneke posits, dissolving the lines between fiction and reality which we might otherwise use to justify our depraved tastes. There is absolutely no urgency on Paul and Peter’s part to put the family out their misery, and so as they sit down in front of the television and flick through an explosive action movie, a natural disaster news report, and a motor sports program, he reveals a common thread of suffering between them from which we draw the same indulgent gratification. Later when he sits on a close-up of the TV streaked with Georgie’s blood, the visual symbolism is even harder to ignore – modern mass entertainment has been thoroughly stained by its own sadistic corruption.
A visceral symbol of blood-soaked entertainment, stained by sadistic corruption.
This is the icy, emotionless distance that Haneke would make a key feature in so many of his films from this point on as well, but never again with the dark satirical humour he carries in Funny Games. Though we certainly feel for these victims, the insecurity we feel is just as anxiety-inducing whenever Paul turns towards the camera and includes us in his fourth wall breaks. When he initially lays out the stakes and bets that the whole family will be dead in exactly 12 hours, we too are offered stakes in the wager that we subconsciously make every time we watch a horror movie.
“What do you think? You think they stand a chance? You’re on their side, aren’t you? Who are you betting on?”
When Georg begs for them to be put out of their misery, they again slyly implicate us in their rejection – “We’d all be deprived of our pleasure” – and when Anna claims they have suffered enough about 95 minutes in, they claim “We’re not up to feature-film length yet,” before turning straight to the camera and asking if we agree.
“Is that enough? You want a real ending, with plausible plot development, right?”
Haneke plays out Anna’s discovery of the family’s dead dog at a cold distance as it falls limply out of the car……then he racks focus into this chilling close-up – our first proper fourth wall break as Paul looks right into the camera.
Haneke’s use of Paul and Peter as storytellers within the story is calculated, having them knock the house’s phone into water early on to cut off the family’s communication, and continuing to progress the film through their self-aware actions. Haneke isn’t afraid to let Funny Games stray from traditional narrative conventions whenever he wishes to prove a point about their fickleness though, granting our unrealistic wish that these villains would leave the family alone by letting them randomly disappear for some time, and consequently revealing how little tension there is in the absence of their violence. Similarly, the common objectification of female characters rears its head when the young men force Anna to strip. By hanging the camera on a close-up of her distraught face though, Haneke excises whatever perverse thrill viewers might have found, leaving us only with a deep discomfort.
Anna is forced to strip, but Haneke finds no thrill in the act, sitting the camera on a close-up that denies us any perverse pleasure.
If it isn’t clear yet just how much Haneke is playing with our hopes for a happy ending, then the all-powerful, invisible hand that has been guiding this family towards their inevitable deaths is certainly at least revealed when he blatantly throws all plot logic out the window to avoid an easy win for protagonists. It looks as if Anna’s quick thinking has saved the day when she grabs a rifle and blasts Peter away, allowing us a moment to cheer for what is the first death explicitly depicted onscreen, and the gory comeuppance we have been waiting for. If we are to find ourselves carried away in the triumph though, then there is one key detail we are likely forgetting – Paul and Peter are the storytellers, and they have the freedom to break whatever rules they like.
It only takes Paul a quick rewind on the TV remote to take us back a few minutes before his friend’s death, allowing him to take the rifle away before Anna can snatch it and thereby transcending the arbitrary narrative logic that we have falsely believed must apply to him as well. Suddenly, it becomes bleedingly apparent that we were never in control of this story, or any story that we consume for that matter. Storytellers might be there to serve their audiences, but they are the ones who have the final say, often making decisions simply based on their own erratic whims.
An infuriating reversal of fortune – literally. Haneke destroys the notion of plot logic with the arrival of an evil deus ex machina, placing all the power in Paul’s hands.
Still, Haneke delights in leading us on just a little bit longer in the final minutes of Funny Games, reminding us of a knife from the start of the film that was dropped to the bottom of the yacht Anna is now tied up in. Of course though, Peter is sure to snatch away the Chekhov’s Gun before she can free herself. After dumping her into the lake, it doesn’t bother Paul too much that they have prematurely killed their last victim an hour before the deadline they promised us. It’s hard work sailing, and it’s about time they grab something to eat – narrative convention be damned. There were many families before this one who have suffered their ritualistic torture, Haneke suggests, and there will be many more to follow. As long as it keeps us gratuitously entertained, then who are we to complain?
A devastating subversion of expectations, setting up the knife in the yacht early on, only to throw it away in the final moments – our last shred of hope.
The line of influence between Andrei Tarkovsky and Ingmar Bergman is an intricate one, both being European filmmakers from the late twentieth century who were equally inspired by each other’s artistry, and in turn expanded the world’s understanding of cinema as an artform. It is hard to argue with Bergman’s assessment of the Soviet director as a master “who invented a new language, true to the nature of film, as it captures life as a reflection, life as a dream,” though perhaps the greatest praise of all comes from Tarkovsky in the form of The Sacrifice.
The concerns of faith, atonement, and material reward in this modern parable could have belonged in a film written by either man, positioning us right on the edge of a potential nuclear holocaust that may destroy everything our protagonist Alexander holds dear. Still, in Tarkovsky’s collaboration with Bergman’s frequent actor Erland Josephson, his cinematographer Sven Nykvist, and production designer Anna Asp, he is clearly curating an aesthetic and tone that bears similarities to the Swedish director’s austere style. On top of that, The Sacrifice’s barren landscapes feature the stony coastlines of Gotland, a neighbouring island to Fårö where Bergman had lived and shot many of his own films since the 1960s.
A superb opening composition that pays homage to Bergman on two levels – not only is it filmed on the stark Swedish coastline, but the single withered tree calls back directly to The Virgin Spring.That opening frame then turns into a ten-minute long take, tracking Alexander, Little Man, and Otto as they walk inland and discuss matters of faith.
Even within the very first shot, Tarkovsky is paying reverent homage to Bergman through the lonely, withered tree that overlooks the Baltic Sea, referencing the solemn imagery of The Virgin Spring as an illustration of life persevering in sterile environments. Where such a tree became part of a violent, pagan ritual in Bergman’s film though, Tarkovsky holds onto it as an icon of Christian hope. As Alexander plants it in the soil with his mute son Little Man, he relays the fable of a monk who would climb a mountain every day to water a dead tree until it blossomed back to life. Through simple faith in a methodical ritualism, Alexander believes, life can be saved from the precipice of death, and rewards may be reaped. Despite all this, he also claims to have no personal relationship with God, only finding salvation from a “defective” civilisation in his small, pragmatic actions that exact change in his environment.
Tarkovsky uses these trees to divide this shot, creating a narrow frame that hems Alexander and Little Man into the middle.A beautiful arrangement of staggered bodies, embodying a precision that has come to typify Tarkovsky’s style.The seventeenth-century map of Europe is a curious gift from Otto, considering deeply – is the sacrifice of the giver the source of a gift’s value?
Much of Alexander’s complex characterisation could be just as easily found in a Bergman film, though where the distinctness of Tarkovsky’s style begins to emerge is in the meditative pacing stretching out through this long shot. Between the two, only Tarkovsky would have been willing to play out Alexander’s philosophical discussion with Otto the postman in a single ten-minute take that refuses to push into any close-ups, choosing instead to slowly dolly the camera with them from a distance as they slowly walk inland.
It is in this minimalist aesthetic that he subtly underscores the rich symbolic details of his scenery, especially once we reach the seaside house where Alexander lives with his wife Adelaide. It is his birthday, and a small group of friends have come bearing presents, one of which is a seventeenth-century map of Europe. “Every gift involves a sacrifice. If not, what kind of gift would it be?” Otto enigmatically foreshadows, perhaps planting the thought of spiritual offering in Alexander’s mind. Later when low-flying jets pass over the house and shake its foundations, Tarkovsky’s camera does not pay attention to his characters, but rather holds on a cabinet of glassware. The vibrations gradually increase from a gentle rattle to a violent shudder, before toppling a precariously balanced jug of milk off the shelf, shattering it into pieces, and spilling its liquid contents of maternal nourishment across the floor.
Delicate, fragile imagery as the milk jug falls from the cabinet and shatters on the ground. One could read into this as a symbol of maternal nourishment perishing with the onset of war, though it is the visual and emotional impact which Tarkovsky prioritises above the intellectual.
Not one to encourage such explicit readings of his iconography though, Tarkovsky often strives to separate his sensual, dreamlike imagery from clear-cut interpretations, much preferring instead to hypnotise us into an impressionable state that frees us from the constraints of traditional plotting. Each shot thus delivers its own story of ineffable emotional complexity, slowing down time as the camera gently drifts by Alexander standing motionless among black trees on a snow-covered ground, or elsewhere submitting us to the rhythmic trickling of water as it leaks through a ceiling and pools on the floor. As if filtered through the prism of one man’s existential trepidation, Tarkovsky casts a delicate ethereality across the earthy textures of his mise-en-scène, capturing actors and props in precisely arranged shots that might collapse with the slightest atmospheric shift.
Tarkovsky slowly drains his film of colour, drifting his camera past these dark trees in a hypnotic trance.More of Tarkovsky’s precision in the way he sets each shot, laying out his furniture in arrangements that somehow express an ethereal presence in the absence of actors.
Especially when prophetic visions begin to intrude on Alexander’s consciousness and reveal an impending apocalypse, Tarkovsky lulls us into a soothing despair in a desolately ruined courtyard, tilting the camera downwards to close-ups of the debris below. Wet newspapers caught in a dirty stream, a single wooden chair remarkably still standing, and a glassy reflection of the ruined city above illustrate the remnants of some pending disaster, while Tarkovsky’s camera floats overhead. The black-and-white grading of this shot is devastatingly bleak, emphasising the ash fluttering through the air while light disappears entirely into the burnt interior of a wrecked car, foreshadowing a progressive colour desaturation of the entire film from the moment Alexander’s eerie dreams manifest in his reality, and war is officially announced.
A mesmerising yet nightmarish tracking shot that starts high on this urban ruin, and slowly tilts down to the debris below, white ash fluttering through the air. Tarkovsky has always been a master of high angles that use the ground as mise-en-scène, and this is one of the best examples of this.
The news immediately dampens the spirits of Alexander’s party, settling ominously over a composition of eerie disconnection, with each guest facing their body outwards from a round table while their gazes are fixed on the flashing television light in the background. Their reactions are diverse – after Alexander’s wife Adelaide is sedated from her hysterical outburst, he quietly disappears upstairs and begins muttering the Our Father in anxious desperation. Josephson has never given a greater performance than he does here, his breath shaking and eyes wide with tears as he collapses to his knees, frantically trying to strike a deal with the God he has not prayed to for a long time.
“I will give Thee all I have. I’ll give up my family, whom I love. I’ll destroy my home, and give up Little Man. I’ll be mute, and never speak another word to anyone. I will relinquish everything that binds me to life, if only Thou dost restore everything as it was before… as it was this morning and yesterday. Just let me be rid of this deadly sickening, animal fear! Yes, everything!”
Erland Josephson’s best acting to date as he prays to God out of fear and desperation, the camera moving forward and peering down at his face in a slightly raised angle close-up.
Very slowly, Tarkovsky pushes us forward into a close-up of Alexander’s fearful face as he misses the contradiction of his intended sacrifice. If the world is to end the way he expects, then all that he is offering now will be destroyed regardless, thus rendering the propitiation useless. Still, in the madness of his terror, this goes entirely ignored. The Sacrifice does not impose judgements of whether Alexander may be a madman, a coward, or an altruist, leaving just enough in the subtext for us to find our own connection to him, though one thing is made undeniably clear – his habitual self-reliance has been rendered totally inept in the face of such immense existential dread. How can we blame him for resorting to such extreme, unfamiliar methods?
Alexander’s newfound faith is driven by fear, not love, and as a result his devotion is totally fragile. He is willing to hang all his material possessions on the tiny chance that God will bring salvation, while hedging his bets that other pagan forms of spirituality might do the same. Having learned from Otto that his housemaid Maria is a witch who can help him save the world, he approaches her with an open mind, ready to perform whatever ritual she asks.
Hunched in shame, he tells her another parable mirroring that of the devoted monk which opened the film, though this time it is a personal confession of the time he accidentally ruined his mother’s beautiful garden, despite his good intentions. Grace has been escaping him his entire life, he believes, and to recapture it now would earn his redemption. Soothing his anxiety, Maria wraps him up in a coital embrace, floating and rotating weightlessly above the bed. Jet planes continue to fly overhead, yet through this surreal, ritualistic imagery The Sacrifice offers a tranquil hope for deliverance.
Calling back to Mirror from eleven years earlier, levitating these bodies in a coital embrace, and forming an entirely new, almost angelic shape.
In the film’s broader symbolic reflection between paganism and Christianity though, there is also a mirroring between the act of life-giving creation that Alexander performs with the witch, and the act of blazing destruction he dedicates to God in the film’s grand climax. Not content that his bizarre sexual encounter was enough to save the world, he follows through on his initial promise, stacking wooden furniture inside his house before setting it alight. Outside, Tarkovsky commences one of the single most impressive shots of his career – a six-minute take sitting several metres high off the ground, watching this giant wooden structure burn to its charred bones.
How ironic that one of the great cinematic set pieces of the 1980s emerged not from any Hollywood blockbuster, but from a Soviet director whose artistic inclinations are almost diametrically opposed to his American contemporaries. That Tarkovsky’s initial effort to coordinate this breathtaking sequence was ruined by a camera malfunction makes the feat all the more admirable, as the entire house had to be rebuilt in two weeks for the second take that eventually made the final cut. His dedication to harsh, elemental visuals pays off enormously too in the fire’s contrast against the cold island landscape around it, reflecting its dazzling orange light in the surfaces of stagnant puddles, and restoring colour to the heavily desaturated film. Beneath the enormous plumes of smoke and flames billowing into the air, Alexander is but a tiny, shrunken figure running madly about in a black kimono, trying to escape the reach of his family and the paramedics who have seemingly turned up out of nowhere.
Again, Tarkovsky using the ground as mise-en-scène in perhaps the greatest set piece of his career. Water forming puddles on the ground, reflecting the fire billowing up into the air – this is incredibly elemental imagery.
Beyond the spectacle, it is also astounding how much character detail Tarkovsky instils in this shot. Given the sudden arrival of these ambulances, one must wonder whether Alexander’s birthday party was really a final farewell before committing him to a mental institution, which then leads us to question how much of what we have witnessed have been the delusions of an unwell man. Alternatively, this could also be evidence of a world that cannot understand his true spiritual enlightenment.
For those who take Alexander’s offering to be totally futile, Tarkovsky’s final scene keeps The Sacrifice from becoming a totally pessimistic tale. He employs his biblical metaphors with care, drawing multiple connections to the fall of man and Abraham’s sacrifice of his son Isaac, but the only true miracle among them arrives with Little Man’s first words as he lays beneath the withered tree from the film’s opening.
“In the beginning was the Word. Why is that, Papa?”
Quoted from the Gospel of John, Little Man appears to carry on a faith that is scarce to be found elsewhere on this island, and which was tainted in Alexander’s pure self-interest. The parallels to a virtually identical miracle at the end of The Seventh Seal indicates yet another tie to Bergman too, though where the previously mute servant girl there greets Death with Christ’s words “It is finished,” Tarkovsky’s selected bible passage implies a spiritual hope. Therein lies the greatest philosophical division between the two auteurs. Alexander’s sacrifice may or may not have averted the end of the world, but as Little Man dutifully waters his father’s tree, we can at least be assured that Alexander’s demonstration has planted the seeds of faith for future generations.
Ending with a true miracle, much like The Seventh Seal, referring back to the tree from the start which Little Man continues to water – spiritual hope for future generations.
The Sacrifice is not currently streaming in Australia, but can purchased on DVD and Blu-ray here.
The modern, commercialised Hollywood of The Player is so steeped in the grand mythology of American filmmaking, it is no wonder that those left to continue its legacy fall so drastically short. It isn’t exactly nostalgia that Robert Altman is expressing here, though his sentimental adoration for the great cinematic masterpieces is evident. This industry has been so thoroughly milked of originality that virtually every new pitch thrown out is a retread of old ideas – Ghost meets The Manchurian Candidate for instance, and even the potential for a dark sequel to The Graduate is seriously considered.
On one hand, the churning out of tired tropes and cliches at least brings in audiences and guarantees Hollywood’s long-term survival. On the other, it destroys any potential for creative innovation, teaching filmmakers to sacrifice artistic integrity for box office earnings. As a metacommentary on the American movie industry, mass entertainment, and the necessity of pandering to audience expectations, The Player occupies a curiously subversive space among all of this, turning one Hollywood studio executive into the star of a crime plot he would much rather stay out of. Much like those films it is sending up too, The Player wears its neo-noir, thriller, and comedic influences on its sleeve too, albeit in much more self-reflexive manner.
It is mainly Altman’s narrative paying tribute to film noir, though in shots like these he is drawing heavily on old visual conventions – rain-glazed windows, neon signs, voyeuristic camera placement.
In many ways, this is no huge departure from Altman’s usual interrogations of genre traditions, having previously taken on war, neo-noir, and western films, and yet it is worth noting that The Player comes out over a decade after his unparalleled run of hits in the 1970s. His penchant for satire has not faded, though his targets are closer to home than ever, tearing down the egos behind his line of work. Writers driven by pure passion put everything on the line, desperately hoping that their script is the one to be picked out, while the producers who call the shots insensitively brush off a vast majority of them, only hiring the remaining few with the intent to warp their vision beyond recognition.
There is not a whole lot that separates our antihero Griffin Mill from every other executive who conforms to these rules. It is only through pure misfortune that he is the one to be targeted by a rejected screenwriter. Postcards have been turning up in his mail for some time now with threatening messages, and after some effort he finally locates the man who he believes is responsible – one David Kahane. The clumsy scuffle that incidentally kills David may disturb a guilt-ridden Griffin, though not enough for him to take responsibility for it. He can’t dwell too long on the ominous image of a writer lying face down in a neon red puddle, his hopes and dreams quite literally dead in the gutter. Pressures and deadlines are looming at work, heaping on a thousand other priorities that take priority over this one.
The puddle where writer David Kahane is killed is lit like a pool of blood, literally leaving his hopes and dreams in the gutter.
What a busy, expansive world Altman builds here too, recalling his talents that previously breathed life into cinematic depictions of Nashville, a rural Western town, and a war hospital, and now applying them to an urban landscape so vast that brutal murders simply blend into the miasma. Though not an overly beautiful film, his camera pans and zooms capture an organic naturalism not bound to any single frame, but rather sprawls beyond its borders. The lives of A-list celebrities, star-struck visitors, impatient producers, and eager assistants intersect in his chaotic overlapping dialogue here, refusing to limit the story of Hollywood’s dream machine to any one perspective.
Altman’s camera zooms are naturalistic and well-placed, directing our eyes around crowded settings.
With this ensemble framework in mind, the eight-minute shot that opens the film effectively captures a slice of Hollywood’s everyday routines, commencing with a fourth wall-breaking clapperboard before hovering the camera just outside Griffin’s office window as conversations pass by. Despite the commotion, not a single detail escapes Altman, who briefly lingers on a discussion regarding the great long takes of cinema history. Touch of Evil reigns supreme, one studio bigwig asserts, claiming a family connection to the shoot while shutting down the delivery boy’s suggestion of the obscure British musical Absolute Beginners. The Player vaguely follows in Orson Welles’ lineage in this way, and yet there is a spontaneity to Altman’s roving camera which is quite distinct from Touch of Evil’s, crafting a shot that is entirely his own even as he pays homage to that which came before.
An eight-minute long take opens the film, hovering outside Griffin’s office where the everyday commotion of Hollywood unfolds. It is simultaneously paying homage to the other long takes of film history, and carries Altman’s visual trademarks – the roving camera, the spontaneity, the zooms.
The microcosm of Hollywood captured in this opening also serves another purpose in The Player’s heavily intertextual screenplay. Whether hanging the threat of total failure over Griffin’s head by evoking the box office catastrophe of Heaven’s Gate, or having his stalker summon him with the fake alias of Joe Gillis, the writer from Sunset Boulevard killed by the movie star, Altman is using Hollywood’s historical legends to mark significant narrative beats. In this modern setting though, they are propped up as images of industrial icons while stripped of their substance, leaving foreign classics to be written off entirely.
“When was the last time you actually bought a ticket to see a movie? You actually paid your own money to see it?
“Last night. In Pasadena. The Bicycle Thief.”
“It’s an art movie, it doesn’t count. I’m talking about ‘movie’ movies.”
This is a big cast outside of Tim Robbins’ slimy studio executive, sprawling across several subplots in 90s Hollywood that compete for attention.
To executives like these who prioritise profits above all else, a Hollywood movie must tick off a list of boxes to be successful – suspense, violence, hope, nudity, sex, and a happy ending. Sure enough, Altman is consciously sprinkling in a little bit of each here too, subtly noting their contrived artifice as they consequently pull us out of the story. As for films that fall outside the mould like Habeas Corpus, the legal drama Griffin decides to greenlight – they can at least be reshaped into the desired form if the potential is there, and as long as the writers are open to making changes.
Rather than letting these cliches confine The Player, Altman delights in their escalation of narrative stakes across multiple subplots, as Griffin simultaneously discovers that David was not the man behind the postcards, finds his job under threat, and lands himself in the middle of a murder interrogation. Adding on top of that his perverse romance with David’s girlfriend, June, as well as his unlikely acquittal in a police lineup, and The Player’s keen manipulation of genre conventions pushes our suspension of disbelief in playfully comic directions.
Griffin comes close to being caught out, and escapes at every turn, subverting our expectations of how crime movies are supposed to play out.
Going by the rules of Hollywood moviemaking, Griffin’s improbable reversal of fortune by the end of The Player is exactly how the story is meant to play out, paralleling the contrived happy ending of a heavily rewritten Habeas Corpus as it plays for test audiences a year later. “What took you so long?” a young Julia Roberts asks Bruce Willis as he heroically carries her from a gas chamber. “Traffic was a bitch,” he quips in return, setting up a corny one-liner that Griffin echoes in the final scene when he happily comes home to his now-wife, June.
The fake movie-in-a-movie is hilariously corny, playing to every Hollywood trope as Bruce Willis carries Julia Roberts in his arms – and of course, the actual ending of The Player mirrors this as well.
The self-awareness of this unexpectedly conventional resolution comes with yet another chilling twist though as Griffin receives a call from his colleague, introducing a man with a brilliant movie pitch. It is called The Player, and is about a studio executive who kills a writer, runs off with his girlfriend, and escapes his comeuppance. These similarities are more than just fate. “He gets away with it?” Griffin nervously asks. “Absolutely. It’s a Hollywood ending, Griff,” the anonymous, postcard-sending stalker on the other end of the line replies, still very much alive. “If the price is right, you got it.”
There are clearly greater powers than art or morality at play in the dream machine of The Player. As Altman’s dark satire winds to a discomforting close, he identifies a quiet insidiousness that resides in Hollywood’s happy endings. By irreverently playing within these set rules, he effectively turns our eyes towards the source of those narratives that dominate the cultural mainstream, and use their status to tell audiences what sort of people deserve success and good fortune. It is certainly no coincidence either that these winners are so often the same wealthy, obnoxious jerks with the power to determine what exactly those narratives are.
Maybe the most depressing happy ending of any film, telling us exactly what sort of selfish, immoral people always win out.
The Player is currently streaming on SBS On Demand, Amazon Prime Video, and The Criterion Channel, is available to rent or buy on Apple TV, or you can buy the DVD or Blu-ray on Amazon.
As journalists Loretta McLaughlin and Jean Cole chase down leads and uncover new pieces of evidence against the Boston Strangler, the more disturbingly apparent it becomes that this investigation alone will not bring true justice. While the list of suspects grows, so too does the list of men complicit in this repeated pattern of murdered women – though not all of them may even consider themselves guilty.
This total lack of accountability may be the most demoralising discovery of all in Boston Strangler. Multiple felons collude behind the scenes, seeking to capitalise on their crimes and escape conviction, while the police and media gloss over what they believe to be a string of unconnected murders. Incidentally, they are also providing the perfect cover for copycats looking to cover their own bloody tracks – a “convenient way out for everybody else” as Loretta notes. Matt Ruskin’s crime procedural takes several creative liberties in its true crime reconstruction, though it still poses a cutting criticism of those patriarchal institutions seeking to protect one half of society, while the other half lives in perpetual fear.
The Boston Strangler’s modus operandi is terrifyingly simple, disguising himself as a handyman, gaining easy access to the homes of older women, and murdering them in broad daylight. Stylistically speaking though, this doesn’t stop Ruskin from cloaking so much of his scenery in a David Fincher-like darkness, faintly lit by the dim lamps and fluorescent lights of empty newsrooms and dingy apartment buildings. The period-specific production design pairs beautifully with this murky ambience, transforming Ruskin’s vision of 1960s Massachusetts into an urban nightmare crawling with malice, and rooting us in a consistently strong aesthetic while the narrative occasionally falls back on far too familiar beats.
After all, it is not merely the visuals that Ruskin is borrowing from Fincher here, but Boston Strangler also wears its Zodiac influence a little too explicitly. As Keira Knightley’s tenacious reporter probes deeper into the brutal murders scattered around the city, she encounters strikingly similar threats of heavy breathing from an unknown caller, and an unsettling suspect inviting her into a shady backroom. It is rather through Ruskin’s manipulation of Hitchcockian devices that the suspense becomes palpable instead, leading into murder scenes with long takes and focusing the camera on extraneous details that visually detach us from the violence – a slow dolly forward on a blank wall for instance, or a dripping tap growing steadily louder with the sound of guttural chokes and screams.
Even when we aren’t witnessing this serial killer’s perverse handiwork, we feel a tangible paranoia spreading across America’s northeast, though one that is experienced solely by women. The lack of urgency within the police department is no surprise given its masculine demographic, and even Loretta’s efforts to break free of writing lifestyle columns and report on the murders are met with pushback from her male superiors. As such, the mirror that Ruskin holds up between both sides of the law is incredibly damning. The ferociously discreet misogyny which kills women and the institutional sexism which forces them into subservience are in service of each other, even letting one suspect confess to everything with the promise of legal immunity and the added potential for a book deal. It is only through the alliance of journalists Loretta and Jean that we find any hope at all in Boston Strangler. Its villains may be repulsive creatures, but just as slippery is the ineffective justice that keeps escaping accountability, and which simply continues to feed humanity’s most rotten, corrupt vices.
Boston Strangler is currently streaming on Disney+.
Michael Fassbender’s dead-eyed assassin goes by no name other than that which is presented in the title of The Killer. He serves no god or country, and refuses to take sides in his clients’ affairs, instead dedicating his entire mind and body to the task at hand with extraordinary patience. “Forbid empathy. Empathy is weakness. Weakness is vulnerability,” his inner voice repeats, like a mantra of short, staccato instructions inducing a state of complete detachment. “Anticipate, don’t improvise. Trust no one. This is what it takes to succeed.”
Why then does The Killer see him tread the fine line between success and failure so frequently? It is a trend that begins to unravel right from the opening scene when, after spending days staking out a Parisian hotel room from an abandoned apartment across the street, he misses his target and hits an innocent woman instead.
The opening scene of The Killer is long and drawn-out, carefully building the image of a cold-blooded killer who does not make mistakes, before picking at a loose thread in his tightly woven procedure.
The error is as shocking to us as it is the Killer himself. He is a man who has refined his craft through self-control and routine, keeping his inner voice from wandering by listening to The Smiths, and tracking his heart rate through a smartwatch. He may believe himself to be immune to human error, and yet it is exactly this which rears its head all throughout The Killer. Much like Michael Corleone claiming in The Godfather that his work is not personal but just business, there is a tension between this hitman’s voiceover and his actions. After all, as much as he would like to believe otherwise, the quest for vengeance that he sets out on shortly after this deadly slip-up is driven by nothing but his own furious desire for justice.
With such a vast emotional distance established between audience and character in The Killer, it is no wonder why David Fincher was drawn to its methodically structured screenplay. Murderous psychopaths have long been at the centre of his meticulous narratives ever since Seven, and even when his focus has drifted to less lethal subject matter in films like The Social Network, there still resides a vague hollowness in his characters. Still, The Killer delivers an icy interrogation of this mindset so distinct from any of those previous films that it is surprising Fincher hasn’t explored the psychological territory of a professional assassin sooner. Jean-Pierre Melville’s neo-noir crime films have long been an influence on Fincher’s work, and so it was only a matter of time before he remodelled the rogue hitman story of Le Samouraï into his own painstaking character study of cold-blooded perfectionism and stifled vulnerability.
The Killer is a feather in the cap for Michael Fassbender after a quiet few years, holding an intensive focus and impassive face that only occasionally breaks to reveal a shameful vulnerability.
Like Melville, Fincher is also a dedicated technician of film lighting and colour, though much preferring his desaturated golden palettes and pronounced shadows over the French auteur’s cool blue washes. The Killer is formally divided into six chapters, each set to a different city made visually distinct by their architecture and weather, and yet it is that consistency in Fincher’s gloomy, yellow aesthetic which formally unites these locations within a treacherous underworld. Whether he is stalking a taxi driver along the tropical coasts of the Dominican Republic or a fellow assassin through the snow-blanketed streets of Chicago, the Killer’s silent operations are shrouded in shadow.
Fincher’s trademark gold lighting illuminates the city streets of Paris, Chicago, New York, and the list goes on. It makes for a good number of excellent establishing shots, uniting each location within a treacherous underworld of assassins.
It is the highly controlled soundstages where Fincher is at his strongest though. The sources of his ambient lighting setups are frequently part of the scenery, with reading lamps, fluorescent battens, portable floodlights, and other fixtures decorating everything from high-end restaurants to bare apartments. It is thanks to these visible light sources that Fincher holds such a command over his darkness as well, letting us lean forward to pick out the incredible detail of his compositions without letting it entirely disappear.
Light sources frequently become part of Fincher’s mise-en-scène, casting a moody ambience across dim restaurants and hotel rooms. If cinematographer Gordon Willis is the ‘Prince of Darkness’, then Fincher is the Duke – simply one of the best lighting technicians in cinema history.
It is a level of aesthetic precision that is not unusual for Fincher, but which here makes for a perfect formal match to the Killer’s slick, patient procedures, fastidiously traced through long stretches of purely visual storytelling accompanied only by that taciturn voiceover. “If you are unable to endure boredom, this work is not for you,” he informs us, and indeed the large majority of his work does not simply involve killing, but rather travelling, tailing, infiltrating, and waiting around to spring into action. Though he claims to have no affiliations, it is in these mundane moments that his idiosyncratic habits come to light – taking the bread off his breakfast muffins, for instance, or his routine stretching.
Fincher’s rogue hitman narrative is patient and methodical. This is not John Wick, constantly moving from one fight to the next – the Killer spends time exercising, waiting, stalking, and infiltrating, approaching every action with absolute precision.
After years of working in franchises and briefly taking a hiatus from acting altogether, Fassbender’s return to auteur collaborations is very welcome here, applying an intensive focus to every action and thereby compelling us to do the same in our observations. Conversely though, the flashes of anger and panic that cross his impassive face whenever he is faced with unexpected diversions also develop a growing sense of unease, building to a violent climax when he is ambushed by a brutish hitman with multiple advantages over him.
Fassbender’s unblinking Killer may have a quick mind and agile body on his side, but he is not a machine, flawlessly executing plans with pinpoint accuracy. He is prone to errors, riddled with weaknesses, and perhaps even capable of the empathy he so frequently derides. Whether or not he can accept this, he cannot simply will his imagined supremacy into existence by repeating the same empty affirmations. This wannabe psychopath does not belong among the few who are truly void of emotion, but among the many who willingly fall victim to it, vulnerable to an innate humanity that limits perfectionism, yet equally expands our self-understanding.
Fassbender is consistently isolated in Fincher’s compositions, mostly as a lone wolf, though here framed in a portrait of melancholy solitude.
There is little sense to be made from the perplexing layout of the 90-year-old Massachusetts manor, Hill House. Doors that are built slightly off-centre slam shut seemingly of their own accord, and there is not a single square corner to be found in the entire building, making navigation of its distorted corridors and cluttered rooms particularly difficult. The Gothic décor of dark floral fabrics and ornate wooden furniture looks as if they have been preserved in time for many decades too, reeking a deathly odour that has not quite let go of old grudges and traumas. Robert Wise forces us into a heavily subjective and wildly disorientating perspective here, twisting, turning, and tilting his camera at all angles like an angry spirit, though even his static wide shots appear to warp the dimensions of the space in his widescreen aspect ratio.
Wise’s camera is terrifyingly subjective, exposing us to harsh angles and images that deliberately disorientate our perspective.Bulging and distorting the shot with unusual lenses and reflective surfaces.
If there is anything that consistently lets us recalibrate our senses, it is Wise’s recurring cutaways to the imposing exterior of Hill House, rising from the estate in low angles that shrink us beneath its pointed turrets and stony columns. The infrared film stock use for these establishing shots has its own eerie effect as well, darkening the daylit sky to suggest a sinister presence permanently hanging over the cursed establishment. In terms of pure visual representation, there is very little that explicitly confirms the presence of ghosts in The Haunting, and yet Wise’s cinematic manipulations settle a terrifying ambiguity across the mansion that paranormal expert Dr. John Markway believes may contain “a key to another world.”
These repeated establishing shots of Hill House are eerily weaved into the film’s formal structure, hanging a supernatural evil over its Gothic facade with the infrared film stock that makes daylit skies appear dark.
The small group of assistants he invites to help study the reported supernatural activity of Hill House are an odd group of misfits. Theodora is a psychic whose belief in the occult strikes a harsh contrast against the cocky scepticism of Luke, the young heir of the estate. Eleanor sits somewhere between the two – she is shaken by uncertainty, and yet she also experiences a strange, psychological attraction towards the manor. It is almost as if it understands her on a personal level, penetrating the veil of secrecy that surrounds the recent death of her mother to draw out her repressed trauma, guilt, and grief.
Given the parallels between Eleanor and Hill House’s backstories, it is not too hard to see why she finds such a twisted sense of belonging there. Dr. Markway sets the scene in a prologue that covers decades of the mansion’s history, narrating the “scandal, murder, insanity, suicide” that began the moment the wife of the original owner, Hugh Crain, arrived on the property, passing away as her carriage violently crashed into a tree. The second Mrs Crain would also perish here, falling down a rickety spiral staircase in the library – the same location a nurse would hang herself many years later after failing to respond to the calls of an elderly Abigail Crain, Hugh’s daughter, who died in the nursery she grew up in.
Hill House’s past is rife with mysterious deaths and religious zealotry, laying out a formal pattern that will see history repeat itself in the present.
A brilliant formal conceit is thus set in what essentially becomes a supernatural prophecy, promising us that the deaths of all four women will continue to echo forwards through time. As we come to discover, the fate of Abigail Crain bears a horrifying resemblance to the demise of Eleanor’s mother, whose knocking on the wall for help went ignored by her daughter. Now as Eleanor takes up accommodation in Hill House, Wise’s camera carefully traces the sound of pounding as it moves around the edges of her bedroom, exposing her heavy conscience and thus making her more susceptible to the house’s evil influence. Subtly binding her even closer to the deceased denizens of this mansion too is the reverberant voiceover that effectively disembodies her inner thoughts, foreshadowing a ghostly destiny alongside those women who fell to its dark charm.
“I’m disappearing inch by inch into this house.”
An incredible use of deep focus in compositions like these, simultaneously framing a close-up and a wide shot that conveys total paranoia.Bit by bit, the house is consuming Eleanor in its Gothic architecture and shadows, framed in high and low angles that diminish her physical presence.
Given the expressionistic shadows which spring to life around her through Wise’s masterful lighting and blocking, this notion of Hill House gradually consuming her mind and soul manifests visually as well as symbolically. His astounding depth of field calls all the way back to his days working with Orson Welles, approaching his blocking, camera angles, and Victorian architecture with an absolute precision that subjugates us to the mansion’s imposing design. “The house watches every move we make,” these visitors whisper, and indeed Wise makes them truly vulnerable in our sights, trapping them in its claustrophobic clutter and spying on them from above in dizzying overhead shots.
Wise makes remarkable use of his widescreen, crafting strange geometric shapes out of his rooms and blocking with wide angle lenses that watch his characters’ every move from every angle.
The Haunting’s magnificent mise-en-scène may be Wellesian, and yet its controlled camera movements and suspenseful editing are almost directly inspired by Alfred Hitchcock, pulling us into Eleanor’s uneasy state of mind. Even here though, there is a huge contrast between those slow tracking shots floating above the sleeping visitors and the crane shots rapidly dropping from the ceiling to the floor, throwing us off with a disorientating visual whiplash. Wise’s stylistic repertoire is vast, and when paired with his anxiety-inducing set pieces the effect is often chilling. Palms sweat as the camera follows characters up the spiral staircase that creaks and sways, and when Wise’s eerie practical effects make a wooden door bulge inward, he restlessly cuts between every canted, high, and low angle that he possibly can, each one more extreme than the last.
The library’s spiral staircase may be the most purely expressionistic set piece, often shot at canted angles that threaten to send us tumbling over its edge.
It is all too easy to fall under the influence of a cinematic technician as inventive as Wise, placing us right next to Eleanor as her trauma begins to take physical form and tampers with her perception of reality. Whether it is the manor’s ghosts or merely Eleanor’s self-fulfilling belief in them which possesses her frantic mind, her connection to the estate offers a meaningful purpose she has never felt before. Hill House accepts her as she is, and so finally the fear and neurosis that has eaten away at her mind long before arriving on its estate can be expressed outwardly. “Something at last is really, really, really happening to me,” she rejoices as she careens her car towards the same tree that the first Mrs Crain crashed into ninety years ago, unknowingly connecting the manor’s final death back to its very first. The living suffer terribly in The Haunting, but for those who have endured the deepest psychological pains of all, the only sanctuary left in the world willing to embrace them is this giant crypt of infinite despair.
