Who You Think I Am (Celle Que Vous Croyez)

Befitting its catfish-related story, Safy Nebbou’s newest offering dons many masks and disguises itself constantly in plain sight, serving both as a treatise on the effects of age and a reflection on deep trauma.

Binoche plays Claire, a middle-aged teacher who’s trying to pick up the pieces and move on after a nasty divorce. She does so by taking up young and emotionally unavailable lovers such as Ludo (Guillaume Gouix), who provide a quick carnal fix while denying her of the intimacy she clearly wants. In an attempt to spy on him, she creates a fake profile on Facebook and pretends to be 24-year-old Clara in order to to befriend Ludo’s friend, Alex (François Civil). It’s all fun and games until they get dangerously close and Claire’s life starts to be dictated by her fictional self’s affair.

The plot, which Nebbou adapted from a novel by Camille Laurens into a script of her own, is fearless in its depiction of a woman so struck by trauma that she loses her moral compass. In her pain, she neglects her two sons, steals her niece’s identity and lies to an almost pathological degree to keep her digital façade.

While the film refuses to judge her, she’s painted as a tragic figure. Through Clara, Binoche’s character feels like she’s finally living her life – telling for a woman who constantly feels that she’s reaching (or past) her expiry date – but this comes at a cost for those around her and eventually herself.

Serving as a proxy for the audience is Dr. Bormans (Nicole Garcia), a substitute psychiatrist whose sessions form a big chunk of the feature. Nebbou even dedicates a long stretch of the film’s second half to a jarring narrative detour in the form of an imaginary outcome for the story, written by Claire and read by the doctor.

It’s in this interaction between doctor and patient that the production finds a lot of driving force and one of its most remarkable subtexts: the way women bond in the face of the exploitation of men. After discovering a key piece of information about Claire’s tale, the doctor comments: “We women think we’re guilty, but we’re not”. The emotional resonance of these words considering what came before is breathtaking.

Ultimately, the sheer sprawl of Who You Think I Am mimics the convoluted mind of its protagonist. While it may not be every viewer’s cuppa – especially those who like their films with a clear sense of closure – it’s a stark and unrepentant stare into an emotional abyss that’s definitely worth a watch.

Who You Think I Am is out on VoD on Friday, April 10th. On Netflix in November.

The Beast

The bomb disposal specialist said: “You never know what somebody might tell you. When they think you’re somebody else”.

The works of Elmore Leonard came to mind when watching Jung-Ho Lee’s crime thriller of familiar territory. Leonard wasn’t a filmmaker, but his novels read like he could’ve easily been one, or for that matter, an American variant to Jean-Pierre Melville. He had a seamless swift. The crime wasn’t so much the fuel of the narrative, it was more so the spirit of the crime, and the temporal proceeding between cops and killers. The characters were regular day-to-day people, behaving within and without the nature of their lives and in midst of a prolonging episode that may, by narrative arc standards, reform them. That line of dialogue from the specialist, Mankowski, echoed for every scene featuring both Jeong Han Min-Tae (Yoo Jae-Myung), and Jeong Han-Soo (Lee Sung-Min), two opposing cops with distraught pasts solving a murder.

Tae and Soo aren’t necessarily different, they’re two hard-boiled cops who cautiously break the law in order to seize it all. They both want a promotion, and whoever solves the grisly murder of a 17-year-old girl, first, will find themselves up above from the rest. In this hunt, it’ll be revealed Tae and Soo aren’t who they say they are, one attracts tabs from prior negotiated thugs, the other uses the template for licit rulings to manipulate the strategy of the other’s squad unit’s attempt at barricading members of a gang.

None of this is really as important as the murder, itself. Which, for a good 90 minutes of the film, descends in a threading of countless subplots. We’re introduced to a shady informant (Ho-jung Kim, from Kwon-taek Im’s Hwajang), and a sergeant (Daniel Choi) whose fate in an Oldboy (Park Chan-wook, 2004) inspired raid sequence determines the ties between Tae and Soo’s unit squad.

For the most part, The Beast isn’t a boring film. It is lengthy at its 132-minute mark but weighs in a lot of unnecessary action that could’ve been an opportunity to refine the two leads. There’s nothing singular in their nature other than both men must have this promotion for the sake of their own credibility and as a sentiment towards the commitment they’ve given for careers that have made them wallowed in despair. So much happens in this film for it to be boring, however none of what’s happening measures the significance of the originated crime. These characters only speak plot, their motives only serve the following moment, it is energetic and alive in its pacing, yet this is more of a ‘by-the-books’ within genre and plot.

What’s missing here is a sense of personality. Lee Jung-Ho has the pieces for a much more complex narrative put into one – not two, or four, or 10 storylines. The ambition by idea and vision gets in the way of a potentially well rounded arc between two rivals of similar notions regarding their own eventual vices. Both Lee Sung-Min and Jeong Han-Soo are experienced and formidable actors who give this straightforward material edge, while sparing the viewers of their own pedantic colloquy and moody facades we’ve seen so redundantly tried in American noir dramas like True Detective. The initial prognosis of The Beast, is every dog has its day. By the climax, none of the violence and the deception really have any meaning behind where both cops emotionally route to. That is to say at least the violence of this film has a blench effect only such violent South Korean films are capable of achieving.

This is not in the means of the choreography (as the kind of choreographed fighting is nothing particularly of sensation), but in the very barbaric and raw beatdowns several characters endure from Tae and Soo’s wrath. Broken teeth, faces being scrapped against a cemented stonewall, noses gushing against barstools, and the rotting ligaments of the murdered victim. The Beast is a visual splendor for the modernist new wave of South Korean noirs that lacks a distinction when set amongst other thrillers of this genre such as Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (Park Chan-wook, 2003), A Bittersweet Life (Kim Jee-woon, 2006) and I Saw the Devil (Jee-woon, 2011). But almost like any of the relentlessly released juniors of this cinema, Jung Ho-Lee’s film comes from a place of ambition and a ferocious endeavour to keep this pulp desaturation of hard crime to prevailing existence. This is his directorial debut (starting out as a screenwriter for the 2017 Sik Jung and Hwi Kim’s period crime piece The Tooth and the Nail), so all he needs is a script of evolving and involving characters that are not traditionally mechanics of the auto-pilot syndrome. Characters who, for instance, like the character Chris Mankowski of Leonard’s world, who have an opinion on almost anything than just what’s there.

What his directorial debut The Beast further showcases, is the great potential he’d make for a mini series of similar means. There’s perhaps a story there nuanced of the fight and stillness these two cops inhibit, and a plot exposed to an enigma of the National Police Agency.

The Beast is available on VoD on Monday, April 6th.

Goddess of the Fireflies (La Déesse des Mouches)

On the day Catherine (Kelly Depeault) turns 16, a family feud ends with her father deliberately ramming her mother’s car against the street gate. While her parents immersed in divorce procedure full of vitriol and finger-pointing, she seeks support from the school’s rebel group, including Marie-Eve (Éléonore Loiselle), Keven (Robin L’Houmeau), Mélanie (Marine Johnson) and Pascal (Antoine DesRochers ). She finds a way into the group by getting involved with Pascal, an initiation of her own sex life and escapism in the form of hard drugs.

The director Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette opts for a lyrical approach, despite the hardcore topics. The film is adapted from Geneviève Pettersen’s book by screenwriter Catherine Léger. In collaboration with cinematographer Jonathan Decoste, she populates the scenes with extreme close-ups, emphasising hands, tattoos and clothes – elements that grab the attention of teenagers.

The protagonist finds shelter in drugs. Her world is highly sensory. Dreamlike sequences portray how the characters process their anxieties internally, and they serve as a counterpoint to the harsh reality of these young people. They work largely because of the work of sound designer Paul Lucien Col and the song selection from the 1990s. It was women defined the rock zeitgeist: an important scene is features by The Breeders and another revolves around the band Hole.

Barbeau-Lavalette is very passionate about her subjects and source material. The topic, however, isn’t entirely new. Christiane F. is a reference point. Our protagonist received the book as a birthday present, reinforcing a comparison that isn’t entirely fletteing.

has for its source material is clear, there isn’t a lot to set the production apart from others made along the same lines. “Cristiane F.”, for example, is a big reference point – and the fact that Catherine wins the book on which the German drama is based as a birthday present reinforces a comparison that is not exactly flattering. It proves that teenage angst and the appeal of drug abuse have become timeless themes.

The film fares better when it shows the lives of young people in Québec’s countryside before the internet changed the way they meet and relate. A real time capsule. This Canadian feature, even with a fairly recognisable plot, makes the most out of its impeccable setting. The story feels current, despite its nostalgic appeal.

Goddess of the Fireflies premiered at the Berlinale earlier this year. Stay tuned for likely UK screenings, once life is back to normal!

Moffie

Nicholas Van der Swart (Kai Luke Brummer) is a white boy in South Africa during the 1980s. He is required to serve the military service for two years, upholding the racist regime. He is also a closet homosexual.

The shy and worried-looking teenager is presented with a lewd magazine, its women presented in various forms of undress. It’s a parting gift, the boy now taking a train journey to adulthood. His carriageway is a claustrophobic decoration of snaffled booze, bravado punches and projectile vomit. He watches one of the men he shares the train with taunt an innocent black bystander for fun. When they arrive at their base, the boys are subject to the gruelling workouts that echo Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (1987).

It’s a testosterone-fuelled, tough, male-led film, with splashes of gentle and delicate camera work thrown in. The viewer is led on a balletic swoop over the naked bodies as they communally shower. It’s done with elegant flair, silhouetting over the soldiers before landing on the pensive, apprehensive Nicholas. “Moffie” is vulgar slang for a homosexual.

Sachs (Matthew Vey), who holds Nicholas as a close friend, speaks out of turn during an instructional video: he’s subjected to physical and verbal humiliation in front of his classmates. A tiring exercise ends with further disillusionment for the adolescents as they watch their leader throw away the soup he’d long promised them. Digging in torrent rain, Nicholas’s wavering eye is drawn to the smouldering Stassen (Ryan de Villiers). They share their trench and beds together, their eyes meeting with electrical froth. When they return to their dorms, Stassen and Nicholas are prompted to engage in playful fisticuffs and told to “fuck” each other up. In a flashback, the young Nicholas remembers why he shouldn’t look at others in the shower. The verbal punishment he gets would stick in anyone’s memory.

The sexual tension is air-tight, but the director Oliver Hermanus never loses sight of the tense political backdrop from which the film hangs. In a country where identity is everything, to be unsure of yours is devastating. In his way, Nicholas is as beautiful, but as rocky, as the mountains he trains on. Essential viewing.

Moffie is available on Curzon Home Cinema on Friday, April 24th.

The Lawyer (Advokatas)

This a moving tale about people coming to terms with themselves. Combining lush photography and poignant social commentary in the background, Romas Zabarauskas’s fourth feature is a slick and potent piece filmmaking rife with both love and grief.

Marius (Eimutis Kvoščiauskas) is a corporate lawyer in Vilnius who is approaching a midlife crisis while contemplating the emptiness of his privileged lifestyle. He longs for a companion but most of all, he longs for something that can give his life meaning. When his estranged father dies, his grieving process sets him on a journey to find Ali (Doğaç Yildiz), a Syrian refugee in Serbia whom he got to know through sex-cam sessions. Their meeting prompts these two very complicated men to achieve some sort of redemption.

The strength of the script, also penned by Zabarauskas, is how it ventures beyond the borders of this deceptively simple plot to tackle many issues surrounding gay life in Eastern Europe. The writer-director is still clearly interested in discussing the homophobia in the region, portraying its LGBT people desire to migrate, and exploring how the contact with someone from another background can be transformational. However, he also finds time to comment on upper-class ennui and the social perception of refugees.

The boldness surfaces in the complex portrayal of Ali. The character is a straight-acting bisexual who feels like he’s not gay-looking enough to meet the criteria for special LGBT refugee initiatives. Against all odds, he misses his homeland and refuses to be seen as a victim. Defiance shapes his interactions with all sorts of people.

For his part, Marius has blinded himself to the pointlessness of his life and there’s enough in Kvoščiauskas’s take on the character to suggest that, in a deep corner of his soul, he has not fully come to terms with who he is. While assessing their predicament in a hotel room in Belgrade, both men realise the only way to move forward is to face their inner demons.

Thanks to DOP Narvydas Naujalis, all of this comes across as a very polished affair, with precise camerawork and vivid colours coalescing into exuberant shots (the fact that the two leads are easy on the eye does not hurt either).

Just like the titular character, The Lawyer keeps posing questions, and leaves people mulling over complex issues during its entire duration of 97 times. You will still be searching for the answers long after the credits roll.

The Lawyer was scheduled to show as part of BFI Flare, which was cancelled due to the coronavirus outbreak. Some films, including The Lawyer, were still available to review remotely. Other films are available to watch on BFI Flare at Home (until March 29th).

Vivarium

Lorcan Finnegan’s first widely distributed movie (he had made one previously that had a festival run), was one of the first films in the UK to have its theatrical release cancelled over the coronavirus cinema closures. It stars Jesse Eisenberg and Imogen Poots as Tom and Gemma, a young couple who decide to look into buying their first house. They meet a very odd realtor, and drive out to see a house that he’s showing. Very quickly they notice that all the houses in the labyrinthian suburb have the same design. Halfway through the viewing, the realtor disappears, and they decide to leave – but as they try to drive away, no matter where they go, they keep ending up at the same house. They wait for the realtor but he never returns – and suddenly a baby is delivered that they have to take care of. From there, things just get stranger and stranger as it goes along.

The film reminded me a lot of Seconds (John Frankenheimer, 1966). Both movies have a similarly dirty and unsettling twist. It’s definitely pulling on very solid influences, from films about the suburbs like Parents (Bob Balaban, 1989) to The Truman Show (Peter Weir, 1998), to plenty of Twilight Zone episodes with similar concepts.

Although it was made without loads of money, it’s very well crafted, with some impressive world-building involved. There is a a real sense of the scale. All the houses are painted in this distinct shade of blue-green, and they reminded me most of the houses in Edward Scissorhands (but in this case, identical). It was shot in Belgium and Ireland, and has a very strange location feel – you can’t quite put your finger on where it is, which is deliberate and adds to the atmosphere.

It’s centred on two of the best young actors around. Eisenberg and Poots starred in The Art of Self-Defense (Riley Stearns) last year: they are a good, quirky, indie double act with some real chemistry.

Vivarium has some funny moments, although it’s not a laugh-out-loud film by any stretch. It definitely has its quirks, and goes in some very interesting directions, with a very strong ending. You see it coming to some extent, but you’ll still be impacted. It adds to the long lineage of films for those who, like me, have always found the suburbs terrifying. It gives a whole new meaning to the line from the Talking Heads’ Once in a Lifetime: “How did I get here? This is not my beautiful house.”

Vivarium is streaming from Friday, Match 27th on all major platforms.

The Whalebone Box

This isn’t an easy film to pigeonhole. It’s not even a particularly easy one to describe. But it’s a very easy film to get locked into, the sumptuous visuals capturing its rod firmly on the viewer’s captivated eye. It certainly starts well, with a black and white still of a barren, abandoned box. Over the box, radio voices crackle with exalted excitement as to what, who or which it might contain.

As it transpires, it is a whale bone box. Caught in the Outer Hebrides, the box landed on a remote beach where civil interest soon turned to astonishment at the box’s mystical powers. Fearful of the powerful consequences, beyond their good and evil, the box must never be opened. Piecing this preternatural jigsaw, director Andrew Kötting focuses the narrative on his daughter Eden, the subject of ensorcelled fables. Filming in 2018, Andrew joined writer Ian Sinclair for an eight hundred mile pilgrimage from London back to the Isle of Harris.

What starts with good intention turns to good potentiality as both men encounter demons inside and outside the terrain. Eden pieces the fragments together, both in her part within the story and as an excited viewer watching the story. It’s more arthouse than forthright, yet its almost certainly a documentary in nature.

It’s an intuitive work, more focused on form over content, however beguiling the hexed content. It makes sense to focus on the visuals; many of them are exquisite. Some of the grainier footage recalls Francois Truffaut’s more striking sixties work, especially one montage that films two of the paraders in sepia tinted colours. While filming through the mountainous snow, Sinclair compares the slippery white ground with an albino whale. Behind them, a scintillating scream echoes with deafening inducement as the two men catch their collective breaths. There’s a magical poetry at play, somehow in keeping with the film’s more abstract agenda. The film prides itself on its DIY aesthetic, leading the viewer into the dazzling territory of devilry.

It requires a certain palette. Viewers coming in expecting realism will be dismayed by the rampant occultism. Pilgrimages are a voyage in time: as such, the film uses past and contemporary footage to wheel their dizzied viewers. The result is strangely hypnotic, capturing the flourescent wonders of a shared journey. At 80 minutes, the film doesn’t stretch out its journey, but does struggle to bring purpose to the story. Perhaps that’s the ultimate delirium; meaninglessness!

The Whalebone Box is on Mubi on Friday, April 3rd (2020). On Blu-ray on Monday, June 7th.

Dunkirk is dirtier than 1917

[dropca]A[/dropcap]s soon as the trailer for Sam Mendes’ 1917 (2020) was released, the obvious comparisons with Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk (2017) began. Both films were about nameless, young British men struggling to survive amongst a cacophony of bombs and bullets. Both had top-drawer British directors attached and both focused on time as a crucial factor. Only one however, cast Harry Styles. But that’s not why Dunkirk is a far better, far more enduring film than 1917.

I will be the first to admit that 1917 is a tremendous cinematic achievement. An stomach-churning, anxiety-inducing thrill ride that does not let up. The cinematography is awe-inspiring and the journey is epic. But it’s missing something that Dunkirk has in spades, which is an urgent and compelling message. Dunkirk isn’t just a war movie, but also a film about the boundaries of morality in an extreme situation. The story is not one that just depicts the visceral experience of war but the philosophical, moral confusion too.

Take, for example, the scene with the young infantry hiding inside a beached trawler, waiting for the tide to help them evacuate. With the ship sinking into the water, they realise that somebody must be forced out or they will all drown. Who should they pick? It is a petrifying conundrum due to its simple lack of moral guidance. They then realise there is a Frenchman hiding in their midst. He is marked out by his accent. Should they choose him? Harry Styles certainly believes so until another soldier comes to the Frenchman’s defence. Whilst 1917 is busy chucking loud bangs and dizzying camera moves at its audience, Dunkirk sprinkles itself with moments that cut to the core of what it means to be good in times of war.

An unnamed soldier (Cillian Murphy) has seen the horrors on the beach. He is saved by a local boat, captained by Mr Dawson (Mark Rylance) and his son, George (Barry Keoghan), the shell-shocked soldier orders them to turn back home to England. Unfortunately, Mr Dawson and George want to continue, driven by what they believe is the right thing to do. This back and forth is something that is as tense as any battle scene. The soldier has to reconcile his fear of death with solidarity. What should he do? Is it ok to risk one’s life in such a way? Or is it foolish? The situation is exacerbated by the soldier’s accidental killing of George. When Mr. Dawson realises what happened, he doesn’t tell the soldier the truth. He only says that George is unconscious. It is a heartbreaking moment of empathy for the man who just killed his son.

Nolan’s treatment of time is also more effective than Mendes’s. 1917’s real time storytelling is an impressive feat, always keeping you immersed in the story, but it does not possess the same scale as Dunkirk. It is confined to a duration of two hours, which isn’t enough to conjure the full-scale horror of war. Cutting between three time zones, you get a feeling of a mass-scale, all-encompassing war that permeates its environment completely. 1917 uses time in order to make you feel war. Dunkirk uses time in order to make you understand war.

1917 has some breathtaking moments. The ghostly shootout in a burning city and the final run across No Man’s Land are heart-thumping and unforgettable for their mastery of the form. But the film never made me reflect. The good guys are good and the bad guys are bad. Nolan had loftier ambitions for his film. In the last moments of Dunkirk, it is revealed that the newspapers called George a hero. George was a young boy who was killed before his boat even got to Dunkirk. His death was the result of a completely avoidable mistake. His death didn’t help save anybody or serve to help people suffer less. Yet he is heralded as a hero. It is a poignant reminder of how we, as a society, justify arbitrary suffering.

1917 is a powerful reminder of how terrifying war might be, but it won’t be remembered in the same way Dunkirk will. Nolan’s film raises far more profound philosophical and moral questions.

The stills at the top and in the middle are from ‘Dunkirk’, while the picture on the bottom of this artcile if from ‘1917’

Koko-di Koko-da

Elin (Ylva Gallon) and Tobias (Leif Edlund) stand above their hospital bound daughter, her eighth birthday cake in hand. Singing through their joyous song, the parents turn to their sleeping daughter. Anxious for her well-being, Elin screams for a doctor, the shivering realisation pouring down her sickened spine.

If this sounds like the opening to Don’t Look Now, it really isn’t. There’s no cosmic love scene that brings the fractured parents in one glorious three minute montage, instead audiences are treated to a two-minute argument as they search for a place to stay. Three years after losing their daughters, time has drifted them further apart to points of continuous argument. It’s her wish to sleep indoors, while the bullish Tobias favours the Scandinavian outland. They park in the middle of an abandoned park, where a tent is lifted. Elin’s desire, need, request to urinate, pee, deliver leads to a circle, a panoply, a conduit, a montage of horrific, violent and gruesome deaths.

The above sentence is not needless padding. As the couple are viciously beaten by a triumvirate of eerie strangers that came out of nowhere, the film returns Elin to her restless tent position. In all its violent presentation, no taboos are spared. Elin’s vagina is sucked by a ravaged hound, her car’s mirrors smashed by a large, festering giant. Tobis reacts to every scenario with defiant heroism, then selfish cowardice, but every outcome ends with his testicles at gun point.

The film is a triumph of showmanship, slipping into a number of telling genres. It opens with a silhouetted animation, a family of rabbits burying one of their fallen pack, and ends with a helicopter shot that feels like a throwback to The Shining’s (Stanley Kubrick, 1980) icy opening. Peter Belli plays the white laden raconteur, poisoning his subjects to pounding tortures, singing directly to the camera the film title that haunts its characters in a series of untimely fashion.

The story isn’t not entirely gender progressive (Elin is always a victim, rather than hero, to her assailants), but Gallon gives an exceptional performance. In one snow laden montage, her decision to follow a white cat leads to the most extraordinary piece of acting in the film. Turning to a wooden shed, Elin is gifted with a shadowed performance that describes to her the meaning she’s long searched for. Silent, mournful, indolent, content, it’s all there in Gallon’s face. Much as it is in the rest of the film, Gallon’s cryptic nature adds to the storyline. Escaping the inevitable is pointless; each of us has our curtains closed on us.

Koko-di Koko-da is on VoD on Monday, September 7th.

And Then We Danced

Like the Georgian traditional dance at its centre, And Then We Danced is a strong piece of work which brims with precision and exudes sensuality. A dancer on the National Georgian Ensemble, Merab (Levan Gelbakhiani) is a poor kid who dreams about making it to the institution’s main dance group and having a life outside the cramped apartment he shares with his family in Tbilisi. The arrival of newbie Irakli (Bachi Valishvili) hits him like a ton of bricks: he dances better, he looks the part… and, to Merab’s eyes, he happens to be very attractive.

Their gradual closeness starts off as a dance partnership, and then it transforms into friendship, finally getting physical. DOP Lisabi Fridell captures the poetry of little gestures people make when they let their guard down. With key scenes set to ABBA’s Take a Chance on Me and Robyn’s Honey, the sparks between the two leads are just very palpable.

Their affair, despite making room for astonishing scenes, does feel a bit samey in the terms of plot, with story beats announcing themselves way in advance to the attentive viewer. Instead, the script, written by Akin, really soars when it zeroes in on Merab’s discovery that the reality he’s in simply doesn’t suit him and that he has to find his own ways of moving beyond it.

Even before Irakli’s arrival, Merab already felt like an outsider, probably aware that he’s different from everybody around him. While his peers are raging with testosterone wanting to hook up with girls – and some of them are even marrying – he does everything to postpone having sex with Mary (Ana Javakishvili), his dance partner and paramour.

When he starts falling for the new dancer, he doesn’t bat an eye over the fact that it’s a gay attraction, which leads the audience to believe that the real question here is not Merab’s homosexuality, but his place in the world. In this, despite being deeply rooted in Georgian life, the feature points to the universality of this theme. One gets the feeling that, if this were to be shot anywhere else, the protagonist could be part of any group or group and still feel the same way, provided that tradition and close-mindedness had an important role in the social dynamics of his environment.

This universality may cause it to cover the same ground as other films, but Akin’s tender and sensory feature is nevertheless worth the watch. It’s filled with the angst and passion of the tough revelations of adolescence – warts and all – and the euphoria of taking one step closer to your true self.

And Then We Danced is in cinemas Friday, March 13th. On VoD the following week (on BFI Player).

The Hunt

After six months’ postponement, The Hunt has finally made it to theatres. The violent satire – which centres around a group of ‘liberal elites’ kidnapping and hunting conservatives for sport – had been set for a September 27 release before the political landscape turned against it. On August 4, mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton raised doubts about the film’s timing, but these concerns were somewhat eased when test audiences didn’t connect the two.

Days later, however, Universal shelved the project when the script was picked up by Fox News, whose crass pundits branded it ‘sick’, ‘demented’ and ‘evil’. Even Donald Trump got wind of it, tweeting: “Liberal Hollywood is Racist at the highest level… the movie coming out is made in order to inflame and cause chaos.”

It would be unreasonable to expect a nuanced, insightful film review from Fox News, but despite his penchant for Jean-Claude Van Damme movies, Trump could’ve done so much better in his appraisal, just look at his review of Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941). The truth is that The Hunt doesn’t have an ideology or agenda; like all good satire, it mocks both ends of spectrum – the elites and the deplorables.

Nick Cuse and Damon Lindelof’s script wastes no time establishing its political themes, lexicon and slapstick viscera – among mentions of ‘snowflakes’, ‘cucks’ and ‘crisis actors’ are brains, limbs and entrails. The deaths come thick and fast, but the characters stick around long enough to serve their purpose as caricatures of US demographics – the mullet sporting Wyoming hick; the tattooed, Gatorade-drinking Florida trash; the hairy conspiracy theorist from some mountain cabin God knows where.

Bucking this trend is Crystal (Betty Gilpin), one of the few to emerge from this bloody tableau. She may be from the red state of Mississippi, but she’s disarmingly neutral in appearance and demeanour. However, her skill in jumping, punching, shooting and killing is anything but neutral. She’s another one of those “badass” John Wick women who’s somehow able to clear a room of armed men with balletic violence in mere seconds. Indeed, all the combat scenes are of that overly choreographed variety that’s high impact yet without credibility and consequence.

Away from the mayhem are the wealthy liberals overseeing this questionable activity, which is dubbed ‘Manorgate’. They too are familiar caricatures – minimalist, pretentious and endlessly bogged down by trigger warnings and microaggressions. The group is led by the steely Athena (Hilary Swank), who’s unlikable yet too underwritten to be loathsome, which she should be. Of course, she also fights like an MMA champion on a bucket of human growth hormone.

The Hunt provokes a few laughs in the characters’ exchanges, making light of America’s political divide. Yet some of the zeitgeisty terminology feels shoehorned and scripted, especially during an impromptu discussion of Orwell’s Animal Farm in the film’s bloody climax. Whether it’s Vietnam, Watergate or Thatcherism, political strife often spawns great art, and it’s no different today. Much will be written about the Trump era’s influence on cinema, but The Hunt’s place in that canon will be a tepid footnote.

The Hunt is in cinemas on Wednesday, March 11th.