Tag: survival

Roxy (Roxy)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM TALLINN

The eponymous Roxy is a fight dog who has so far killed 12, no… 14, dogs. For no good reason, he bites a pedestrian’s hand, causing his walker to hand a wad of banknotes to seemingly unflappable, hired taxi driver Thomas Brenner (Devid Streisow) to straighten the situation out. Then his new fare has put Roxy on the back seat, his panting head inches away from Thomas’ face. “You have to buy a muzzle for this dog,” Thomas calmly explains to his fare. “It’s the law in Germany.”

Thomas, whose working life consists of picking up a fare from the railway station, taking them where they want to go, and then returning to the station to pick up the next fare, loves routine and order. In his intermittent voice-over running through the film, we learn that his grandfather was in the Wehrmacht and his father the Stasi, the latter eventually committing suicide in 1990. He has learned from his late mother to never look people in the eyes, a survival mechanism, a way of remaining invisible.

In his flat, his inherited collection of die-cast model cars and motor vehicles sits in lovingly sorted, pre-arranged positions on wall-mounted ornament shelves. His set of dice sit in ordered rows on his pristine tray except when he rolls them for his own amusement, always replacing them in exactly the same place. The tray is covered in tiny images of iconic, naked women, occurring at regular, spatial intervals. He often visits the local bar for a quiet drink, where conversations with latent nymphomaniac barmaid Sara (Valliamma Zwigart) inevitably end in sex.

His latest fare, though, is set to turn his highly ordered life routines upside down. Levan (Vakho Chachanidze) and his friends are criminals or gangsters or some such, we never find out exactly what, but clearly not to be messed with. Levan is impressed with Thomas’ ability to stay cool under pressure, pays well and offers more work. A ride or two later, he’s joined by his pretty, young wife Lisa (Camilla Borghesani) and young son Vova, eight (Raphael Zhambakiyev). Vova asks a question: which is stronger – lion or tiger? It’s a question that sets Thomas thinking.

And then one night, they’re in a restaurant and someone attempts to shoot them. Whatever their history is, these people are on the run and their pursuers are close behind. At this point, Thomas might try to extricate himself from the situation, but he doesn’t. Levan is impressed that Thomas never asks about his background but simply does whatever needs to be done. Above all, Levan is concerned not for himself but for his wife and son. Thomas finds the group a safe house. And Levan offers Thomas a piece of advice about dealing with animals which flies in direct contradiction to his mother’s: always look them in the eyes.

In the scenes that follow, Thomas is asked by Levon to help them obtain fake passports. Surely there must be someone he knows who knows someone who knows someone. Thomas starts asking around to see what he can do. Then he is contacted by people claiming to be agents of a foreign power in pursuit of these men, who want him to help them. They, too, pay well. The only way he is going to survive is by playing one side off against the other, which could prove quite lucrative. What’s more, Thomas gets on really well with Vevo, and Lisa is a very attractive woman…

Also in the picture are Levan’s underlings Andrej (Ivan Shvedoff), Niko (Nicolos Tsintsadze) and the none too intelligent Sasha (Sandro Kekelidze) not to mention a troupe of avant-garde theatre actors who do a nice sideline in fake passports – among them a woman in a blue bodysuit with a fake penis and a truly fearsome, blonde-bewigged man (Waléra Kanischtscheff) sporting a turquoise pantomime dress.

Not only is this one of the most cleverly plotted and executed thrillers in years, which never misses a trick, it’s also about some very interesting ideas. What exactly is power, and how is one person able to wield it over another? When is the time to do as you’re told, and when is the time to strike out and take decisive action? Which is stronger – lion or tiger? We follow Thomas’ journey as he moves from invisible everything-in-its-right-place man towards something far more dangerous, brilliantly expressed in Streisow’s superb performance.

The film is a masterclass in casting, with a superb clutch of performances from the various supporting cast members, including the small boy and, for that matter, the dog. It’s also flawlessly structured, shot and edited. And consistently inventive to boot.

Moreover, it’s a welcome addition to that small, select subgenre of the taxi driver movie which includes such seminal outings as Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1976), Taxi (Carlos Saura, 1996), Collateral (Michael Mann, 2004) and A Taxi Driver / Taeksi Woonjunsa (Jang Hoon, 2017). Collateral, in which a mysterious stranger arrives into town and hires a taxi driver to drive him around, probably the closest to it. The film is a real winner and distributors should be falling over themselves to acquire it in territories round the world. An utterly enthralling, stunner of a thriller which deserves to be a massive, worldwide hit. Don’t miss.

Roxy plays in Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival. Watch the trailer below:

Hunted

Posted on by Paul Risker

A flirtatious encounter turns into a life-or-death struggle for Eve (Lucie Debay), when she meets a charming stranger (Arieh Worthalter) in a nightclub. She’s away from home supervising a construction project, and dodging the calls of her boyfriend or husband, she leaves the hotel and heads to a local club. She hits it off with the stranger and winds up in the back seat of his car, only for them to be disturbed by a second man. Unsettled, Eve escapes and flees into the forest, but her ordeal is far from over. Pushed to the extremes of survival by the two men in pursuit, awakens a vengeful desire.

With its clichéd heart of a woman victimised by men, tradition dies hard in French director Vincent Paronnaud’s English language horror, set in a nondescript place. While Covid-19 may be depriving us of normalcy in our everyday lives, it assures us normality can still be found in genre cinema.

Watching Hunted, I found myself provoked by the quizzical feeling of why we choose to watch these types of films, and why do storytellers continue to tell these stories? These plots are a well trodden path of violence, that can seem to have little to offer us beyond their adrenaline fuelled survivalism.

A relentless and intense nightmare, we watch Eve flee, trying to evade her pursuers. She’s caught, only to escape again, until the final showdown ends somewhat predictably. It may be that we’re supposed to see these stories as empowerment forged through violence, a defence against the recriminations of misogyny that genre cinema is vulnerable to.

Hunted is not supposed to be a comfortable experience, and it’s not solely about physical violence. Eve’s torment is treated like a twisted sexual act – the verbal abuse is the foreplay to the violent consummation. Without doubt, this is an abrasive movie: its maker doe not fear repelling and unsettling people.

As civilised as we are, there’s a primitive side to us. Therapy offers a client/patient a safe space to confront their thoughts and feelings. Cinema offers us something similar to connect with our shadow complex and our primitive instincts – the survival and the predatory.


Characters like Eve allow us to experience the former, while Worthalter’s charming but sadistic killer, similar to the likes of Heath Ledger’s Joker in The Dark Knight (Nolan, 2008), should allow us to empower the darker aspects of our personality, but in a safe way.

The skill of these films is to find a means to make cruelty fun, often through the antagonist who finds the separation between our moral and shadow complexes, then whether consciously or subconsciously, they rip it open. Worthalter’s character is laced with black humour, that opposite Eve’s vulnerability and lack of confidence early on, seduces us. It’s not to say we like or sympathise with him, but there’s a part of us tickled by his cruelty. Unlike Gotham’s homicidal clown, who compels the conflicted choice of who we would aspire to be: the hero who defends society, or the villain that seeks to burn it down, the antagonist in Hunted is superficially amusing.

One of the interesting ideas Paronnaud plays with is nature as a moral arbitrator, that protects the woman in plight. Hunted can be positioned as a metaphorical film, with Eve representing mother nature, who is victim to man’s violence, and the wolves and the dogs are nature fighting back. If the red coat and the wolves are supposed to infer this is a reimagining of Little Red Riding Hood, then it’s not. There’s an awareness of the fairy tale and references, but there is no act of reimagining.

At the same time, it seems unlikely that there would be a political agenda for the director, but Hunted responds to present-day US in an unexpected way. Eve can be seen as personifying democracy. She plays with fire by allowing herself this sexual dalliance, and burning herself she’s forced into a struggle to reassert control. It echoes the American political system that frustrated with the establishment, chose the untraditional Trump. Now having burnt themselves, they’re in a struggle to reassert control, and protect their constitution and democratic values.

I often wonder whether there’s a point where survival films such as this need us to enter an emotional and psychological space, that with continued exposure becomes increasingly difficult? The insurmountable struggle for Paronnaud is that neither his protagonist or antagonist are memorable characters, fating his film to be forgotten with the passage of time. Already likely to be a divisive film, Hunted is certainly not for everyone. Genre fans may even respond with lacklustre enthusiasm, tired of the overexposure to the familiar, but for some, they’ll be moths drawn to the flame.

Hunted streams exclusively on Shudder on Thursday, January 14th.

Harpoon

Posted on by victorfraga

Alfred Hitchcock once famously said: “In feature films the director is God; in documentary films God is the director”. If his assertion is true, then in his role as God, director Rob Grant is apathetic towards Harpoon’s trio of characters.

An effective suspenseful genre picture, the pleasure we derive from watching the plight of these three characters is our shadow complex expressing itself. Not dissimilar to the moral distinction we draw between innocent intrusive thoughts versus the guilt of our actions, storytelling absolves us of guilt. The pleasure we get from the suspense and the humour from the suffering of these characters reveals our apathetic and cruel side. If we are honest, through cinema we communicate with our primitive self that derives pleasure from suffering, from which there is no escape.

When Richard (Christopher Gray) suspects Sasha (Emily Tyra) is cheating on him with his best-friend Jonah (Munro Chambers), it sends him into a fit of rage that leaves Jonah a bloody mess. As tempers calm and Sasha and Jonah are able to convince Richard that his suspicions were a silly misunderstanding, the three friends decide to clear the air by going out on the ocean on Richard’s yacht. Once out to sea the tensions continue to swell, and when the yacht’s engine fails stranding the trio outside of shipping lanes without food and supplies, they must set aside their differences to survive.

Grant’s tale of isolation and tension between three people features shades of Roman Polanski’s Knife in the Water (1962). However, as a commercial genre film combining comedy, horror and thriller in its dramatic plot, it does not have the art house sensibility of Polanski’s early masterpiece. Alfred Hitchcock’s Lifeboat (1944) is another fitting comparison, itself a commercial film set in WW2. Tapping into the political tensions of the time, a group of American and British survivors clamber into a lifeboat following a torpedo strike on their liner by a German submarine, and when they allow a German officer to come aboard, they must decide whether they can trust him. The dramatic approach of these three films is to centralise the interpersonal dynamics of the small group of characters, by isolating and applying pressure to provoke their adversarial inclinations.

While Lifeboat, Knife in the Water and Harpoon are all distinct works with questions of trust, they become studies of rationale versus impulsive emotion. Grant’s film features more shades of Polanski’s than Hitchcock’s film, striking similar beats of incidents and masculine competitiveness. Yet if Polanski were happy to end ambiguously after the breach of trust between husband and wife Andrzej (Leon Niemczyk) and Krystyna (Jolanta Umecka), Grant uses this to provoke his characters to explore themes of choice and the legitimacy of fate.

Harpoon effectively sustains its suspense across a succinct 82 minutes, that like the ebb and flow of the tide moves between a calm civility and tense stand-off between the trio. Sporting, the film never feels that it cheats us with its twists, instead by sharing the restricted point-of-view of its characters, Grant respectfully manipulates us viewers and sets us up to experience pleasurable twists. Tempering the violence and punctuating the film with gory scenes, the violence is never gratuitous, nor does it undermine the tension between the characters.

What keeps this story ticking along is both our naïve hope that they can find a way to survive together, and our indecisiveness. While we naturally sympathise with Jonah and Sasha over the violent and egotistical Richard, shifts of balance of power provoke an indecisiveness in our emotional loyalties. Whether consciously or not, Grant plays with this dynamic, by raising and thwarting our hopes of a happy ending, which is a counterpoint to the negative expression of the shadow complex. If we can express our apathetic cruelty through cinema, then we can also express our morality and humanity by what may seem indecisiveness, but is our instinctive expression of magnanimity.

Harpoon is a tragic tale of how trust fractured cannot be fully repaired. If we are to read it in such a way that we see the trio positioned as victims of fate and misfortune, then this says more about us. Their situation is the result of choices each of them have made, and not the result of their victimisation by an all-encompassing metaphysical force.

Looking beyond them as prisoners of fate, Harpoon is a cautionary tale of the need for mindful choices, and that we create our own happiness, contentment or suffering. Still a simplified reading of Grant’s film, Jonah’s relationship with his parents feeds into his friendship with Richard and provides a subtle motive for a sub-plot of the drama, that looks to suffering as a cycle we create with others. Harpoon touches on darkly philosophical themes of how our continued existence is one of a continued cycle of suffering, that contemplates the cruelty of parenthood, life and birth – the person deprived of free will that sees his or her trauma feed into a communal and shared cycle of suffering.

In spite of its darker, existentialist thematic inclinations, Harpoon never loses its sense of humour and true to its intent is a fun genre picture. Grant effectively strikes the notes of suspense and comedy, yet he performs a discrete subversive act by offering a spark for a deeper philosophical conversation, understanding that simple stories can have thematic ambition beyond the superficial spectacle of pleasure.

The UK premiere of Harpoon played at the 20th Anniversary of Arrow Video FrightFest. A theatrical release is yet tbc.