Tag: thriller

The Execution (Kazn)

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM TRANSYLVANIA

This is a crime thriller with enough twists to make Agatha Christie proud. An unpredictable, non-linear serial killer drama from Russia, Execution is a bloody, bruise and highly nasty film from debut director Lado Kvataniya. With echoes of Memories of Murder (Bong Joon-Ho, 2003), Old Boy (Park Chan-wook, 2003) and David Fincher’s Mindhunter (2017-19) and Zodiac (2007), The Execution a confident and exciting genre picture that doubles up as an allegory of the last, fading days of the Soviet Union.

It’s freely inspired by the true story of Andrei Tchikatilo, who murdered, sexually assaulted and mutilated at least 52 women and children in the 80s 80s. While the USA had experience building psychological profiles of killers from the mid-20th century, this was the first time the Soviet Union had to pursue such a case, leading to much confusion among the politburo.

Nikoloz Tavadze is perfect in the main role as the lead investigator in the case. With a similar gait and frame to Ivan Lapshin in Alexey German’s classic My Friend Ivan Lapshin (1985), he occupies a similar world of paranoia and crumbling institutions, with lone men given free rein to be both judge, jury and execution. With intense pressure from above, the police commit unspeakable brutality in order to pursue their cases, showing how the solution can often approximate the same level of the problem. The myth of the Etruscan Execution is invoked, whereby the perpetrator is attached to the body of the victim until both bodies turn black. Of course, we’ll see something to that effect by the end, but its how it gets there that keeps us riveted throughout.

The film starts in 1991, but the killer starts in 1978, the film freely hopping between and playing with time, slowly revealing layer after layer during its luxurious runtime. The non-linear approach is a smart one, as the story is as much about how information is doled out as what we know from the start. And no matter how much you predict what’s going to happen, there’s simply no way to have a clear grip on how brilliantly this film reaches its final conclusion.

Mixing a romantic atmosphere with the utter darkness of man, it often feels more South Korean than Russian, especially in the way that lurid violence is tied to character and its portentous sense of destiny and forward momentum. While it often strains towards the absurd, its excesses seem necessary given the lurid subject matter. All the while, the heads of state seem useless to stop the killer or rein in the reckless behaviour of its officers. Considering torture is still commonplace in Russian prisons, it has an all-too present day resonance.

Considering that it’s from Russia, the chances of it playing in the UK are incredibly slim. Yet one hopes that when the awful invasion is finally over, it will have a chance to be discovered as a solid genre programmer worth pursuing.

The Execution plays in Competition at TIFF, running from 17th to 26th June.

Immersion (Inmersión)

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM TALLINN

A taut and smart Chilean thriller that blends societal unease with pure genre pleasures, Immersion is a gripping experience right from the start. The kind of clever, compact feature often missing in official festival competitions, it might also be the one with the best chance of commercial success.

Ricardo (Alfredo Castro) is divorced, taking his daughters Tere (Consuelo Carreño) and Claudia (Mariela Mignot) on a boat trip to see his brother’s house. His rift with his more spunky daughter Tere is rather pronounced from the beginning, drawing his ire when she decides to bathe topless. Then he spots three men on a boat quickly filling with water. Instead of helping them, he drives away as quickly as possible.

It’s obvious the story doesn’t end there, Tere goading her father to return to help these men; leading to a fascinating game of wills that keeps the tension constantly rising. There is an obvious racial element to proceedings. Ricardo and his daughters are white, while the fishermen are Mupache. Ricardo initially says he didn’t want to pick up them up simply because he doesn’t like their faces. He is a deeply paranoid man: he obviously believes that they will rob him, setting the scene early on when telling stories of houses being burned and looted by the locals. No mention of whose land it was in the first place, of course…

Immersion shows that you can do so much in a thriller just through suggestion and foreboding, and how paranoia can often be the most dangerous emotion of all. While some of the twists can feel quite contrived, including Ricardo’s constantly changing mindset, Castro is able to embody privilege, loathing and self-righteousness with immense ease, selling us on each further plot development.

Even if the film’s premise is an exceptional circumstance, it actually plays on one of the most relatable of issues: the impossibility and stress of making decisions on a family holiday. As they scramble across the lake to come to a final decision, each solution naturally ends up frustrating someone. What’s even more impressive is that even while Ricardo is a reprehensible person, we can’t help but feel sorry for him. Trying to tell your daughters what to do on holiday is already a nightmare for most people.

It’s amazing how much action takes place just on the boat itself, without ever losing our interest. The white sailboat (tellingly powered by motor) becomes a deeply claustrophobic place, the surrounding water always suggesting a sense of danger. In fact, it’s the kind of simple high concept thriller premise that American producers might be angling to remake. Of course they won’t need to. Immersion already does the job incredibly well. This is the kind of smart thriller that knows that it doesn’t need to do much to be a success, while also making you think about race and class dynamics in the process.

Immersion plays in the First Feature Competition at the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, running from 12th – 28th November.

Occupation (Okupace)

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM TALLINN

Credit must be given to Occupation for answering a question I had never previously considered: is there actually a good reason to wear a Nazi uniform? A blend of satire and national inquiry, all wrapped up in a one-scene thriller-comedy, the Czech film zigs and zags through one dark and heavy night of the soul.

After Soviet control of Czechoslovakia in 1968, theatre is in crisis mode. Pre-1968, directors were putting on Beckett productions. Now theatre has turned to a more politicised mode, the film taking place entirely after a production of a play lionising the life and death of journalist-turned-resistance leader Julius Fučík. Imprisoned and executed for his communist beliefs, he was turned into a propaganda symbol for the controlling party.

For director Jindrich (Martin Pechlát), drowning his sorrows in the theatre bar, the play was a total failure, featuring “mediocre actors and mediocre direction.” He was once a revered playwright, as student Milada (Antonie Formanová) shows when asking him for help on her student thesis project. She wants to know who a hero is: unlike the Nazi uniform question, this one is left unanswered throughout this black comic thriller.

There’s a touch of Quentin Tarantino here, whether it’s the long dialogue scenes, mix of comedy and violence and the twangy guitars on the soundtrack. While the final twist can be seen a mile away (and is the kind of easy resolution Tarantino would avoid) it still pays off in a deeply satisfying way, showing how resistance is easy to talk about, and often impossible to put into genuine action. The other key influence is closer to home: Miloš Forman’s The Fireman’s Ball (1967), featuring a similar balancing act and an equally gratuitous level of heavy drinking. But while Forman had to sneak his critique under the censors, director Michal Nohejl, along with co-writers Marek Sindelka and Vojtech Masek, is far freer with his lacerating look at the era.

The party turns from a pity-fest into a taut thriller when a Russian commander appears and instantly spices up proceedings. While the Russians are heavily critiqued and stereotyped, the film sets much heavier targets on the Czechoslovakians themselves, who ultimately held little resistance against the Germans. The Russians on the other hand, liberated the country, and saw themselves at this moment of acting in their best interest. Still wearing their Nazi uniform from the earlier play, the film plays upon both Russian and Czech national nightmares. It’s bad taste that achieves fascinating results.

Occupation captures the era well, with colourful clothing, deep-hued lighting, reverb-heavy music and meticulous production design. Essentially a play in film form, the widescreen aspect ratio and careful blocking allow for variation in shots that all take place in the same room, complemented by a game cast who enjoy the opportunity to drink, dance, moan, tease, bully and fight in equal measure. While never reaching genuine hilarity, it’s still an entertaining night in the company of deeply miserable people during one of their most hopeless eras.

Occupation plays in the First Feature section of the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, running from 12-28th November.

Cop Secret

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

This Scandinavian movie answers one of the most important questions of our time: what if Tango and Cash, from Tango and Cash (Andrei Konchalovsky, 1989), were also lovers? Taking the homoerotic subtext of 80s and 90s buddy cop thrillers and putting it at the heart of the movie, this cop parody posits a new kind of hard-boiled masculinity for the 21st century. While ultimately an uneven take on the beloved genre, Cop Secret is a slick, at time hilarious production that shows off a lighter side to the usually dour and stoically-depicted Nordic nation.

Bussi (Auðunn Blöndal) is the toughest cop in Reykjavik, opening the film with blatant disregard for rules, restrictions and different jurisdictions. He’s your typical alpha-male, unwashed protagonist, a bald, leather-jacketed, jäger-swilling, punch-first-ask-questions-later kind of guy who represents an absolute nightmare for the police HR department.

The Sylvester Stallone to his Kurt Russell is the wealthy, metrosexual, impeccably-groomed, openly polyamorous and proudly pansexual Hördur (Egill Einersson). He’s already rich and speaks 15 languages fluently (it would be sixteen but he chose not to learn Danish on principle). Together they fight for supremacy of Iceland: when meeting at the heart of a robbery Bussi asks if Kenny Rogers is playing while Hördur asks if he’s at a casino. Nonetheless, they are both ultimately respectful of each other’s excellent police work and soon find their personal and professional lives tangling.

Villain Rikki (Björn Hlynur Haraldsson) is purposefully Europacorp-satirising Eurotrash, talking in English with an accent that feels like a parody of a Trump parody. Haraladsson’s performance is deeply inspired, deliberately bizarre and filled with pointless anecdotes about animal behaviour. It’s the only part of the movie that feels truly cut loose, channelling that raw energy that makes something like Tango and Cash, a complete mess of a movie that’s nonetheless utterly brilliant as a result, so unique.

The American influences, ranging from Lethal Weapon (Richard Donner, 1987) to The Other Guys (Adam McKay, 2010) are pretty pronounced, and the overall tone so polished, Dwayne Johnson — recently himself riffing off this same genre with the rather uneven Hobbs and Shaw (David Leitch, 2019)— could turn up and it wouldn’t feel incongruous. Nonetheless, while American cop comedies thrive off gay panic jokes, baiting audiences with subtext before a Mark Wahlberg-type shouts he’s not “really gay” so everyone can understand he’s still a cool Boston cop, Cop Secret actually goes the extra mile, normalising the concept of a an alpha male cop who can be gay while beating the shit out of bad guys.

The ultimate scheme of the bad guys is mostly irrelevant — something to do with hacking, a football game and a gold reserve — and makes little to no ultimate sense. Thankfully, this satire manages to nail the basics of good, clean action choreography, realising that it has to look like the real deal in order to work at all. While the relatively smaller Icelandic budget sometimes shows in rushed CGI backgrounds and the odd awkward edit, director Hannes Þór Halldórsson (who usually spends his time in goal for the Icelandic national team!) has studied the basics of the genre well, resulting in a fun and easy film to kick back to with a couple of drinks in hand.

Cop Secret played in Concorso internazionale at Locarno Film Festival, when this piece was originally written. It premieres in the UK in October as part of the BFI London Film Festival.

Framed

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

For those put off by the overblown histrionics of The Woman in the Window (2021), Framed offers a far more effective low-key and lower budget alternative riff on a classic Rear Window (1954) premise. Telling the story of a young amateur photographer who becomes obsessed with snapping the woman across the street, it is a film of actual substance, unlike Joe Wright’s excessive A-list nonsense.

Thomas Law stars as the entitled Karl who begins the film quitting his job to become a full-time amateur photographer. One assumes he has amassed a significant savings fund to live in a studio apartment in London without a job, where opposite in a nondescript apartment building is a woman with no qualms about strutting around the house in her underwear with her clothes off.

Like the protagonist of the Krzysztof Kieslowski’s masterpiece A Short Film About Love (1988), his voyeurism doesn’t appear to be sexually motivated — rather he sees his project in terms of its artistic potential, wanting to create an exhibition entitled “The Stalker & The Exhibitionist.” When the woman sends notes asking for more pictures, they build a strange relationship built on watching and being watched.

Working with a limited budget and a constrained amount of sets, Framed isn’t particularly interested in going down the lurid thriller route, rather using its premise as a means to explore the nature of consent, the relationship between the sexes and the relationship between life and art. Lottie Amor plays Karl’s friend and confidant Virginia, who is appalled by the photos, acting as the film’s feminist conscience. Rarely given much interiority of her own, Amor (in a debut role) shows an impressive naturalism in certain scenes but does tend to overplay her hand in others.

Framed

Conversely, Law does a great job of conveying male pride and privilege that leaks beneath a “nice guy” persona. He knows what he is doing is wrong, but believes that as he hasn’t got any bad intentions, then it doesn’t matter. His convoluted views of gender and relationships — including seeing nothing wrong with a man insisting on paying the entire bill — seem to stem from this same wellspring of male chauvinism, all the more sinister considering how nice he seems from his exterior. This persona seems to remain intact throughout the film, a brave decision considering how easy Framed could have fallen into false moralism by the end. Instead, we are invited to watch alongside Thomas and come to our own conclusions.

A late-in-the-game twist — featuring blackmail, a private detective and a political scandal — does little to dispel the academic nature of the film, which remains firmly fixed in second gear throughout its short runtime. Nonetheless, given its micro-budget and modest aims, Framed is a confident debut from Nick Rizzini that provides far more to chew on than the empty $40 million The Woman in the Window. Not quite Hitchcock, and not quite Kieslowski either, it charts its own dogged path through sexual politics and the compromised nature of much male-created art.

Framed is now available to stream on Prime Video.

Kindred

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM TALLINN

Fiona Shaw is a national treasure. As the terrifying matriarch at the heart of Kindred, she shrieks and scowls, scoffs and shocks with venomous glee. Occupying a central space in this British pregnancy horror, she reminds us that she is one of the best actors working today.

An indication of her character Margaret’s entitlement comes quickly into the film. When she is told by her son Ben (Edward Holcroft) and girlfriend Charlotte (Tamara Lawrence) that they are moving to Australia, her reaction is of pure disgust. How can they leave her and her enormous manor behind? But why wouldn’t they want to leave? She is a dark and difficult woman, constantly doted upon by her “nice guy” stepson Thomas (an excellent Jack Lowdon).

Things suddenly change when veterinarian Ben dies in a horse-related accident. Charlotte, suddenly pregnant despite being on the pill, blacks out in the hospital and awakens in this large, ancestral home, replete with long corridors, creaky floorboards and various other Bric-à-brac. She wants to use her phone. It’s broken. She wants to go back to her home. It’s been foreclosed. She wants to go to a hospital? Thomas can take her… No matter the reason, Charlotte finds herself unable to get out or contact anyone.

Charlotte is black but her race is never mentioned in the film. Nonetheless, it seems to be an exploration of the well-documented ways Black women are more likely to be disbelieved than white women, especially in a medical setting. Charlotte is constantly being gaslighted, from the small things — like complaints about dizziness being waved away— to the large, like the amazing moment when she tells a nurse that she is being kidnapped to remarkable indifference. There is also the fact that these large legacy homes across the UK are notoriously white spaces, making Charlotte a constant stranger despite technically being part of the family.

While engaging in the odd symbol here and there — the reappearance of the horse shot like its come straight from a Lloyds commercial, and a flock of birds straight out of Hitchcock — this horror leans more family thriller than supernatural. And unlike many big theme horrors that have come out in recent years, which lean on metaphor and feeling more than good old-fashioned storytelling, debut director Joe Marcantonio has a great eye for set up and pay-off, making it a remarkably entertaining movie. A fair point can be made that the hereditary theme isn’t really explored at all, but it’s not much of a big deal when the film is just this much fun.

With constant twists and turns, delightful red herrings and moments of genuine suspense, Kindred has ounces of flair. Supported by three remarkable performances, including Tamara Lawrence’s steely resilience, Lowdon’s skin-crawling creep act, and Fiona Shaw’s scene-chewing monologues, and this is easily the best British horror of the year. Expect a warm reception back in Britain.

Kindred plays as out of competition in the First Feature strand at Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, running from 13th to 29th November.

The Translator

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM TALLINN

By their very nature, professional translators are not meant to have a personality. Their role is to provide fidelity. They should not draw attention to themselves. But how do they feel when they are asked to say something that they don’t believe in? The Translator plays around with this conflict by opening with a tiny translation error by a Syrian interpreter that powers the rest of this touching family drama.

The year is 2000, and Sami (Ziad Bakri) is working as an interpreter for the Syrian athletes at the Sydney Olympics. When one of them is asked what they think about the transfer of power from Hafez al-Assad to his son Bashar, a small change in translation means that he has to claim asylum in Australia. It’s a clever, well-rendered moment, the ramifications of which the audience won’t fully comprehend until the end of the film.

After this brief prologue, we are flung 11 years into the future, at the advent of the Arab Spring. Guilty over the way he abandoned his family now suffering the full brunt of Assad’s brutal regime, the conflicted Sami, played with subtle sadness by Bakri, ponders the ways he can help those back home. When he finds out that his brother has been arrested after demonstrating against the government, he leaves his Australian wife and sneaks back into the country — in a tense scene that threatens to boil over into violence at any moment — facing up to his own past and his previous reluctance to speak up against the Syrian regime.

Filmmaking duo Rana Kazkaz and Anas Khalaf know a thing or two about living in exile. Having left Syria themselves due to the conflict, they have found a way to revisit their home country and interrogate their own past with this heartfelt film. Together they blend social family drama with impressively-shot thriller elements. A sense of haunting paranoia pervades almost every scene. Sami, once tasked with mere relaying what others have said, has to find his own crucial voice, even if it will cost him personally. While a little slow-going in the middle, tending more towards the emotional aspects of the film instead of truly channeling them through a thriller narrative, the moral clarity of the film rings strongly throughout.

The Translator shows us that the repressive nature of the Assad regime lies on his vice-like grip over nearly every element of Syrian society. It is not just through military violence either, but with the power of propaganda and coercion. With the situation in Syria still deeply precarious and with Assad still firmly in the Presidential Palace, the situation of The Translator is as true today as in 2011. The film reminds us of the need for people to speak up and let the world know what is going on. This is stressed through the continuous use of English-language radio and television reports providing crucial context and clarification for international audiences. Here’s hoping that the urgent message of The Translator provides the same effect.

The Translator plays as part of the First Feature competition at Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, running from 13th to 29th November.

Muscle

Posted on by victorfraga

This is a movie packed with a toxic mixture of testosterone and steroids. Simon (Cavan Clerkin) works in a call centre cold phoning prospective clients in search of their credit card number. He has a pretty partner and stable home, yet monotony seems to have taken its toll on him. His small beer belly epitomises both his passivity and frustration. So he joins the local gym, in an attempt to inject some vim and vigour into his life.

The highly intrusive and aggressive personal trainer Terry (Fairbrass) approaches Simon almost immediately, telling him that he’ll quickly cripple himself if doesn’t learn how to lifts weights properly. The 55-year old Eastenders and Rise of the Footsoldier star here plays the character he knows best: the tough guy/manipulative conman. The inexperienced Simon is easily persuaded, and soon takes up Terry’s “services”. He’s virtually forced to take steroids, making him fickle, irritable and violent. As a consequence, his partners simply packs up and leaves, and he also loses his office job.

Gradually, Terry takes control of virtually every aspect of Simon’s life, assisting in every step of his personal collapse and deconstruction. He eventually moves in, bringing a prostitute friend along. The once respectable office employee has now become an informal worker reliant on his personal trainer. The once clean and civilised flat has now turned into a party and drug den, where orgies are routinely held.

Terry is highly volatile and outburst-prone. Expletive-laden rants and threats are the norm. He does not allow Simon to make decisions. Fairbrass’s character represents a grotesque type of hyper-masculinity that’s incompatible with modern conviviality. Yet he’s strangely enticing. Even seductive. Perhaps this bromance could develop into something else. Something sexual? Something lethal? Or could this erratic lifestyle slip into criminality?

This 109-minute black and white thriller has enough twists and turns to keep you guessing the nature of Terry’s elusive personality and also of his relationship to Simon up until the very end. Plus the photography of the barren and lifeless suburbs and industrial estates of Newcastle makes for gripping viewing. This is a movie satisfactory enough for fans of British thrillers/neo-noir. But that’s about it. It has little to offer in terms of innovation, and mostly sticks to trite old formulas.

Muscle showed in Competition at the 23rd Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, when this piece was originally written. It’s out on BFI Player on Monday, September 4th (2023). On Sky and NOW in June. On most VoD platforms from July

The Pool

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Day (Theeradej Wongpuapan) wakes up. There’s a lot of blood. He’s at the bottom of a drained, six metres deep swimming pool with a crocodile advancing towards him. But how did he – and for that matter the crocodile – get there?

Flash back to six days earlier. Day and his girlfriend Koi (Ratnamon Ratchiratham) are working on a movie set. He looks after the swimming pool and as a bonus his dog Lucky has to heroically jump from the poolside over the water in the schedule’s very last shot. The dog leaps, the crew gets the shot, it’s a wrap, everyone’s happy. In fact, Day is so happy that when almost everyone else has gone, he dozes off on a lilo in the pool while its draining. When he wakes, the water level has gone down so far that he can’t get out. Somewhere on the ground nearby, a flier announces an escaped crocodile is on the loose.

Around this seemingly flimsy opening, going one day at a time up to seven days, director Lumpraploeng constructs an edge of the seat slice of narrative suspense which deserves a place in that pantheon of suspense thrillers which take place in small locations often with reduced numbers of characters. This pantheon includes:

Lifeboat (Alfred Hitchcock, 1944, in a lifeboat);
Rope (Alfred Hitchcock, 1948, in one apartment);
Duel (Steven Spielberg, 1971, in a car pursued by a lorry);
Dead Calm (Philip Noyce, 1989, three people on two boats);
Cube (Vincenzo Natali, 1997, in, um, a cube);
Phone Booth (Joel Schumacher, 2002, in a phone booth);
Buried (Rodrigo Cortés, 2010, in a coffin);
Frozen, 2010, Adam Green, a ski lift);
Cosmopolis (David Cronenberg, 2012, in a stretch limo);
Locke (Steven Knight, 2013, in a car); and
Arctic (Joe Penna, 2018, in the Arctic following a plane crash).

None of those are what you might describe as creature features though, unless you include the brief sequence where a snake enters the coffin in Buried, the wolves on the ground below in Frozen or the bear in Arctic. But the crocodile in The Pool turns it into a full blown creature feature as well.

The trapped man in the pool’s obvious means of escape would be his girlfriend turning up and lowering a lifeline or ladder. She does indeed turn up, but then owing to a rapid-fire series of events, she quickly ends up injured, perhaps fatally, in the pool with him. Other possible ways out include a helicopter overhead, a drone, the latter’s owners descending into the pool to retrieve it and the lowering of a bamboo ladder at the poolside. There’s also a manhole cover in the middle of the pool, screwed down until our hero finds a way to remove the screws, leading to a small underground cylindrical service tunnel (shades of both Dr. No, Terence Young, 1963 and Alien, Riley Scott, 1979, the latter indubitably a creature feature, the former not so because the script cut out the giant squid Bond battles in the book) which might or might not provide a way out.

Then there’s the crocodile which following a run in with Lucky (in which we won’t tell you if the dog lives up to his name) the crocodile ends up on the floor of the swimming pool. And the fact that the hero is diabetic and his insulin shot is sitting ready in a syringe on a table beside the pool, beyond his reach.

The crocodile must be mostly CGI because otherwise at least two cast members (three if you include the dog) would have been unlikely to survive the shoot. This educated guess is based on the plethora of animation and computer technicians on the end credits, not on the croc itself which is pretty convincing on every level. The two main actors put everything they have into their performances too and the director brilliantly rachets up the tension throughout so that, as the piece proceeds to its conclusion, you’re thoroughly gripped.

While it’s hard to locate this film in specific Thai or wider East Asian culture, it shares a certain kinship with Thai action star Tony Jaa vehicle Ong Bak 2 The Beginning (Tony Jaa, 2008) which has a heart-stopping sequence with the hero fighting for his life in a flooded crocodile pit. The Pool is every bit as heart-stopping from start to finish. If no enterprising UK distributor has yet picked this up, then one of them really ought to do so.

The Pool showed at the The London East Asia Film Festival, in 2019, when this piece was originally written. On Shudder in July 2020.

7500

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM LOCARNO

The limited thriller has been growing in popularity in recent years. Whether its the police responder drama The Guilty (Gustav Möller, 2018) or the man-in-the-car-with-great-phone-reception talkie Locke (Steven Knight, 2013), the thriller has been pushed further and further in terms of doing more with less. You can now count 7500 — referring to the code pilots used when being hijacked — on that list, a German production that reinvents the wheel by trimming it down to the absolute barest essentials.

Bar a few opening scenes via CCTV, the entirety of the movie’s point-of-view is from the cockpit of the airplane. Once we are in the cockpit of a plane going from Berlin Tegel to Paris, it starts with almost rigorous realism; both the pilot (Carlo Kitzlinger) and his first captain (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) going over in fine detail about procedure that no one but a pilot or radio controller could understand. Taking place in almost real time, 7500’s premise isn’t very subtle. We know from the beginning that there will be some kind of Islamist threat, it’s how it goes about it that makes it such an entertaining, turbulent ride.

7500

Patrick Vollrath and his cinematographer deserve credit for keeping things interesting inside such a close space, quick exchanges of point-of-view, insert shots and close-ups allowing momentum to continuously build. This is all edited with invisible precision, easily allowing us to go along with the plot despite the limited amount of scenarios that are possible. All extraneous cutaway scenes plane hijacking thrillers are known for — such as the control tower going haywire, the police chief facing a difficult decision, or the accompanying fighter jets — are completely missing, referenced only through radio and seen through the plane window. This works very effectively because a) these scenes are almost always completely rote anyway and b) they allow us to use our imagination instead, making the film far more unpredictable and enjoyable.

All in all, it’s an almost perfect pure thriller, with the extra thematic elements — such as the threat of Islamic extremism and German-Turkish conflict within cities like Berlin — almost completely unnecessary to the plot itself. These hijackers could’ve been far-right fascists, money-grabbing freeloaders, Quebec nationalists, or pro-Brexit extremists and the film would’ve worked in almost exactly the same way. It’s a little bit of a shame that in a post-9/11 world that the de facto plane hijackers are still Muslim when there are so many conflicting ideologies across the world ready for adaption, but this plot is really just a threadbare line to hang the enjoyable ride upon.

Ultimately this isn’t a film about themes; this is a film that rests purely upon style and succeeds tremendously. With Joseph Gordon-Levitt in the main role, 7500 has the potential to be a breakout hit. While his Americanness doesn’t add much to the screenplay — which in fact may have worked better if he were simply a white German — his recognisable face and over-the-top acting style perhaps tells us much more than a lesser name could. It also means that it has more potential to be seen. Let’s just hope its rollout isn’t as limited as its premise.

7500 debuted to strong acclaim in the Piazza Grande open-air section. Amazon Studios are helming this one in all territories apart from German-speaking regions. Expect it in a cinema near you!

The Wedding Guest

Posted on by victorfraga

The main enjoyment of a thriller like The Wedding Guest is having no idea what’s going to happen next, one’s mind racing to fill in the board before the pieces have been even revealed. Starting with British man Jay (Dev Patel) boarding a flight from Heathrow to Lahore, before taking us on an epic journey of the Indian subcontinent, its greatest asset, at first, is the way it keeps the viewer continuously guessing. Yet when it finally settles into a fixed gear, it slowly deflates into something mechanical and predictable, dashing to pieces its initial great promise.

I’ll try to spoil as little of the plot in my review. Let’s just say that when a movie is called The Wedding Guest, perhaps the titular character isn’t exactly a friend of the bride. After his for-hire job is botched, he heads to the Indian border with a new acquaintance in tow (Radhika Apte), quickly scrabbling to make things right.

Michael Winterbottom has always been obsessed with travel. Not only has he helmed every film in Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon’s The Trip series and adapted On The Road, but he has also filmed in locations as diverse as Bosnia, Italy and Texas. The Wedding Guest follows in this wandering tradition, but the sheer size and diversity of India seems to overwhelm him. By doing too much and going too far, he can’t quite slow down and figure out why the story matters.

Here he zooms in on the bureaucratic processes of travel, depicting the ostensible dull scenes of Jay renting cars, boarding trains and buses, and checking into hotels. With ID checks constantly needed, Winterbottom tries to suggest that there’s always someone watching. At the same time, India is presented as a land of opportunity and escape, a place to get lost in and start a new life. Spanning from the paradisiacal beaches of Goa to the ramshackle streets of Delhi, it’s a vicarious travelogue through the world’s seventh largest nation. With a better screenplay, this contrast between restriction and escape, bureaucracy and freedom may have pushed the characters to exciting heights, yet once the initial set up is over, The Wedding Guest runs out of interesting places to go.

There is never any real sense that the walls are closing in, both characters easily able to sojourn around the country with little to no possibility of actually getting caught. While it neatly advertises, especially through its sweeping landscape shots, India as a great place to be a fugitive, this hardly makes for a truly gripping thriller. The landscape simply destroys the story; the lusher the scenery becomes, the duller the story gets.

This lack of narrative tension may have been compensated by some sparkly romance, yet you can’t just dump two handsome leads in a five-star hotel pool and hope for the best: there has to be a reason why they become attracted to each other. Lacking this central hook, The Wedding Guest feels weightless — lacking that extra level of sophistication to really elevate it into something special.

Still, its hard to play for-hire enigmas in the grand tradition of Le Samourai (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1967), The Transporter (Louis Leterrier/ Corey Yuen, 2002) and The American (Anton Corbijn, 2011). Show too much emotion and the spell is lost, but show too little and the audience is given little reason to care. Dev Patel does a good job of emoting through body language and facial gestures alone, allowing us to get some sense of who this guy is despite his otherwise gruff tone and curt speech patterns, but there’s only so much he can do after the blindingly exciting first act gives way to bog-standard thriller clichés. It’s almost as if he’s auditioning for a better role than this. Let’s hope, unlike Winterbottom, he actually finds what he’s looking for.

The Wedding Guest is in cinemas across the UK on Friday, July 19th. On VoD the following Monday.