Here (2024)

My favorite moment in any film is when Emma and Mr. Knightley put their hands together in 2020’s Emma. It’s a silly scene, all stodgy costumes and ornate dancing; I’m not even sure I could call it well-acted. But when the two lock arms and orbit one another, the electricity of their touch renders me breathless. It’s as though I’ve been waiting all my life for that moment rather than an hour looking at Anya Taylor-Joy on the screen.

When that electricity strikes, when the coming together of two fictional hands overwhelms me, I know that a film is working. For all its historical adornment, Emma works; I buy into Emma’s journey and yearn for her, rather than those around her, to find happiness. But what I’m feeling, the invisible hand pulsing giddy emotion through my cynical veins, is tension. I can feel the possibility that Emma might not end up with Knightley—Austen makes compelling cases that she should not, ratcheting up the suspense as the delicate proto-romcom baubles toward its quietly triumphant pairing.

Here, the 2024 Belgian film directed by Baz Devos, would seem an odd companion for Emma, let alone all this talk about electricity. Set in Brussels during a rainy season, the film follows construction worker Stefan (Stefan Gota) as he leaves his high-rise work site for an extended holiday trip to his home in Romania. In the film's first half, we see nothing but Stefan preparing for his journey. He makes soup to empty his fridge and delivers it to family and friends.

I’ve never been to Brussels, but Devos introduces a lumbering giant with a soft side. As Stefan walks between destinations, we enter quiet communal gardens and dim cafes, places suggesting solitude despite their potential as hubs. Although Stefan cuts through lush locations on the outskirts, suggesting a peaceful coexistence, his profession looms; his work engineers an encroachment on the tranquil places across the road and behind the chain link fences. Still, Here resists recriminating these commercial spaces, lighting them with just enough gentle light for their intimacy to breathe. When he crashes on the table while his sister looks on near the film’s midpoint, Stefan bothers no one and finds no disturbance. “I have to go,” she says. But yet she waited while he dozed.

Meanwhile, ShuXiu (Liyo Gong) stares through a microscope at a sample. A bryologist, ShuXiu splits her workdays between a solitary desk and a dark lecture hall where she teaches botany. Like Stefan, her emotions are restrained and subdued, but her investment in this minute work goes unquestioned. Just as all takers toast the soup he made, proving his skill and compassion, so too do we watch ShuXiu pause on the sidewalk to collect a square of moss. The building it grows beneath towers over her; she notices nothing. It’s the unseen infinitesimal forest that inspires awe.

Although I knew this film’s trajectory—Here made Tim Grierson’s personal Top Ten list—I’d bet you understand my invocation of Emma now. When Stefan and ShuXiu meet in the unfussy noodle shop of her aunt, there is instant, unspoken chemistry. Beset by persistent rain behind the window Stefan foregrounds, their polite interactions across the restaurant offer gentle sunlight. There’s no hint of flirtation unless you listen to Stefan’s slightly-more-eager chiming or squint at the corners of ShuXiu’s smile. The world goes on around them, something they thoughtfully commiserate over when a delivery man exits into the downpour, but you know what this is. We know. It wouldn’t be a spoiler to say these two will meet again.

Unlike Emma, a film that clamors toward the inevitable conclusion near-every romantic comedy since has taught us to anticipate, Here breathes. Deeply. When the two find one another again, by pure happenstance, Devos turns off all clocks and unspools time for our characters. Meandering through the forest, running fingers across microbial forests while the city they inhabit quietly looms just beyond earshot, these two engage with nature more than one another. Rarely, if ever, do we get a shot of these two together. The lanky Stefan loses his upper body to the 4:3 aspect ratio; the inquisitive ShuXiu strolls so far ahead that she momentarily loses her fortuitous walking partner. Do they spend two hours together? Do they pass two eternities out in the woods? No matter—their rendezvous with the natural world is timeless because so is this tether between them. When the moment arrives where they finally face one another, their expressive faces escaping the frame does nothing to tame the cosmic forces that have united

Nothing happens. Devos shows us nothing, that is. Not unlike Emma’s and Knightley’s hands, this acknowledgment of what we in the audience have been waiting for is ephemeral. It’s just a moment. These two might well be cellular organisms in a moss forest of merely another scale. It isn’t heartbreaking any more than the divergent forces postponing Emma’s ultimate romantic collision with Knightley because we know—we know—what we’ve witnessed, but it is disorienting. The film watches cellular slides and fluttering leaves longer than it gives us Stefan and ShuXiu.

We bring so much of ourselves into viewing a film. I toted that magical minute of Emma, for instance, but I also brought more harrowing questions. Stefan’s journey betrays signals of finality; the beet broth in his delicious soup puts ominous thoughts in my head. Is ShuXiu happy with her work? Her pleasant encouragement with students comes naturally, but her polite smile there pales in comparison to her rosy cheeks while chit-chatting with Stefan. The film has one blinking moment of magic realism—what does it mean? My brain isn’t wired for the gentle breeze that is Here. I spent many a languorous shot searching behind the frame for mysteries.

If I understand the science outlined in Devos’s screenplay, moss is little more than a cluster of tiny trees ShuXiu calls a forest. When I think of forests, I picture the massive sequoias in San Francisco or the sky-kissing oak that once graced my parents’ backyard. Those trees have massive roots, roots so large they can destroy a foundation or Challenge young climbers by themselves. Moss, therefore, must consist of tiny roots; that’s why our protagonists have no trouble extricating squares from their environment. There’s so much moss on every log, every stump, every boulder—the scale of these ecological marvels deceives us into missing the life sheltered within and waiting to spread its spores across the earth. Like those miniature plants, Stefan carries seeds in his pocket. He seeks somewhere to plant them but resists the generous plots others offer.

 

Pause Here before its final scene. I guarantee you’ll know when you’ve reached it. Give yourself a moment to think about what should come next. Think about everything you’ve seen, and maybe think about what I’ve written. If you’re like me, you’ll find yourself listening for something. If you’re like me, you’ll be surprised by what Here delivers in its place and when it cuts to darkness.

If you’re like me, you’ll also find yourself with gentle tears of joy the film shouldn’t have earned but did.

In multitudes.

Nightbitch (2024)

As much as any movie I can remember, Nightbitch wanted to rip my throat out.

Maybe that’s appropriate.

That Amy Adams’ character has no name beyond “Mother” telegraphs Nightbitch’s bent. Adams plays the exhausted mom at the film’s center. The former high-brow artist totes her toddler son to storytime and keeps him from electrocuting himself with a fork. She’s frazzled, she’s harried, and she’s pissed. Her working husband’s job necessitates travel, and he’s useless in parent mode.

And she tells us as much. Over and over, Adams reads dialogue or plays out fantasies of spewing philosophic all over those who cross her. If you told me Nightbitch was adapted from a blog or first-person novel, I’d nod and go, “Yep”. Every time Adams talks, the film becomes a blunt instrument of righteous fury. Nightbitch froths at the mouth, daring you to criticize its overclocked protagonist.

 

 

Who also turns into a dog. Maybe. You see, Nightbitch is high-concept that takes its high on the side. Trying to stake some claims about the animalism of motherhood and its violent suppression of humanity, sometimes the film goes body horror, with Adams unfurling a stringy tail from a puss-filled lump above her butt. Another time, she viciously maims the family pet…probably?

For a script that believes its audience incapable of detecting subtly and a Scoot McNairy performance that puts its hand so forcefully on the scale the thing explodes, Nightbitch withholds a lot of answers. Whether the writer/director believes that lends it a hazy surrealism evocative of late-night feedings or because she’s struggling to unite such a diverse and unruly pack of conceits, I’m not sure, but the result is a clunky, jarring, pseudo-magic realist lecture about parental sacrifice.

Contractual obligations dictate that I now acknowledge that I am not a parent and, thus, incapable of comprehending the metamorphosis wrought on the DNA of a woman when she becomes a mom. I watch many movies whose wavelengths I never find, but Nightbitch doesn’t want me on its wavelength. This is a chained-up dog of a film growling at me while I pass its yard. “You’ll never get it,” the film says, glaring at me with murderous canine eyes.

I might believe my lack of motherhood renders me ineligible to offer compassion for what it broadcasts, except I can’t: I’ve watched a film with this message about the fractured identity and eternal apocryphal fatigue of motherhood devastate me. My muse, of course, would be 2018’s Tully, starring Charlize Theron and Mackenzie Davis. In Tully, Diablo Cody’s script engineers empathy with expert precision; like Heller, she champions the gritty dysfunction of parenting by invoking [[SPOILERS]] something akin to magic realism, but every decision has a purpose. I bawled at Tully and thought about my mother’s many sacrifices with lips that quivered until I got home; during Nightbitch, I dared say nothing lest Adams’ character might sic her pack on me.

Which is too bad. Adams remains a magnetic performer, and her stripped-down portrayal here ties imbues every shot with proof of the draining costs of her unpaid labor post-labor. Heller doesn’t trust Adams to let her expressive bloodshot eyes invite us to understand; she’s constantly narrating like the script was lifted directly out of a novel without adaptation. Everything in this script is awkward, sacrosanct, and so aggressively on the wet nose that I looked up the number for animal control. And don’t even get me started on the cartoonish depictions of professional artists (that basically gets thrown out at the end for…reasons).

Admittedly, there was a part of me that thrilled as the film progressed and refused to yield from its “Mothering makes monsters” message. There’d be guts in committing to hostility toward the demands of child-rearing…so of course, the film pauses to insist it’s not the child but the role, as though we hadn’t already repeatedly seen Adams pouring from an empty cup to delight her son. Instead, it buries all of its intensity at the end in exchange for a Milkbone of compromise, communication, and a groveling husband who sees the error in his ways while sweeping a warehouse moments earlier full of moms bonding over the animals they murdered.

Reflecting now, I wonder if this film got chopped to pieces; its 98-minute runtime felt a tad slight for its premise, and there were jarring cuts and suddenly-central characters who leaped from NPC to VIP in a blink. Maybe a more expansive screenplay (or the novel it’s evidently based upon) did more with those extra square inches of canvas. There’s definitely something here because I cried at the end, albeit while certain I was crying because Adams so resembles a brilliant friend who wants to be a mother, and my heart broke thinking about what life bringing life into the world might strangle from her according to this movie.

 

 

Great films can make something specific feel universal, but even mediocre films manage that for me. I enter films wanting to empathize and connect and find personal truth in the story on screen. By that measure, Nightbitch ranks among the worst movies I have watched. Like a wild dog, it took my intended empathy, tore it apart like a wild skunk, and left it on my doorstep to rot.

WOOF.

Barbarian (2022)

Barbarian is a horror film that twists like few others. What starts as heart-pounding claustrophobic suspense pivots into what I will only describe as…other things…right at the moment that such turns would seem least appropriate. I knew this going in—Will Leitch’s phenomenal newsletter piece on that very thing convinced me to strain my schedule and squeeze seeing it in—but I underestimated just how engaging this presentation could be. 

 

I make this statement because, in the midst of a climactic scene with about fifteen minutes remaining in the film, something happened in our theater. The lights flashed brightly on the wall twice and then the screen cut to black before giving way to a translucent red hue. The audience was silent, sharing a collective curiosity over what had just happened. Phones came out, some muttered dialogue floated under the suddenly silent air conditioner, and a member from each of the two parties present with me—seven teens sharing three vape pens between them and a quiet couple in my row—left to speak with a manager. 

 

I, on the other hand, continued to munch on my popcorn. This is crazy, I thought with a grin so wide the others might have pegged me as a promotional plant for Smile. Will didn’t say it was interactive too.

 

It turns out: there was a power surge that caused everything to reboot. Ten minutes later, the film picked up again, and we all watched the conclusion that went over pretty well. In all seriousness, though, I assumed the cut and flashing were part of the movie. That speaks to the level of disorientation that Barbarian conjures at its finest moments. 

 

Dramatics aside, Barbarian is a masterwork of tension in the early going. Tess (Georgina Campbell) is in Detroit for a job interview, but her Airbnb is double-booked by charmingly awkward Keith (Bill Skarsgård). The two agree to share the tiny house for the night, with Tess in the locked bedroom and Keith on the couch, but Tess wakes in the night to the door open but Keith asleep in the other room. After her interview, Tess returns to explore the house, and the less said about what follows, the better.

 

Ultimately, there’s some very familiar horror stuff going on in Barbarian, but the film deftly evades ever feeling that way while watching. The pivots and twists are beautifully orchestrated, the performances are pitch-perfect all around, even if characters and motivations don’t always add up, and, as I said before, the effect as a whole is spellbinding. The set design, particularly the house’s interior, establishes an uneasy atmosphere that manages to imbue menace into the mundane in a way that screams “something is coming” but still subvert and toy with expectations. Barbarian feels confidently made and well-executed despite its many bold choices, and I’d say that all five principal cast members do well in their respective roles. 

 

If you’re looking for a fresh horror movie experience that takes some chances but mostly lands it, Barbarian is worth the price of admission. The experience of watching it is indeed remarkable, even if everything doesn’t entirely hold up under post-viewing scrutiny, and some of what it’s saying ends up pretty on the nose. As much as any genre, horror movies are about the visceral experience of watching them and the tangled web of emotions that flare up along the way. In that regard, Barbarian is a definite win.

Don't Worry Darling (2022)

No one can know what an intimate relationship is like from the outside. When friends or family members get divorced, someone always acts surprised. “I never saw it coming,” they say with misplaced incredulity. Even among the closest friends, there’s a sizable chasm between what an outsider sees between two people and what that connection is like in private. 

One of the elements I appreciate about Don’t Worry Darling, the new film from director Olivia Wilde, is that it willfully subverts this idea. The tight suburban world of Victory, suffocated on all sides by a deadly desert landscape, is predictable and familiar; it is the domestic sitcom sandbox Wandavision played around in where roles are clearly-defined and everyone waves in synchronized motions around the cul-de-sac when the hubbies leave for work and the wives buckle down for a day of cooking and cleaning. We are supposed to know what those marriages are like on the inside because they are archetypes we know.

But, of course, knowing what is happening inside leaves us uneasy. We aren’t supposed to know about the passionate love-making sessions Alice (Florence Pugh) has with her husband Jack (Harry Styles). We’re not supposed to believe such chemistry is possible! It is so perfect that we immediately question it, particularly while taking in an immaculate world that is an anachronistic terror of perfection, not unlike Pleasantville. Tension grows while we wait for Alice to catch up with us and finally question the apparent unreality of her heavenly, if decidedly antiquated, world. Punctuated by a haunting score full of musical throat-clearing and stomach-churning lines that sound sugar-coated by repeat and syncopate in grotesque and unnerving ways, the film urges Alice forward until she is literally trapped between a wall and a glass door and on the verge of suffocating under the weight of questions she has somehow failed to answer.

While Alice begins to question whether she, from the inside, truly understands her own marriage, the world around her grows increasingly sinister. A former friend Margaret (Kiki Layne) appears at lavish celebratory functions with dead eyes and claims of rampant lies. The optimism of best friend and doting mother Bunny (Wilde) clashes with the creeping, self-important guidance of development organizer Frank (Chris Pine) whose wisdom fills the airways between fun little fifties hits. We see a cult of sorts, or maybe aliens—the bizarre monolithic mountain the husbands enter for work each day certainly leans that way—but only Alice seems willing to confront it, and confrontation has costs.

If this all reads like glowing praise, it is: I really do admire what the film did well. Nothing here is truly new territory—you get shades of Luhrman’s Great Gatsby cocktailed with some Black Mirror vibes and a healthy note of Shymalan and the aforementioned Wandavision—but the construction that we see on film is powerful. Pugh elevates this even further, once again excelling at the center of emotional torture porn; for every moment when Styles doesn’t quite get there with the emotion of his Jack, Pugh nails three others with an intensity that confirms her dynamic abilities as a leading woman.

But, like everywhere in Victory, what meets the eye doesn’t quite match what gurgles under the surface. Don’t Worry Darling is so on the nose at times—the trailer scene of Pugh wrapping her face in plastic wrap meets a moment where her marriage is, would you believe, suffocating her—that the presentation borders on condescension, but the film is also so packed with characters and threads and ideas that it can’t possibly pay them all off. Without spoiling anything, for instance, there’s a high-intensity scene with Gemma Chan playing infallible Frank’s wife that plays on-screen with gravity matching the richest moments of Alice’s…but why? We’ve seen Chan in only a handful of scenes; our profile of her character runs directly counter to her actions here. The entire moment is a miscalculation—either that pr evidence that many embiggening elements got chopped from the final cut (I could believe this).

But this isn’t an isolated incident: the film is so dense with ideas that I had trouble tracking all of them. Foreshadowing lands flat; explanations work but under the weight of blunt reveals that again show so much that I worry Wilde and her writers think we are idiots incapable of internalizing nuance. The message of Don’t Worry Darling is unsubtle, which is fine, but in the place of a meticulous script is one with dozens of shiny things and ideas that Wilde goes out of her way to point to, only to leave to rust off-screen when we finally are sponged our answers.

I liked Don’t Worry Darling—there’s too much good stuff here with too much Pugh excellence to hate what is an aesthetically strong, well-made movie. I liked it, but I really wanted to love it despite its many unoriginal elements. It carried a potency throughout its runtime: maybe it was Pugh, maybe it was the similarity to Wandavision, or maybe it was the unbearable tension it gripped me from the moment the film began with raucous disorienting dialogue among six people spilling on top of itself. Hell, maybe it’s that I’d gone exactly two movie theater-less months since seeing Nope on opening night in July. (Or perhaps it’s the tabloid-level drama that had plagued the film’s promotion but kept its title in front of me for weeks.) Whatever the case, I have a definite affection for this film…I also know that it squanders a ton of potential by trying to do too much and insisting so hard on beating me over the head with a message and themes I’m already on board with.

Prey (2022)

I was just graduated from high school when Alien vs Predator released and, from the marketing fervor around it, I knew I was supposed to think that clash of franchises was a big deal. Although my parents were and are big sci-fi fans, I had seemingly missed both franchises, though, rendering AVP as a movie I never even thought to see. My first film in the franchise was The Predator a few years back; my lack of institutional knowledge posed no problem for me there. 

Because I have such a limited history with the Predator franchise, I hesitated about turning on Prey, the newest entry streaming exclusively on Hulu. It wasn’t so much a concern about missing something as a non-fan—I understood these films don’t exactly build that kind of mythos—as simply a lack of interest. The best reviews I heard and read came from longtime fans of the franchise. I took their endorsement as coming from a different place than would serve me. 

But the concept behind Prey intrigued me. I love those alternate pathway stories that play with convention. always thinking of Red Son, the Superman comic series that imagines Kal-El landing in Communist Russia rather than Metropolitan City. I had real curiosity about how a violent and advanced alien killing machine would grapple with Comanche warriors. It was different and I wanted to see it play out, a fact that combined with a series of insistent recommendations to compel me to watch over dinner. 

And I’m glad I did because Prey impressed me. 

Prey follows the intense and often grisly conflicts that arise when a Predator arrives on earth in Comanche hunting land centuries ago. As soon as it’s shimmering but translucent feet hit the ground, violent confrontation looms, but the story focuses first on Naru (Amber Midthunder), a talented Comanche healer who prefers to hunt. Her brother Taabe (Dakota Beavers) who leads the hunting parties humors her but doesn’t hesitate to diminish her obvious skill or discourage her participation. When the Predator arrives, though, it begins to attack everything in sight except Naru, whom it deems a non-threat. Soon, though, it is Naru who must contend with the ruthless hunter and try to outsmart it despite its abundant physical and technological advantages. 

The success of Prey owes great credit to its fun premise, but that premise only soars because of Midthunder. Although the first act is a familiar conceit—the younger sister wants to participate but is discouraged from working in the “man’s” world—even that section still plays behind the leading performance. Midthunder, whom I knew only from her work on Legion, is perfectly cast: her diminutive stature and young face lend instantly to the idea that both the tall and muscular hunters and the massive Predator would see her as physically unimposing. Likewise, this heightens the drama when she gets sucked into a skirmish: there’s a terrifying menace to seeing her face off against larger foes and forces. But it’s not just her stature that plays but her expressive intensity as well. We see big swings of emotion in her eyes that range from mortal fear to gritty determination and even diabolical hatred; when she enhances those looks by painting her face, she becomes not just a clever problem-solver and rooting interest but a haunting threat of her own with demons to exorcise. 

Even with such a great character and performance at its center, Prey still could have been a silly exercise, but this is a film that not only excels in its story but that looks and sounds great in every frame. This is a beautifully filmed work with grand sweeping shots of the Great Plains but also intense close-ups of muddied and bloodied faces alike. Despite the vast battleground, there’s a sense of intimate geography present too; I felt like I could follow Naru’s planning because the filmmakers familiarized us with the terrain in a way that made her decisions feel logical and satisfying. The soundscape of this natural world comes out wonderfully—we hear Naru approaching the hungry party early on through the same slight sound the men do, for instance—and contributes to the immersive depth of this world. The score is also great, evocative and stirring while used in just the right moments. 

Not knowing the Predator franchise well coming in, maybe it’s wrong of me to make this statement but I will anyhow: a super powerful alien hunter movie didn’t inherently demand the quality craftsmanship and thought that Prey delivers. With a few clever kills and enough story, CGI, and fake blood to get from A to B, the result could have surely still experienced moderate success from its built in loyal fans without pushing itself. But the team behind this film went hard on making Prey sing and that effort shows, making what could have been a fun but disposable sci-fi slasher into something far greater. It’s hard not to admire and appreciate that effort. 

The Bad Guys (2022)

Effectively a heist movie for a children’s audience, The Bad Guys mimics the slick style of the Ocean’s trilogy. It’s got the cuts and costumes and double-crosses and MacGuffins you’d expect from a genre staple, but it also features zany, child-friendly plot lines with zombie Guinea pigs and (explicit and methodical) lessons about how to be nice. I like this in theory far more than in its execution but, even when I knew what was coming from a mile away, I found this earnest spoof enjoyable enough. 

The Big Bad Wolf (Sam Rockwell) leads a gang of criminal masterminds, his surly best friend Snake (Marc Maron) among them. Pulling off elaborate thefts and toying with the police along the way, the five outcasts live together as friends, but things change when Wolf’s gang is badmouthed by Governor Diane Foxington (Zazie Beetz), prompting the proud Wolf to lead a rushed operation at a charity gala. While there, Wolf inadvertently saves an old lady and gets a taste for good deeds which stirs conflict among his crew. They oppose his new lease and want one last high-stakes job, even when they get caught red-handed and must rehabilitate themselves working with philanthropist Professor Marmalade (Richard Ayoade). But a grander conspiracy swirls around the bad guys and Wolf can’t help but be sucked into its center. 

I caught a trailer for this months ago and, while the “breaking good” story intrigued me, it was the unique animation that drew me in first. It evoked Into the Spiderverse for me in a way, an effect that wasn’t lost watching at home from my kitchen. Up close, though, the limited detail and cartoonish faces of the animal characters could be seen. There was still something visually interesting about it, particularly when the varied animals burst into action, but the novelty had a short half life. 

The Bad Guys includes an eclectic but notable voice cast beyond Rockwell, Maron, and Beetz, with Awkwafina, Craig Robinson, and Anthony Ramos rounding out Wolf’s crew. Outside of Ramos, who has a blast with the wildest performance including a lively musical number that showcases his vocal chops, though, the voice work felt oddly generic. Even after looking up the performers behind the characters mid-movie, I struggled to hear them in the roles—isn’t that the point of stunt casting celebrities? A lot of that issue probably falls to Rockwell capturing the cool conflicted vibe of Wolf but playing things so understated and Clooney-esque: I love Rockwell but a kid-ified script and what feels like an impression robs his work of memorability. 

Having never read the books that inspired the film, I enjoyed a plot full of surprises and changing allegiances that never robbed the film of its gentleness or accessibility. Are all of these telegraphed? Oh, for sure—you’ve seen everything here before in better films. But that familiarity bothered me less in a movie made for a young audience. Give me this over Sherlock Gnomes any day. I do fear that some of this twisting results in mixed messaging for younger viewers—bad being good and good being bad could leave an aftertaste of TRUST NO ONE EVER—but a film about redemption arcs and accountability is nice to offer up. 

As one might expect from a childrens’ caper, The Bad Guys isn’t high art with dynamic characterization or smooth pacing. Elements don’t always add up here and things lurch between tropey set pieces from better-crafted adult movies. But I won’t lambast a kids’ movie, particularly one that entertained me and kept me engaged, even when it seemed to aim lower than its aesthetic and idea seemed capable of. I’d watch a sequel for sure.