After the atrocity we dealt with yesterday, I’m in the mood to push my luck, much like a naïve man who just survived a shootout and is now under the impression that nothing can kill him. As such, knowing that even the depths of Happy Madison rarely reach the utter revulsion of Freelance, I’ll be spending today and tomorrow looking at the four HM releases that made it to Netflix.
Up to this point, writer/director Noah Baumbach has operated in the chattier sectors of American indie cinema. We’ve look at three of his films on this blog already, and they have all involved intimate and unvarnished looks at families with a shared interest (or even disinterest) in the arts. And despite a couple disagreements here and there in the film craft or the framing of their central ideas, I’ve come to look forward to seeing new films from the guy. So you can imagine my surprise when his new film is a major switch-up from his usual wheelhouse.
A film that gets described as a “metaphysical science fiction drama” in its Wikipedia page is like a siren call to me. And the story attached to it certainly doesn’t disappoint from that perspective, exploring what happens to a family when their adopted son passes away. Well, not so much ‘passes away’ as he shuts down and won’t turn back on, as this is set in a near-future where a company exists that basically sells artificial siblings wholesale, and said child (the titular Yang, played by Justin H. Min) is a ‘technosapien’ that couple Jake (Colin Farrell) and Kyra (Jodie Turner-Smith) originally bought so that their other adopted child Mika (Malea Emma Tjandrawidjaja) had someone she could learn about Chinese culture from.
The second team-up between Italian crime aficionado Stefano Sollima and revisionist Western master Taylor Sheridan finds them both dealing with familiar territory, while also refining their approach from Sicario: Day Of The Soldado. Like Soldado, it is a particularly grim look at American military efforts, and like the original Sicario, a lot of it focuses on how one soldier becomes twisted at the whims of their handlers.
