Infinity Pool (2023) - Movie Review

While Brandon Cronenberg’s filmography up to this point has shared some similarities with the work of his father (emphasis on body horror, fascination with interfaces, bleak sense of humour), he has also developed his own style and flavour that has helped keep him out of his father’s shadow. Where David fixated on the body as it changes, be it from internal or external forces, Brandon focuses specifically on the body (and mind) as it disintegrates under the weight of capitalistic systems. Antiviral took the idea of ‘viral star’ to its icky yet logical conclusion, Possessor showed that the workplace demands psychological compartmentalising even at the best of times, and with Infinity Pool, we get a class satire along the same lines as something like Triangle Of Sadness, only I’d argue that this hits much harder.

Pearl (2023) - Movie Review

The prequel to one of my favourite films from last year in X, Pearl serves as the origin story for that film’s surprisingly sympathetic villain of the same name. After how much X wound up impressing me, both as a straight-forward genre experience and as a multi-faceted treatise on the nature of horror, pornography, and cinema in general, I went into this excited but not necessarily knowing what I was getting myself into. And truth be told, I wound up enjoying this even more than X… but not for the reasons I was expecting.

The House (2022) - Movie Review

 

Yep, still on an animation kick, and this is a real beauty here. Put onto Netflix back in January, this is a three-part anthology film all about the titular House. This is another situation where the use of stop-motion specifically does a lot for the storytelling all on its own, as putting emphasis on tangible textures and physical objects makes a tighter connection between the audience and the setting that these stories fixate on. It also makes each story’s more horrifying aspects sink in even deeper.

X (2022) - Movie Review

Sex and horror are strange bedfellows. As types of entertainment that exist outside of the mainstream’s safe zone, they’re inexorably linked, but they also have an uncomfortable relationship with each other. One of the most referred-to stereotypes in horror movies, and particularly slasher movies, is that if a character has sex on-screen, or has ever had sex in their fictional life, they are going to die. Films like the Friday The 13^th series, where it seemed like Jason Voorhees had a sixth sense for people fucking nearby (an idea that became literal with Jason X).

Now, while there’s a general understanding that, yeah, that’s the actions and motives of the villain, so it’s not implicitly meant to be a viewpoint that should be adhered to… well, when it gets to the point where that stereotype of ‘sluts die’ is something that gets brought up consistently not just with discussions of older films, but is brought back in a lot of modern meta-horror features as well, you have to start wondering if that repetition is to acknowledge how regressive that worldview is, or to reinforce it. See also: The black man being the first to die in a horror film.

Emma (2020) - Movie Review

There is nothing worse than writing about a film’s inefficiencies, and in the process only highlighting those same inefficiencies in your own writing. Like writing about something not being funny, while you yourself aren’t making people laugh either, or describing a dull event that itself reads like the literate version of paint drying. And as I find myself trying to muster up things to write about in regards to this movie… yeah, I am honestly worried that I’m just going to bore my dear readers to tears in trying to express how much I didn’t engage with this particular work.

Part of me just wants to write the whole thing off and just… not write about it. But that would put this film in a category outside of pretty much every other film I’ve written about on here, and while it’s not nearly that bad, it’s certainly not that special either.

High Life (2019) - Movie Review

Well, this is certainly a change of pace from what sci-fi space flicks have been lately. Writer/director Claire Denis’ first step into English-language cinema finds her looking at all the monumental idealism baked into features like Interstellar and The Martian, and questioning whether such things would really play out that way. The result of that is a very different, very moody, very fucking depressing take on the isolated-in-space thriller.