A thriller that lives up to the name

There are films and there are films. A lot are highly rated, some very very. And I watch and I nod my head and ferret out a fine performance here, great sets and costumes there, an interesting storyline or theme. But so few really consume me. So, it’s exciting when I do find one that does. As was the case this weekend when I accidentally tripped over J. Blakeson’s I Care a Lot (2020) on Netflix, bookended bv Find Me Falling (Stelana Kliris 2024) with Harry Connick Jr. (saccharine romantic) and Locked In (Nour Wazzi 2023) with a mainly no-name cast drifting through endless fraught psychological evil. Wow, here’s a thriller that lives up to the name! Marla Grayson (Rosamund Pike, who won a Golden Globe for her performance) is a professional guardian whose grift is to take over the estates of elderly people and extract their proceeds for herself. Her caring is all a veneer as she fends off offended family members who the courts obviously can’t trust because of personality flaws. Until, one day, she dissolves the estate of Jennifer Peterson (Dianne Wiest), a retired but fully functioning senior living her best life in an elegant house on a bucolic tree-lined street. Marla has a scam with a local doctor who signs certificates over to her for “difficult” patients and Jennifer is one. But what Marla doesn’t know is that Jen’s outward demureness comes with baggage. That’s in the person of Roman Lunyov (Peter Dinklage). From here, the movie transforms into a kind of high stakes tennis match on steroids, with the two sides enveloped in a war of frenzied wits with each as corrupt and ruthless as the other. It’s a gripping tale and you don’t ever know how it’s going to end until, well, the very end – the way all good thrillers should be. Marla’s emotional ferocity is underlined by composer Marc Canham’s superb clanging score. Her seemingly Houdini-like properties are rivalled by Lunyov’s icy black cunning. There is a social theme, I suppose, to all of this: the exploitation of the old both by the institutional care establishment (think thousands of dollars a month for living facilities). And the way society treats the aged, as throwaway human husks, their worth – personally and financially – exhausted. 

One formulaic Hollywood, the other an intense absorbing experience

On a lazy long weekend and bored out of my mind since previous plans feel through, I hauled myself to Devonshire Cineplex to catch a movie with the biggest buzz right now, and another under the radar that I was surprised Devonshire was even screening. 

The first was A Quiet Place: Day One (Michael Sarnoski). I was barely aware of the Quiet Place phenom/franchise as Hollywood sci fi movies aren’t really in my orbit (get it?). But one newspaper called it “fantastic.” I’ll go see any movie if it’s that good. Buy, yup, this prequel to its two other films had H’wood written all over it. I was optimistic. But the beginning didn’t start out well – slow and in a nursing home? However, the main character, Sam (Lupita Nyong’o) is a cancer patient and only wants to devour a New York style pizza before her demise. The hospice takes a trip into the big city, only to find the skies overhead filled with weird planes and white bursts. You may know what happens next. But our hero, and an eventual hanger on, Eric (Joseph Quinn) are determined to make their way up Manhattan to a Harlem pizza joint, despite all the other shell shocked victims heading in the opposite direction. Very formulaic, and little tension despite all the apocalyptic terror. But the star of the film is the cat or cats, who have surprisingly wonderful “man’s best friend” instincts. 

Meanwhile, also at Devonshire (and continuing this weekend) is a very unexpected Yorgos Lanthimos’s Kinds of Kindness. Wow. A mainstream theatre carrying one of the current avant garde cinema’s most outré directors? A treat! And it was. This is three-films-in-one at almost three hours length. Lanthimos helmed Poor Things last year with Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe and Mark Ruffalo, a magic realism tour de force which won four Oscars. I’ve also caught his The Favourite (2018) and The Lobster (2015), a surreal take on sex and isolation. The Globe and Mail’s Barry Hertz wrote his latest off as “an aggressively juvenile and tedious dissection of the notion of free will” and a “truly torturous experience.” Well, he can speak for himself. I found it fascinating. But then again, I guess I would, since I’m attracted to the abstract and the “in between” of human behavior that tries to get at, well, essential truths. Sort of like looking at a Picasso painting. Or watching a Harold Pinter play. If that’s pretentious, so be it. These three films are all connected by a character RMF but otherwise disparate. Emma Stone and Willem Dafoe are back with the au courant actor Jesse Plemons (whom I didn’t recognize) figuring front and center in every story. For brevity and possible inaccuracy let’s just say the first film was about questioning authority, the second about loss and doubt, and the third about demands of the commonweal. Hertz may have written the flicks off. But any film that makes you think and could provide hours-long discussion is worth it. At minimum it held my interest, more than I can say for A Quiet Place, which I walked out of.

Two weekends ago I caught part of WIFF’s Local Retrospective - WIFF Shorts 1 and Best of the Mark Boscariol 24 Hour Film Fest as part of its 20th anniversary celebrations.  These were only part of a weekend of films including features, made locally. It’s absolutely amazing the talent and commitment to film there is in Windsor-Essex. It’s not impossible to see the much underrated (for the arts) Windsor area become a filmmaking hub, just as WIFF has become one of the best film festivals in the country.