Category: Films about obsession

Nosferatu (2024)

Eggers’ wonderfully atmospheric remake is creepy, haunting and quite extraordinary

Director: Robert Eggers

Cast: Bill Skarsgård (Count Orlock), Lily-Rose Depp (Ellen Hutter), Nicholas Hoult (Thomas Hutter), Aaron Taylor-Johnson (Friedrich Harding), Willem Dafoe (Professor Albin Eberhart von Franz), Emma Corrin (Anna Harding), Ralph Ineson (Dr Wilhelm Sievers), Simon McBurney (Herr Knock)

Robert Eggers dreamed so long of his own version of FW Murnau’s seminal vampire film (and Bram Stoker copyright infringement) Nosferatu, it was originally announced as his second film. We had to wait a bit longer, but it was well worth it. Eggers’ experience helped him create a film infinitely richer than I suspect he would have made ten years earlier. Nosferatu is an astonishing, darkly gothic, richly rewarding film, glorious to look at and a fiercely sharp exploration of the subtexts of both sources. It can never match the original’s seminal impact, but celebrates and elaborates it.

The story hasn’t changed dramatically from the one Murnau ripped off from Stoker. In Wisborg, junior solicitor Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult) leaves his beloved wife Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp) for Transylvania and a lucrative land deal with the mysterious Orlock (Bill Skarsgård) that could lead to a comfortable life for him and his new wife. Unfortunately, there are three things he doesn’t know: firstly, the Orlock is a ravenously cruel vampire, with extraordinary supernatural powers; second his employer Knock (Simon McBurney) is an occultist worshiper of Orlock; thirdly, Orlock has used his mental powers for years to terrorise and groom Ellen from afar and Hutter’s presence is the final step in his scheme to control her. It won’t be long until a deadly curse plagues Wisborg.

Egger’s dark (but extremely beautiful) gothic film drips with atmosphere, gloomy shadows rolling over its elaborate sets, the drained out night-time shots reminiscent of the tinted black-and-white beauty of the original. The entire film is soaked in love for silent-era horror, with homages to Murnau, Dreyer, Sjöström and so many others I couldn’t begin to spot them all – though I loved Orlock’s gigantic shadowy hand creeping Murnau’s Faustus-like over Wisborg. The film drowns in folk horror, from its snow-capped Transylvanian countryside dripping in unspeakable hidden evils to the unreadable motives of a mysterious Transylvanian village.

At its heart is an exploration of the sexual undertones of the vampire legend. Orlock’s assaults leave his victims are overwhelmingly sexual, with Orlock’s body thrusting forward while he drains the blood of his groaning victims. That’s not to mention Orlock’s revolting sexual manipulation of Ellen. Nosferatu leans heavily into Stoker’s dark sexual awakening subtext. Orlock’s psychological manipulation has left Ellen traumatised, torn between dark sexual desires and romance with Hutter. Nosferatu opens with a dark (dream?) sequence, as Ellen rises with sensual sighs from sleep, drawn towards Orlock’s seductive shadow in sheet curtains, before joining him outside for something that looks an awful lot like sex before Eggers cuts with a jump scare shot, our first glimpse of Orlock.

This is an Orlock radically different from Max Schreck’s original. While he shares his long nails and angular posture, here he is no-more-or-less than a decayed, rotting corpse. His body is covered in sores of decayed skin, with everything (including his penis) halfway to the compost heap, his bony legs and hips positively skeletal. There are homages to his Vlad the Impaler roots, from his fur-lined uniform coat (that like the rest of him has seen better days) to his surprisingly well-groomed moustache. But there isn’t a trace of the handsomeness of so many Draculas – this Orlock is possibly even more repulsive to look at than the rat-faced monstrosity of the original.

Skarsgård’s make Orlock a truly ruthless figure, delighting in his natural cruelty. With Hutter his looming, shadowy menace offers not a jot of home comforts, working to terrify a man who he sees as a perverse romantic rival. (His hallucinatory blood-sucking assault on Hutter is filmed in a manner reminiscent of rape). Throughout, he treats almost everyone he encounters with contempt and lofty disgust and takes a sadistic delight in torturing Ellen’s friend Emma Harding’s family, culminating in a truly shocking scene of grizzly horror. While the original Orlock was almost feral, like his rats, this one is a monstrous decayed sorcerer with a never-ending hunger and sadistic desire to play with his food.

He also has something the original never had: a voice. Skarsgård spent weeks in training to develop this (digitally unaltered) vocal range, a rolling bass-rumble which wraps itself around a raft of Dacian dialogue. Eggers’ gives him immense supernatural skills, in a film dripping with occult magic. Simon McBurney’s Knock (a remarkable performance) is a lunatic drowning in it: covered with dark markings, biting the heads of pigeons and communicating with Orlock by sitting naked in a Pentecostal star. His brain has been flushed out by Orlock’s mental power (who treats him like dirt) and the vampire’s hypnotic voice overwhelms the senses: just a few sentences drains Hutter of willpower (Nicholas Hoult’s fear is so palpable here you could almost touch it). Orlock’s malign influence can twist people or make them suddenly ‘wake’ with no idea of where they’ve been.

The power of his influence twists and distorts emotionally and physically. Lily-Rose Depp captures all this in a remarkable physical and vocal performance, as Ellen falls victim to Orlock’s mental manipulations. Depp throws herself into the most violent fits since Linda Blair: her body spasming, her voice distorted into an Orlock-mirroring gurgle, her eyes rolling back, her inhibitions falling away and blood weeping from deeply disgusting places, especially her eyes. Depp’s performance is extraordinarily committed, her fear and self-disgust at her manipulated sexuality (eekily from childhood) by the Count as tender as he hatred of him is sharp and all-consuming.

It’s never clear how far the vampire wants to screw Ellen, and how far he wants to consume her (Eggers even suggests, towards the end, that Orlock may even welcome his own destruction – perhaps the rapacious hunger is too much?). What is different from the original is Orlock and the plague he brings with him are different. While the original was a destructive force of dark nature, this Orlock is focused exclusively on punishing Ellen, with a literal plague striking down Wisborg.

In the face of this beast, the powers of science and reason are powerless (as Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s delicately performed Harding discovers, refusing to believe until its far too late). Like Murnau’s original, the powers of science and reason (such a key weapon against the vampire in Stoker) are useless. Even rationalist Dr Sievers (a fine performance by Ralph Ineson, channeling Peter Cushing and Michael Hordern) – a man so calm even the insanity of Knock can’t flap him – chucks in the towel and calls in Willem Dafoe’s barnstorming Professor von Franz (here considerably more effective than his counterpart), a scientist turned alchemist with deep occult knowledge.

But it can’t change the fact this is not a war between two sides, but a deeply personal struggle between Orlock and Ellen, with Hutter torn between them. Eggers’ focus on this personal story at the heart of a dark twisted legend adds a genuine freshness – and makes a superb counter-balance to the lashings of gothic horror the film soaks in. It makes for a superb remake that contrasts and comments on the original while telling its own story of dark, corrupted manipulation. Eggers’ direction is faultless in its atmospheric unease and there are superb performances from Skarsgård, Depp, Hoult and the rest. It’s a powerful work, overflowing with silent horror atmosphere while also feeling very modern that has the potential to haunt our nightmares as much as the original.

Frankenstein (1931)

Iconic monster film, dark expressionist nightmare that totally reinvented the novel’s public image

Director: James Whale

Cast: Colin Clive (Henry Frankenstein), Mae Clarke (Elizabeth Lavenza), John Boles (Victor Moritz), Boris Karloff (The Monster), Edward van Sloan (Dr Waldman), Frederick Kerr (Baron Frankenstein), Dwight Frye (Fritz), Lionel Belmore (The Burgomaster), Marilyn Harris (Maria)

Has any film shaped the popular idea of a book more than Frankenstein? Ask anyone to describe the monster or the book itself, and you’ll not have to wait too long until you start to hear about bolts in the neck, thunder-struck gothic castles, hunchbacked assistants and labs stuffed with bizarre electrical equipment. Of course, none of that is actually in Mary Shelley’s The Post Modern Prometheus. But it is a key part of James Whale’s creative vision in this Hollywood hit. In fact, so much of a hit that it and its army of sequels led to whole generations convinced Frankenstein was the name of the monster, not his creator.

Frankenstein in fact bears almost no similarity to the original novel at all, checking off a few plot points and duplicating some character names. Other than that, it’s very much its own thing, a big expressionistic nightmare, with everything dialled up as high as those lightening-catching electrical machines can cope with. Henry Frankenstein (Colin Clive) – you’ll note the film even changes his name to the more relatable Henry, with Victor given to his dull-as-dish-water pal Moritz (John Boles) – won’t settle down and marry fiancée Elizabeth (Mae Clarke). Instead, he dreams of creating life, to become like God! And to follow that dream, he’ll dig up bodies, steal laboratory brain specimens from his mentor Dr Waldmann (Edward van Sloan) and stitch them together into a creature (Boris Karloff). But then misunderstandings and ill treatment leads to a series of terrible events.

James Whale’s film is a triumph of atmosphere; its images and visual creativity so haunting it’s not a surprise it effectively overwhelmed the novel. Inspired by German expressionist cinema – you can see the fingerprints of Cabinet of Dr Caligari and Fritz Lang all over it – Whale sets this monster tale in a world of towering, angular buildings, looming shadows and vast steampunk (long before it came into fashion) labs in damp-lined medieval castles. There is a strange timeless quality to Frankenstein: it opens with a shadow-laden graveyard dug up by Henry and his assistant Fritz (Dwight Frye), but the village feels like it is set in almost any time from the late nineteenth to early twentieth century (the costumes in particular are a real hodgepodge). Perhaps this was part of Whale’s intention, to create a timeless metaphor for man’s reach exceeding what’s sensible, to disastrous consequences?

It’s also interesting that, for all the warning of the terrors to come the film opens with from Edward van Sloan (who also portrays Waldmann), we actually end up siding with the creature. A lot of this is due to Boris Karloff’s excellent performance. Without a word of dialogue, Karloff makes this lumbering result of stitched together bits and pieces, into something vulnerable, frightened and child-like, whose violent acts only emerge from tragic misunderstandings or gross provocations. Karloff’s physicality is frequently gentle and timid, the few strangled sounds he makes sound almost scared, and his awkward stumbling resembles a deadly, confused toddler. He needs parenting, not chasing down by a mob.

The film’s key moment is Frankenstein introducing the creature to the daylight – the camera following those towering vertical lines of the set up to into a skylight, with the enchanted creature reaching his arms up to try and touch this magic ball of light. Then Frankenstein smugly slaps it shut and Fritz shoves a torch into the poor creature’s face. The monster may be introduced with all the elements of dread – Whale’s classic introduction a series of striking cuts that pull us closer and closer to the reveal of his restitched head – but it doesn’t take long before you feel really sorry for it. Even if it does have a ‘criminal mind’ stitched into it (a development so out of tone with the treatment of the monster, it feels like a fig leaf to reassure the producers it must be the baddie).

Not least because Frankenstein himself is hardly that sympathetic. Colin Clive – a long-term collaborator with Whale – grabs this larger-than-life part and runs with it, oscillating from scenery-chewing self-aggrandizement (his celebratory screaming has rightly passed into cinematic legend) to self-pitying excuses. It’s telling he never takes a jot of responsibility for either creating the monster, or for his inattention and poor treatment of it directly causing the tragedy it unleashes. Unlike his book counterpart, his arrogance requires witnesses – Elizabeth, Victor and Waldmann – to his experiments, entirely due to his arrogant fury at Waldmann’s questioning his sanity. His first solution, as soon as the creature becomes challenging, is to euthanise it and he never confesses to the lynch mob that take on the creature in the film’s final act that he is its creator.

The lynch mob is responding to the creature’s accidental drowning of a small girl. Again, this killing stems from a misunderstanding. Young Marie – the only person in the film who doesn’t react with horror when she sees the creature, suggesting she instead sees a kindred spirit – invites the delighted creature to join her in a game, tossing flowers into the river. Clapping his hands in delight, the creature joins in for a scene directed with bucolic beauty by Whale – right up until the flowers run out and the creature tosses Marie in instead, only to find she doesn’t float artistically.

As the creature flees in confused panic, Whale cuts to the raucous wedding celebrations in the Frankenstein village, which comes to a crashing close as Marie’s father walks with her body through the crowd, that turns from joy to shock around him. It’s one of several striking moments of fluidic camera work in Frankenstein, Whale employing a tracking shot that follows and partially rotates around the father, while keeping him tightly central in the frame as he walks through the crowds. There are similar moments of dynamic camerawork throughout the film, Whale using every opportunity to make this gothic nightmare world as immersive as possible.

The hyper reality of Frankenstein means it doesn’t really matter that much of the skylines are all too clearly cloth (I like to think Whale deliberately kept the multiple points where the cloth has bunched up in shot to stress the artificiality), since everything about this is dialled up to eleven, from performances, to setting to the grandly staged windmill-finale, hugely impressive in its flame-licked excitement. In fact, it’s all so overblown and gothic, in its set design, shooting and performance that the most grounded, human thing in it is Karloff’s beautifully played creature himself. That feels like no accident and makes Frankenstein a surprisingly subversive film. And also perhaps, even though it strips the creature of much that makes him a character in the novel, made him a modern icon.

The Substance (2024)

Twisted body horror isn’t quite the feminist statement it thinks it is, but still a unique film

Director: Coralie Fargeat

Cast: Demi Moore (Elizabeth Sparkle), Margaret Qualley (Sue), Dennis Quaid (Harvey), Edward Hamilton (Fred), Gore Abrams (Oliver), Oscar Lesage (Troy), Christian Erickson (Man at diner)

Getting old in Hollywood is not kind. Particularly for women. Elizabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore), a big star of the 90s, now eeks out a living as exercise queen for a daytime TV show. But TV exec Harvey (Dennis Quaid) decides people don’t want to watch a woman in her 50s and unceremoniously gives her the boot. Fearing a life of lonely irrelevance, miles from the limelight, Elizabeth accepts an invitation to try ‘The Substance’. This black-market drug creates a ‘younger, more beautiful, more perfect’ version of you – birthed from your spine. Taking the drug, Elizabeth spawns Sue (Margaret Qualley), a 20s version of herself who promptly lands her old job on the exercise show.

The two must swop places every week, one living their life (either in obscurity or vicariously enjoying much-lusted after career success) the other lying comatose on the bathroom floor. At first the balance works, but they soon grow to resent each other: Sue despises Elizabeth’s self-loathing bitterness while Elizabeth becomes consumed with envy at Sue’s hedonistic success. Quickly the balanced life between the two collapses, leading to inevitable disaster.

The Substance is one of those films you can pretty much guarantee people will remember about 2024. Pretty much everything in it is dialled up to eleven, a crazy mix of The Picture of Dorian Gray and Cronenberg-body horror (particularly The Fly) by way of David Lynch. Fargeat shoots it with a deliberate grindhouse intensity, revelling in the vast amounts of icky body horror, gallons of blood and guts, often filmed in a mix of dream-like drifting and trashy exploitation.

It’s a sharply directed, extremely intense film from Coralie Fargeat (who also scripts), punchy, vicious and darkly hilarious. It’s also been shot to be almost as uncomfortable to watch as possible. The camerawork is frequently disjointed, full of disconcerting jerky close-up. Nightmare Lynch-style dream horror images pop-up, along with haunting Mulholland Dr style floating heads and Kubrickian homages. Every moment of body horror is accompanied with revolting, squelching sound-effects. You’ve rarely seen anything as intensely, bizarrely OTT as this, the film carefully designed to get audiences either screaming “fucking hell!” or hiding their eyes behind their popcorn.

The film’s most successful moments are these moments of shocking body horror. Created from a host of ingenious practical effects (The Substance surely is destined for a make-up Oscar), the film superbly creates everything from green-fluid soaked birthing scenes to the grim disintegration of various body parts that slowly ages Demi Moore into a wizened babushka to the final hellish Elephant Man by way of the The Fly inspired ending. It’s superbly done, deeply unsettling, but blackly entertaining in its extremity. And The Substance is incredibly extreme, pulling absolutely no punches in this blood-soaked, Angela Carteresque fairy-tale horror.

Fargeat draws an extremely committed performances from Demi Moore, given the sort of acting challenge she never got when she was the biggest star in Hollywood, playing a woman so consumed with ingrained self-loathing and disgust (having so completely swallowed the ideology that your personal value is directly connected to your appearance) that she would rather live as a recluse in the shadow of another version of herself than build a new life. There is an extraordinary scene where a panic stricken Elizabeth prepares for a date with an old schoolfriend (possibly her last chance at a normal life) but is so consumed by self-loathing and doubt about her appearance (painfully ironic, since she of course looks great) that she goes through multiple attempts at make-up up in the movie, each time rubbing it off with such increasing fury that by the end she’s virtually sand-papering her face as if trying to erase herself from existence.

Just as fine is Margaret Qualley as the ‘perfect’ version of Elizabeth, but who has just the same self-loathing and insecurity as the original. It’s a similarly committed performance by Qualley, a carefully studied, surprisingly vulnerable performance while also being ruthlessly ambitious and self-indulgent, which embraces the hyper-sexualised expectations of young women in Hollywood. Dennis Quaid also throws in a fun cameo as a lasciviously camp, OTT executive full of ruthless, heartless bonhomie who sees women only as window-dressing for perverts. After all it’s an industry that forgets: from the opening montage of Elizabeth’s Hollywood star going from eagerly photographed to forgotten, through to the insultingly trivial gift stuffed in her hands as she is dismissed.

But The Substance’s satire is often rather forced and obvious (right down to Quaid’s exec being called Harvey). It feels like it misses a trick by having its only female character being a woman who has so swallowed the ageist views of Hollywood, she literally can’t imagine questioning it. So much so, her clone equally embraces life as a sex object. While The Substance invites us to understand the poison of this world independently, there is virtually no commentary on the unjust sexism within the film. In fact, The Substance so echoes the leering camera angles and pervy shots of the worst kinds of sexist cinema that sometimes it’s a bit hard to see it as satire and (as the camera stares at Qualley’s butt or down her top) more as just reality.

At no point do Elizabeth or Sue make any form of realisation about how they have been indoctrinated to only understand themselves as being worth something so long as they look like a pin-up. While The Picture of Dorian Gray understood the temptations of a selfish hedonism even when we know its wrong and The Fly was all about the damaging impact of ambition, for all its pointed smirking fun The Substance is at heart more of a pulpy gore-show revelling in extreme than a sort of social satire.

In fact the more you watch The Substance the more you think it’s real inspiration is Whatever Happened to Baby Jane and the ‘hag-horror’ of the 60s. A star name of yesteryear, takes on a role that riffs on their loss of youth and beauty, throwing them into an ever more twisted tale of obsession and revenge. You could argue The Substance trusts us to see for ourselves that all this rampant sexism is wrong: but you could also quite happily watch the film and assume it was Elizabeth’s vanity that caused all the problems, not the system that inoculated it in her.

There is another version of The Substance that could match its pulpy love of horror thrills with a bit more of an insightful commentary on gender politics. But the fact the film ends in an explosion of blood that makes The Shining look positively restrained (a sequence that goes on too long in an overlong film), you suspect its real heart is actually in creating shocking images rather than really exploring the issues it wants you to think it is addressing.

Basic Instinct (1992)

A sensationalist hit, this Trashy Hitchcock-pastiches looks very pleased with its own naughtiness today

Director: Paul Verhoeven

Cast: Michael Douglas (Detective Nick Curran), Sharon Stone (Catherine Tramell), George Dzundza (Detective Gus Moran), Jeanne Tripplehorn (Dr Beth Garner), Dorothy Malone (Hazel Dobkins), Denis Arndt (Lt Philip Walker), Leilani Sarelle (Roxy Hardy), Bruce A Young (Detective Sam Andrews), Chelcie Ross (Captain Talcott), Wayne Knight (Assistant DA John Correli), Stephen Tobolowsky (Dr Lamott)

If there is one thing Basic Instinct proves for sure, it’s that Paul Verhoeven is a very naughty boy. A sensational smash hit in 1992, largely because of the instant iconic status of that scene (you know which one), Basic Instinct remixes Hitchcock (especially Vertigo and Psycho) with lashings of explicit sex and violence, a touch of The Silence of the Lambs and a dollop of Fatal Attraction. It’s a deeply silly, dirty film that was a sort of Fifty Shades of its day: vanilla porn for those who feel too self-conscious to actually go and watch a real one.

Catherine Trammell (Sharon Stone) is number one suspect for the murder of her boyfriend (or rather as she describes him “the guy I was fucking”) for two reasons: one she published a novel a few weeks earlier where she explicitly described the crime in detail and two she’s an obvious Hannibal Lector-ish genius psychopath. Doesn’t stop weak-willed detective Nick Curran (Michael Douglas) from becoming obsessed with her, sucked into a wild sexual affair. But is Catherine a misunderstood unlucky victim, or the genius manipulator her old college rival Dr Beth Garner (Jeanne Tripplehorn) – also Nick’s on-and-off girlfriend and psychiatrist – says she is?

Basic Instinct was the most expensive script ever sold, earning Joe Eszterhas $3million for what he claimed was fourteen days’ work. And you can see why – it’s got everything audiences could need for an addictive, trashy bit of fun. A femme fatale who is also a genius psychopath! A handsome macho cop! Brutal murders! A puzzle interesting enough to keep ticking over but obvious enough that you don’t need to think about it too much! And of course, lots and lots and lots of sex! And then even more sex! No wonder people saw dollar bills – at the very worst they had a chance at a so-bad-its-good box office smash.

But the good stuff. Basic Instinct’s comic-book Hitchcock pastiche actually works rather well, helped enormously by a marvellous Oscar-nominated score by Jerry Goldsmith, which brilliantly channels Bernard Herrmann’s luscious Vertigo strings. It’s no exaggeration to say Goldsmith’s score dramatically improves the film, from adding tension to a drawn-out elevator trip to adding a film noir lyricism to Catherine and Nick’s rather forced sexualised banter. Verhoeven also really knows his business: the film’s famous interrogation scene works as well as it does through his skilful editing between wide angles, close-ups and POV shots, aided by the striking uplighting from cinematographer Jan de Bont.

That scene – and the film – also works because of Sharon Stone. Taking on a role turned down by almost every single woman in Hollywood, Stone seizes hold of a part she knew was a once in a lifetime opportunity. Nick may be the lead – and Douglas, in the middle of his run of weak modern American men bewitched by strong women, may have been the high-paid star ($14 million to Stone’s $550k) – but both knew this was Catherine’s movie. Stone plays the role with a playful, sensual confidence and arrogant defiance, knowing full well she can seduce anyone. Despite the clunky dialogue, she makes Catherine sexy, smart and just about vulnerable enough to make some viewers doubt whether she’s the killer or not. (I mean she blatantly is, the film doesn’t really try and pretend otherwise. Most of the fun is seeing how shamelessly she can parade it and still get away with it.)

Away from that though, Basic Instinct is a terribly silly film, a well-made pandering to our lowest desires. Opening with an extremely graphic post-coitus stabbing frenzy (with blood spray everywhere and a nose skewered by an ice pick) – it then teases us three times that it will repeat this again after nearly every explosive session of rumpy-pumpy. Ah yes, the rumpy-pumpy. Basic Instinct slows at the half-way mark for an almost five-minute extended multi-angled, orgasm packed bit of horizontal jogging that Nick then rather pathetically spends most of the rest film bragging about being “the fuck of the century”.

But then Nick is a pathetic figure. Somehow keeping hold of his badge, despite gunning down two tourists while high on cocaine, he’s got such an addictive personality he makes Lloyd Bridges’ (“I picked the wrong week to quit sniffing glue!”) air traffic controller in Airplane look like a model of restraint. After internal affairs-mandated therapy (how’s that for a slap on the wrist) – hilariously compromised by Jeanne Tripplehorn’s Dr Garner crossing all ethical lines by repeatedly shagging him – Nick has proudly quit drugs, drink, smoking, and shooting before asking questions. Needless to say, under Catherine’s influence, he embraces all of these again, all while still managing to be the sort of middle-aged loser who wears a pullover to nightclub.

Eszterhas’ script mixes awful “tough” dialogue (“Looks like he got off before he got offed” Nick’s partner jokes over a victim) with clumsy psychological insight (my favourite is Tobolowsky’s consultant who confidently states two options: Trammel either did or didn’t do it – inevitably this childishly empty insight is met with the manly ‘tecs muttering “In English Doc!”) and blunt statements of the obvious (“She’s brilliant! And Evil!” screams poor Tripplehorn). The flirty banter is largely sold by Sharon Stone’s confidence, since the lines (“I’m not wearing underwear”) are hardly Double Indemnity. The film’s mystery is so irrelevant to its appeal (and, in many ways, plot), it merrily gets bogged down in several off-screen murders of characters we’ve never met.

Today Basic Instinct feels like a bizarre museum piece. George Dzundza’s sidekick cop is intended as comic-relief but comes across like a little ball of toxic masculinity. An early sex scene between Nick and Beth is pretty much impossible to watch today without thinking “yeah that’s rape”. The film uses bisexuality (though we only, of course, get girl-on-girl – Douglas made it clear he ain’t gonna kiss no man) as raw titillation, an entre for the soft porn of Douglas and Stone noisily going at it for about 10% of the film’s run time. Even the famous scene is uncomfortable to watch, since Stone has since made it clear she didn’t consent to that shot.

Basic Instinct is a deeply silly piece of trash. But then that was its appeal back then – no one felt they were actually watching Hitchcock when they sat down to this rip-off of the master (in fact Basic Instinct makes you feel it’s probably a relief the production code meant Hitchcock couldn’t give into his Verhoevenish instincts). Today most like to think of it as a sort of well played card trick. However, it’s hard not to feel a bit for Sharon Stone to whom it became a millstone (which she eventually exploited for a terrible belated sequel for which she pocketed $13.5million), despite being the person possibly most responsible for its success. So maybe Nick won in the end after all.

The King of Comedy (1983)

Scorsese’s dark satire on the obsessive love of fame was miles ahead of its time

Director: Martin Scorsese

Cast: Robert De Niro (Rupert Pupkin), Jerry Lewis (Jerry Langford), Sandra Bernhard (Masha), Diahnne Abbott (Rita Keene), Shelley Hack (Cathy Long), Frederick De Cordova (Bert Thomas)

Like moths to a flame, celebrity attracts obsessives, weirdos and those desperate to grab their slice of fame’s limited cake. In our world of influencers and social media, the sharp, uncomfortable and acidic King of Comedy has become a classic after flopping on release. The world seems full of Rupert Pupkin’s today, people who feel their mission in life is to share their gifts for entertaining with the world and feel ownership over their famous idols.

Rupert Pupkin (Robert De Niro) feels like this about TV chat-show host Jerry Langford (Jerry Lewis). Pupkin sees himself as a polite, affable comedy-star-in-the-waiting and only the fact that he and Langford have never met is preventing them from forming a deep and lasting friendship. In actuality, Pupkin is a fantasist with an elaborate fantasy-world he struggles to differentiate from reality. Believing Jerry wants to give him his big break, his stalkerish attempts to become the star’s protégé lead to inevitable rejection. Desperate, he allies with Jerry’s even-more-openly obsessive stalker Masha (Sandra Bernhard) to take desperate measures to break into the spotlight.

The King of Comedy gets, in a way few other films have done before or since, the dark outer-reaches of the allure of fame. It’s a film about people desperate, in different ways, to have a part of the glamourous exciting world are pressed up against the screen watching. It’s about the darkly-comic – and, in their way, terrifying – lengths people will go to feel special and noticed. To land a quiet moment with a distant superstar or (even better) to become the celebrity themselves.

There’s a little bit of Rupert Pupkin in all of us. Perhaps that’s why we find De Niro’s exquisite performance both hilarious, mortifying to watch but also strangely endearing. Who hasn’t spun in their head elaborate fantasies full of warm conversations with those we admire, where they fall over themselves to tell us how amazing we are? Or imagined a critical teacher going on television to tell the world how wrong they were? Or dreamed of impressing the person we fancied at school with tales of our high-flying success among the hoi-polloi?

What we perhaps don’t do, is build a replica TV studio in our apartment, staffed with life-size cardboard cut-outs of our heroes. Or act out, long into the night, the conversations we wished we had. We probably don’t try to force up fantasies weekend retreats with superstars into reality by turning up at their houses unannounced with a date we want to impress in tow. We might enjoy flirting with a little fantasy life, we’ve probably not started to believe it or started to resent the celebrities for not performing in real life the affection they show us in our mind.

But Rupert does. Superbly played by De Niro – this might just be his finest performance, hilariously over-eager, pathetic but with just the possibility of Bickle-like danger under the surface – Pupkin lives half in this world, half in his own. He doesn’t even seem to realise how socially awkward or desperate he is, approaching every conversation with an air of polite, calm decency. The sort of guy who hands over his own autograph to the girl he’s trying to impress, telling her it will be worth a fortune one day. Who, when he finally gets the chance to talk to his idol after ’rescuing’ him from a deranged fan (something we quickly realise is a set-up – and an indicator of the ends Pupkin will go to), seems literally unable to let the conversation end, utterly unaware each additional word that passes his lips makes it less-and-less likely Jerry will ever speak to him again.

Pupkin only looks normal when he’s compared to his partner in Jerry-obsession Masha, a superbly grating performance of unhinged monomania from Sandra Bernhard. Masha and Rupert – the sparky, bickering interplay between De Niro and Bernhard is electric, the two sounding like children feuding over the last cookie in the jar – are two halves of the same personality: Rupert the more polite, more capable of affecting normality part who longs for a celebrity to recognise him as one of their own; Masha is the possessive id, who wants to grasp her object of affection tight and never let them go, focused on celebrities because they are easier to follow than regular people.

But we’ve all been desperate to take a chance to get close to something we want haven’t we? When presenting himself at Jerry’s office with his demo tape, Pupkin politely but firmly refuses to read any social cues from the staff that they want him to leave. De Niro’s permagrin is a superpower, rejection bouncing off him unscathed. De Niro manages, under the smile and unassuming manner, to always demonstrate Pupkin’s belief fame is his due. The King of Comedy really understands the belief many feel that all which separates them from success is luck. Pupkin rejects hard work and honing his act, genuinely not understanding why he can’t graduate straight to prime-time TV. He’s a millennial ahead of his time, someone who believes if he really, really wants something he should get it.

What’s fascinating about Scorsese’s film is it encourages us to share Pupkin’s delusional perspective. Jerry Langford – a superb performance of bitter, dark self-parody by Jerry Lewis – is all smiles on TV but, as far as we can see, a surly bully in reality, frequently abrupt and rude. But think about it: we only really see him from the perspective of the invasive Pupkin and the frankly terrifyingly Masha. Would you cut these guys any slack? In brief moments where King of Comedy puts us in Jerry’s shoes, it’s clear his world isn’t always pleasant: the woman who responds to his polite refusal to talk to her son on the phone screams “You should die of cancer” at him and he’s obvious genuinely scared of Masha. Is it a surprise he clutches a golf club throughout his confrontation when Pupkin arrives at his home? He chooses his words carefully because too much interaction can be as dangerous as none-at-all.

What’s also quietly clever about King of Comedy is that Pupkin isn’t talentless as such. His problem is all his material is as derivative and carefully studied as his attempt to act normal is. When we see his act, some of the jokes land – but they land like with the carefully planned poise of an obsessive who has copied the tics of those with genuine talent. Pupkin is witty, but it’s outweighed by his obsessive desire for immediate fame. Everything about him is carefully crafted, his entire persona constructed to cope with the world. That’s why he retreats so often in fantasy, where everything is easier.

And maybe King of Comedy heads into fantasy, much as Taxi Driver perhaps does. Don’t trust a Scorsese-De Niro film where someone who we’ve seen as maladjusted, unaware and self-deceiving as Pupkin gets what he wants at the end. King of Comedy shares huge amounts of DNA with Taxi Driver – history repeating itself as farce – even if Pupkin is too childish and incompetent to be as much of a danger as Bickle is.

King of Comedy captures all this with a brilliant understanding of the addictive qualities of fame and celebrity. Sure we sort of like Pupkin sometimes, but we also understand why Jerry finds him so unbearable and unsettling – and also clear just how short a distance he would need to travel to become Masha. King of Comedy delivers all this with an unflashy skill and hosts a truly superb performance from De Niro, a pitch-perfect study in weakness, longing, delusion, repressed desperation and strange vulnerability. It speaks to feelings we’ve all had, but it also reveals the horrific end results of those longings.

The Insider (1999)

Mann’s finest film is a chilling breakdown of the insidious strength of corporations

Director: Michael Mann

Cast: Al Pacino (Lowell Bergman), Russell Crowe (Dr Jeffrey Wigand), Christopher Plummer (Mike Wallace), Diane Venora (Liane Wigand), Philip Baker Hall (Don Hewitt), Lindsay Crouse (Sharon Tiller), Debi Mazar (Debbie De Luca), Stephen Tobolowsky (Eric Kluster), Colm Feore (Richard Scruggs), Bruce McGill (Ron Motley), Gina Gershon (Helen Caperelli), Michael Gambon (Thomas Sandefur), Rip Torn (John Scanlon), Cliff Curtis (Sheikh Fadlallah)

For decades we persuaded ourselves smoking was problem-free. Then, when we finally decided sucking tar into your lungs several times a day probably didn’t go hand-in-hand with good health, Big Tobacco bent over backwards to argue they didn’t believe for one minute nicotine was actually addictive. This lie – they were improving the hit to increase the customer base – was blown upon by corporate whistle blower, and former B&W employee, Dr Jeffrey Wigand (Russell Crowe).

But the battle over the reporting of the story also exposed the fault-lines in corporate-owned media companies, as Wigand’s 60 Minutes interview was canned by a CBS network terrified of legal action imperilling a corporate sale, much to the fury of crusading producer Lowell Bergman (Al Pacino) who spent months bringing Wigand in only to see him brushed aside. The Insider charts these two stories merging into each other: the deadly campaign of intimidation and smears against Wigand, segueing into the caving of CBS in the face of legal threats with Bergman left furious, betrayed and turning his campaigning fire against his own employers.

This all comes grippingly to life in Michael Mann’s superb slice of All the President’s Men inspired-reportage, turning this 1996 TV-and-business scandal into a sleek, intelligent thriller that takes a chilling look at how corporate America rigs the game in its own favour with impunity. The Insider is as rightfully furious at the dirty-tricks and menace of the tobacco companies, as it is at the subtly insidious way corporate interests pollutes news reporting. It does this while also presenting its two heroes as flawed men with more in common than they might think: competitive alpha males, both prone to taking rash, destructive actions in fits of head-strong self-righteousness, caring about their own moral code over the needs of others.

The Insider splits into two clear acts: the agonising decision of Wigand to blow the whistle on corporate malfeasance, in the face of immense personal and professional pressure and Bergman’s subsequent struggle to deliver on his word and get Wigand’s confession on air. The first half offers the more traditional heroics – and the more overt hero-and-villain structure, but increasingly I find the second half, of news shows being dictated to by their paymasters more-and-more unsettlingly prescient, becoming increasingly relevant the older the film gets.

But that first half makes for a compellingly tense pressure-cooker view. It’s powered by an excellent performance by Russell Crowe (effortlessly convincing as someone twenty years older, and collecting his first Oscar nomination). Crowe makes Wigand principled but prickly, brave but confrontational and at times frustratingly self-righteous. His moral qualms are finally sharpened into action his fury at the blunt-intimidation from B&W’s sinisterly avuncular CEO (a masterful cameo from Michael Gambon – one of the great single-scene performances in movies) and its implication that he cannot trusted to stick to his NDA. Wigand barely involves his wife (a tightly-wound Diane Venora) in his decisions, only mentioning his dismissal in passing and deciding to appear on 60 minutes (a decision that will shatter their lives) unilaterally.

But Wigand also has higher motives. He wants to be able to look his daughters in the eye, having sold-out to burnish the dirty-deeds of B&W with his scientific skills. He’s rightly affronted by the lies Big Tobacco has sold the public and undergoes enormous sacrifices (financial, marital, professional, legal, death threats and a public smear campaign) to see things through. Mann’s cool mix of starkness and shadows, full of drained out colours and greys, is perfect for a world where Wigand is shadowed by strangers at a driving range, receives bullets in his mailbox and searches late at night for who has left footprints in his garden. Crowe superbly conveys a man acting out of an increasing sense of moral imperative, struggling desperately to hold himself together under immense pressure.

This section of the film – especially with its clear antagonist – plays as a superb personal and political thriller, Mann expertly conveying lurking menace. In 1999 the second half of the film, the struggle to actually broadcast Wigand’s interview, was often seen as slightly underwhelming. But actually it shows a different type of danger: less overt and heavy-handed corporate power with its legal injunctions and bullying FBI guys hoping for a cushy retirement job with the corporation, more how these corporate masters assert control in quiet, less direct ways to decide what we hear or see.

Our journalists have no fear when confronting criminals or terrorists – The Insider’s prologue establishes this with Bergman and host Mike Wallace not flinching in the face of gun-toting Hezbollah fighters guarding the Sheikh they have arranged to interview. But they face far greater threats to their integrity when confronted with lawyers and corporate directors (effectively embodied by Gina Gershon and Stephen Tobolowsky as uncaring suits) whose threats are indirect and insidious. Wigand’s interview could imperil the sale of CBS and the bonus of the corporate suits, and in that scenario journalist principles can go hang. Christopher Plummer is, by the way, superb as the charismatic Wallace, who caves to pressure then convinces himself he hasn’t, a super-star of the airwaves who loses part of his wider integrity trying to protect his position.

And doesn’t the idea that corporations can squeeze the life out of journalistic stories feel even more chilling today? After all, virtually every single news outlet out there is owned by a major business, all with their own agendas. Can we really believe they’ve not all made calls on gets reported, based on what their shareholders might think? Mann’s film skilfully – and rather chillingly – shows how quickly they can re-work the agenda. It leaves Lowell Bergman raging (as only Al Pacino can) against the betrayal of trust he’s being forced to make towards Wigand.

Crowe’s pressure-cooker performance stole many of the headlines on release but The Insider also benefits from an excellent Pacino performance. Utterly committed to his principles and – just like Wigand – utterly unwilling to compromise them even an inch, no matter the cost, Bergman will pick up the windmill-tilting banner, and charge with it at his own paymasters. No one can rip through speeches quite like Pacino, but he gives Bergman a real genuineness, grounded in a fundamental decency, whose righteous anger is underpinned with world-weary disbelief that it’s come to this.

It grounds an excellently studied breakdown of a journalistic turf war. The Insider plays like All the President’s Men, if Woodward and Bernstein had been spiked after they nailed the story. Mann demonstrates the influence in The Insider’s crisply immersive photography that employs depth of frame and gyroscopic deep-focus, as well as in the crisp editing and the film’s mesmerising emersion in the complex details of building a story. Combine that with a gripping conspiracy thriller on the machinations of ruthless corporations and The Insider makes for a compelling film.

The Right Stuff (1983)

Patriotic heroism subtly retold as shrewd satire – no wonder the film bombed

Director: Philip Kaufman

Cast: Sam Shepard (Chuck Yeager), Scott Glenn (Alan Shepard), Ed Harris (John Glenn), Dennis Quaid (Gordon Cooper), Fred Ward (Gus Grissom), Barbara Hershey (Glennis Yeager), Kim Stanley (Pancho Barnes), Veronica Cartwright (Betty Grissom), Scott Paulin (Deke Slayton), Charles Frank (Scott Carpenter), Lance Henriksen (Wally Schirra), Donald Moffat (Lyndon B Johnson), Levon Helm (Jack Ridley), Mary Jo Deschanel (Annie Glenn), Scott Wilson (Scott Crossfield), Kathy Baker (Louise Shepard), David Clennon (Liaison man), Jeff Goldblum (Recruiter), Harry Shearer (Recruiter)

During the Cold War, the US and Russia had to fight with something – from proxy wars to chess, but most famously with Space: the competition to go further, faster and higher among the stars. The Right Stuff focuses on the Mercury Seven pilots at the centre of the US response to Soviet success including Alan Shepard (Scott Glenn), John Glenn (Ed Harris), Gus Grissom (Fred Ward) and Gordon Cooper (Dennis Quaid), a mix of the cocksure and the confident. But in a space programme where a monkey is an acceptable “pilot” for this human cannonball, do any of them have “the right stuff”? Could any of them match the skill of legendary test pilot Chuck Yeager (Sam Shepard) – one of the guys who scorned this astronaut programme for being “spam in a can”?

The Right Stuff, adapted from Tom Wolfe’s book, seemed destined to become a patriotic smash-hit. Despite its eight Oscar nominations (and four wins) it was, in fact, a catastrophic bomb. Perhaps that was because it subverted its patriotism so well. The Right Stuff is, in fact, a subtle, anti-heroic satire (told at huge length) masquerading as a patriotic yarn. It’s marketing avoided that meaning those most likely to enjoy didn’t go and see it, and those who went for that felt alienated. While largely respecting the astronauts, it suggests space race triumphalism was a sort of mass hysteria, with limited results, inflated into something mythic by political expediency, media spin and industrial might. Not the happy, flag-waving message Reaganite America expected or wanted.

Kaufman’s sympathy instead lies with an older, “truer” America. The Right Stuff is an intensely nostalgic film: but for a completely different time. It is in love with Frontier America, where men-were-men and the daring proved themselves in taming the frontier, in this case the sky itself. Our tamer is Chuck Yeager, played with a monosyllabic Gary-Cooper-charisma by Sam Shepard. Yeager is the last of the cowboys (even introduced riding a horse in the desert), taking to the skies like an old frontiersman hunting down that “demon” who lives at the sound barrier.

This is the sort of America The Right Stuff celebrates, and Yeager is the guy who has it. Unlike the Mercury programme, Yeager isn’t interested in showbiz and self-promotion (his reward for breaking the sound barrier? A free steak and a press embargo), just the quiet satisfaction of having done it. It’s the old, unflappable, quietly masculine confidence of a certain kind of American tradition and it’s totally out of step with the world the media is now celebrating with the astronauts. Instead, these effective passengers in the rocket will be hailed as the great pilots.

Kaufman’s film is a long, carefully disguised, quiet ridicule of many of the aspects of the Mercury programme. It’s conceived, in a darkened room, by a group of politicians so clumsy they can’t even work a projector. It’s head, Lyndon B Johnson (Donald Moffat on panto form) is a ludicrous figure, at one point reduced to an impotent tantrum in a car when he doesn’t get his way. The NASA recruiters are a comedy double act – Goldblum and Shearer sparking wonderfully off each other – who first suggest (in all seriousness) circus acrobats as pilots and then fail to identify Yuri Gargarin. The programme begins with a series of failed launches that travel tiny distances before exploding, culminating in one attempt ending with an impotent pop of the cap at the top of the rocket.

NASA is slightly ramshackle and clueless throughout. Far from the best and brightest, Kaufman is keen for us to remember that many of the scientists fought for the Germans in the war, that decisions were often made entirely based on what the Russians have just done, that the astronaut recruitment tests are a parade of bizarre physical tests because no one has a clue what to test for, and that the final seven selected aren’t even the best just the ones who persevered through the tests and (crucially) were small enough to fit in the capsule. That doesn’t stop the media – played by a San Francisco physical comedy troop – from turning them overnight from jobbing pilots to superstars.

The astronauts status is frequently punctured. Scott Glenn’s granite-faced Shepard is strapped into the cockpit for hours on his first flight, until finally he begs to pee (followed by a montage of coffee being slurped, hose pipes blasting and taps dripping) before being instructed to release his bladder into his suit, meaning he heads into space sitting in a puddle of his own piss. Dennis Quaid’s cocksure Cooper has an over-inflated idea of his skills and is prone to dumb, blow-hard statements (arriving at Yeager’s Air Force base he non-ironically states he’ll soon have his picture up on the deceased pilot’s memorial wall). Fred Ward’s Gus Grissom is a slightly sleazy chancer – controversially The Right Stuff presents him as panicking on re-entry from his first mission, blowing his hatch and sinking his ship, something he categorically denied (and was later proved not to have done).

Even John Glenn, played with a sincerity and decency by Ed Harris (if this had been a hit, Harris’ career of playing hard-heard would have been totally different), is subtly lampooned. So straight-laced he literally can’t swear (his attempt to say ‘fuck’ never gets past a strained Ffff), he’s introduced via a ludicrous TV quiz show and his square-jawed morals frequently tip into puritan self-importance. Undergoing physical tests, Kaufman even cuts from his grimacing face to a grinning chimp on the same test (and who will beat him into space). Compared to Yeager, who can correct a plane on a desperate nose dive and beat the skies into submission (and has the only outright heroic refrain in Bill Conti’s Oscar-winning score), none of them have that right stuff.

Do they get it? In a way: but their triumph is establishing their character, not their skills. Kaufman uses Yeager to point us towards this (his seal of approval is vital for the film): after Grissom’s debacle, he defends him in the bar and praises their courage in essentially sitting on top of a massive bomb.
Tellingly, the astronauts’ most courageous moment in the film isn’t in the cockpit at all: it’s Glenn supporting his stammering wife’s refusal to go on air with LBJ, despite the pressure from NASA bigwigs – and the other astronauts uniting in fury when Glenn is threatened with being dumped from the next flight. The others become more noble through maturing and casting aside fame’s temptations.

In a way they prove their spurs, even if Kaufman’s film makes clear none of them can match Yeager’s traditional values. The film ends with Yeager, maverick to the last, undertaking an unauthorised test flight in a desperate attempt to keep funding for his jet programme going. Even with this final flight – dressed in a bastardised version of a space suit – Yeager shows he’s not lost it, a man so undeniably superhuman in his American resilience that even a bit of fire won’t slow him down.

The Right Stuff celebrates Yeager, but he’s the B-story – and the film frames him as a forgotten figure, left behind by a world obsessed with the bright and shiny. The Right Stuff has to centre the astronauts but it doesn’t focus on the missions (which, apart from Glenn’s, barely receive any screen time – certainly not compared to the time given to Yeager’s flights) or the glory, only quietly implies there was a slight air of pointlessness about the whole thing – that the space race was perhaps just a dick-waggling competition between superpowers. It makes for interesting – if overlong – viewing, but as punch-the-air entertainment, no sir. No wonder it bombed.

Memento (2000)

Nolan’s Hollywood debut is still a mesmerising, inventive and inspiring noir thriller

Director: Christopher Nolan

Cast: Guy Pearce (Leonard Shelby), Carrie-Anne Moss (Natalie), Joe Pantoliano (Teddy), Mark Boone Jnr (Burt), Jorja Fox (Catherine Shelby), Stephen Tobolowsky (Sammy Jankis), Harriet Sansom Harris (Mrs Jankis), Callum Keith Reinne (Dodd)

Memento is a twisty-turny thriller of man who can’t remember anything that has just happened to him. But it’s also a tragedy of a man who actually can never forget. Leonard Shelby (Guy Pearce) has anterograde amnesia, a condition that prevents him forging new memories. Every few minutes or so, his memory resets and he forgets what just happened to him. But he can never forget what happened to him immediately before his condition: the murder of his wife by a mysterious assailant. Effectively, Leonard lives forever in that last moment he remembers: it has always just happened, and has shaped his life into a relentless search for revenge.

It’s a realisation I made after a watching again Christopher Nolan’s sophomore calling-card, surely one of the most complete artistic statements of intent Hollywood has seen this century. You can see the roots of all that was to come here, from Batman to Oppenheimer, via Tenet, Inception and Interstellar. Memento is a gripping thriller and also a playful and intriguing dance with narrative conventions, largely told backwards (each seven minute or so section in colour occurs after the scene that preceded it) but also featuring a black-and-white parallel narrative that takes place (it is revealed) chronologically, that eventually links up with the other narrative (the film, effectively, ending somewhere in the middle of the story).

Far from a stunt, this is ingenious, exciting story-telling from Nolan, superbly recreating some idea of what it might be like to never remember why you are somewhere, where you have been or whether you have ever met the person you are talking to before or not. You could say the story, once rearranged in chronological order, is simple – but everything is easy to follow with a map.

Memento’s structure reflects part of Leonard’s perspective, forcing you constantly to watch the film in the moment and never be able to apply your wider knowledge of the narrative. No matter how familiar I become with the film, I find I inevitably become as confused and lost as Leonard is, your mind struggling to reorder and reinterpret “later” scenes as you discover the “earlier” ones, the whole film fracturing into mini-arcs (the chase where a bemused Leonard doesn’t know at first whether he’s chaser or chase; the bar conversation that starts in the middle; the mysterious woman who appears in a bathroom, and so on).

Even more ingeniously, we realise Leonard is essentially ‘re-born’ with every cut-to-black. He will never feel anger towards someone who wronged him minutes earlier or fondness towards someone who was kind to him. The Leonard dead-set on a goal one minute will cease to exist the next, with only any notes remaining to guide him. Essentially, Leonard is constantly handing over to himself: even he knows this: that decisions he makes in a moment effectively carry no implications, because he won’t remember them. He will never feel guilt, or regret, shame, pride and delight.

Leonard prides himself on making his life work through a rigorous system of mental conditioning. His short-term memory may be destroyed, but his ability to “learn” has not. He talks proudly of his system: carefully written notes, annotated polaroids of key people, places and objects, certain things always kept in certain places and, of course, a body littered with tattoos of crucial facts about his wife’s murder. What’s ingenious about Nolan’s film is that, like Leonard, we never know the context of any of this. When Leonard makes a note, what prompted him to do it? Like him we don’t know.

That lack of context exposes, over the course of the film, the nonsense of Leonard’s system. Trusting notes – particularly written by himself – implicitly from moment-to-moment, leaves him wide open to manipulation. If he has a polaroid of an object with the note “This belongs to you”, he will assume it is true. If someone produces evidence of a friendship or mutual interest, he will believe it. Even more chillingly, we discover Leonard himself is more than capable of leaving himself breadcrumbs he knows his future selves can (and will) misinterpret. After all he’ll never remember the deception and will never waver in the belief that he would never deceive himself.

Like Leonard we can never know the truth about the people he talks to. Should we listen to the message “don’t believe his lies” about the ingratiating weaselly Teddy – especially since the film “begins” with Leonard shooting him in the head as the killer of his wife. Or is Teddy, played with a perfectly smarmy, smart-alecky wit by Joe Pantoliano, the friend he claims to be? Does Natalie, the quiet but helpful woman who has also lost someone (memorably played with a beautifully balanced mix of the austere and tender by Carrie Anne-Moss), deserve the absolute trust Leonard accords her based on his annotated polaroids? After all, the manager of the hotel he’s staying at (a marvellously droll cameo from Mark Boone Jnr) cheerfully confesses to ripping him off, since he knows Leonard won’t remember it next time they speak.

What becomes clear is that Leonard, for all his surface assurance and confidence is a raw emotional mess, utterly lost in the world he inhabits and trapped forever in an emotional state of raw grief and fury, his politeness a ‘learned’ habit as much as his mantras and endlessly repeated stories. Guy Pearce gives a fantastic performance of a character both deeply vulnerable but carrying reserves of bitterness that are intensely dangerous when unleashed. Pearce’s empathetic performance, low-key and underplayed throughout, helps us build a deep connection with Leonard, making the audience want him to succeed, while never hiding the possibility of danger in a man who knows nothing about the world around him other it has deeply wronged him.

It’s that hidden emotional state Nolan’s twisting film hides in plain sight throughout. After all, we know Leonard is capable of acts of violent rage – its literally the first thing we see him do. Opening the film with a shot of a Polaroid developing, played in reverse (so the image gets fainter), Nolan even shows us at the start that the facts will become less clear as the film progresses. Despite both these things, it’s frequently shocking how what we think of Leonard and those around him changes.

It’s told with a superb streak of film noir, but also a dark wit (after all, a guy who you can be as blatant false to you as you like because he’ll act like your friend five minutes later, is inherently funny) that means sucker-punch moments when we make crucial discoveries about objects, characters and even the story of Sammy Jankis (a similarly afflicted man, investigated by pre-accident Leonard in his old life as insurance claims investigator) land with a real wallop.

Memento is truly unique, a near unrepeatable trick expertly pulled off by a director who even in his second film was able to present a complex, multi-layered narrative with the assurance of a veteran. What’s interesting about Memento is that, away from the mechanics of how it is told, there is very little self-conscious flash or bombast about it. It uses flair when it serves the story, but otherwise lets events speak for itself. And it unfolds like an onion, each layer rewatch revealing a fresh new layer that shocks the senses. Superbly acted and brilliantly made, it’s a modern noir masterpiece.

Saltburn (2023)

Dreadfully pleased with itself and full of shallow insights and stunt clickbait moments

Director: Emerald Fennell

Cast: Barry Keoghan (Oliver Quick), Jacob Elordi (Felix Catton), Rosamund Pike (Lady Elspeth Catton), Richard E Grant (Sir James Catton), Alison Oliver (Venetia Catton), Archie Madekwe (Farleigh Stuart), Carey Mulligan (“Poor Dear” Pamela), Paul Rhys (Duncan), Ewan Mitchell (Michael Gavey), Sadie Soverell (Annabel), Reece Shearsmith (Professor Ware), Dorothy Atkinson (Paula Quick)

Promising Young Woman was a thought-provoking, very accomplished debut. It’s odd that Emerald Fennell’s sophomore effort plays more like a first film: try-hard, style-over-substance, very pleased with itself and its punky attempts to shock. Crammed full of moments designed to be snipped out and talked about – in a “you will not fuckin’ believe what just happened” way – Saltburn is a fairly trivial remix of ideas much, much better explored elsewhere, predictable from its opening minutes.

It’s 2006 and Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan) is a scholarship student at Oxford University, socially awkward and very conscious of his Liverpudlian roots, struggling to fit in among the wealthy set that dominates his college. At the centre is Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi), fundamentally decent but blithely unaware of his privilege, who takes a shine to Oliver with his shyness, troubled working-class background and grief at the recent death of his alcoholic father. Felix invites Oliver to spend the summer at Saltburn, his luxurious family seat. There Oliver is welcomed – or does he inveigle his way? – into the lives of the Cattons, from seducing Felix’s sister Venetia (Alison Oliver) to charming his parents Sir James (Richard E Grant) and Lady Elspeth (Rosamund Pike). But is Oliver all he appears to be?

The answer, of course, is no. Which shouldn’t surprise anyone who has ever really encountered any form of unreliable narrator before. Fennell opens the film with a clearly older, well-dressed Oliver recounting the film’s story to an unseen person. It’s not much of a deduction from this alone, that Oliver is at best not to be trusted, is definitely potentially dangerous and is probably a lot worse. All that, inevitably plays out, in a film that so nakedly rips off Brideshead Revisited (or Recycled) and The Talented Mr Ripley that Oliver might as well be called Ripley Ryder.

“Ryder” would at least have been a witty name for a character who spends most of the film putting his (apparently) well developed manhood to effective use in manipulating and controlling people. Saltburn assembles a series of “shocking” moments of sexual weirdness from stalker-like sociopath Oliver – so much so, that the moments he merely wanders (or dances) around in the buff feel almost normal. Surely there was more than half an eye on hashtags when the film presents scenes like Oliver drinking spunky bathwater, performing oral sex on a woman during her period or dry humping then wanking over a grave. It’s not big and it’s not clever.

“Not clever” also sums up the film’s inane social commentary. Set in 2006, it seems to take place in a version of Oxford that probably hasn’t existed since 1956. Having been in a state-school kid at Oxbridge at this time, its vision of a university 98% populated by poshos jeering at working-class kids with the wrong sort of tux just isn’t true (in fact there were more state school students than private school kids at Oxford that year). In this fantasy, all the students are either from Old Etonians or maladjusted weirdos from state schools. It’s hard not to think this is Emerald Fennell (a woman so posh, her 18^th birthday party was featured in Tatler) guiltily looking back at how her “set” at Oxford might have behaved to the less privileged students.

It boils down to a view of Oxford as an elitist social club laughing openly at anyone who can’t trace their descendants back to the House of Lords, where tutors are entranced by the idea that a place like “Liverpool” exists and snort at the working class student for being a clumsy try-hard by actually reading the books on the reading list with student life flying by in a series of hedonistic raves, hosted by the rich and famous. Maybe I was just in the wrong circles back in the day.

This portrait of Oxford as a play pen for the super elite is as damaging (it’s exactly the sort of false image that stops deserving people from wanting to go) as it is lazy, tired and false. But then, Saltburn compounds its boringly seen-it-all-before social commentary by trudging off down other, all-too-familiar paths as it turns its fire on those with their nose pressed up against the window of privilege. The film’s vilest member of the elite, Farleigh, is himself an interloper, turned aggressive gate-keeper. And, as is not a surprise, Oliver’s roots turn out to be far more comfortable than he is letting on. Oliver is a Charles Ryder who yearns for Brideshead so much, he starts destroying the Marchmain family to get it. Because, in his eyes, as an aspirant middle-class type he appreciates it more.

On top of this is layered a clumsy, Ripley-esque madness to Oliver, who can’t decide himself whether he is infatuated with the charming Felix (very well, and sympathetically, played by Jacob Elordi) or just wants to suck his soul dry. Barry Keoghan plays this Highsmith-styled sociopath with just enough flash and sexual confusion – and he does manage to successfully turn on a sixpence from wide-eyed wonder, to vicious anger. But the character again feels like a remix of something done better elsewhere, trading emotional depth for cartoonish bombast and clumsy on-the-nose point scoring.

The on-the-nose-ness runs through the whole film. It’s a film screaming to be taken seriously, from its 4:3 framing, to its jarringly satirical music choices, arty Gothic fonts, visual quotes from Kubrick and look-at-me love of tricksy camera shots (some of these, I will admit, are gorgeously done, even if the film frequently lingers on them so we can “see the work”). But it makes very little sense. How does Oliver manage to exert an influence, so profound and complete, over Felix’s parents? Why does the wool fall from everyone’s eyes one-at-a-time in quick succession? Does Saltburn feel sorry for the generous but emotionally dysfunctional Cattons or does it feel they deserve their fate?

Because so many of these ideas are so half-heartedly explored, it becomes a collection of scenes designed to shock, tricksy directorial decisions, some flashy performances (Rosamund Pike can certainly wittily deliver a slew of lines dripping with blithely unaware privilege) and twists that will only surprise those who have never seen a story about an outsider before. Jacob Elordi emerges best, creating a character of surprisingly revealed emotional depth, but most of the rest of Saltburn settles for flash and instant gratification. To use its own terms of reference, it’s as satisfying as premature ejaculation: fun for an all-too-brief second, then a crushing, shameful disappointment.

The Testament of Dr Mabuse (1933)

Lang’s masterful mix of gangster thriller and supernatural psychological drama is superb

Director: Fritz Lang

Cast: Rudolf Klein-Rogge (Dr Mabuse), Otto Wernicke (Inspector Lohmann), Oskar Beregi Snr (Professor Baum), Gustav Diessl (Thomas Kent), Wera Liessem (Lilli), Karl Meixner (Hofmeister), AE Licho (Dr Hauser), Theo Lingen (Karetzky), Klaus Pohl (Muller), Theodor Loos (Dr Kraum)

Did Fritz Lang invent the concept of the cinematic universe? Or after completing M, did he just wonder what it would be like if his detective Lohmann (Otto Wernicke) took on the dastardly criminal mastermind Dr Mabuse (Rudolf Klein-Rogge) from his earlier epic crime drama. Either way, the hero and the villain from those two very different films face-off in The Testament of Dr Mabuse, a pacey crime melodrama spliced with a spooky ghost story, that rattles its way through a scintillating story tinged with the whiff of the dread of Nazism.

It’s eleven years after Mabuse’s reign of terror ended with him catatonic and under arrest. In a psychiatric hospital under Professor Baum (Oskar Beregi Snr), who sees him as a fascinating case study of deluded genius, Mabuse has not spoken in years instead filling his days with endlessly scribbling a series of blueprints and schemes for the criminal underworld, focused on destabilising the country and corrupting the currency. But, despite being under lock and key, a secret society of criminals is carrying out Mabuse’s scribbles, seemingly under the guidance of the man himself. Can death, when it comes, really take Mabuse? Or are Lohmann’s suspicions that the dread hand of the Great Unknown still controls events, even from beyond the grave, correct?

Lang’s gangster film throws together some of the best elements of all his German films. This is a pulpy gangster thriller, full of action, shoot-outs and explosions mixed with the unsettling double exposure appearance of ghosts and shady, unknown powers manipulating events. It’s Scarface meets A Christmas Carol, with Mabuse as a dreadful Marley’s Ghost causing devastation and chaos even after death. The Testament of Dr Mabuse sees realism meet thriller meet supernatural powers, but brilliantly combines all three up into a propulsive thriller.

And it’s a film, more than any of Lang’s others, about the malign influence of Fascism. For what is Mabuse’s dogmatic lust for chaos and destruction, but a terrible prophecy of the horrors Hitler would unleash. Mabuse, like the Fuhrer, is interested only in destruction wanting to pull the world down to rule over the ashes, to reforge the remains into his ideal vision of reality. His paranoid ramblings – and the spectral, transparent (brilliant use of double exposure at the technical possibilities of cinema, as always from Lang) presence he becomes parroting the same mantra of the nobility of destruction – are about leading the country into a morass of destruction. No wonder The Testament of Dr Mabuse was almost immediately spiked by Goebbels. Hitler’s magnetic powers of persuasion and control were surely the real-world apotheosis of Mabuse’s skills.

Mabuse’s powers are so great that even death can’t slow him down. Today it doesn’t take long to figure out exactly who the real mastermind – or after-death puppet of Mabuse’s – might be. As wardens in the hospital say, even in silence the fixed, controlling glare of Mabuse is enough to bend minds to his will. The rantings of his testament – Mabuse’s Mein Kampf – merely add to the force of his stare. Even the echo of Mabuse’s name will turn former police detective Hofmeister into a gibbering wreck. His power is absolute.

No wonder he appears after death, disfigured post-autopsy, his eyes bulging, to continue to direct his puppets, his ghostly form directing their actions. It’s a wonderful visual expression of the hypnotic control Mabuse had over his victims, that they continue to see his controlling, ranting form – across a desk or guiding them down corridors – even after they’ve gone. Mabuse’s ghostly form will literally emerge out of the body of his underling, crossing to sit opposite him and pour more instructions in his ear.

Ordering his underlings from behind a curtain that hides his true face, Mabuse’s commands are absolute and its threats always delivered. The gang, each a series of cells who work together only when instructed, are nearly all brain-washed fanatics, accepting orders without question. Much like Hitler, Mabuse’s followers cover a vast range, not just common criminals, or trigger-happy loons but also the middle-class and professional, in thrall to the words of a mad man promising a new dawn (sound familiar?) Much like in Mabuse’s hey-day, any deviation from absolute loyalty is met with swift, fatal punishment. What chance does Thomas Kent (Gustav Diessl – a spitting image for the young George Sanders) have when he decides the gang life is too risky for his girlfriend?

Up against this, Lang places his hero from M and his accustomed detailed fascination with the mechanics of investigation. The Testament of Dr Mabuse mixes this analysis of things like the forensic translation of scratches on a windowpane, with this outré pulpy set-up of Wizard of Oz-like criminal masterminds. The world of Lohmann is one of order and methodical investigation, grounded in realism and detail. It’s an adjustment for Lohmann who, in M, was more the jovial face of a failing institution – here he’s the last bastion of reasonable authority.

The Testament of Dr Mabuse is full of shrewd political observations – but it’s also a supremely entertaining film. Few directors were as good at crime drama set-ups than Lang. The film’s opening sequence, showing Hofmeister tracking the gang through a warehouse, is a masterclass of the tension of imminent discovery, then of explosive (literally) violence during a chase. A gorgeously inventive bomb sequence – where a flooded room is the best chance of safety – is another masterpiece of slow burn tension, while the insidious threat of Mabuse’s voice creates a miasma of terror.

That sequence plays beautifully into Lang’s increasing comfort with, and mastery of, sound. The film opens with a pounding heart-beat on the soundtrack as freelance investigator Hofmeister hides in the factory where Mabuse’s men assemble their latest schemes, capturing the fear as he constantly ducks and hides to (unsuccessfully) avoid detection. The sound of machinery grows to overwhelm the film and, as Hofmeister flees, his barracked by the sounds of engines and rolling oil-filled barrels that burst into flames. Sound skilfully stresses mood and bridges scenes, controlling mood and atmosphere and adding to the air of distrust and disturbance.

The technique shines out of several stunning set-pieces. A traffic light assassination – another masterpiece of sound – is a brilliant piece of gangster-ish business, the gangsters using a crescendo of car horns to cover a fatal shot. Watching its slow build-up and the carefully paced release of information to the audience (the presence of the killers, the gun, the tension of the wait) you can see why Lang often felt Hitchcock got a lot of credit for things he had invented.

Fast-paced and thrilling, it’s a perfect extension of both Lang’s previous films, a brilliantly unsettling and disturbing drama wrapped up in a gangster package. It’s supernatural touches are just the right side of psychological drama, a portrait of obsession and a fractured mind. A perfect expression of Lang’s mastery of mixing the high and low brow into an engaging, thought-provoking and thrilling package.