The Lesson (2023)

Sinister family mystery, full of good moments that don’t come together into something that really works

Director: Alice Troughton

Cast: Daryl McCormack (Liam Sommers), Richard E. Grant (JM Sinclair), Julie Delpy (Hélène Sinclair), Stephen McMillan (Bertie Sinclair), Crispin Letts (Ellis)

Liam Sommers (Daryl McCormack) strides onstage for an interview about his literary debut, that has set the world alight. How did he get the inspiration to write about a domineering patriarch in a rich country house? Flashback to Liam’s summer spent as an English tutor to Bertie (Stephen McMillan), who is trying to get into Oxford to impress his domineering father JM Sinclair (Richard E Grant), Britain’s leading literary novelist. The Sinclair household bubbles with suppressed grief over the accidental drowning of JM and Hélène’s (Julie Delpy) older son Archie in their private lake. As Sinclair puts the finishing touches to his new novel – and ropes in Liam to help him as “final lap amanuensis”, what secrets will Liam uncover about this family?

The Lesson revolves heavily around its oft-repeated pithy mantra from JM Sinclair – “Great writers steal”. So often is this repeated, that it drains much of what little surprise there might be about the true origins of JM Sinclair’s latest tome. It’s a fitting mantra from the film that feels like a mood piece, assembled from little touches of other filmmakers (Kubrick for starters), reassembled into something just a little too pleased with its reveals and secrets-within-secrets structure, but is well enough made that you are willing to cut it some slack.

Effectively all filmed in a single location, the Sinclair’s luscious house (a mix of the modern and the classical) set amongst rich private grounds, it’s well directed by Alice Troughton, who makes effective use of angles and transitions (particularly its cuts back and forth between the working practices of Sinclair and would-be novelist Liam, which subtly stress both their similarities and differences) to enhance mood and an air of unknowable menace. The camera drifts with a chilling intimacy across the fateful lake, giving it a sense of ominous power and mystery.

The film is at its strongest in its opening sections (like Sinclair’s novel, it is divided into three parts with short prologues and epilogues). Within a self-contained theatrical space, tensions and resentments between the family are carefully but not pointedly outlined. The father who switches between indifference, annoyance and gregarious enthusiasm. The mother who feels like both a dutiful supporter and a resentful slave. The prickly, difficult son scared of affection, who attempts (unsuccessfully) to ape his father’s authoritarianism, but is crying out to be hugged. Troughton skilfully cuts between these characters, frequently positioning them at opposing sides of the frame, setting them at visual odds with each other.

In the middle of this, Liam becomes an out-of-place, equally unreadable presence. Very well played by Daryl McCormack, full bluntness mixed with inscrutability, Liam is impossible to categorise and totally outside the upper-class formality of the Sinclair home (with its servants, home fine-dining accompanied with classical music and casually displayed artwork). He’s Irish, working-class, Black and sexually ambiguous. But he’s also hard for us to read: is his admiration for Sinclair something that could tip into resentful violence? Does he really like Bertie, or does he see him as a tedious, brattish child? As the prologue sets up, is he an innocent or a destructive, vampiric presence?

These beats are neatly set up in The Lesson’s opening parts, added to by the presence of a Pinteresque butler (a fiercely polite Crispin Letts) whose status and loyalties prove equally hard to read. Liam’s slowly becomes an intimate figure in the house, moving from a servant occasionally allowed to dine with the family, to Sinclair’s IT consultant, proof-reader and one-sided sounding-board for conversations about his novel, becoming an object of sexual fascination for Bertie and Hélène and given the late Archie’s clothes to wear (adding an Oedipal frisson to his flirtation with Hélène).

Ambiguity however slowly gives way as The Lesson continues, as it fails to weave its initial jarring mood into a reveal that feels truly satisfying, logical or surprising. This effect is magnified by the fact the more time we spend with Sinclair, the more it’s made clear he is less complex than we think, but simply an egotistical monster. Richard E Grant has huge fun with this larger-than-life braggart, a man so competitive that he feels compelled to aggressively slap down Liam’s draft novel as “airport trash” and smilingly telling him he has “done him a favour” by encouraging him not to write. But Sinclair’s monstrous, bullying self-importance sign-posts a little too clearly where the plot is heading.

The final reveal that we have been witnessing a secret plot unfold in front of us feels like a flawed attempt to add a narrative coherence to a series of events that would be impossible to pre-plan. This also relies on chance events and skills (events hinge on Liam’s near-photographic memory). The final ‘answer’ is also too clearly sign-posted from the opening, leaving you expecting a rug-pull that never comes.

The Lesson has a good sense of atmosphere in its opening half and some strong performances – Julie Delpy is very effectively unreadable as the enigmatic Hélène – but for all its sharp direction, its plot is too weak to be truly rewarding on a first viewing or give you a reason to want to return for a second lesson. Despite some good scenes, a bravura Grant and a subtle McCormack, the resolution of its quiet atmosphere of tension and inscrutability doesn’t quite ring true.

The Lives of Others (2006)

Breathtaking, heartfelt and in-the-end deeply moving film which leaves you with a profound sense of hope for humanity

Director: Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck

Cast: Ulrich Mühe (Hauptmann Gerd Wiesler), Sebastian Koch (Georg Dreyman), Martina Gedeck (Christa-Maria Sieland), Ulrich Tukur (Oberstleutnant Anton Grubitz), Thomas Thieme (Minister Bruno Hempf), Hans-Uwe Bauer (Paul Hauser), Volkmar Kleinert (Albert Jerska), Matthias Brenner (Karl Wallner), Herbert Knaup (Gregor Hessenstein), Charly Hübner (Udo Leveh)

For almost half the twentieth century, Germany was a country divided. West Germany was a world we might recognise today. East Germany was one George Orwell would have found eerily familiar, a surveillance state, where neighbour reported on neighbour, conversations and opinions were monitored and controlled, and the Stasi had ultimate power. Everything was designed to undermine personal loyalty, introduce mistrust into every relationship and keep in power apparatchiks who enjoyed privileges beyond the imagination of others. But what happens when humanity comes up against this system? Can the lives of others affect what the system’s agents think and feel?

1985, East Berlin. Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Mühe) is the perfect cog in the Stasi machine. Emotion isn’t an issue when he interrogates dissidents for hours at a time, or sits overnight listening to every word spoken in a suspect’s bugged house. All that starts to change when Wiesler is ordered to carry out an operation against noted playwright Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch). Dreyman appears to be the perfect citizen, but is suspected of dissident sympathies. More dangerously for him, he’s having a relationship with famed actor Christa-Maria Sieland (Martina Gedeck) who has attracted the lascivious attentions of the corpulent and corrupt Minister Hempf (Thomas Thieme). As Wiesler listens to Dreyman and Sieland’s lives, he finds himself deeply affected by exposure to art he has never experienced and begin to question the certainties of his world-view.

The Lives of Others is a moving, humane debut from von Donnersmarck, offering a rich and chilling insight into the horror of living in a country where thoughts are not free and words are strictly monitored. It carries such emotional impact because it gives us hope that, no matter the strictures of the world around us, common humanity and decency can break through and change us – even the most mechanical servants of a regime. The Lives of Others does this with realism and a lack of sentiment, showing life and the after-effects of our decisions in non-romantic detail, while also giving us hope that goodness can shine through no matter the cost.

Shot in a series of cold colours reflecting the featureless surroundings of East Germany, The Lives of Others exposes the beige hopelessness of Soviet life. It opens with Weisler’s long interrogation of “Prisoner 227”, cutting between it and a lecture hall, where Weisler plays tapes of it to teach a class. He shows no emotion of any type in either setting for the distressed, exhausted prisoner he’s talking to, and matter-of-factly marks down the name of a student who questions the ethics of what he’s doing. Weisler’s life is one of quiet exactitude: his apartment is featureless, his meals are bland pasta with ketchup, he has no friends and barely seems able to smile.

He contrasts totally with Geog Dreymon. Played with an ebullient innocence by Sebastian Koch, Dreymon has accommodated himself with the regime’s requirements. Does he believe in socialism? It’s one of the film’s mysteries – Dreymon may have an intellectual romanticism but he’s averse to making pointless protests or stands that will only lead to him being silenced. He is willing to accept the shelving of his director friend, for his works to be pushed into a realist factory-setting by plodding directors. His charm sees him befriend the high and mighty (“it was a gift from Frau Honecker” he tells a Stasi officer who questions his possession of a Western book) and he has boyish innocence, like someone who has never known the Orwellian horrors he lives amidst.

His friends however have. His director friend Jerska (Volkmar Kleinert) is an ‘unperson’ whose presence is an embarrassment at parties. Another is a closet radical who feels he should take a stance. Above all, Christa-Marie (a marvellous Martina Gedeck) lives with the abuse of Minister Thieme. This corrupt man – who orders Stasi investigations against people he doesn’t like and is the only character who looks overfed and well-dressed – fondles Christa-Marie at parties and forces her into sexual encounters in his chauffeured car. Corrupt men run this state – similarly Wiesler’s Stasi superior Grubitz (a wonderfully smug Ulrich Tukur), is interested only in promotion.

The system is propped up by men like Wiesler. But all that changes as listening to Dreymon’s life pulls something out of Wiesler he has never thought about before. What pivots this? Perhaps Wiesler truly listening to the warmth and vibrancy of Dreymon’s home life? Perhaps exposure to art? Von Donnersmarck masterfully shows (with complimentary camera moves between two locations) Wiesler teary, spellbound listening to Dreymon’s playing of a piano sonata. It opens up a new world of artistic and cultural understanding to Wiesler, who is drawn to the books in Dreymon’s apartment and begins turning more than a blind eye to Dreymon’s flirtation with dissidents.

In fact, Wiesler morphs from Dreymon’s dark shadow to his protective guardian angel. He awakens in himself a care for people around him, from the son of a neighbour to Dreymon and Christa-Maria. He conceals Dreymon’s involvement in a scheme to smuggle someone across the border (tragically the plan is a fake, designed to test if Dreymon’s apartment is bugged). He does his best to reassure Christa-Maria, “bumping into her” anonymously to provide her a moment of solace with a stranger and subtle counselling on her relationship with Dreymon. As Dreymon carefully writes an article, to be smuggled to the West, critical of the regime, Wiesler fills his reports with imagined plot details and quotes for the Lenin play Dreymon claims to be writing.

Dreymon is actually writing an article about the suicide rate in East Germany. Suicide becomes a heart-wrenching central theme. An oppressive, domineering regime like East Germany offers only one real escape: death. A state designed to make its own people suspect and turn on each other is designed to grind you into a choice between blank conformism or taking your own life. And we see the effects of this on multiple characters, as people are separated from the things that give their life meaning, stripped of their own identity, or made to betray those they love. For some, this is more than they can bear.

In this world, just displaying humanity is the victory. Ulrich Mühe’s breath-taking performance slowly fills with growing doubts, longings and passions under the surface of an impassive, quiet man who suddenly realises the world is larger and more magical than he ever imagined. Like a butterfly emerging from a chrysalis, he starts burrowing in the bowels of Stasi HQ, his eyes fixed only on what is in front of him. The film’s victory is turning this man into one who makes huge, unrewarded, sacrifices to protect another, the very attitude he quietly deconstructed in the film’s opening. Mühe is superb, the film constantly exploring his face for unspoken depths.

von Donnersmarck’s film ends with an extended coda of life after reunification. Some things are not as triumphant as hoped: Wiesler lives in poverty, the streets are lined with graffiti and tramps, cockroaches like Thieme remain in authority. But it is also a place where hope and friendship are possible, where things can be spoken rather than suppressed. It culminates in the sort of free-publishing Dreymon could never dream of and a tribute that could never have been spoken before.

After the crushing misery and suicidal pressures of the East, a world of possibility and freedom is one where we all could change our stars like Wiesler, to find an inner contentment from doing the right thing for no reward. Brilliantly filmed and deeply moving, The Lives of Others is a masterpiece.

War and Peace (1956)

Tolstoy is boiled down in this epic and luscious but soapy adaptation of the greatest novel ever

Director: King Vidor

Cast: Audrey Hepburn (Natasha Rostova), Henry Fonda (Pierre Bezukhov), Mel Ferrer (Andrei Bolkonsky), Vittorio Gassman (Anatole Kuragin), Herbert Lom (Napoleon Bonaparte), Oskar Homolka (Field Marshal Mikhail Kutuzov), John Mills (Platanov), Anita Ekberg (Hélène Kuragina), Helmut Dantine (Fedor Dolokhov), Tulio Carminati (Vasily Kuragin), Barry Jones (Mikhail Rostov), Milly Vitale (Lisa Bolkonskaya), Lea Seidl (Natalya Rostova), Anna Maria Ferrero (Mary Bolkonskaya), Wilfrid Lawson (Nikolai Bolkonsky), May Britt (Sonya Rostova), Jeremy Brett (Nicholas Rostov)

Let’s just say it right from the start: you can’t do Tolstoy’s War and Peace in three hours. All you can hope for is the little chunk of it you’ve bitten on is the most succulent part. King Vidor’s War and Peace zeroes in on the elements of the book Hollywood is most comfortably reproducing: a golden-tinged romance between Natasha and Pierre and the sweeping epic spectacle of Napoleon’s soldiers surging towards Moscow and limping home in the snow. While War and Peace, bravely, barely cuts a single major character or development, almost every other theme Tolstoy attempted gets shoved to the margins. This makes it both a SparkNotes version of the Greatest-Novel-Written, but also a very earnest attempt to do the impossible.

Tolstoy’s story stretched over seven years. The great Russian struggle against Napoleon is a backdrop to the lives of dilettante-turned-thinker Pierre Bezukhov (Henry Fonda), vivacious and impulsive Natasha Rostov (Audrey Hepburn) and stolid-but-thoughtful Andrei Bolkonsky (Mel Ferrer). Around them swirl other characters: Natasha’s warm-but-useless family, worthless womaniser Kuragin (Vittorio Gassman), his sister and Pierre’s faithless wife Hélène (Anita Ekberg), heartless roister Dolokhov (Helmut Dantine) and of course Napoleon (Herbert Lom) and his military antagonist, the pragmatic Kutuzov (Oscar Homoloka). Natasha falls in love with Andrei, betrays him then finds maturity caring for soldiers retreating from Napoleon, all while silently loved by Pierre.

This is compressed together into a film that certainly doesn’t feel like it is covering seven years despite its epic run-time. No one seems to age (just as well since everyone starts the film far too old) and the attempt to cover as much of the plot as possible means the film is moving forward so swiftly any sense of time is lost. It also means that the script frequently has to fill in the dots, communicating vital information that alters the lives of characters – major figures often die or are married off in short, easy-to-miss, sentences – and the ideas Tolstoy masterfully expounded about spirituality, destiny, fate, the quest for a life of meaning, are pretty much rinsed out in the plot focus.

War and Peace effectively reduces Tolstoy down into a sudsy romance against an epic backdrop. The romance is handled reasonably well, even if there is very little chemistry of any sort between any of the three protagnonists. Tolstoy’s rich leads, with the fascinating inner lives, are reduced to pen-portraits. There are odd moments where we have access to the inner thoughts and voices – sprinklings of voiceover dot around the picture – but they never feel real. Andrei has been robbed of the decency and warmth behind his thoughtfulness that attracts Natasha, while Pierre feels more like a second father or benevolent uncle than a soul mate.

This stripping down of Tolstoy’s complex characters to their bare principles fatally compromises all three lead performances. Hepburn comes off best, making a decent fist of Natasha Rostov. This is, after all, a character who embodies in her mix of passion, loyalty, fecklessness and self-sacrifice the very nature of Russia itself. No adaptation has ever managed to translate Tolstoy’s unplayable creation, but Hepburn has all the radiance and self-sacrificial guilt down pat. The film has to rush through her foiled elopement with Kuragin (Hepburn has more chemistry with Gassman than any of the others and their near elopement is artfully framed by Vidor with mirrors, reflections and a real illicit charge). Hepburn conveys the mesmeric impact this playboy has on Natasha and her selfish, tear-stained fury at the foiling of her disgraceful plans is laced with enough genuine guilt and pain by Hepburn to keep us caring. Hepburn skilfully translates this into a far wiser and more generous Natasha, placing others needs before her own.

By contrast, literally nobody reading the novel could picture Henry Fonda as Pierre (he’s the wrong age, shape, manner – there is nothing right about him at all), but Fonda does his best (as one reviewer at the time mentioned he’s one of the few actors who looks like he has read the book). He never convinces as the drunken playboy who gets into duels (he looks and sounds far too mature) and similarly doesn’t capture any of Pierre’s doubt and uncertainty (Fonda always looks like he knows exactly what he needs to do). It’s an intelligent reading for all that, but fundamentally miscast. Which is more than you can say about Mel Ferrer who turns Andrei into a stuff bore, ramrod straight and flatly monotone, an intellectual we never get interested in.

Honestly the film would have done better cutting more. Fonda is so unconvincing as the reckless young Pierre, they may as well have made him officially middle-aged to begin with. Similarly, Natasha’s brother Nicholas and his one-sided romance with cousin Sonya is given a mention so token its likely to confuse casual viewers. Andrei’s first marriage gets about five minutes and his sister Mary is reduced to a few dull scenes. Even John Mills’ thoughtful performance as Platanov strips out the characters worldview (and its profound impact on Pierre), turning it into one of simple, symbolic tragedy. It’s all the more noticeable when the film gets some stuff right, most notably Helmut Dantine’s bullying Dolokhov who war turns into someone with a sense of shame.

Faring much better are the historical characters. Like all War and Peace adaptations, this dials up the presence of Napoleon played with an excellent puffed-up grandeur by Herbert Lom, prowling with a swagger stick and collapsing into childish frustration, then silent tears as his plans for world domination collapse. Equally stand-out is Oscar Homoloka as scruffy realist Kutuzov.

Vidor’s film may offer a simplified, romantic vision of the characters but he delivers on the scale. If you can bemoan the fact the peace leaves the characters neutered, the film completely nails the war. War and Peace is a beautifully filmed by Jack Cardiff. From the sweeping vistas of the battlefield of Borodino, to the Dante-tinged flames at Moscow that cast orange light through the arches of a monastery where the Rostov’s take shelter, through the white-and-blue chill of the snow-covered retreat from Moscow, the film is an explosion of gorgeous colours. It’s also got the scale that old Hollywood loved. Borodino is restaged seemingly at 1:1 scale with a literal army of extras, soldiers and cavalry charging in their hundreds in long-shot and cannon fire peppering the land as far as the eye can see. Ballrooms are overflowing with extravagantly costumed extras and seemingly never-ending lines of Frenchmen march through the snow in the films closing moments.

It’s what this War and Peace is: a coffee-table accompaniment to the novel. You can look at the images it brings to life and the sweeping camera work Vidor uses to create nineteenth century Russia. But you’ll not understand anything that makes the novel great. In fact, to the uninitiated, you are likely to come away thinking the film must be a sort of high-brow Mills-and-Boon page-turner, a Gone with the Snow. What this tells us, more than anything, is that fifteen years on from the definitive Hollywood epic, Hollywood was still trying to remake it – and bringing Tolstoy to the screen was very much second to that.

Past Lives (2023)

Lost opportunities and the path not taken carries real emotional force in this fabulous debut

Director: Celine Song

Cast: Greta Lee (Nora), Teo Yoo (Hae Sung), John Magaro (Arthur), Seung Ah Moon (Young Nora), Seung Min Yim (Young Hae Sung), Ji Hye Yoon (Nora’s mum), Min Young Ahn (Hae Sung’s mum)

Few things carry such mystique and indestructible promise as the paths not taken. We can invest choices we didn’t make with overpowering possibilities. In them, every moment can be perfect, every outcome joyful, every conclusion perfect. But when we look back at who we were when we made those choices, our past lives can feel like exactly that: other lives of different people. The passions, desires and dreams of those people can feel completely foreign to us today, while at the same time carrying a strong nostalgic pull.

The mystique of the past is a key theme in Celine Song’s debut. Partially inspired by events in her own life, Past Lives covers 24 years in the lives of Nora (Greta Lee) and Hae Sung (Ted Yoo). Childhood sweethearts in Seoul in the late 90s, Nora migrates to Canada with her family and the two lose touch, reconnecting in their early 20s. Nora is now a writer-in-training in New York, Hae Sung an engineering student in Seoul. Communicating by Skype, they recapture some of their closeness but never meet in person before Nora cuts off contact to focus on her writing career. Twelve years later, Nora is a playwright married to novelist Arthur (John Magaro), living in the East Side of New York, when Hae Sung visits the city, looking for he-knows-not-what from Nora, who is herself torn between the pull of her past, the happiness of her present and her plans for future.

Past Lives is a romance devoid of contact, features no words of love and built on unspoken feelings and distance (a distance that covers metres in person, continents online and years in understanding). Gentle, poetic and full of lingering moments, it’s wistful and quietly involving. In many ways very little happens, but everything is at stake for all of the film’s characters and their future happiness. Song gives the dialogue a poetic naturalness, but also knows when silence speaks volumes. It’s particularly striking that nearly half the film – and 24 years – pass by before Nora and Hae Sung actually meet in person and the extent to which they recognise the differences between who they are and who they were is one of Song’s central themes.

Nora is key to this. Beautifully played by Greta Lee, she is a mix of unspoken desires and determined ambition, focused and driven but with a deep vein of romantic nostalgia in her. An immigrant who has moved from Seoul to Toronto to New York, she has a career in English but (as her husband tells her) dreams in Korean. She is also a woman who has effectively remade herself at several junctures: from the child who dreams of the Nobel Prize, to the trainee writer who wishes to win the Pulitzer Prize for journalism, to the playwright cracking Broadway. She moves forward at every point.

This contrasts sharply with Hae Sung. Ted Yoo is wonderful as this quiet, polite, romantic soul whose ambitions are simpler and desires more homespun. He’s the sensitive boy reduced to sullen, hurt silence when Nora leaves for Canada. He supports his parents, forms friendships for life (he has a core group of three university friends who remain his closest friends 12 years later – they are, by the way, a wonderful portrait of male supportiveness) and remains unspokenly devoted to Nora all his life. While she can compartmentalise him away for a decade, it’s clear her image stays with him every day, the pain of that tearful goodbye over Skype lingering through his future relationships.

He arrives in New York to see if there may be something there, to see if in-person those long-distance Skype calls (at dawn in New York and dusk in Seoul) can turn into something real. It relates to a Korean idea of In-Yun – that over several lives, an invisible force can bring people together by destiny. In-Yun is what Nora and Hae Sung both wonder may join them together: play-dates in a park in Seoul, Skype calls in their twenties, walks along the banks of the East River in their thirties. These are like different lives, but yet they keep returning to each other. Could this mean they are meant to be together? Or could this all just be groundwork for a future life to come?

The characters don’t know. Perhaps they will never know. But as Nora and Hae Sung stroll through New York – surrounded by canoodling couples at every turn – it’s hard to escape the pull of that possibility. It’s recognised by Nora’s husband Arthur, a difficult part well-played by John Maguro. In many ways, Arthur is patience embodied. Arthur, who recognises that part of the groundwork of their marriage is the pragmatism of Nora needing a green card, doesn’t complain. He sits quietly (admittedly with flashes of pain in his eyes) while they chat in Korean at a bar and makes every effort to be welcoming. But the obvious bond makes him ask, does he have the same bond with Nora? Could he affect her life, the way Hae Sung has – and the way Nora has affected his own. In a bedroom chat, he playfully (but with a tinge of passive aggressiveness) suggests she might be happier with Hae Sung. Maybe Arthur sees a lot of himself in Hae Sung – it’s not a stretch to imagine Arthur flying halfway around the world on the off-chance of a date with Nora.

If Past Lives has a fault, it is that it doesn’t do enough of really using this relationship-that-never-was as a way to delve into the immigrant experience. Nora has a passing wistfulness for Seoul and Korean culture, but Song relies a little too much on Nora bluntly telling us this. Any sense of conflict, between the pull of these two cultural heritages doesn’t really come to life in the film. Past Lives doesn’t really delve into the alienation and lack of understanding Nora now has for parts of her Korean culture – for instance she is stunned to hear Hae Sung lives with his parents and about his sense of financial obligation before marriage, but the film treats these as more personal eccentricities rather than insights into a cultural divide that has grown up.

Past Lives though builds – in a year that feels very French New Wave and inspired by Richard Linklater – into a masterful single-shot sequence that plays out a fateful wait for a taxi in real time that carries devastating emotional force, where every possible outcome guarantees pain. It uses the slightly awkward, self-conscious distance between two people who never touch but want to, to extraordinary effect and creates an atmosphere replete with longing, sadness and inevitability. With superb performances from the three leads – who are all in turns both wonderfully patient and desperately needy – it’s a simple but universal tale that grows rich in the telling.

The Exorcist (1973)

Unimaginable horrors seep into your mind in Friedkin’s hugely influential terrifying shocker

Director: William Friedkin

Cast: Ellen Burstyn (Chris MacNeil), Jason Miller (Father Damien Karras), Max von Sydow (Father Merrin), Linda Blair (Regan MacNeil), Lee J Cobb (Lt William F Kinderman), Kitty Wenn (Sharon Spencer), Jack MacGowran (Burke Dennings), Father William O’Malley (Father Joseph Dyer)

Growing up in the 90s in the UK it was easier to get your hands on a porno than a video copy of The Exorcist. For 12 years the film was banned because its influence was considered so insidious that it would inevitably lead to the corruption of the children who would (of course) dig out a copy to watch. Why was The Exorcist considered so powerful? After all no-one banned The Omen. Perhaps because there is something existential – unknowable, unexplained and unstoppable – at the heart of The Exorcist, while The Omen is a pulpy slasher about imaginatively bumping off Brit character actors. The Exorcist has a poetic nihilism, that reaches into your soul and takes a long-hard squeeze.

Hollywood actress Chris MacNeil (Ellen Burstyn) has problems. Her daughter Regan (Linda Blair) is growing increasingly unbalanced, suffering mood swings and saying the unsayable in grotesquely crude, sexual language. Doctors can’t find anything wrong with her. Above all they can’t explain her increased strength, contortions, the shaking of her bed and the freezing conditions in her bedroom. Could it be that Regan is possessed by a force darker than any we understand? After an unexplained death, Chris has no choice but to consult psychiatrist turned priest Father Damian Karras (Jason Miller) who reluctantly agrees that Satanic forces have taken control of Regan – and that an exorcism by himself and experienced Father Merrin (Max von Sydow) may be the only option.

Adapted from a chilling novel by William Peter Blatty (who also wrote the screenplay and produced), The Exorcist is an all-consuming experience film, directed with immersive power by William Friedkin. Everything in it is designed to unsettle, disturb and dig deep into the fears of the viewer. What could revile us more than a child, her body twisted into the features of a revolting, malign spirit, spouting revolting, bile-filled rants and revelling in a twisted, macabre sexuality? All this wrapped inside a film that makes your skin crawl with its coldness, precision and drained out colours, where sound is unpredictable, discordant and unnatural and which offers very few answers.

The Exorcist does this in spades. It’s methodical and quietly repetitive in aspects of its editing and framing, constantly using visual and audio association to build dread. Friedkin’s prowling camera glides constantly through the MacNeil’s luscious townhouse, gliding up the stairs to Regan’s bedroom to reveal new horrors. Friedkin builds the dread, his camera first studying the shock and horror on the faces of the characters, before cutting to reveal the terrors they are looking at.

We move from subtle moments – Regan’s Ouija board, through which she communicates with imaginary friend ‘Captain Howdy’, whose glider jumps unprompted from Chris’ hands. The moments of chilling flatness in Regan, such as when she tells a visiting astronaut he “will die up there”. The violent, uncontrollable, impossible shaking of her bed. Regan’s astonishing strength that can hurl people across rooms. All this builds us towards the real grotesqueness: her deformity, her sex-obsessed rantings, impossible body contortions and her revolting sexual defilement of a crucifix. It increases in immediacy, graphicness and in its breaking of social convention, until you get the feeling you watching something that can only be classed as a revolting, all-pervading, all-corrupting evil.

Evil is at the heart of The Exorcist. Friedkin superbly suggests a mystical, eternal clash between that and good at its heart. It’s opening sequence, with the discovery of the relics of the demon Pazazu in an Iraq is awash in suggestive menace: the percussive drum beat of the excavator’s tools, gusts of unexplained wind, the barking of battling dogs. A mist-filled skyline sees Merrin (and the granite faced von Sydow feels like a mythical figure) confronting a terrible statue of Pazazu. The moods –particular the audio features of this landscape – are echoed throughout the film, tying disparate locations together and subtly suggesting an age-long war that can never end.

That lies at the heart of The Exorcist’s ghastly appeal. Everything feels undefeatable, with regular streets and homes transfigured into places of inhuman dread. Little moments – a dog, a tramp, a train – take on echoes of sounds and sights associated with the demon. The brilliant repetitive use of Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells provides a mesmeric rhythm that always echoes the discordant tones of other sounds and sights. Friedkin plays this up with visual touches – subliminal imagery is used to flash horrors past us and the film plays with visions of suggestive unease. The demon similarly plays on underlying fears – of guilt, inadequacy and repressed desire – that it flings horrifically to the fore, through parroting the voices of others to changing its shape and appearance.

No wonder medicine is flummoxed. The Exorcist, considering its reputation, surprises for being such a slow-burn. It takes nearly two thirds of the runtime before the idea of the exorcism arises, during which we watch never-ending medical tests on Regan. Friedkin shoots these with a cold, impersonal professionalism (an angiography, with blood spurting from Regan’s neck, is almost unwatchable in its realism) which makes it feel even more powerless against the demon’s existential evil.

The Exorcist gently glides over narrative and logic gaps (not least the sudden onset of Regan’s worsening condition) because it retains a mystic power and the nightmare inducing dread of knowing exactly what is happening, but being unable to step into the film and tell the characters. It all leads perfectly into the exorcism scenes, when the film’s horror culminates in scenes of extraordinarily intensity, difficult to watch, with just the right amount of gore and suggestion.

Is The Exorcist about anything? That might be its greatest flaw. So enamoured is it with infecting us with dread, that it neglects to offer much that can give lasting spiritual or intellectual nourishment. Like a brilliantly constructed haunted house, it thrills but leaves you with little else to consider (other the costly struggle against evil). At heart, it’s a superbly well-made B-movie, a terrific horror-thrill ride where every single moment is masterfully designed to illicit an effect from the audience.

It’s helped by the superbly horrific make-up (not to mention von Sydow’s hugely convincing ageing) and effects whose practical realism increases their dread. Friedkin – at the height of his dictatorial auteurism – directed with little regard for cast and crew, focused on producing the desired effect. Guns were fired to illicit shocks. He slapped Father William O’Malley seconds before shooting a scene to make him look distressed. Burstyn and Blair both suffered lasting back injuries from being jerked around and the exorcism was shot in such refrigerator conditions, the actors couldn’t spend longer than fifteen minutes in the room.

But Friedkin’s determination to produce his vision through every means necessary worked. The Exorcist has a power few other films can dream of. The actors do their part: Burstyn’s increasingly raw pain and distress grounds it extremely well, Blair’s innocence makes her later horrors (voiced by a gravelly Mercedes McCambridge) even more disgusting, Miller is very good as the film’s eventual hero whose soul becomes a battle-ground, von Sydow invests Merrin with a rich hinterland.

They are framed with a film that is immediate, discordant and subtly grotesque. It leaves little to the imagination, but nevertheless encourages the mind to add its own horrors. It feels like the film itself can be a quiet demon, working its way inside to change you. It’s a horrific ride, and if it feels like it ends on a beat of grimness and desolation (despite Blatty’s intentions) that feels fitting for a film that may have little to truly say but affects viewers in a way few other films do. That’s why it was seen as having such power, because it invests deep, subliminal meaning and import to what could have been just (as its sequels are) an exploitation flick. That’s why it was banned.

Barbie (2023)

Fabulously pink comedy with serious – and very earnest – things to say on sexism and gender

Director: Greta Gerwig

Cast: Margot Robbie (Barbie), Ryan Gosling (Ken), America Ferrera (Gloria), Will Ferrell (Mattel CEO), Ariana Greenblatt (Sasha), Kate McKinnon (Weird Barbie), Issa Rae (President Barbie), Alexandria Shipp (Writer Barbie), Emma Mackey (Physicist Barbie), Hari Nef (Dr Barbie), Sharon Rooney (Lawyer Barbie), Kingsley Ben-Adir (Basketball Ken), Simu Liu (Tourist Ken), Ncuti Gatwa (Artist Ken), Michael Cera (Alan), Rhea Pearlman (Ruth Handler), Helen Mirren (Narrator)

Who knew that the film which sparked the most conversation in 2023 about the roles of men and women would be one launched by a toy company, with the goal of selling toys? Barbie feels a little like a project happily hijacked. In another world this could have been a straight-forward, Adventures of Barbie flick, designed only to get kids crying out for that Margot Robbie Barbie to be appearing under the Christmas tree. Instead, thanks to the team of Gerwig and Robbie, this is a self-reverential, witty, smart and highly engaging look at gender politics which also manages to be a fun, gag-filled evening out at the cinema.

Stereotypical Barbie (Margot Robbie) leads a blissful life in Barbie-Land, where every day is the best day ever. Every Barbie knows they’ve inspired change for the better for women in the Real World. Everything is perfect until one day Barbie starts thinking about Death. Before she knows it, she has flat feet, cellulite and a crisis of confidence. The only way to fix this? A journey to that Real World to meet with the child who’s playing with her. But Barbie and Ken (Ryan Gosling) find the Real World very different from what they expected: all women’s problems are not solved and Ken discovers The Patriarchy, a wonder he is determined to bring back with him to Barbie-Land. Can Barbie save Barbie-Land and help rebuild a relationship between moody teenager Sasha (Ariana Greenblatt) and her mother Gloria (America Ferrera) in the real world?

Barbie’s sharp playfulness mixes heartfelt messages on gender politics with the sort of joyful fish-out-of-water stuff beloved of family films where a naïve figure from our childhoods finds the real world a much harsher, more cynical place than they expected. Barbie’s expects our world to reflect of the female-dominated Barbie-Land is immediately exploded. Arriving in California, the reaction to an attractive woman roller-skating along a beach is remarkably different to what she’s used to. Wolf whistles, a parade of sexualised comments from construction workers (not a woman among them, to her shock) and a world where nearly all the top jobs are held by men.

Barbie addresses head-on whether a doll can really be an aspirational figure. In a surprisingly complex manner, Gerwig’s film looks at the pros and cons. Teenage Sasha doesn’t think Barbie has shown her world of possibilities, but instead sees her as a puppet of corporate America presenting a veneer of opportunity to women, while pushing them back into a box marked “pretty woman”. (This deadpan tirade provokes one the film’s many laugh-out loud lines as Barbie bemoans she can’t be a fascist as “I don’t control the railways!”.) Barbie may be able to do any job under the sun but this encourages attainment and also piles expectations on young women. If you can be almost anything at all, doesn’t that make it even the obligation to be something even more of a burden?

The real world is also a revelation – in a different way – to Ken. In our world, Ken discovers men (and possibly horses, Ken isn’t sure) rule though a marvellous thing called “the patriarchy”. Watching the Kens become infected by toxic masculinity, becoming high-fiveing bros who down beers, mansplain and call all the shots, is both funny and also a continuation of the film’s earnest exploration of gender politics. You can see, unpleasant as he becomes, that Ken might well want a piece of that action, coming from a world where men are so marginal they don’t even have homes (after all Mattel never made “Ken’s Dream House”). It’s also a neat gag that the other Barbies are easily brain-washed into accepting demeaning Stepfordish roles (dressed almost uniformly as French maids or in bikinis) because the confidence with which the Kens express their rightful place as masters-of-the-universe is literally mesmerising.

It’s also a neat part of Gerwig’s commentary here that the crucial factor to breaking out of this state is all about embracing the pressures of being expected to do it all: of being clever but not a know-it-all, ambitious but not a monster, raising a family but also having a career etc. If Barbie-Land in its beginning is a sort of vision of utopian feminism, then its salvation lies in accepting and embracing the struggle of marrying together a raft of contradictions and expectations. Sure, this isn’t exactly reimagining the wheel and its fairly easily digestible stuff – but it also rings true and you can’t argue with the connection its made with people.

All of which might make you think Barbie might be a po-faced political lecture. Fortunately, not the case when every point is filled with laugh-out-loud, irreverent humour expertly delivered by a cast clearly having the time of their lives. They are led by Margot Robbie, sensational in bringing to life a character who begins the film feeling like a doll made flesh and ends it as a three-dimensional character who embraces the contradictions of life. Robbie, who produced and set out much of the film’s agenda, is fabulous – funny, endearing, heartbreakingly vulnerable and extraordinarily sweet, mixing light comedy with genuine moments of pathos.

Equally good is Gosling playing the almost preternaturally stupid Ken with a winning sense of self-mockery, walking a brilliant line presenting a character who is (at times) the nominal villain but also a lost soul. Barbie also employs him and Robbie in some outstanding song-and-dance routines, deliciously performed and exquisitely funny. The other Barbies and Kens are uniformly excellent in their winning mix of initial shallowness and growing emotional depth while America Ferrera and Ariana Greenblatt are immensely winning as a mother and daughter overcoming a divide.

Barbie is also an explosion of delightful design and superb eye-for-detail, in its pitch-perfect recreation of a host of Barbie toys and props in real-life size, all thrown together with the perfect level of pink presentationalism. Drily narrated by an unseen Helen Mirren, every scene has a winning gag or laugh-inducing piece of business, especially when poking fun at the naïve optimism and artificiality of the Barbie world. Saying that, the film stumbles when it blurs the lines in the real world, which is half presented straight, half as a weirdly Wes-Andersonish oddity, particularly in the Mattel building and its corporate board, who are played as even more cartoonish than the actual toys populating Barbie-Land.

Barbie though generally works because it successfully mixes a heartfelt, earnest look at gender politics and the pressures on women with great gags, winning performances and a bouncy sense of off-the-wall fun that ensures nothing gets too serious. From its 2001 style opening, through its pink-led-primary colour settings, to its song-and-dance and larger-than-life-but-grounded performances, it’s a treat and in particular a triumph for its originator, producer and star Margot Robbie.

The Silence (1963)

Bergman’s third film in his “faith” trilogy, is an intriguing Sartresque puzzle

Director: Ingmar Bergman

Cast: Ingrid Thulin (Ester), Gunnel Lindblom (Anna), Jörgen Lindström (Johan), Birger Malmstein (Waiter), Håkan Jahnberg (Hotel porter)

Two sisters, Esther (Ingrid Thulin) and Anna (Gunnel Lindblom), mother to ten-year-old Johan (Jörgen Lindström), are travelling home on a train through Europe. Ester, a translator, is already ill and her health takes a sharp downturn, leading to the group being forced to rest in a hotel in a town called Timoka, in an unnamed (fictional) European country. Anna resents what she sees as the judgemental expectations of her older sister and sees her obligation to care for her as a burden. Over a few days in the hotel, the two sisters move awkwardly around each other, avoiding addressing their problems while struggling in a country where neither of them speak the language.

The Silence was the third, and final, film in Bergman’s loose thematic trilogy on the absence of God in the modern world. It’s also possibly his most bleak and Sartre influenced work so far, a film of oppressive silence (devoid of music, the only noises coming from objects in the rooms of the hotel) with events occurring in a disturbing, slightly surreal world, where the normal rules of human interaction seem to be hold. Perhaps that’s because the characters move, like ghosts, through a world where they have no ability to communicate other than stumbled words and hand gestures, residing in a hotel where there seems to be no timescale on how long they are (or have been) there.

It also feels like an entrée to Persona, Bergman’s next major work. Like that, The Silence revolves around a symbiotic relationship between two women, who together seem to form two halves of one personality. Esther is intellectual, reserved but also vulnerable and adrift, dependent on others for help and frequently resorting to drink to dull her pain. Anna is more earthy, sensual but insecure, resentful and feels judged by others, finding temporary peace in casual sexual encounters. Both sisters are locked in a relationship that feels both disconnected and mutually dependent, constantly clashing with each other but living in worlds defined by their feelings for the other.

They are played majestically by two performers at the height of their powers. Thulin seems cold but conveys great depths of pain and suffering beneath what seems like her confidence and assurance. Thulin’s expressive face communicates great emotional turmoil, even with only the slightest movements and gestures. It’s a beautifully delivered performance of a woman who is unknowable, distant, difficult but also highly sympathetic. Lindblom’s physical assurance is counter-balanced by the great uncertainty she manages to communicate in every beat of Anna’s life. Her general demeanour of icy chill, interrupted with emotional breakdowns which alternate rage with tears and hysterical laughter, is faultlessly delivered.

These two characters increasingly feel trapped inside a world where they can’t easily communicate, with the threat of turmoil constantly rumbling on the margins. This unnamed country teeters on the edge of war – tanks and other military equipment make constant intrusions on the streets and the train tracks and the rumble of planes can be heard in the air. They are also rendered increasingly mute and isolated by their inability to speak the language. Communication with people around them is impossible and understanding is only fractured.

This is where Bergman’s views on God slowly take their form. For, as he observed in other films in the trilogy, what is this world but one where we strain in vain for the voice of God? Isn’t that like being adrift in a country where the language is unknown? And if, as Bergman so heartily expresses elsewhere, God is love what does it mean that this film revolves around character who have such negative to indifferent opinions on others. Ester may love – as she argues – Anna, but Anna has interpreted this love as smothering and oppressive her whole life and rejects Anna utterly. Anna seems disinterested in her son Johan (who Ester yearns to be closer to, but can never quite find the way to close the gap) and impatient with her sister. Not only are the characters trapped in a world of silence, they are also trapped in circles of loveless relationships.

It’s striking then that this was Bergman’s most sexual film so far. Bizarrely – for a film as austere, glum and challenging as The Silence – it was a box-office hit. This was, in large part, connected to its comfort with sex scenes. Anna watches a couple sat next to her having passionate (and beautifully lit) sex in an opera house, before engaging in wordless (of course) intercourse with a waiter (Anna even mentions the benefits of the man not understanding a word she says). The more frustrated Ester masturbates alone – no coincidence that she later speaks of her disgust with the sexual act and its bodily fluids. This is a film without love but with a lot of base, meaningless, carnal love in it – all part of a Godless world leaning into its nihilistic close.

The Silence is extraordinary in its filmic confidence. It’s exquisitely shot by Sven Nykvist, his camera (far more mobile than almost any time before in Bergman) tracks down corridors and through rooms of its luxurious but chillingly empty hotel (you can see The Silence’s influence on Kubrick’s The Shining). It uses light, shade and shadow in strikingly meaningful ways, arcs of light suggesting a host of underlying emotions and unspoken longings.

The Silence is a film that invites analysis and theorising, partially because its characters speak in such gnomic, Bergmanesque mysteries. Some have theorised Johan is in fact Ester’s child, raised begrudgingly by Anna, now longed for by his real mother at her end. Some have suggested Ester and Anna are such contrasting sides they may in fact be the same person (traces of Lynch’s Mulholland Drive) others see an incestuous longing in Ester for her sister. Bergman increases the unknowing mystery by presenting much of the film from the perspective of the precocious (not many children read Turgenov) but innocent Johan, a child who sees but cannot interrogate the actions around him.

It makes The Silence feel like a bridge from one era of Bergman to the next. The last hurrah of his spiritual study, before a series of films that would explore the interconnected lives of women whose desires, needs and dependencies motivate and merge into each other. That makes it a fascinating and vital milestone in Bergman’s development – as well as another extraordinary, haunting and fascinating work from a great director.

Shine (1996)

Middle-brow and safe biography that takes easy choices and makes reassuring points

Director: Scott Hicks

Cast: Geoffrey Rush (David Helfgott), Armin Mueller-Stahl (Peter Helfgott), Noah Taylor (Young David Helfgott), Lynn Redgrave (Gillian), Googie Withers (Katherine Susannah Prichard), John Gielgud (Sir Cecil Parkes), Sonia Todd (Sylvia), Nicholas Bell (Mr Rosen), Alex Rafalowicz (Child David Helfgott)

A hugely talented pianist, David Helfgott (played by Noah Taylor then Geoffrey Rush) trained at the Royal College of Music in the late 1960s but developed schizoaffective disorder, a condition that stalled any music career. What happened next is debated, but according to Shine years of mental institutes and sheltered housing eventually led to rediscovery and a life turned round by marriage to Gillian (Lynn Redgrave). This provided a happy home to Helfgott, who had grown up under the domineering hand of his father Peter (Armin Mueller-Stahl), a Polish-Australian who had narrowly escaped the Holocaust and disowned his son after he travelled, against his wishes, to Britain.

Shine repackages Helfgott’s life into a crowd-pleasing triumph-against-adversity biopic which plays fast and loose with facts. Shine makes no mention of Helfgott’s first marriage, it’s portrayal of his father as a misguided tyrant has been disputed by other members of Helfgott’s family and the level of estrangement Helfgott had from his family (his brother claimed David continued to live with the Helfgott family after his return) has been strongly disputed. Shine smooths off all rough edges and emphasises dramatic potential in others to create its stereotypical heart-warming tale.

What it also does is turn Helfgott’s life into a middle-of-the-road biopic, a highly convention film full of expected arcs (struggle, triumph, collapse, triumphant return) and directed with a middlebrow assurance by Hicks. It’s a film that flatters to deceive, offering only cursory insight into its subject and ends with a sentimental scene in which we are all-but-invited to join the characters in a standing ovation for a Helfgott comeback performance (which the film doesn’t even show us).

Shine has almost no interest in Helfgott’s illness, what bought it on, how it developed or what he and those around him did to help him function in society (his marriage to Gillian gets barely ten minutes of the film’s runtime). It has very little interest or insight into music – other than Rachmaninov being ‘very hard to play’ and some guff about finding the heart behind the notes which sounds full of import because anything said by John Gielgud sounds important. It takes a fascinatingly conflicted character like Peter Helfgott and bends over backwards to make him as two dimensional as possible, with only a brief throw-away line that leans into how quite possibly his views on the importance of family might just have been affected by the slaughter of the rest of his in the Holocaust. Everything is designed to make us feel that standing ovation is earned.

The film gets a much better performance than it deserves from Armin Mueller-Stahl as Peter Helfgott. Here is an actor with more compassion and insight into his role than either the film or the director has. On the surface everything Peter does is appalling; controlling what his son plays, demanding he wins competitions, blocking opportunities for progress, beating him in a rage twice and throwing him out of the house. But Mueller-Stahl plays the fragility and vulnerability under Peter exquisitely. This is a man so terrified about losing his family that he goes to extraordinarily damaging lengths to hold it together. So much so he destroys it.

And you understand that in every moment of Mueller-Stahl’s sensitive and immaculately judged performance. He looks at his son with tenderness and adoring love. His eyes dance with fear at the prospect of David going out alone into a world he thinks is dangerous. Its fear that leads him to react with violence – the terror of weakness pours from Mueller-Stahl. It’s a rich, layered, superb performance which seems almost smuggled into a film that does it’s very best to present Peter Helfgott as a controlling, destructive bully who (it believes) was the root cause of David’s illness.

The drama of the film – most of its first hour – revolves around the clash between this domineering father and the young Helfgott, played by Noah Taylor. It tells a very familiar story: the quiet, but talented son and the monster behind him, but does it solidly enough. Quiet, mumbling and shy – but with subtle traces of condition we know will seize him later in life, Taylor is marvellous. The training sequence at the Royal Academy, again familiarly reassuring for its pupil-mentor set-up, also allows a lovely showcase for an-almost-swansong role for Gielgud, sparkling, wry and charming.

It’s strange than that the Best Actor awards were poured onto Geoffrey Rush who only appears in two scenes before taking over the role at the 67-minute mark (of a 100-minute film). Rush, then unknown internationally, gives the sort of grand performance beloved of awards ceremonies. I admire Rush enormously: but Shine is all technique and no insight. Rush twitches, talks at a thousand miles a minute and plays the piano like a natural. Never once is he given the opportunity to really get inside what motivates Helfgott. He doesn’t even get the main dramatic meat of the film (he shares one brief scene with Mueller-Stahl). It’s ironically like a note-perfect but professionally smooth piano recital: the sort of role you feel Rush could actually have done standing on his head.

Shine even fudges moments of stand-up-and-cheer. Helfgott has been told he cannot play a piano because it affects his nerves. We frequently see him starring wistfully at a piano. The film opens with a rain-soaked Helfgott barging into a closed café hoping to be allowed to use the piano. The film is clearly building towards the moment when Helfgott plays the piano in that café, wowing the clientele with his virtuosity after a clumsy initial test playing of a few keys. We should have been wondering: does he still have it after all these years? We’re not because Hicks has thrown away Helfgott’s first playing of the piano in years five minutes early by having him hammer the keys with brilliance in a piano in his hostel (the instrument subsequently locked by his annoyed host). Why not have the piano locked from the start, sitting in his room, present but out of reach? Wouldn’t that have made it even more triumphant when Helfgott played like a master in that café one evening?

It’s cack-handed moments like that exposes the weakness in Shine, a film that flatters to deceive, offering only the most conventional and safe perspectives on a life. It boils things down to goodies and baddies and simplifies mental problems into being solved by just a little love and affection. It’s a film that wants us to applaud Helfgott – and, by extension, to feel better about ourselves. But Shine offers very little in the way of insight or understanding and boils all its events down into easily digestible narrative homilies. It’s middle-brow filmmaking of the middlest kind.

Steamboat Bill Jnr (1928)

Keaton struggles to win his father’s approval in this brilliantly fast-paced farce

Director: Charles Reisner (& Buster Keaton)

Cast: Buster Keaton (William Canfield Jnr), Ernest Torrance (William Canfield Snr), Marion Byron (Kitty King), Tom McGuire (John James King), Tom Lewis (Tom Carter), Joe Keaton (Barber)

Steamboat Bill Jnr was meant to be a return to glory after the box-office disappointment of The General. Unfortunately for Keaton it shared all the traits of his previous film. An artistic triumph, today seen as one of the great silent comedies: but at the time an expensive misfire that hammered the final nail into Keaton’s filmmaking independence. Before he was swallowed by the MGM machine, Steamboat Bill Jnr was the last pure Keaton film, the last display of the master’s gravity defying stuntwork and all-in physical gag commitment.

Keaton is the forgotten son of paddle steamer operator William “Steamboat Bill” Canfield (Ernest Torrance) whose craft, the Stonewall Jackson, is being put out of business by the cutting-edge steamer The King named after its wealthy owner JJ King (Tom McGuire). William Jnr is a disappointment to his manly father: he’s clumsy, polite, decent has a pencil moustache (but not for long) and plays the ukelele. What kind of son is that? Worst of all, he falls in love with Kitty King (Marion Bryon), daughter of Steamboat Bill’s love rival. Can his son prove his worth when disaster piles on disaster and a cyclone hits the town?

Steamboat Bill Jnr is Keaton at his best. Although it has a romance plotline, this wisely plays second fiddle to the sort of role Keaton was born to play: slightly naïve and foolish sons, who are disappointments to their father. With his sad sack, impassive face and earnest, try-hard determination, Keaton was guaranteed to win the sympathies of the masses and Steamboat Bill Jnr is the fine-tuned ultimate expression of this classic Keaton role. He’s horrendously unlucky – he seems destined to trip over and activate vital levers or if he opens a door it will inevitable send someone tumbling off the boat – and at every turn well-meaning attempts to win his father’s favour backfire. It’s a superb exploration of a key theme in Keaton’s life and work – the struggle to win the regard of a domineering father in his own line of work, something Keaton had faced in his own life.

But despite that, like all the best Keaton heroes, he never, ever gives up. Adversity is milk-and-drink to him and, despite everything, his ingenuity and determination always wins out. He may look like a clueless, slightly ridiculous college kid adrift on a boat, walking around in his over-elaborate uniform: but the final reel, which shows him hooking up the boats systems via ropes and pulleys so he can control it singlehandedly proves it certainly wasn’t lack of attention that lay behind his mishaps.

And what’s really wrong with being a clearly middle-class kid who hasn’t spent much time on boats? It’s not like he’s a dandy or a layabout – he just doesn’t fit the mould his father expects – that of a flat-capped, oil-stained, tobacco chewer (and who knows not to swallow it!) never happier than when getting his hands dirty. Ernest Torrance is very good as this exasperated working-man, whose ideas of what counts as “manly” are very narrow (barely extending beyond the mirror) and sees any deviation in his son as highly suspicious metropolitan laxness.

Perhaps he feels his son looks too much like his puffed-up, slightly dandyish rival JJ King (an effective Tom McGuire). There is more than a touch of class warfare between these two, as well as a romantism that values the run-down-but-reliable Stonewall Jackson (right down to its Civil War era name) and the overly-polished-can’t-trust-it King. There are echoes (and not just in the names) in the generational family feud of Our Hospitality – not least in the fact that marriage seems destined to eventually bring the two families together in something approaching love and harmony.

Marion Byron gives a decent performance as Kitty – even if the film has little interest in her beyond love-interest device, including the inevitable moment where she becomes convinced Keaton’s character has let her down and decides to snub him. This snubbing takes place in a very funny scene of missed meetings and attempted evasions on the street; although this scene is itself a shadow of father and son meeting at the station, the son writing he will be recognisable by his white carnation, a flower everyone arriving at the train seems to be wearing (not helped by Keaton losing his).

Eventually matters proceed to blows and the arrest of Canfield Snr (and an attempted break-out foiled by the son’s inability to get his father to trust him) before the town is blown away in one of the great Keaton set-pieces. Rain and bad weather peppers the final thirty minutes of the film – including an exquisite sight gag when Keaton steps into a puddle and disappears up to his waist – and erupts into a cyclone that rips buildings apart, blows others across fields and raises the waters to wreck the paddleboats and wash other buildings out to sea.

And this storm is the centrepiece of another peerless display of Keaton’s physical determination and courage in the name of comedy. He gets trapped in a hospital bed blowing through the streets (after the building rips away to reveal him, a stunning in camera trick). He walks at almost 45 degrees against the wind. And, most famously, he stands in the perfect spot for the window of the façade of a house to save him when it falls on top of him. For this final stunt – insanely dangerous by any standards – even Keaton would later reflect on the suicidal risks he took. Either way, it’s a brilliantly elaborate set-piece (a riff on another set-piece from an earlier short) and a clear sign no-one did better than Keaton.

And no-one did. Watching Keaton bound like a squirrel up and down a paddle boat and dive into the flooded river, you know you are watching someone who really understand both the beauty of visual imagery and the peerless excitement of reality on film. Steamboat Bill Jnr combines this with a strong story, full of characters to root for and stuffed with sight gags (from a parade of hats stuffed on Keaton’s head, to a shaving from his father Joe) that make you laugh time and again. It’s a tragedy that this, one of his finest comedies, would also be his last where he had creative control.

Kwaidan (1964)

Unsettling dread abounds in this beautiful, terrifying collection of ghost stories

Director: Masaki Kobayashi

Cast: The Black Hair – Rentarō Mikuni (Samurai), Michiyo Aratama (First wife), Misako Watanabe (Second wife); The Woman of the Snow – Tatsuya Nakadai (Minokichi), Keiko Kishi (Yuki-Onna); Hoichi the Earless – Katsuo Nakamura (Hoichi), Tetsurō Tamba (Warrior), Takashi Shimura (Head priest); In a Cup of Tea – Osamu Takizawa (Author), Noboru Nakaya (Shikibu Heinai), Seiji Miyaguchi (Sekinai)

What is horror? For many people, it’s guts and gore. But I’ve always found far more unsettling the creeping terror of the unnatural, the unsettling dread of the unknown. The best ghost stories do this: the horror of encountering something that, by all logic, shouldn’t be there. The paralysing fear of coming face-to-face with something that surely cannot be real. The MR James style of ghost stories, where supernatural powers are unknowable and unrelenting. Kwaidan, Kobayaski’s collection of Lafcidio Hearn’s Japanese ghost stories, trades brilliantly in this – each of the stories contains moments of real spine-tingling dread that sent goosebumps racing over my body.

Kwaidan is built around four short stories, each separate but thematically linked. In The Black Hair, a samurai (Rentarō Mikuni) leaves his faithful first wife (Michiyo Aratama) for a loveless marriage with the daughter of a rich man. Realising his mistake, he finally returns to her but he stumbles into a haven that becomes a nightmare. In The Woman of the Snow, woodcutter Minokichi (Tatsuya Nakadai) encounters a terrible spirit (Keiko Kishi) in the forest who swears him to secrecy on pain of death – can he keep his silence from Yuki (Kishi again), the woman he marries? In Hoichi the Earless, Hoichi (Katsuo Nakamura) a blind ballad singer, is unwittingly hired by the spirits of a dead warlord. And in In a Cup of Tea, a samurai (Seiji Miyaguchi) is horrified when he sees a reflection that is not his own in a cup of tea.

Simple concepts – and in many cases you can see where this might be going just from the description – but the unnerving sense of dread and the uncontrollable inevitability of the supernatural horrors are what makes this truly terrifying. Kobayashi’s film is slow, careful, precise, and it is this very quality that contributes most effectively to its terror. As the camera moves slowly through unnaturally still and quiet locations, with a soundtrack made of a mix of silence and deeply unsettling, jarring chords and discordant sound from Toru Takemitsu, you actually feel like you want nothing more than to turn and run. Whatever Kobayashi’s camera is slowly edging towards showing us, we know it can’t be anything good. The expectation is a large part of the terror.

The unsettling world of Kwaidan is magnified by Kobayashi’s desire to control every element of the world he constructed. Bar a few shots of wave-lashed coasts and a Samurai riding competition (presumably too difficult to recreate inside), every scene was filmed inside a massive air-hanger studio. No attempt is made to disguise this. Instead, this exquisitely beautiful film makes a virtue of this to add to the unnerving sense of unreality. Skylines and backdrops are swirling whirlpools of paint and colour, never once trying to suggest a reality. Buildings, fields and even lakes subconsciously feel hemmed in by massive walls of painted unreality. It adds a terrifying fable quality – a nightmareish unreality – to the entire film.

It also makes Kwaidan a uniquely beautiful film. Not since Jack Cardiff’s work with Powell and Pressburger have scenery and backdrops looked as beautiful as this. Kwaidan is an explosion of gorgeous colours, used vividly and imaginatively to suggest mood, themes and threats. In The Woman of the Snow, the spirit seems to suck everything but blues and whites out of the palette – something we notice even more from the orangey skies that surround the woodcutter at every other point. The faded, paler colours in The Black Hair when the samurai returns to his first wife clue us in that all is surely not well. Splashes of red throughout spell danger – a coat, the lining of a pair of sandals, a torn flag, the lining of a cup, all of which the characters ignore.

They ignore these dangers at their peril. One of most dreadful things about the unsettling terrors of Kwaidan is that we can see the outcomes of their mistakes long before the characters do. The stomach-churning dread is waiting for it to happen. It’s executed to perfect effect in The Black Hair. The pompous samurai (a fine performance by Mikuni) is naturally due to be punished for abandoning his wife – and the faded home but unchanged wife he visits after years warn us well before him that horrors will follow. But Mikuni’s horrified shriek when confronted with the truth – and the staggering, nightmare-like, lack of control he seems to have over his body when he realises it (like a dream where you need to run but can’t) – makes this short chapter honestly one of the most unsettling things I’ve ever seen, a true Japanese MR James classic.

Equally fine is the second story The Woman of the Snow. It’s the most lusciously filmed of the four – its painted backdrops are Van Goghian works of art and the colour contrast between the warm summer and terrifying, pale blue winter is extraordinary. Its story is slight, but its spirit – Kishi moving with, again, a nightmarish precision that is deeply unnatural – is terrifyingly relentless. It offers no plot shocks, but the terror of inevitability, to excellent effect.

Kwaidan’s two final stories are less satisfying than these two masterpieces. Hoshi the Earless is very long – almost half the run time alone – and the story most dependent on an understanding of Japanese history. It recreates with a deliberately artificial beauty an ancient Japanese naval battle – clearly taking place in a water tank before a painted backdrop, but dreamlike in its execution, like a half-remembered vision, crammed with striking colours and images. The actual story of Hoshi is the least haunting, but provides Kwaidan’s most lingering cultural image, of a body covered (almost) from head to toe in writing to ward off spirits. Kwaidan concludes with a curiosity In a Cup of Toe a deliberately un-finished story – although the reason it remains unfinished provides Kwaidan with its final burst of shocking horror and another striking, unforgettable image of nightmarish dread.

Images of nightmarish dread abound in a film constructed intricately and deliberately artificially to heighten its sense of horror. The inevitability of many of the outcomes in its story detracts not one jot from the terror – if anything they add to it. Kobayashi’s direction is detailed, controlled, perfectly paced and wrings every last drop of unease from the audience. It’s a film that is long and slow, because the best terror often comes from the lingering slow-build – and its world of disjointed noises and sounds works perfectly to never allow the audience to relax. Kwaidan is an essential and masterful horror film, a collection of the sort of ghost stories that would make you run from the campfire.