Loosely based on The Beast in the Jungle by Henry James, director Bertrand Bonello's The Beast disdains a dithering, male perspective on commitment to detail how terrible it is to be the subject in somebody else's problem. To be both incredibly vital and yet somehow still extraneous. In all of their meetings Léa Seydoux's Gabrielle is quite capable of recognising the connection between herself and George MacKay's Louis. She pursues him, using the apparatus of her age to appear open and amenable. It is Louis who resists, unwilling or unable to be truly brave and take a chance.
Viewers with a more comprehensive knowledge of Frank Herbert's cosmology might, in Paul's visions of endless elderly faces, find trace of the path this new emperor will walk over the years (and films) to come; the terrible foresight that demands he make some attempt to take control of the inevitable carnage. Denis Villeneuve's Dune: Part Two though accounts for another, more human perspective to creep in: revulsion. Cursed with a total understanding of his own appalling genealogy, Paul connects with a barbaric, animalistic aspect as a way to reframe his own nature and satisfy his personal need for revenge. When Rebecca Ferguson and Timothée Chalamet's all-powerful mother and son meet again, their first order of business is this rotten lineage and what it means for a shared future. The Atreides name, the human greatness of a Duke Leto that inspired loyalty and devotion in all of his subjects, has been polluted forever and will, in the fullness of time, sink beneath a flag of boiling, merciless violence. Amen.
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, director George Miller's latest instalment of Antipodean apocalypse, does tell a much more conventionally structured story than its predecessor. There are chapter stops and our heroine's progress is measured in decades rather than a few, fraught hours. These breaks allow tension to wane, to draw attention to a fractured approach to storytelling that underlines the suspicion that these are fragments culled from Fury Road's fruitful pre-production period. That fourth Max may be the livelier piece then, one that never stops to explain (really) anything, but Furiosa is still light years ahead of its nearest action contemporaries. Even with the odd stuttering, computer generated stunt double that doesn't quite match the physical capture, the conceptual focus on determined figures surmounting hair-raising hazards, all without ever losing either a sense of geography or genuine physical danger, is the work of a master.
Writer-director Chris Nash's In a Violent Nature is consumed with its killer, the camera dutifully trailing in his wake as Johnny crashes through undergrowth in search of a totemic locket. Outside viewpoints and performances are, for a majority of the film, pointedly irrelevant then. The anonymous victims who invade Johnny's space are contextualised using his point of view: they are therefore flat and one-note, nothing more than badly essayed irritants who demand to be silenced in increasingly ingenious ways. The time and energy usually apportioned to a more human frame of reference has been drained away here, leaving only the strange tranquillity of an untiring monster methodically battering through the woods, that used to be his prison, in search of something to silence the buzzing inside his skull.
As an actor, Takeshi Kitano has a magnetic pull based largely around his casualness or indifference to the harrowing strife that surrounds him. This aspect of his performance has only deepened with age, as Kitano has grown larger (at least in this role) and even less mobile. His character, Hideyoshi, who frequently makes reference to his beginnings as part of the peasant class, isn't constrained by the same circuitous logics of pride and propriety that cage his suffocating peers. The studied ceremonies of the people he has infiltrated are actually physically excruciating for him, largely because a great deal of it is premised upon extended displays of suicidal etiquette. Hideyoshi finds it all just plain boring. Kitano, a comedic actor through and through, approaches each new, outrageous development as a hassle rather than a calamity then. Despite the (comfortably) hundreds of lives violently extinguished over the course of Kubi's runtime, Hideyoshi views all of the film's churning developments as the latest wrinkle in some ongoing cosmic joke aimed squarely at him.
Based on a web manga written and illustrated by Chainsaw Man's Tatsuki Fujimoto, Look Back, at least in its beginnings, revolves around a one-sided rivalry between two young teens who both contribute their art to the school newspaper. Fujino, the more confident and outgoing of the pair, submits wonderfully coarse and genuinely amusing three-panel gags, whereas the pieces sent in by the reclusive Kyomoto are more contemplative, demonstrating a much more obvious technical ability. Of course, each of these artists covets the skills of the other and express their devotion in wildly different ways: Kyomoto imagines her rival as a great master of the form who she worships from afar; Fujino kills herself trying to improve her draftsmanship then, judging herself to still be lacking, temporarily gives up altogether. Writer-director Kiyotaka Oshiyama's film, rather fittingly for an animated feature, revolves around an incredible amount of hard work, the vast majority of which is self-compelled and largely about achieving a kind of personal betterment. Rather than enjoy the picturesque landscapes that the film consistently offers up to the viewer, the pair (eventually) meet then promptly seal themselves away in Fujino's bedroom, working in concert to produce something they both can be truly happy with. Fanciful and devastating in almost equal measure, Look Back is a beautiful illustration of the strange, deeply internalised compulsions that drive people to produce and produce, often to no clear material advantage.
In Perfect Days, Koji Yakusho's Hirayama has achieved an everyday routine that allows him to live frozen inside a contented peace. Repetition and the fulfilment of basic but attainable tasks seems key to attaining this baseline. So, rather than think beyond the moment and stock up on something like the Boss brand Caffè Latte cans that this man unfailing begins his days with, Hirayama prefers the ritual of depositing a coin in the (admittedly well-stocked) vending machine that sits in the courtyard of his apartment complex. Similarly, the work that keeps him in his canned coffee is janitorial in nature, based around a series of avant-garde toilets dotted around an upmarket Tokyo district. In the time allotted to him, Hirayama can clean these commodes to a standard that is, in itself, pleasing to him. Evenings are spent pruning tiny trees that sit beneath UV lighting, listening to catalogued cassette tapes or reading through the second-hand books Hirayama has purchased for a pittance. Director Wim Wenders (co-writing with Takuma Takasaki) allows us a glimpse into the life of someone who has fine-tuned themselves to appreciate tiny, almost microscopic feedback loops, all of which allow him to experience or consume something in their entirety and then be satisfied enough to disengage. Unfortunately for Hirayama his regimen can be upset by the human scaffolding that supports his asceticism: the incompetent co-worker who torpedoes this carefully curated balance or the simple fact that Hirayama's cheery, guileless presence cannot help but engender deeper expectations in those he spends his time around.
In conversation with someone she believes to be her subordinate, Juliette Gariépy's Kelly-Anne describes her detached approach to the should-be exciting games of chance that account for her financial independence. How she will often discontinue these online poker matches early to protect her own investment or the ways in which her deliberately cold playstyle contrasts with those who find themselves emotionally entangled in the game and therefore more likely to make mistakes. She lets something crucial slip during these briefings though, perhaps emboldened by her proximity to another person who seems to share her own strange fascination with serial killers and their Red Rooms. This statement the only real insight we get into a finely-tuned person who sips smoothies in her wind-whistled glass house while casually committing identity fraud or cataloguing paedophilic snuff clips. Kelly-Anne doesn't just like to win you see. What she really enjoys is witnessing somebody else lose.
A French-language remake of an earlier, Japanese-language Kiyoshi Kurosawa film that threads this project's cross-continental drift back into the text of the piece itself. In this new, 2024 version of Serpent's Path we are no longer dealing with just an obvious class divide, that is to say the chaffing and cross-purposes experienced by a middle-class maths teaching mastermind as he directs the violence of an incompetent, low-level dogsbody. Damien Bonnard's Albert, a journalist investigating the abduction and murder of his daughter, at least initially, seems to be on an equal sort of footing with Ko Shibasaki's Sayoko, an emotionally cool hospital psychiatrist. The men they abduct, and the crimes they charge them with, aren't as clear cut as they were back in 1998 either.
There, Sho Aikawa's Nijima and Teruyuki Kagawa's Miyashita were attacking something structured, local and physically attainable: a criminal gang that was distributing video cassettes containing unimaginable darkness. Albert and Sayoko's quarry is much more corporate and therefore illusory; dark money and illegal organ trades intermingle, while the video capture of premeditated murder somehow functions as a particularly loathsome side-hustle. The men they capture are intermediaries who either express an ignorance (or all-consuming fear) of the next link in the chain. Kurosawa then consistently withholds a clear sense that any of the people at either end of the film's many tortures really know much of anything. The more emotive Albert rages and dithers, a man seeking a particular version of the truth. One that lionises rather than condemns him. Comparatively, Sayoko is steely and unflappable. Equally at home flirting with traffic wardens, while they hover next to vehicles packed with bodies, as she is with sipping coffee in an adjacent room while two of her prisoners claw each other to death.
Jonathan Glazer's The Zone of Interest is a powerful illustration of sociopathy and the avaricious ability for one particular group of human beings to suddenly imprison or exterminate another for whatever arbitrary reason has just crossed their mind. Locked inside static shots that detail the lush, upper middle-class trappings of a villa sat on the same grounds as wailing, industrialised murder we see various expressions of the thought processes underpinning this deplorable crime. Imogen Kogge, playing Linna, the mother of Sandra Hüller's Hedwig Höss, seems to think of The Holocaust through a kind of class dimension, with the extinction of the Jewish women who used to employ her a necessary sacrifice so that people like herself and her oafish daughter can move up a station in life. Indeed many in the Höss family are enraptured by these trappings, the luxuries afforded to them by their enthusiastic participation in the truly appalling, often to the exclusion of everything else.
Above all (and certainly eclipsing any affection she feels for her husband) Hedwig delights in the power she is now able to wield in her household, the silence and fear she can instil in the Polish teenagers who race around, adjusting ugly bric-a-brac while trying, desperately, to remain unremarked upon. This bullying and crushing lack of empathy is presented as instructional for the Höss children. Left alone in the garden to play, one older boy assumes the role of jailor, locking his younger brother in a greenhouse. While his sibling screeches to be set free, the big brother basks in the authority he has momentarily seized for himself. Hedwig, in accordance with the demented screed of Nazi era pedagogues like Johanna Haarer, keeps her children at arm's length. Tolerated but never consoled or loved. A brief interlude, while a sleepless Linna considers the smoke rising from the nearby camp, features Hedwig's screaming baby in some adjoining room, billeted away from its mother. It stands up in its crib; red-faced, crying and desperate to be held. Hedwig refuses to answer this call and the Polish woman assigned to nurse this child simply stares at this scene, drinking herself into numbness. Whether this servant is also acting in accordance with Haarer's blueprint for raising obedient and emotionally bowdlerised citizens (Die deutsche Mutter und ihr erstes Kind, if you're interested) or enacting some tiny, sanctioned revenge on her captors isn't clear.
