Possession

We are assured, repeatedly, during Andrzej Żuławski's audio commentary for Possession that this film is, as horrifying as it sounds, autobiographical in nature. The piece a spitefully arranged reaction to the dissolution of the writer-director's marriage to actress Małgorzata Braunek and the blame that he, and Żuławski isn't afraid to share this, apportioned to her. On the same track, which is really more of an extended interview with film scholar Daniel Bird, a combative Żuławski even goes as far as detailing the marital difficulties experienced by cinematographer Bruno Nuytten and lead actress Isabelle Adjani. The pair, he implies, grew apart during the film's emotionally gruelling, low budget shoot. Aside from any interest prickled by ancient gossip beamed-in from a bygone era, this detail feels critical to understanding the hypnotic appeal of such a savagely candid film. It isn't enough that Adjani's doe-eyed Anna is, despite her obvious and sustained mania, stunningly beautiful. She is portrayed as actively intoxicating to orbit. 

An interlude in which Anna's husband, a sad sack former spy played by Sam Neill, is sent a short reel of film shot by her guru-cum-affair partner, Heinz Bennent's Heinrich, neatly encapsulates the tensions experienced by an audience wavering between rapture and revulsion when beholding Adjani's performance. In this clip Anna, presiding over a troupe of young ballet dancers, prowls the room, moving from girl-to-girl. She barely acknowledges her students, maintaining eye contact with the camera - knowing that she is the subject of this short and drawing power from being so permanently considered - while she harshly manipulates a shrieking girl's limbs. Nuytten's hand-held camera pushes in on this scene, the frame filled with Anna's pleading, mock innocent stare and that of a wailing, distressed child. We are being asked, directly in this moment, not to focus on the genuine horror that Anna is almost casually creating. We are to look past the sobbing face of an innocent and focus only on the woman, the trusted teacher, who is very deliberately conducting these would-be ballerinas with scathing words and physical pain. 

This confrontational approach to deceit is crucial since Anna shares many of her scenes with men who she is attempting to emotionally manipulate in some way or other. Be that her husband; their long-suffering child, Bob; the heartbroken Heinrich; or the pair of snoops who turn up, unannounced, to the rotting hovel in which Anna shelters her darkest, bloodiest secret. Adjani's Anna is, we discover, constructed in layers, with each of these men only able to access a particular level of attention or information which always leaves them wanting more. None are permitted to possess a complete understanding of Anna or her actions. She withholds, violently at times. Equally though, Anna's hold must extend beyond the figures dancing on a flat, two-dimensional screen to the viewer themselves. Nuytten and Żuławski's startling camera work makes our involvement explicit. Our perspective is essentially voyeuristic: a prowling, encircling presence that sweeps at and around these hysterical figures as they bite and claw at each other. Possession rubs our faces in domestic neglect and an escalating, apocalyptic sense of violence. The viewer is incriminated then, judged as a participant for daring to peak into these lives. Perhaps, since we're privy to scenes and sequences outside of the experience of Neill's Mark, we can delude ourselves (at least for short spell) that we have a more complete view of this relentlessly complex woman but, as Italian special effects artist Carlo Rambaldi's presence in the opening credits begins to take shape, it becomes clear that we're just as clueless and susceptible to manipulation as the rest of the people that Anna gleefully deludes. 

Kazuki Tomokawa - Doushita

The Odyssey by Dani Torrent

The Avalanches - Blue Shadows ft. Karen O

Ludwig Göransson - Hades

The Odyssey

Writer-director Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey is, as expected from the creator of the temporal pincer movement, a non-linear telling of the ancient poem that is steeped in queasy memory and elided thought. As with the director's own Oppenheimer, this Odyssey hinges on an individual who seems, for all appearances, to be an emissary from a forthcoming, dreadful new era of human extermination. Where J. Robert dreamed of quivering, sub-atomic galaxies, the lost king Odysseus chats candidly with the cosmic entities that bridge the hemispheres of his brain. Their faces are anchored in his own failings, while the thoughts they prompt demand consideration of his unholy ingenuity. Both Oppenheimer and Odysseus' visions relate to the application of an original but fundamentally terrible new thought, ideas that have rolling consequences; waves that crash and echo far beyond the sand on which they were plotted. The equivalent here to Oppenheimer's fission-based nuclear weapon is The Trojan Horse itself, a deception that works so well because, we are told, it undermines the most basic tenants of human decency. 

The sacking of Troy then isn't organised as a great or ingenious victory; it's a crime that damns mankind. Somewhat of a piece with the director's breakthrough film Memento, in that the present for Matt Damon's mislaid monarch is a fog of unconscious, reflexive action (he scours a blasted beach for signs of his ship or crew) and winding conversations with a woman, Charlize Theron's bronzed Calypso, in which critical information is deliberately withheld, prolonging his agonies. While Tom Holland's Telemachus steps away from a household packed with seditious suitors to brave a trip to Sparta, in the hope of hearing word of his absent father (finding little to nothing), a stirred Odysseus answers his child's queries but only for our benefit. Odysseus giving detail to a horrifying voyage premised on a desire to physically split with the ungrateful allies who share their wrongdoing. By straying from the shipping lanes, Odysseus inadvertently abandons himself and his crew to the Gods and the elements they personify: Zeus in the ferocious thunderstorms above them, Poseidon in the churning waves beneath. 

The light of knowledge that prompted Odysseus to pack himself into a holy object - apparently a gift for petty Gods, intended to curry favour - is absent on this expedition. In this section mankind's brightest, most devious mind is confronted with how much he doesn't, cannot know. Nolan's film then taking the island-hopping form seen previously in Don Chaffey and Ray Harryhausen's Jason and the Argonauts, only absent the certainty or good-natured bonhomie that kept the Argonauts from Jason's throat. In Nolan's telling Odysseus meets the men he has failed, including Elliot Page's Sinon, and is then cursed to know, by figures who emerge from black sands, how events can play out. The decisions he will be pressed to make and how lives will be lost on each path. Forced to treaty with powerful supernatural forces - from Samantha Morton's Circe, a witch who can remake men in the slovenly image of beasts, or a massive, one-eyed man who is Francisco Goya's Saturn Devouring his Son rendered in, as behind-the-scenes images would have us believe, Royal de Luxe-style puppetry - horror in Nolan's Odyssey is not just the unknown but the unknowable. All around them are thought and method that exceed the grasp of these pillaging sailors. 

Finally returned to Ithaca, Damon's king prospers again by deception, breaking another siege - this time of his own palace - by exploiting the social norms of the day. He enters his household as a beggar, a disguise that we are told is beloved of earthbound Olympians. Telemachus, desperate for any connection to a father who has been transformed into contemporary myth, repeatedly voices entreaty that acknowledges that the person he is speaking to has displayed some aspect, so beyond the norm, that it raises suspicion that they are Godly. Odysseus, again, uses this human reverence for something beyond themselves to his advantage. Anne Hathaway's Queen Penelope may weep at the straining sound of an unstrung bow; Odysseus tearing apart the challenge he has conquered only to clatter the jerry-rigged debris against the fleeing bodies of his enemies but the lasting impression of Nolan's film is its description of hubris. Damon's Odysseus as a man arrogant or foolhardy enough to consider himself in terms that are not instinctively beneath Greece's vengeful pantheon. Odysseus as an agnostic in the age of antiquity who, when judged against governing Gods who personify aspects of human life, makes a case for himself as a new deity of deceit. A line drawn from Prometheus, the fire-giver, and the failed sculptor Dolus to Odysseus. A figure so powerful he can even deceive himself. 

idialedyournumber - Limbs

Sonatine by Alexye

Dry Cleaning - I Have the Key

Phoebe Bridgers - Lost Boys

The Snow Woman

The striking Shiho Fujimura stars as The Snow Woman, a gliding wraith that stalks the frigid depths of a feudal forest, freezing elderly snoopers when they dare to bed down in abandoned cabins for the night. Rather than hold this supernatural character at arm's length, director Tokuzō Tanaka's film (clocking in at a concise 79 minutes), welcomes her into the household; describing her pained attempts to maintain a consistent emotional presence in the human realm. Beautifully shot by Chikashi Makiura, The Snow Woman largely elides location work, and any verisimilitude such a practice can confer, preferring to stage its spontaneous blizzards on a succession of cramped, delicately lit sound stages. This beatific falseness reflective of a central character who works extremely hard to maintain their own staged, and temporary, reality. 

Besotted with the apprentice sculptor who wandered into her chilly domain, Fujimura's Snow Woman disguises herself as a beautiful, ageless woman and quickly ingratiates herself with the widow of the man she flash-froze, all to win her beloved's heart. Based on a folk tale included in Lafcadio Hearn's Kwaiden: Stories and Studies of Strange Things, the spell of The Snow Woman is that this paranormal presence is, essentially, both sympathetic and, unless threatened, benign; a lonely creature that really only represents an aspect of nature that just so happens to be associated with death. Yuki, as she is known to her husband, simply wants to be in love and raise a family. The outside forces determined to degrade or undermine this partnership then seethe with jealousy: the brutish local lord who wants The Snow Woman for himself or the ancient medicine woman who blisters Yuki's pearlescent skin with boiling, ceremonial waters. 

LTJ Bukem - Demon's Theme Part II

The Major by Vallez Gax

Robert Glasper - Everything in its Right Place

Supergirl

Aside from a pair of brief flashbacks featuring David Corenswet's Superman, that ground the picture in the ongoing present of this newly minted DC cinematic universe, director Craig Gillespie's Supergirl often appears like it could all be happening hundreds of years into the future. In fact, given that every other humanoid very specifically resembles the exact kind of people found on Earth, it seems like it'd be less distracting if Kara Zor-El's adventures where disentangled from the now and took place when mankind has journeyed into the stars. Much like Starlord and pals in James Gunn's Guardians of the Galaxy movies though, this Supergirl is both contemporaneous with DC's unfolding superhero phase and proceeds from a place of airtight, space-faring slobbery. The interiors of this film's physics-defying spacecraft are caked with everything from shredded papers and stale cereal to fluorescent green dog piss. The leaky, lived-in aesthetic that George Lucas was so keen to evoke in Star Wars is taken here to a depressive, bed-rotting conclusion. 

Away from her adopted home planet, Milly Alcock's Kara celebrates her impending birthday by travelling to solar systems without yellow stars. By avoiding this specific spectrum of light radiation, Supergirl is able to both drink herself into a stupor and become vulnerable enough for Gillespie's film to entertain ideas of jeopardy. Bereft after being sent away from a surviving shard of the dead planet Krypton, Kara - quite reasonably - seeks distraction from her decaying memories of the family she left behind. Unlike the strident colonisers who sent Kal-El to Kansas to be its conqueror, Kara's parents (her father, played by David Krumholtz, is dressed very much like a retrofuturist scientist from a Fleischer cartoon) are far less megalomaniacal. Their decision to fashion a similar craft and have Kara follow her cousin to Earth done so simply to preserve the life of their beloved daughter. Of course, given that the audience is supposed to sympathise with Supergirl, it makes sense that she isn't seen to be mourning the passing of monsters. Indeed, there are asides from her parents here that are directly critical of Jor-El and Lara; positioned within the text as if to reassure us that not all Kryptonians are intergalactic imperialists but Kal-El's parents definitely were. 

Brief, compared to its comic book movie contemporaries (the film doesn't even hit the two hour mark), Supergirl plays like an overly tidied telling of a much messier journey. As is often the case with Warner Bros. tent-poles, trade magazines have rushed to detail the ways in which the various filmmakers fell out behind the scenes but even on the night, Supergirl is very obviously lacking in finer, lyrical detail. Characters may expound on their backstories or act decisively but there's little sense that they are growing closer and coming to rely on each other. At its conclusion Gillespie's film may outright declare that Eve Ridley's Ruthye (essentially Mattie Ross' vengeful teen from Charles Portis' True Grit) has, in fact, grown on Kara but there isn't a great deal within the piece that underlines this assertion. Although his screentime is comparatively brief, there's more of a sense that Jason Momoa's snarling Lobo has become a fan of this unusually principled child. That said, and although this film concludes in ways that are at odds with its source material - Tom King, Bilquis Evely and Matheus Lopes' Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow - it's difficult not to draw real satisfaction from the sight of Kara, in full blue and red super-costume, placing the edge of an ornate sabre on the neck of a quivering, unrepentant sex trafficker then drawing it across his throat. 

Antônio Carlos Jobim - The Girl from Ipanema

Supergirl by Tom Scioli

Tricky - I'm Yours (feat. Mitch Sanders)

Assault Girls

Writer-director Mamoru Oshii's Avalon follow-up is a breathtakingly dull trudge beneath static skies that, somewhat, simulates the dawdling rhythms faced by video game players when they're putting off attempting a particularly difficult encounter and don't want to suffer their way through a team-up. Meisa Kuroki, Rinko Kikuchi, and Hinako Saeki are the Assault Girls, a disparate group of solo adventurers stuck on the same enormous, cybernetic worm combat event. Unlike this film's predecessor though, there's almost zero sense of a real world life that exists for any of these women outside of the all-consuming app. An extended opening passage - that perfectly replicates the feeling of being trapped, mid-level, by an unskippable interruption - details the jump from the derelict, post-Soviet aesthetic of the previous instalment to the much more obviously fantastical, Monster Hunter-esque design that props up the current iteration, Avalon(f). This transformation which, for all appearances, is a tremendous downgrade is, apparently, symptomatic of the stagnant Neoliberalism that has the twenty first century firmly in its grip. Oshii is still effortlessly prescient then, even if Assault Girls is not particularly entertaining to actually sit through. Edited with the all the stuttering imprecision of a post-round replay running on a shorting System 11 board, Assault Girls is less a full-fledged feature and more a dangling, discursive DVD freebie. The kind of compressed, live action distraction you might expect to find taped to a Japanese gaming magazine in the early 2000s, destined for the landfill. 

The Womack Sisters - If I Let You