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Frankenstein

Following an attention-grabbing prelude in which Jacob Elordi's beragged Monster stalks the North Pole, pummeling Danish sailors with an inhuman ferocity that is strikingly similar to that exhibited by Luke Goss as Nomak in Blade II, Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein, very obviously a dream project for the writer-director, decamps to its namesake's childhood. Rather than lay any foundations for a romance (or domestic intrigue) that never quite materialises, del Toro proposes, in Charles Dance's Baron Leopold, a father so completely awful that he ruins his first son's ability to successfully interpret love. The harsh, disciplinary teachings designed to shape a young Victor into a physician worthy of his father's name instead fosters an intense, combative arrogance. 

Oscar Isaac's Victor, now grown and determined to establish a dominion over death, is callous and unfeeling in this pursuit, an aristocrat who uses the bodies of his social inferiors as both jerking experiment and repulsive adornment. This, in del Toro's telling, is key to understanding the relationship between Victor Frankenstein and the childlike creature he manufactures. Once molded from the bodies of criminals and the pulverised soldiers of The Crimean War, Elordi's gaunt, Bernie Wrightson inspired Monster is expected, by a reproachful Victor, to instantly demonstrate an adult's grasp of their unfathomable situation. That the Monster can only mutter "Victor" back to his parent is viewed in purely mechanical terms: this new gizmo has failed to meet its creator's impossible expectations. Victor then channeling the stinging resentment wielded by his own father, broadcasting it at the generation of Frankenstein that he and his towering, tiled womb have begot. 

The gentleness and innocence present in Elordi's early performance is underlined by Mia Goth's Lady Elizabeth who instantly twigs that there is no continuity of mind or soul from the cadavers that Victor has used to construct this man. The Monster is, in all possibility, a new kind of life. She accepts this stitched-up child for what he is rather than what his parent wants him to be then; holding an amorous Victor at arms-length for his failure to console the innocent that has been brought into the world. Big screen adaptations of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus are steeped in the idea that their Victors are all playing God by creating life - their Adam - out of dust. Del Toro's addition to this pantheon is to view this creation in human or, maybe more accurately, biological terms: a twisted act of procreation that has been accomplished, solely, by an unbalanced and exacting male. It's a tweak that recasts the central child as a product of pure, spiteful ego rather than, at the very least, the outcome of physical affection. There's a crushing sadness in the fact that this Monster is assembled, like a kit, to be dispassionately assessed by an uncaring father rather than nurtured and adored by a loving mother.  

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Return to Silent Hill

Strangely fitting that director Christophe Gans' long-delayed Return to Silent Hill often resembles a misaligned memory of a PlayStation 2 playthrough that was completed decades earlier. In the quarter century since, all of the characters have become smushed together in the player's head; their fictional motivations and backstories interconnecting then overlapping until we arrive at a misinformed, misreading of the video game's sprawling events. This is a hundred minute adaptation of a fifteen hour game though, isn't it at least economically laudable to retain all of the principle personalities? Even if this can only be accomplished by making each of them some stained aspect of either Hannah Emily Anderson's Mary or Jeremy Irvine's James? Perhaps I'm just sympathetic to this reorganisation because, when playing Bloober Team's recent remake of Silent Hill 2, I was convinced that Maria, the scantily dressed doppelgänger of a dearly missed wife, was being positioned as a flickering, vulnerable reincarnation.

Instead, as it turns out, this tattooed duplicate is a temptress dreamt up or manifested to lock your in-game character into a disappointing ending. That human recollection is both unreliable and frequently misleading is a key attribute in any (re)telling of Mary and James' story though, so why shouldn't these inconsistencies turn in on themselves, altering our understanding of these dreamlike events? Return to Silent Hill's somnambulist acting and gobbledygook dialogue even serve to accentuate this sense of detachment then, registering as fragments that have been pushed and pulled across several text translation tools. The boldest shake-up offered by Gans (co-writing with Sandra Vo-Anh and Will Schneider) though is the decision to map the revolting, familial abuse experienced by the mousy Angela character onto Mary. This particular revision not only allowing for much more miserable, even shameful, notes of secrecy to creep into a central relationship that was previously only experienced from a male perspective but also aligning this otherwise disconnected story with the child endangering doomsday cults seen in Silent Hill and Silent Hill: Revelation 3D. You know, for people who enjoy lore. 

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Bugonia

Obviously a completely different experience if you've already seen Jang Joon-hwan's Save the Green Planet!, director Yorgos Lanthimos' Bugonia is then, under those circumstances, transformed into a feature-length query. Are these filmmakers prepared to go quite as far as Jang's film did? As before, Bugonia details the kidnapping and torture of a pharmaceutical executive by a mentally ill conspiracy theorist who harbours a grudge that is rooted in the experimental treatments that have placed his mother in an unending coma. Aside from the minutiae of this global subjugation, as espoused by Jesse Plemons' apiarist turned abductor Teddy Gatz, the biggest point of departure in this telling is the amount of time and space apportioned to the chained-up CEO, played here by the Academy Award winning Emma Stone. In this Lanthimos telling, written by Will Tracy, Stone's Michelle Fuller is a much more magnetic and conniving presence than her South Korean predecessor - Baek Yoon-sik's much more conspicuously reptilian Kang. Perhaps this decision to give over so much more of this film's focus to Fuller unbalances the overall piece? 

Certainly, the extra layer of context provided by the Bugonia's closing minutes are jealously guarded; a pointed refusal to allow the audience's perspective or expectation to truly align with Teddy's paranoid outlook. Stone, a gifted physical comedian, plays Fuller as irritating and disingenuous but never quite odious or even, really, gloating. Her attempts to reason with her kidnappers may be communicated in the patronising double-speak of American office culture but even this achingly neutral invective signals an attempt to reassume the upper hand she expects rather than outright offend. Stone's performance is such that Fuller could be an extraterrestrial, or a robot, or even just a sociopathic businesswoman attempting to navigate the violent moods of the unwashed chuckleheads who have locked her in their basement. Stone's innate ability to confer depth on her CEO, and the fact that she plays a certain kind of melancholy in the decision that closes Bugonia, actually ends up framing this remake in much more alien and nihilistic terms. As cinematographer Robbie Ryan's camera glides over beatific images of extinction, rather than the tiny fragments of happiness that closed Save the Green Planet!, it's Fuller's sadness and thwarted sense of ambition that we the audience (including any potential Oscar voters catching up with their screeners) are being asked to consider. 

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Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance

Viewed in the afterglow of last year's No Other Choice, writer-director Park Chan-wook (Lee Jae-soon, Lee Moo-young and Lee Yong-jong are credited as co-writers)'s earlier, 2002 film Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance seems oddly familiar. Although Mr. Vengeance was retroactively positioned as the first instalment in director Park's vengeance trilogy, none of this film's participants exhibit the well-drilled expertise seen in either Oldboy or Sympathy for Lady Vengeance. Instead, you discover that No Other Choice is the closer relative, with both pieces betraying a similarly grim fascination with the trials and tribulations of fairly normal people pressed to pursue a ferocious and, at times, darkly comic kind of criminality. Shin Ha-kyun's Ryu, a deaf-mute who finds himself out of work with a terminally sick sister to fend for is uniquely unsuitable for this new career trajectory. Alarmingly naive, even childlike, in his dealings with a gang of ruthless organ traffickers who pocket both his severance pay out and one of his kidneys, an increasingly desperate Ryu is then pressured into an ethical kidnapping by his girlfriend, played by Bae Doona, as a way of making up for their monetary shortfall. 

The ten million won idea being that since they won't mistreat the child they abduct then there can be no lasting ill-feeling or trauma for any of the participants. Obviously, this fantasy quickly falls apart in the face of brutal reality. Mr. Vengeance, photographed by Kim Byung-il, lacks the luxurious, lace bow touch of its vengeance trilogy stablemates, often reading - in terms of set-ups and the visual contrasts therein - as a particularly despairing kind of comedy. The tragedies that unravel here are excruciating, both in strict, blood-curdling event and the ways in which these horrors are all, plainly, preventable. There's a real boldness in the very deliberate decision to spend so much time in the company of Shin's Ryu rather than focus solely on Song Kang-ho's righteously savage father. Like the character Shin played in Save the Green Planet!, Ryu is uniquely alienated and disconnected from both his surroundings and the audience that are sat observing him. His deafness and inability to communicate vocally, coupled with his participation in Park's carefully arranged catastrophes, creates an innate and uncomfortable tension. Although sympathies do largely align with the film's bereaved parent, Mr. Vengeance refuses to portray Ryu as an evil monster to be vanquished at the story's climax. He's a vulnerable person, chewed up by an uncaring money-hungry system, who is ill-suited to navigate the life-or-death schemes he has blundered into. 

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28 Years Later: The Bone Temple

The second part of a planned trilogy, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, from director Nia DaCosta and screenwriter Alex Garland, arrives hot on the heels of its predecessor, 28 Years Later, forgoing the customary leap forward in time to stay settled-in with the cast of characters that were introduced in this previous instalment. We are, very briefly, presented with a small, croft settlement of brand new survivors at one point but these creeping foragers scarcely amount to much more than superficially detailed victims for Jack O'Connell's devil-worshipping Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal, and his mob of track-suited tearaways, to brutalise. The Bone Temple then isn't particularly interested in these kinds of perspectives - the barely sketched people who allow the filmmakers to burn minutes in repose while offering up a repetitive sense of discovery. And why would you be, when you have Ralph Fiennes on call as the iodine-stained Dr. Kelson? 

The interlaced inferno of 28 Days Later flash froze a specific moment of post-millennium anxiety, one that prodded at that era's mounting sense of horror that the endless prosperity predicted in the 1990s might not, actually, materialise. That, in actual fact, the human race was becoming unstuck and reverting back to patterns of behaviour that are more outwardly violent and base. The rage virus that galloped through these British isles brought that country to a screeching halt, trapping its surviving citizens inside a pantomime performance anchored to the thoughts and feeling of a receding century. The United Kingdom was, essentially, pickled. So, not only does O'Connells' cult leader behave like some nightmarish recollection of a disgraced light entertainment personality but cottage-dwelling fathers dote on their children, singing lullabies about a world in which fascism has, definitively, been vanquished forever. Their world may have collapsed in on itself but, barring any contradictory transmissions beamed in from the outside world, somehow the UK's immolation seems to have righted the sinking ship that we, in reality, have all found ourselves on. 

These strange, nostalgic pangs for the comfort and certainty promised by history's end extends to the aforementioned GP, a job role that is itself now a deliberately diminished position within modern, British communities. Kelson, unburdened by the slashed funding of austerity or orders to direct the sick and needy to privatised care, is patient and delicate in his dealings with the damaged people that come before him. He sits with them and listens, getting to know them and tailoring his therapies to the individual rather than fobbing them off with a one-size-fits-all treatment path. His serene, non-judgmental demeanor is itself a potent tonic; enough to dispel all manner of simmering anger. Unusually then, Bone Temple rejects any of the fantastical underpinnings of this specific zombie virus to examine how a valorous doctor might attempt to provide treatment for such unapologetic, mutative violence. Danny Boyle's first instalment may have ended on the promise of bewigged nutters somersaulting over the camera in a Super Sentai flurry - a mode of action that, funnily enough, the much younger DaCosta has no interest in replicating here - but this Bone Temple is instead a sort of inverse of Aleksei German's Hard to be a God. Specifically, a film premised on the idea that a knowledgeable man steeped in (now) deeply foreign art and technologies can be a force for radical change in this sunken world. 

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