Annihilation takes a different approach to alien contact, instead of placing mankind in the driver's seat, solving and conquering an invader, Alex Garland's film makes us subservient. The extraterrestrial presence dividing relentlessly in Area X does not approach us as separate entities, the sanctity of individual identity is not respected, people are reduced to cells and code, building blocks to be disassembled and reconfigured.
Life, sentience, is nourishment for The Shimmer's malignancy, treated as a behavioural quirk to be smothered and processed. Like Alien and The Thing, the horror in Garland's film is in arousing the attention of something so powerful and inscrutable that its designs go beyond the predatory. To be killed and consumed proposes two actors working with differing degrees of agency. To be trapped, examined, pulled apart and replicated goes further still, perverting and offending the basic specialness we feel about our humanity.
Natalie Portman's Lena meets her facsimile shortly after accidentally bleeding into the throbbing, fluorescent fissure that used to be her colleague. The copy, a featureless marionette with a petrochemical iridescence, parrots Lena's movements, dancing and colliding with its mother. Upon waking, a bleeding Lena picks at the combusted remains of her husband, the man she's followed into this nightmare, finding a white phosphorous grenade.
Garlands film proposes a basic invasion building block - the fiery destruction of the mother base, then explains it in a way that that informs the piece's approach to the wider extraterrestrial threat. Lena pulls the pin then hands the flame to the doppelganger. This Promethean boon ignites in the alien's hand, a ravenous, chaotic form of life whose touch renders the copy drunk and floundering. The fire consumes the visitor's cradle, then blazes out across the entire manufactured landscape either destroying and consuming the invader's presence or, perhaps, finally sating its voracious hunger.
Without giving anything away, Calibre is what happens when moneyed self-assurance collides with a situation that cannot be bullshitted or brute-forced. Martin McCann's Marcus is used to getting his own way, he's cocky and successful, a man who treats every interaction as an opportunity to score points. Best pal Vaughn is happy, or at least neutral enough, to indulge his friend's bravado no matter how much it may end up compromising him. He's along for the ride.
Visiting a small town in the Scottish highlands for a hunting trip, Marcus sets to throwing his weight around, winding up the pub regulars by sharing his cosmopolitan coke wraps with the object of everyone's affections then ingratiating himself with the local bigwigs by promising a vague, and presumably fictional, interest in the area's regeneration. Marcus is high on himself and determined to turn the screws on everybody else. Laws and rules are there to be flouted, he cannot conceive of a situation he cannot ooze his way around. Calibre then is about tiny concessions and short-cuts, and how easily basic mistakes, and the desire to avoid any kind of penalty, can lead to full-scale, excruciating, disaster.
First Reformed talks about knowledge and self-examination as weight, burdens to be slogged around and grappled with. Ethan Hawke's Pastor Toller is trapped, servile to an environment that does not nourish him. Writer-director Paul Schrader shoots urban sprawl and obnoxious mega churches as inhumane, alienating constructs that blight and obscure a tactile connection with the physical world around us. Abundant Life, the corporate sinkhole at the centre of the film, peddles compliance, religion packaged up and presented with the tranquillising reassurance of wealth. Toller struggles, attempting to engage with and conquer the emptiness this prompts inside himself, using his faith as a language and means towards personal discovery rather than pat, attention-diverting answers.
A serial killer confessional told with the creepy hesitance of a nerd building himself up to an out-and-out boast. Matt Dillon's Jack, in conversation with an unseen party, starts off describing his crimes - his life's work - not as an indulgence but as a reflex summoned up by his poisonous company. The demanding, insensitive strangers who foist themselves upon him or the greedy widows looking to bleed the system dry. Regardless of how he enters their orbit, Jack is insistent, it's just not his fault.
Writer-director Lars von Trier further massages this sociopathic jabbering with the mocking, sardonic voice of Jack's companion. This decision allows an ironic distance to assert itself in The House that Jack Built, similar to that found in Remy Belvaux, Andre Bonzel and Benoit Poelvoorde's Man Bites Dog. Attention is called to Jack's total misogyny, with just enough distaste that the film remains amusing until the exact point that Trier decides it shouldn't be. In its early passages the film is eating its cake and having it too. It's not until we get three or four recollections in that the mask is allowed to slip completely.
Jack stops talking about his crimes as accidental, situational occurrences that he has had the terrible fortune to stumble into. The icy veneer of buttoned-up, middle-class pretension that has allowed his repulsive hobby to register as acutely comedic is jettisoned for a sweaty, venomous chapter in which he talks about his greatest love and how he literally turned her into an object. The House that Jack Built talks about broadcasters and egomaniacs, men who demand, over and over, to be seen and discussed. They want to be venerated, to be held up and examined as inscrutable puzzles when, in reality, they're just nasty, selfish little pricks.
Leave No Trace is a delicate, deliberate film that examines interpersonal responsibilities and the idea that a parent's job is to prepare their child to deal with the wider world. Will (Ben Foster) finds society completely overwhelming, preferring to live in the bracketed wilderness of a national park with his daughter Tom (Thomasin McKenzie). Despite the tough, hardscrabble environment they inhabit the pair's relationship has a quiet, idyllic quality to it. There are no distractions or interference, Will can give Tom his full, undivided attention. The problem is that he's only really preparing her for a life exactly like the one she already has. Writer-director Debra Granik, working with co-writer Anne Rosellini, have the restraint to not make their film a series of messy, bubbling confrontations, instead we have ideas and alternatives slowly taking hold in two people who see different things in their futures.
Although The Night Comes for Us does feature guns of every stripe, they represent brief, terrifying expulsions in a whole designed around violent utility. Everything in Night is a weapon, anything with enough weight to crack or sharp enough to puncture is put to work. Goon bodies are blubbery and pregnable, they lack the fortification conferred by intent. Ito and his friends, our guides through this mayhem, are different, their courage armours them.
They aren't soft, malleable flesh, they're hardened and defiant in the face of injury, able to soak up a truly heroic amount of punishment before they yield. They do not surrender to simple slashes or even small calibre gunfire. Their entire bodies act as deterrent, limbs break then redirect blows, telephone directories provide the level of protection you'd expect from a bomb disposal suit. Even when stabbed their wounds ooze around and seize the incoming weaponry, allowing it to be repurposed against its original owners.
Original review
Mercifully short on actual rape, Coralie Fargeat's Revenge is more interested in examining the interpersonal dynamics that lead to certain men deciding they are owed something they haven't been offered. As far as Matilda Lutz's Jen is concerned she is enjoying a couple of days holiday with her married lover Richard in a secretive, secluded desert mansion. She is his girlfriend, he might even leave his family for her, that lends her status. When his hunting buddies arrive a day early, the couple are caught off guard.
Reality has intruded for Richard, he can no longer pretend he's living in a little bubble. These people know his wife. Trapped in the middle of nowhere with three slathering, reptilian men on her trail, Jen slowly starts to turn the tables. These men expect to succeed, they've bought all the weapons and kit, they even have snappy little all-terrain vehicles. What chance does an injured half-naked woman have? Comparatively, Jen is used to difficulty, she's a woman after all. She's adept at modifying her behaviour and persona to better suit the men attempting to overwhelm her. Jen thrives because of her ability to adapt then overcome.
Boots Riley's Sorry to Bother You is genuinely magical, a socially conscious comedy with flights of science fiction fantasy grounded in the (very real, very apparent) callousness casually displayed by the exceedingly rich. Lakeith Stanfield's Cash is an African American telemarketer who is able to adopt the deep frequency-free shriek of a dumpy white actor when fielding calls, naturally this talent brings him nothing but success. Riley's film talks about status and a person's ability to move up and along social classes, asking if they can remain unaffected, uncompromised by their experiences on the other side. Cash finds himself increasingly valuable but, unfortunately, not as a partner or even really as a person. He's a commodity, an opportunity to deepen and protect someone else's fortune.
Jobs eh? Absolute nightmare. Andrew Bujalski's Support the Girls tracks an awful / typical day in the life of a manager working in a knock-off Hooters. Regina Hall's Lisa takes her position as a leader seriously. As far as she's concerned it isn't just a meaningless title to be invoked at will, used to separate herself, socially and financially, from the people she works alongside. To Lisa, management means an ongoing relationship with, and responsibility to, her staff, they're aren't problems to be filed away or discarded, they are, by the nature of their business, young, vulnerable woman finding their way in the world. They need to feel safe and protected, so that's exactly what she does. Lisa's approach is kind but firm, a den mother who, naturally, finds herself in opposition with her weak-piss supervisor, a scrawny nothing completely unable to engage with people beyond their ability to acquiesce to his fantasies.
You Were Never Really Here isn't interested in how a tortured man inflicts himself on the world, the events of the film are likewise not proposed or communicated in terms of catharsis either. Joe's already broken. No amount of pulverising will fix him. Writer-director Lynne Ramsay's focus is reflective rather than deflective then. A sharp, elliptical continuity constructed out of a lifetime of internalised trauma and the flawed, inadequate responses Joe has employed to placate himself.
Original review
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