Sunday 24 December 2023

2023 in Cinema

A year of considering the variables. I watched The Long Good Friday for the first time in the spring and its final moments have stayed with me all year. A man lost in the present with absolutely no idea how he got there, coming to terms with the end of the road as street lights stream past in the background. A grimace of clenched teeth. A lot of the films I’ve loved this year are in one way or another about people who have misread the room, or no longer understand what’s in front of them, and I don’t know why these kinds of films keep resonating with me. Perhaps it’s part of some drawn-out crisis of my early thirties. A lot of things in my life have changed this year, in joyful ways for the most part, but not exclusively, though it doesn’t feel as if I’ve had much time to savour the highs or the lows as much as I should have. Things keep happening, again and again, and the weeks roll by a little faster. I’m not lost in the chaos, by any means. I’m not Harold Shand, cogs whirring, frantically trying to make sense of how I got here, powerless to change anything. And yet the image keeps coming back to me all the same.

In terms of things I have been able to control, I’ve had a necessarily quiet year of film-watching. I’ve wanted to disengage a little and just enjoy the things that I want to enjoy, without the noise, and broadly I’ve done that. I’m on pace to end the year with an average of about one film every two days, which, by any measure, is still far too much cinema, but it’s a start. It’s definitely been nice to ease off and do other things with my time. In saying that, though, I’ve still been to all the usual festivals: Berlin in February, Edinburgh in August, London and Vienna in October; each one equal parts fun and frustrating in its own way, but I’ve enjoyed them all to varying extents. I’m starting to wonder whether this part of my life is winding down a little. As much fun as it is to lose myself in a city for the sake of cinema, the festival experience isn’t as exciting to me now as it was a few years ago. Maybe I’m becoming too familiar with these places. I’m quite keen to go somewhere else in the new year.

In September, I spent a weekend in Christchurch watching a dozen or so horror movies on 35mm at Grindfest. I’m by no means a film purist, and I still don’t know why I decided to go to this in the first place, but seeing great movies like John Carpenter’s The Thing and Tobe Hooper’s Lifeforce, and deranged oddities like Brian Trenchard-Smith’s Dead End Drive-In and Stephen Carpenter and Jeffrey Obrow’s The Kindred, on a big screen with a hyper-engaged audience was a lot of fun, to say the least. Elsewhere, the jarring double-feature of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Tropical Malady and Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma at the BFI on a Saturday evening in January was a real joy, as was seeing Akira Kurosawa’s Dersu Uzala for the first time in a decade at the same cinema a month later, on 70mm no less. I didn’t get up to London as much as I’d like to have done this year, so other highlights are thin on the ground, but in September I left work early and jumped on the train for a surprise screening at the Prince Charles that turned out to be John Sayles’ Lone Star. I wish I did spontaneous things like this more often. I knew absolutely nothing about the film, even after the surprise was revealed, and found it to be a wonderful, knotty piece of work about, of course, and among other things, an unexpected challenge to an already accepted reality. Everything can change and sometimes it does.

This is a sentiment that has echoed through the films that have moved me the most from the year. Unexpected challenges to reality. I’m thinking about the forest fires burning elsewhere and getting closer in Afire. The lost memories of a man’s past played back to him on a cinema screen in an incomprehensible present in Close Your Eyes. An actress’s sudden realisation that her attempts to understand the complexity of the woman she’s playing in a movie have been nothing more than shallow mimicry and tickbox research in May December. An anguished scream towards a stolen future in The Beast. And, most specifically of all, a young boy’s reckoning with the fact that taking control of the chaos of his life will not save him from it in The Boy and the Heron. It’s a matter of finding a way to live with your own reality, not as it ought to be, not as it used to be, but as it is now. And then life can go on.

And I think that’s where I find myself in December: looking back on a year of letting life in. Maybe that’s why The Long Good Friday has stayed with me. Not so much for its bleakness, but for the simple fact that I’m not a passenger in my own life like Harold Shand. As turbulent and chaotic and messy and sad as this year has been in places, I feel better than ever for pushing through it. Everything can change and sometimes it does. I’m finally somewhere close to where I want to be. Let’s see what 2024 holds.

In alphabetical order:

Afire | Christian Petzold
The Beast | Bertrand Bonello
The Boy And The Heron | Hayao Miyazaki
Close Your Eyes | Victor Erice
Do Not Expect Too Much From The End of The World | Radu Jude
Evil Does Not Exist | Ryusuke Hamaguchi
Following The Sound | Kyoshi Sugita
Here | Bas Devos
Last Summer | Catherine Breillat
May December | Todd Haynes
Music | Angela Schanelec
Oppenheimer | Christopher Nolan
__________

Some discoveries from a scattershot year. Scattershot by design, I think, in the sense that I’ve started to just watch anything regardless of how much context I have for it. I feel like I’ve been accidentally limiting myself over the past couple of years by focusing on the filmmaker rather than the films, so I’m not doing that anymore. Watching movies really shouldn’t be that complicated. I don’t need to see the deep-cuts of directors I don’t really care about before moving on to other things. Who cares!

In alphabetical order:

Bend of the River | Anthony Mann, 1952
Daisy Kenyon | Otto Preminger, 1947
Four Nights of a Dreamer | Robert Bresson, 1971
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes | Howard Hawks, 1953
The Heiress | William Wyler, 1949
The Long Good Friday | John Mackenzie, 1980
La Recta Provincia | Raul Ruiz, 2007
The Shop Around The Corner | Ernst Lubitsch, 1940
Trust | Hal Hartley, 1990
Violent Saturday | Richard Fleischer, 1955
__________

A musical snapshot. Ten albums: five new, five old; all of which were new to me, and all of which have hit me pretty hard at some point in the past year. I think I’m too close to know what this list says about me, if it says anything at all, but I’m sure I’ll make more sense of it one way or another in a year or two. Or maybe it’s just a list of ten albums I like.

In alphabetical order:

After The Magic | Parannoul, 2023
A Promise | Xiu Xiu, 2003
The Disintegration Loops | William Basinski, 2002-2003
Halos of Perception | Lisa Lerkenfeldt, 2023
Javelin | Sufjan Stevens, 2023
The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We | Mitski, 2023
Paper Airplanes, Paper Hearts | Everyone Asked About You, 1997-2000
Smoochy | Ryuichi Sakamoto, 1995
Transatlanticism | Death Cab For Cutie, 2003
trip9love…??? | Tirzah, 2023
__________

I relaunched my newsletter a couple of months ago. It’s called Strange Days, and so far I’ve been framing it as a round-up of what I’ve been doing over the past month. It’s mostly film, of course, but I’ve also written about a Yoshitomo Nara exhibition and Super Mario Bros. Wonder, too. I don’t know how it’s going to evolve in 2024 but for now I’m having a great time with it. You can sign up here if you’d like to.
__________

If you've made it this far, or if you just scrolled to the bottom, I hope you have a wonderful festive season. Speak soon.

Tuesday 28 November 2023

The Lineup | Don Siegel, 1958

The Lineup | Don Siegel, 1958

Two circles on a calendar. Yesterday and tomorrow. Yesterday, a man died after stealing a bag and crashing a cab in San Francisco, but nobody knows why. Two detectives investigate and trade in fragments of information, one clue leading to another, and another, and slowly the pieces begin to fit together. Tomorrow comes, and two men in grey suits, one calm, collected, methodical, the other wild, dangerous, impulsive, arrive in the city and yesterday's version of events becomes prophetic. A carefully laid plan unfolds as these men go about their business in the shadows. But tomorrow was always going to come. The boats and planes of yesterday become today’s aquariums and museums. Information trickles back to the detectives. Time ticks by and the cage closes in. And then the road runs out.

Friday 6 October 2023

The Perfect Kiss | Jonathan Demme, 1985




New Order: The Perfect Kiss | Jonathan Demme, 1985

It would be tempting, perhaps seductively so, to shoot a Talking Heads live show from multiple angles and train every camera on David Byrne. His sudden jerks and lurches and twitches never fail to catch the eye, as they should, but with Stop Making Sense, Jonathan Demme is solely interested in capturing the totality of this performance, and this band, and these songs, and these people. Byrne’s unstoppably jagged charisma is a huge part of this, running laps of the stage, dancing with a floor lamp, performing in an enormous grey business suit, but it’s just one layer of dozens, each happening at the same time in the same place in total harmony. The alchemy of live music. Even split into its constituent parts and pieced back together, it’s impossible to see how it all comes together.

A year later, Demme took a similar approach with his music video for New Order’s single The Perfect Kiss, shot in the band’s practice room in Manchester as they perform the song from start to finish. The video cuts between close-ups of each member individually, either playing their instruments or waiting to play them, with the camera mostly trained on their faces. Demme isolates each person in a frame of their own and emphasises their individual contribution to the song: Bernard Sumner singing and playing guitar and hitting a cowbell; Gillian Gilbert and Stephen Morris turning the dials and pressing the keys of various synthesisers; Peter Hook playing a bass riff and hitting some drum pads. Each close-up underlines a certain sound visually as a single layer among dozens of others, created by one of four people and their instruments, and by focusing on the means by which these layers are constructed, Demme finds the same thing he found in Stop Making Sense: that music is alchemical. It’s water into wine, lead into gold. It’s a thousand individual noises thrown together to create something dense and magic and unknowable. 

Sunday 24 September 2023

Frantic | Roman Polanski, 1988


Frantic | Roman Polanski, 1988

A missing piece. A photo kept in the wallet of a family man, taken in San Francisco and now cut into pieces in Paris. The face of a smiling woman removed, cut out with scissors and taken by police for an investigation into her disappearance, or her kidnapping, or maybe nothing at all. The remains of the photo are given back to the man who provided it, who treasured it enough to take it across the Atlantic in his wallet, and all he can do is take it and keep looking for the person who completes the picture, an ocean removed from where it was taken. A family’s happiness remains frozen in time, a world away from the present, but now the absence overwhelms the joy. A square hole in place of a face, a photo that will never mean what it once did. A treasured memory doomed by the present and lost to the future. A ghost.

Monday 28 August 2023

Edinburgh International Film Festival 2023 | #1

Edinburgh Film Festival 2023 | #1

When I first went to the Edinburgh International Film Festival in 2018, it was June and the city was calm and quiet, and I remember feeling as if the crowds that built up around the Royal Mile and the Grassmarket were easy to slip away from, and some peace was never too far away. It’s been five turbulent years since then, and the festival is now held two months later in the year, in August, competing for space against a seemingly endless array of other festivals that all seem to take place in the city during the same four-week period in the summer. The calm and quiet of my first visit was this time replaced by near-total chaos, with every hideaway, every park, every alleyway filled with dozens and dozens of people gathered around to see something happen. Anything. A didgeridoo beatboxer opposite the entrance to Edinburgh Castle. A sword-swallower laying on a bed of nails outside the Scottish National Gallery. A toilet-paper juggler standing atop a precarious stack of IKEA tables in Princes Street Gardens. A hyperactive dancer performing a J-pop medley near the Palace of Holyroodhouse. A city so stacked with music and dance and performance at this time of year that it overflows from the bars and pubs and clubs and out into the cobbled streets and beyond. In August, everyone in Edinburgh seems to be outside and standing still, stuck endlessly in one place, watching and listening.

I’m not sure how cinema is supposed to contend with such mayhem, such an overwhelming array of louder options, and yet here we are. In the face of such congestion, and following the sudden collapse into administration of the Centre for the Moving Image, the operator of the festival, in October last year, the Edinburgh International Film Festival is somehow still here, holding firm, bringing cinema to the city once again. This is my fourth visit to the festival, but the first in which I’ve had to contend with the full cacophony of Edinburgh in August. In the five days I was in town, I saw 12 films: eight new features, three from the retrospective, and one, Christian Petzold’s Afire, that I’d already seen in Berlin and was curious to revisit. Even just a few months ago, it seemed as if the festival would never happen again. I was very glad to be there for its rebirth.

Among the necessarily truncated programme of feature films on offer this year, I was most excited to see Laura Citarella’s Trenque Lauquen, the latest work to emerge from El Pampero Cine, the production company and artist collective behind, among many others, Mariano Llinás’s La Flor and the work of Alejo Moguillansky. Trenque Lauquen is a two-part, four-hour mosaic about Laura, a mystery-loving botanist and part-time radio host, whose sudden disappearance baffles the men in her life, Chicho, a colleague, and Rafa, her boyfriend, both of whom are in love with her, and sets them on a meandering cross-country search to find her, or, at least, to find their own version of her. These two men drive from town to town, asking questions, following leads, and eventually hitting a dead end, before moving on to the next town down the road, again and again, searching in vain for some trace of Laura. Citarella frames this story in a dozen or so chapters, presented out of order, beginning with Rafa and Chicho’s search and gradually recontextualising it with new information and new obsessions: a mystery involving letters hidden in the pages of library books; a search for an unclassified species of orchid; a conspiracy surrounding a mysterious creature washed up on the shores of a lake. Time passes, and the film continues to shift and deepen, taking on layers of new detail that serve to cast a shadow over everything that came before. For Citarella, understanding is a futile game. Instead, Trenque Lauquen is a film about the limits of comprehension. Both Rafa and Chicho have decided that the Laura they know and love is the real version of Laura, whatever that means, when really the person they know only a small part of who she is. If they really knew everything about her, they’d know where she was. As with all the letters Laura found in the library books, it’s both easy and satisfying to take a set of (potentially incomplete) clues and use them to piece together a likely version of events, but that can never capture the totality of a story, a history, a life. It’s impossible to have all the facts, all the contexts, motivations. It’s impossible to truly know someone. All you can get is the version you’re most willing to believe in while the mysteries remain unsolved in the margins.

I’d be surprised if I see many films this year that have the same density and commitment to mystery as Trenque Lauquen, and while that wasn’t something I was particularly hoping for from the rest of the programme, the tidiness of some of the festival’s biggest titles seemed at odds with much of what made Citarella’s film so interesting to me. Both Ira Sachs’s Passages and Celine Song’s Past Lives feel dulled by the restrictive care with which their triangular relationships are constructed, and the inevitability with which they evolve and develop, while the ferocity of Daniel Bandeira’s Property, a survival thriller in which a farm-owner’s wife is trapped inside an armoured car after the workers take violent revenge after years of exploitation, is cheapened by the suspension of logic in key dramatic moments. Christian Petzold’s wonderful film Afire, on the other hand, is anything but obvious, and takes a similar approach to Trenque Lauquen, with a careful accumulation of information serving to disprove a solipsistic author’s assumptions about the world around him and force him, for better or for worse, to engage with the realities of his life. But of everything else at the festival, perhaps most interesting of all was Kelly Reichardt’s Showing Up, a film actively fighting against restriction at every turn, and one that, somewhat belatedly, received its first UK screening here eighteen months after its premiere in Cannes.

Showing Up follows a week or so in the life of Lizzy, a sculptor and administrative assistant in Portland preparing for a solo exhibition of her work in a small gallery in the city. As the week progresses, Lizzy has to deal with the distractions of her day-to-day life as she tries to prioritise the completion of her own work: a hungry cat, her tense relationships with her separated parents and reclusive brother, the care required to nurse an injured pigeon back to health, the lack of hot water in her apartment, and her landlord, friend, and fellow artist’s refusal to help her as she prepares her own work for exhibition. These inconveniences serve as an incessant attack on Lizzy’s ability to create, but never malevolently so. It’s all just a symptom of the world in which she lives, a world that allows her to live the life she wants, but doesn’t necessarily value her work or respect her desire to create it. Reichardt contrasts Lizzy’s life with other people’s perceptions of success and talent around her, but never towards her: her friend and landlord is staging two celebrated shows at the same time; her increasingly detached brother is seen by her parents as a misunderstood genius while they seem to have no opinion of her work at all. Even her workplace, the Oregon College of Art and Craft, seems to be against her, with several cut-aways showing students given the space and time to develop their art in their own way without the burden of responsibility, while Lizzy, no longer a student, is only able to give the required time to her work at home, and is only able to use the kiln at the college, a required tool in the completion of her sculptures, with the assistance and permission of a colleague. And yet she keeps working because that’s what she wants to do. It’s worth it for Lizzy. Showing Up is about finding ways to do what you love, and to go and make it happen in spite of every possible reason not to. The art itself can be angry on your behalf, as it should be, but it has to be there to begin with. It has to exist. If ever there was an ethos for the new-look Edinburgh International Film Festival, it would have to be something like that.

Tuesday 8 August 2023

Oppenheimer | Christopher Nolan, 2023

Oppenheimer | Christopher Nolan, 2023

“Algebra’s like sheet music. The important thing isn’t can you read music, it’s can you hear it. Can you hear the music, Robert?” 

Or how the music becomes a cacophony. A film in which brilliance is a given and reputations precede men, and men alone, as they tend to be, in such a way as to anonymise rather than idolise, a hive of brilliant minds in service of the same goal, the same idea, the same breakthrough. Barked surnames, brief handshakes, numbers on badges. A collective effort led by one man, alone. A man who looks at a Picasso portrait, fragmented, vibrant and pensive, and sees himself, like Hanna and McAuley see themselves in each other in Heat. Only this painting is a mirror, not a table in a diner. J. Robert Oppenheimer is the father of the atomic bomb, the man who moved the Earth. A man longing to be looked upon by the world for his genius and not his creation, for the science over the war, for the success of the test over the horrors of its weaponization. And so the work continues. Men gather around chalkboards like students, frantically writing impenetrable equations and batting around ideas, as Oppenheimer, the wild hair and wide eyes of youth now lost to the weight of the world, looks on and listens, orchestrating the room and pushing its occupants towards the scientific breakthrough to come. And it does come, eventually, and the looming nightmare of losing an arms race with the Nazis fades away, replaced instead by the reality of a perilous new world on a knife-edge. Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb, the man who moved the earth, can barely handle the weight of his creation. The energy of his youth and the ferocity of his work have slowly rotted away, revealing a sluggish, sickly tiredness, and half-hearted plays for pity drawn out by incessant, self-flagellating cross-examinations in courtrooms across America. The atomic bomb has been fathered. The world has been moved. There’s nothing left to do but justify the actions of the past, again and again, as they echo into the future, in the vain hope that people might somehow understand. Oppenheimer is a man whose life is now open to interpretation, out of his control, left to others to form their own opinions. A cubist figure of history, perhaps, fragmented, vibrant and pensive, laden with a legacy that bears no resemblance to the man he imagines himself to be as time ticks by beyond him, marching ceaselessly towards a new world of his creation and even further beyond it. Of course, he closes his eyes.

Thursday 15 June 2023

Bend of the River | Anthony Mann, 1952


Bend of the River | Anthony Mann, 1952

Wagons in the mountains. Two men whose reputations precede them in certain circles are thrust together by chance on the trail, far from home, each looking for a new life somewhere else. McLyntock is leading a group of farmers to Oregon to build a new town, and Cole is travelling to California in search of gold. Cole tags along for a while and a kinship emerges between the two ex-raiders. Their journey is tough. Distance is marked by days and the wagons are fragile and the sun is hot and the horses are tired and the trail is jagged and steep and fraught with dangers, and yet they go on. The dream persists. Meanwhile, gold is found nearby and the world changes in a season. The clash of ideals between these men, previously unspoken and undisruptive, is projected untenably onto a once quiet town poisoned by new money. The old deals are not today’s deals. Nobody is safe without a gun and bargains are made with money and without trust. But distance is still measured in days. The trail is still fraught with dangers. For men like Cole, the risks taken for riches are worth the reward, no matter the cost. For men like McLyntock, nothing has more value than one’s word to other people. Like the trail, that hasn't changed. And so the dream persists.

Saturday 1 April 2023

Me, Myself & Irene | Bobby & Peter Farrelly, 2000




Me, Myself & Irene | Bobby & Peter Farrelly, 2000

Monday 6 March 2023

Berlin Film Festival 2023

Berlin Film Festival 2023 | #1

In Yui Kiyohara’s Remembering Every Night, three women separately spend a quiet summer’s day wandering the streets of Tama New Town, a 1960s housing development built quickly on the outskirts of Tokyo to provide homes for people flocking to the city for work, with apartment blocks, green spaces, and public amenities repeated over and over for miles on end. Chizu, in her forties, tries to find the house of an old friend she’s long since lost touch with; Sanae, in her thirties, helps an elderly man find his way home as she does her rounds as a gas meter reader; and Natsu, in her twenties, dances in the park and goes to a museum, before tracking down some photographs taken by an old friend. These relatively mundane but nonetheless important day-to-day activities are conducted independently, but in fleeting moments throughout the day the women cross paths, wordlessly seeing each other from afar before moving off again in a different direction, and their separate lives continue without interruption. The idea of a long and frustrating search is one that Kiyohara seems interested in exploring here. Deep, typically static wide-shots frame these women firmly in the context of their surroundings and the languid editing keeps them in the same place for a long time, with occasional panning to follow them as they move around the town’s many pathways. The town itself, virtually deserted on this particular day, is something of a labyrinth given its endless uniformity, and its residents comment that it can be hard to find things. There’s a sense that each of these women is stuck in one way or another, and trying to find some way to move forward with their life. And it’s only ever a sense, a barely perceptible shift in tone inferred by gestures, glances, spaces; small moments that barely break the surface before fading away again. The great subtlety of Kiyohara’s filmmaking is in the quiet and beautiful accumulation of these inferences. Time passes, and everything and nothing has changed. Life goes on.

Set entirely within a secluded hotel in northern Portugal over the course of a chilly weekend, João Canijo’s double-feature Mal Viver and Viver Mal, two different but complementary angles of the same time, the same place, and the same characters, observe a variety of bitter and destructive relationships as they begin to unravel under the pressures of living in close proximity to one another. Mal Viver focuses on five women from different generations of the same family who live and work in this hotel, while Viver Mal follows three separate sets of guests whose own conflicts come to the fore during their stays. Each film has a different focal point, yet most of the events are shown in some way in both, but from different perspectives. An argument presented in detail in one film might be overheard from afar in the other, and characters regularly appear in other people’s stories. After all, this hotel is both a private and public space. A place in which people are either pulled together in small rooms or pushed out into the semi-privacy of communal swimming pools and dining rooms. There’s nowhere to escape from each other in this hotel, and the forced intimacy inflicted upon these people creates a perfect storm in which any and all problems are magnified and exacerbated, permeating outwards in such a way as to feed to the overall culture of hostility that lingers over the building. Mirrors and windows often reveal shadowy figures lurking in the background, watching and listening in places they shouldn’t be occupying. Balconies, open doors, and thin walls, architectural devices designed to provide a semblance of privacy in a public space that are prone to the threat of prying eyes and pricked ears. Even if there’s nobody around, the possibility of being watched or overheard can never be discounted, and so the anxiety builds and builds. Canijo, a truly great architect of space and tone, constructs a location that catalyses the breakdown of these already fragile relationships, and observes as everything between these people is laid bare and weaponised. A balloon that keeps inflating, far past the point of no return. Bad living, indeed.

Christian Petzold’s Afire follows four young people thrust together by chance for the summer in a holiday home in northern Germany. Leon, a writer, is trying to finish a novel, while his friend Felix, whose parents own the house, is working on a photography portfolio. Nadja, a colleague of Felix’s mother, is staying in the house too, and spends her nights with Devid, a local lifeguard. As time passes, Leon becomes increasingly irritated by the others and struggles to write as his deadline approaches, never able to satiate his desire for solitude, while everyone else enjoys their time together, even as the spectre of wildfires burning nearby grows larger and larger. Leon is a person who looks without seeing, stuck inside his own head. He never asks questions that he doesn’t think he knows the answers to and he has no desire to spend time with his housemates, preferring to be left alone to write. Petzold repeatedly creates images of the ideal summer and finds ways to restrict them, focusing on their potential dangers as opposed to their capacity for relaxation. The picturesque path from the cottage to the beach runs along a crumbling cliff-edge. A night sleeping under the stars is made impossible by bug-bites. A quiet drive along an empty country road is disrupted by engine trouble, forcing the passengers to take a shortcut through the forest as night descends. All of this reflects Leon’s inability to comprehend the world as it really is, and sits in contrast to how the others live their lives. Where Nadja could listen to a song on her earbuds and whistle the tune when she’s not, Leon wears black jeans and a heavy backpack to the beach. He never sees life on anything but his own terms, and nothing plays out as he expects it to. By shutting down the possibility for surprise, Leon is oblivious to everything that he wants to find. Petzold finds great sadness in Leon, a writer looking for life while simultaneously ignoring it, and ultimately Afire is a film about the need to confront life head-on. To find a way to let life in before it’s too late, not just for the creation of meaningful art, but for the sake of the connections we have with the people in our lives, and the relationships we one day wish to forge.

Monday 6 February 2023

Knock at the Cabin | M. Night Shyamalan, 2023

Knock at the Cabin | M. Night Shyamalan, 2023

M. Night Shyamalan started making movies in the wrong era. Following the critical and commercial successes of The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable, the earnestness of his work from 2002-2008 played at odds with the rising tide of hero-worship and militarism in popular American cinema post 9/11. The solutions in Shyamalan’s films cannot be brute forced with violence, but discovered; everything is masked in smoke and mirrors, and power dynamics emerge from a lack of information: the arrival of aliens in Signs, the secrets kept by the elders in The Village, the blind faith required in Lady in the Water, the reasons for the collapse of society in The Happening. The so-called “twist” endings for which Shyamalan became known are not so much tricks as revelations. The fog lifts, and withheld information is able to be processed and understood, if not always by the characters then by the viewer, in such a way as to show a path to some kind of future by recontextualising everything that came before. Education is everything.

Following a strange decade in the 2010s, from The Last Airbender to Glass, Shyamalan returned to high-concept original drama with 2021’s Old, in which several holidaymakers find themselves trapped on a secluded beach that inexplicably accelerates the ageing process. Old similarly relies on an absence of information to drive its narrative, but unlike these previous works, the final pull-back of the curtain doesn’t reveal the machinations of this beach, but rather the exploitation of these machinations by higher forces. There’s nothing here that can be overcome or understood. For this new era for Shyamalan, comprehension isn’t always enough.

And that brings us to Knock at the Cabin, a film about the limits of comprehension, in which a young family is tied up in a holiday cabin by four armed strangers and told they must sacrifice one of their own to stop the apocalypse. The key absence here is proof that any of this is really happening. The strangers believe that it is but the family have no reason to believe them, and the dramatic thrust of the film is the tension between these two viewpoints as new information is brought to light. A well-timed breaking news report is both proof of the end of the world and a convenient coincidence, and the revelation that these strangers found each other on an online message board is both divine intervention and evidence of a shared delusion. Information can be disputed to serve any purpose, and everyone remains at an impasse as long as doubt exists. If information is not enough, it’s a matter of finding another way to connect. An act of faith, of trust, of love; even a sacrifice. For Shyamalan, there has to be some way to move forward, whatever the cost.

And yet, with Old, and now with Knock at the Cabin, there’s a growing sense in Shyamalan's work of what these characters have lost, or what they have to give up, in order to get to such a point. Both of these films end with a broken family moving towards an uncertain future, and while it's true that a sliver of hope does endure, that there is a future to move into, it’s one poisoned by lost time.