Double feature: Ride Like a Girl & Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark

  

Ride Like a Girl's retelling of the Michelle Payne story only asks one thing of its audience: that they have no questions at all about why someone would constantly risk their life riding racehorses under bad conditions and with worse pay. While this covers all the main details of the life of the first woman to ride a Melbourne Cup winner – nine siblings, all equally as horse-mad thanks to their single dad (Sam Neill) and their horse farm upbringing, a life-long obsession with riding despite the horse-racing death of one of her sisters and a near-fatal accident herself – the one question it never comes close to answering is the only question that matters: why? 

Teresa Palmer as Michelle Payne is always convincing – though not as convincing as Stevie Payne, who plays her brother Stevie Payne – and the story often hits the right notes on a scene-by-scene basis as she battles the odds and entrenched sexism (which this film doesn't dig into as much as you might have expected - it often feels like it's tip-toeing around issues to keep the racing industry on-side) to make her dream come true. But Payne herself remains something of a cypher, a character whose fierce drive is taken for granted and never examined or explained. Without that human element, this is just a list of her real-life achievements, and no matter how well they’re told the story remains hollow at heart.

There’s been a lot of horror at the movies aimed at kids (well, older kids) in recent years, but Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark is the first high profile film to admit what’s been obvious for a while now: if you leave out the gore (and the sex, but every mainstream movie leaves out the sex these days), horror movies are suitable for all ages. Based on a popular but infamous series of children’s books which retold a series of generic horror tales, this adds a framing device involving a dead girl, a haunted house, a book that writes itself (“you don’t read the book… the book reads you”) and a late 60s setting that’s solidly realised but doesn’t really add much to the scares beyond a lot of mentions of Richard Nixon and Vietnam. 

The four teens who accidentally stumble onto the evil book and unleash its power are good in that Stranger Things / It way that seems to be the default for horror at the moment, while the actual scary scenes where the monsters come out to play are universally well done, featuring both creepy imagery and decent jump scares. Yes, the sequel door is left open; there’s plenty more scary stories to tell.

- Anthony Morris