Review: Promising Young Woman

  

Putting this candy-coloured take on the way sexual abuse can sour a life seems like the dictionary definition of counter-programming during the holidays. But this aggressively provoking film – in which Cassandra (Carey Mulligan) becomes a #metoo vigilante – is close enough to a traditional superhero / revenge film to feel like a much-needed corrective to the usual holiday action thrill-rides.

 

By day 30 year-old Cassandra (Carey Mulligan) seems to be wasting her life, working a dead-end customer service job and living with her puzzled parents: by night she goes out, pretends to be drunk, and waits for “nice guys” to try and pick her up. They get more than what they bargained for; eventually, so does the audience.

 

The usual payback thrills from this kind of film are here but this has more on its mind than just sweet revenge. Cassandra’s backstory is slowly filled in to become a hard-hitting look at the way abuse can derail a life, and just how difficult it can be to get back on track - especially when everyone on that track is acting like it never happened and even if it did, was it really so bad?

 

This never questions the necessity of her actions, but it's doesn't exactly revel in them. Cassandra's character is too well developed for this to remain the one-note vigilante thriller it initially seems to promise, and her mission of vengeance has just enough nuance to keep things uncomfortable. 

 

Not every step here is as sure-footed as it could be (the ending manages to be satisfyingly uplifting on a thematic level while remaining grimly downbeat in its specifics) and Mulligan's exhaustive, exhausting performance carries things more than it should, but there's more than enough verve here to get it across the line in style.

 

The casting of a steady stream of dreamboat TV stars (Adam Brody, Max Greenfield, Christopher Mintz-Plasse) as the parade of creeps Cassandra encounters are the candles on this brightly iced cake, playing characters so similar to their starring roles you’ll wonder why you never realised they were scum all along.

 

 

- Anthony Morris

 

 

 

Review: Another Round

Martin (Mads Mikkelson) is in a rut. A high school teacher who's boring his students, a married man who barely speaks to his wife, he's drifting through life, the promise of his younger years long gone. Then at a birthday party with three friends - all of whom share his sense of a life slipping away - one of them comes up with an idea: why not get drunk and stay drunk all the time?

Thanks to a fairly dubious-sounding theory that people are born with an alcohol deficiency and the natural blood alcohol content for a human is .05%, the quartet embark on an experiment that largely involves stashing booze all around the school and topping themselves up whenever they can. 

And for a while it works. Sure, they reek of alcohol, their hidden booze keeps getting discovered, and the occasional slurred word and stumble threatens to give the game away - but they feel more alive and engaged than they have in years, and their work and home lives are on the way up. Until they aren't.

As a low stakes look at middle age despondency this isn't quite as grim as it could be, but there's little denying the overall mood isn't so much "feel good" as "feel anything". These are men on the downhill slope of life, and while their boozy scheme does help them reconnect with the world around them, it's only ever a temporary solution.

It might seem obvious that things are going to come to a bad end - they're middle aged men drinking during the day; if this was a movie made in the west the demon drink would have them all dead and the school burnt down - but writer / director Thomas Vinterberg (The Hunt) underplays that angle in a way that highlights the many differences between Europe and the English-speaking world.

Here the men's problem isn't framed so much as drinking itself as it is that drinking - especially excessive drinking - is an activity for the young. The quartet's problem isn't so much the physical affects of drinking (though they definitely play their part) as it is their ultimately doomed attempt to recapture their youth. Some of them realise what's done is done and move on; some don't.

As a regular, average, beaten down schlub, Mikkelson hits the perfect balance of present-day depression and past potential. His former glories are behind him, but that doesn't mean he can't reach back and grasp them for a moment here and there, and it's hard not to cheer him onwards even when it's clear the path he's heading down can't end well - any movement is better than the numb stasis he's been in. 

The film doesn't exactly end on a sombre note, or a hopeful one, or even a combination of the two; rather it captures everything the film's said and releases it in a moment of pure expression that - whatever this film's other flaws - is one of the most striking and heartfelt conclusions seen in a long while.

 

- Anthony Morris

Review: Long Story Short

Time travel movies are all about agency. The fun comes from seeing someone moving outside the normal flow of time, and then using that to change things (or try to). It's not the actual traveling through time that's the hook (we all travel through time every day), it's what the characters do with that ability that keeps us watching. Long Story Short gets there, but it definitely takes its time.

Teddy (Rafe Spall) is a procrastinator. After he met current partner Leanne (Zahra Newman) by pashing her by mistake on New Year's Eve, their relationship has slowed to a crawl. It's been three years and he's only just proposed to her; when they're going to get married is anyone's guess. But when he's called out about it by a mysterious stranger (Noni Hazelhurst) - at his father's grave, no less - he's spurred into action... briefly.

The night of their wedding he's still putting things off (booking a honeymoon, mostly), when he stumbles across a strange wedding gift: a can that comes with a card reading "do not open for 10 years". He lies down to sleep, and when he wakes up in what he thinks is the next morning, it's actually a year later, Leanne is pregnant, and he starts freaking out.

The "freaking out' stage of the story goes on for longer than you might think, as Teddy barely gets time to find his bearings in one time before he's swept ahead another year. There's no time for any real forward planning; all he can do is take in the yearly updates on his life - and increasingly he's not happy with what he's hearing.

Thanks to some solid work from writer / director Josh Lawson, this feels like a much bigger film than it is. With a tiny cast (Ronny Chieng as Teddy's best mate is pretty much it) and a story that largely takes place in one apartment (don't worry, Teddy goes outside eventually) this still manages to feel like a full scale rom-com. The performers are a big plus too: both Spall and Newman are consistently entertaining as characters traveling in different directions in life.

The contrast between the two keeps the film watchable even when the story is running on rails. Spall's frantic panicking as a man in love who's seeing that love slip away (being flung through time might have something to do with it too) keeps the energy up, while Newman gets to be the more level-headed of the two while convincingly showing their relationship ebbing away.

As for the "running on rails" part. it gets pretty obvious where this is heading early on, and annoyingly Teddy has zero agency for most of this film - he can't influence events in any real way, as no sooner has he figured out what's going on that he's off again. How this must look to outsiders is never considered; he just goes a bit strange for a few minutes each wedding anniversary then snaps back.

There's a bit of an attempt to tie this all in with some personal growth for Teddy (putting things off and working too hard is bad), but his love for Leanne is never in doubt. The message here is basically "life's too short", which is fine as messages go but once you've said it you still have another 89 minutes left of movie to fill.

Long Story Short is basically too good-natured to have any real fun with the plight of its hero, with most of the comedy more about assuring the audience that the mood is going to stay light than scoring any real laughs. It's a slight story, but a charming one - just don't ask any questions about how they could possibly afford their Sydney beachside apartment.

- Anthony Morris

Review: The Little Things

It's the 1990s and a serial killer is on the loose. That sounds about right; the 1990s were a high point for serial killers in pop culture - Seven was a hit in 1995 - and though this script was first written in 1997 it makes sense to keep the action set back then. Serial killers aren't exactly a relic of the past, but we've got better things to worry about in 2021.

It also helps that we haven't seen a lot of serial killer movies lately (unless you're spending your time deep down the trashier end of the streaming services), because most of what The Little Things has to offer initially seems as stale as the contents of the first victim's fridge. 

A woman's been killed, and it looks like the latest crime from a repeat offender. Hotshot LA detective Jim Baxter (Rami Malek) is on the case, and mysteriously unpopular country deputy sheriff Joe Deacon (Denzel Washington) just happens to be hanging around his former workplace. Why sure, he'll take a look at the case if Jim asks nicely.

So far so buddy cop, though already there are a few questions. Why does (almost) everyone at his old job seem to hate Deacon? Why is Baxter so keen (well, slightly keen) to have him check out the case? And why is Deacon sticking around when he should be heading home - oh wait, it's because this case looks an awful lot like the unsolved string of murders that led to him having a heart attack and getting a divorce and leaving the force for a quiet job in the country.

Writer / director John Lee Hancock (The Blind Side, The Founder) keeps the writing and visuals workmanlike, which means for a while this gets by almost entirely thanks to the presence of Washington and Malek. They're both legit movie stars with charisma to burn (news flash) and while neither is being particularly challenged here they're both skillful actors who can do a lot with a little. 

And a little is what you get here; even the murder details are fairly tame, and while a creepy opening sequence goes some way towards establishing the killer's menace, our cops are clearly not up against any kind of murder mastermind.

So it makes sense that Albert Sparma (Jared Leto) turns out to be their prime suspect, because the thing that makes him their prime suspect is that he wanders around acting like a serial killer. But is he really a killer or just a wannabe who's being played by an actor hamming it up like crazy and sticking his gut out like he's pretending to be pregnant? Looks like they're going to have to go outside the law to get the proof they know is just out of reach.

If it's not already obvious, once you look past the performances much of this solidly competent film is fairly by-the-numbers, and how much you enjoy it is going to rely more than usual on whether you think it sticks the ending. The good news is, it's an ending that goes some way towards elevating what's come before - it even, in a somewhat blunt way, goes some way towards explaining why you'd make such a pro-cop movie (they're lone heroes taking down an evil that society is powerless against!) in 2021. 

It won't keep you up at night - it probably won't keep you thinking once you get home - but it does provide a decent update to what otherwise seems like a generic salute to the 1990s, when being murdered in your bed by a deranged maniac following some creepy ritualistic pattern was about as scary as it got.

 

- Anthony Morris