Review: Companion

Companion is one of those movies with a big, story-changing twist at the end of act one, and you can tell that while the film makers thought it would be a big mind-blowing shock, the publicity department went "yeah, this is how we're going to get people in to see this movie".

You can't blame them - there's no point in your movie having a great twist if nobody is going to go see it, and without knowing the twist there's not a lot obviously going on you can sell Companion with. But it does mean that talking about the movie in any kind of detail is going to require spoilers, which is a shame because the reveal is a pretty good one (even if wikipedia does give it away).

Without spoiling anything then, here's what you need to know: Josh (Jack Quaid) and Iris (Sophie Thatcher) are heading out to a fancy cabin in the woods for a getaway weekend with friends. Kat (Megan Suri) is friends with Josh, not a fan of Iris, and is the mistress of Sergey (Rupert Friend) a dodgy Russian businessman who owns the house (and everything around it, including a lake). 

Also staying are Patrick (Lucas Gage) and Eli (Harvey Guillen), who get to watch on as Sergey hits on Iris and generally sleazes up the place. Kat doesn't seem to be having all that much fun either. The vibes are bad; it doesn't take long to realise there's a good reason for that.

Last paragraph without spoilers, so: what follows is more of a "crime scheme gone wrong" thriller than a "cabin in the woods" slasher, though there are a few gory moments. Some characters turn out to be arseholes, some are more decent than they seem, some don't stick around long enough to go either way. It's fun rather than edge-of-your-seat gripping, though there are a number of good twists and once it gets going it doesn't slow down: it's like a lightweight Fargo where you cheer on the character you'd least suspect.

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Okay: Iris is a robot, and she's been jailbreaked to do something she's not meant to (not sex, she's all good in that department) so Josh can get something he wants. Once she's done what he wants, she's disposable: the rest of the film is about her trying to protect her off switch, only because she's a robot there are ways to hit that switch beyond just shooting her - and in fact, because Josh needs the whole thing to look like an accident, he has to shut her down like you would any other malfunctioning item. No suspicious bullet holes or tire marks.

It's a smart tweak to an otherwise familiar genre, and it allows the story to go all-in on Josh's barely concealed misogyny. It's not robo-shaming - there are other plot elements that make it clear that robot-human love is just fine so long as you're not an abusive whiny creep - and it makes for a nice explanation as to why Kat dislikes Iris. Gold-digging girlfriends are going to have a tough time competing with sexbots, after all.

Writer / director Drew Hancock has come up with a solid noir thriller that's also a smart science fiction story (though don't expect any examination of how sexbots have changed wider society - the action here stays very close to home) with a touch of horror mixed in. It's a tight, exciting ninety minutes, but what really lifts it over the top are the performances.

Quaid artfully walks the line between caring boyfriend and thoughtless creep at first, then goes all in when the extent of his boorish selfishness is revealed; Thatcher all but carries the film as she goes from loving partner to scared victim to determined survivor. She makes every step of Iris' wild emotional (yes, really) journey seem plausible - which is in no way reassuring for anyone watching who might be in the market for a sexbot in a few years time.

- Anthony Morris

Review: The Brutalist

Epic both in scope and run time, The Brutalist is one of those rare recent films that gets bigger the more you think about it. It's taking on territory largely ceded to television drama: it's often expected that they'll take the time to attempt to suggest a world beyond their immediate events, while movies are now required to zoom in and burrow down. Which this also does, though perhaps not in the most obvious ways.

The story of Laszlo Toth (Adrien Brody), a former and future architect who flees Europe in the wake of World War II for a new life in America, a big part of what makes The Brutalist work so well (aside from its many obvious virtues) is the way it picks and chooses which questions to pose and which ones to answer. The two groups do not always overlap.

Initially staying with relatives, Toth has a wife (Felicity Jones) he left behind but cannot bring over. American capitalism has no use for his skills, and he slides from furniture design to manual labour. It's not entirely luck that brings him to the attention of wealthy businessman Harrison Van Buren (Guy Pearce), but he soon finds himself with a major commission: to build a massive, possibly unwanted, community center (no to a pool, yes to a church) as a memorial to Van Buren's very much loved mother.

The stage is set for a seemingly predictable clash between art and commerce, but director Brady Corbet is working with characters, not types; Toth has a vision but also a temper, and while he knows that working with clients is a vital part of his job he doesn't suffer fools. Van Buren knows enough to stay out of Toth's way - at least some of the time - but it gradually becomes clear that as far as he's concerned he is the real genius for being canny enough to hire Toth, and respect should flow accordingly. 

Things develop in ways both surprising and inevitable. Toth's family is reunited, a drug problem he developed during tough times continues to lurk, cost-cutting is an on-going threat to Toth's vision and Van Buren's veneer of genial civility is at times only loosely attached. 

An intermission (the film flies by, despite the three and a half hour run time) provides the opportunity for a time-jump; reality continues to grind away at dreams. Building to an ending that's both satisfying and haunting - and then with a coda that recontextualizes much of what we've seen, even as it raises new questions of its own - this is as soundly constructed a film as one of Toth's own creations. 

The visuals are constantly striking; the barren hilltop that's the site of Van Buren's memorial speaks volumes, while even smaller locations evoke mid-century America in all its grime and bustle. The performances are uniformly excellent, though while Brody is the constant focus it's Pearce's 90% charming Van Buren that lingers, a man solidly built around a pinprick of rot.

Art and capitalism turn out to be entwined, but so is everything else. You can make your mark, but need someone else to explain it to the world. Hopefully they'll be sympathetic to your vision.

- Anthony Morris

Review: We Live in Time

Falling in love is enough to build a movie on, but if you want to talk about an actual relationship you need something more. We Live in Time brings two extras to the table: the story jumps around in time so we don't get to see things unfold in a linear fashion, and someone gets cancer. So a main character dies halfway through the film Pulp Fiction-style? Not quite.

Tobias (Andrew Garfield) is a wet sock of a man, a soft-spoken mid-level nobody at the Weetabix company whose wife has left him (mutual? yeah, right) but fortunately he looks like Andrew Garfield so there's still some hope.

Enter Almut (Florence Pugh), who is so firmly full of life that in another film she'd come close to be a manic pixie dream girl. Here she's one of the UK's top chefs - seriously, at one stage she's recruited to competitively cook for Britain - who knows what she wants and how to get it. Will that be Tobias? Let's wait and see.

This film's strengths are all the obvious ones. It looks like a slick coffee commercial - everyone lives in various forms of amazing homes and is impeccably dressed even when they're meant to be slumming it - and with Pugh and Garfield it has a main cast whose performances overwhelm the average material they're given. You'd watch them together in anything; unfortunately you're stuck watching them in this.

(if all you're after is attractive people in a slightly complicated relationship drifting through well-designed locations while events build to a bittersweet ending, you can stop reading now: We Live in Time delivers all those things in a pleasingly competent fashion)

Narratively the shuffling of scenes adds little to the storytelling. There's no point where the time jumps lead us astray, or provide a contrast that illuminates an aspect of the characters or their relationship. You'd assume it's happening to prevent this from being a traditional romance, only all the big moments - breakup, childbirth, serious news - come at the expected points in the film, so there's never any problem keeping track of things.

This kind of story is usually skewed towards one character or another (they can't both be right all the time), but this largely forgets to give Tobias any positive characteristics beyond being pitiable, while Almut is always right about everything (she dumps him for asking if their relationship has a future, and it's up to him to win her back) and is also so amazingly talented it's revealed towards the end she also had another secret world-class competitive skill only she gave it up because of a family tragedy and if she didn't have video proof you'd have to assume she was some kind of demented fantasist.

Just to make matters worse, the one thing Tobias does want out of the relationship, and that Almut comes around to agreeing to (ok, it's having children), also turns out to be the reason why there's a mention of cancer in the opening paragraph. It's literally the case that a doctor tells her if she doesn't have a procedure she'll almost certainly get cancer, but she knows if she does have the procedure Tobias will be very sad, and there's only so much of Garfield's hangdog expression one movie can stand.

Her storyline is messy in a way that's meant to suggest a strong personality but often just feels muddled, like she's a character that refuses to think anything through. He's little more than a prop, as soggy and shapeless as the products his company manufactures, a background character in his own life. It's not impossible to see them getting together - in a way it makes sense - but it results in a relationship it's hard to get invested in.

Put another way, they both deserve better. They might live in time, but despite a pair of charismatic performances, they're wasting it with each other.

- Anthony Morris

Review: Wolf Man

Leigh Whannell first made his name as co-creator of the Saw films, but in recent years his run of surprisingly effective small scale thrillers has threatened to overshadow his horror roots. 

Upgrade was pure science fiction; his creepy take on The Invisible Man was firmly grounded in technology. Wolf Man might continue his run with the classic Universal horror monsters, but it's also - a brief mention of a virus aside - a return to pure horror.

Blake (Christopher Abbott) grew up in the woods with an overprotective father, a man who, considering what might have been lurking in those woods, possibly had a good reason for his hair-trigger temper. But that was long ago: Blake's living in the city and he's a father himself now. He's trying to do better by his daughter Ginger (Matilda Firth), even if his marriage to Charlotte (Julia Garner) is going through a bit of a rough patch.

The news that his long-missing father is now officially considered dead brings with it the chance for the whole family to head back into the woods and revisit the family farmhouse. Which of course is an extremely bad idea as they promptly get lost, pick up a creepy local, then get run off the road thanks to an encounter with a very strange creature that probably wasn't a bear.

Now the local's splattered, Blake is injured, and the family are trying to make it to the farm house before whatever it is that's lurking in the woods gets its teeth into them. But even if they do make it inside and lock the doors behind them, are they locking the evil out... or trapping it in with them?

There's a few minor twists and turns along the way, but for the most part this is the kind of horror movie where the horror comes from knowing exactly what's to come (and it's all bad). There are some very effective, very creepy sequences, and some strong monster action moments as well, but the horror lies mostly in the story of a man uncontrollably changing into something that's not really human.

In his recent films Whannell has shown his strength is in embracing the pulpy aspects of his subjects, thinking deeply about their core concepts and coming up with twists that make sense while still being surprising and thoughtful.  

The big innovation here is to drag out the transformation and show parts of it from the transformed's point of view. This is more a story about infection than it is about traditional werewolf tropes like the thrill of unleashing the beast or the shock of waking up from a violent bender, and the scenes where a character can feel their humanity being drained from them are amongst the film's strongest.

Otherwise, Whannell and co-writer Corbett Tuck stick to the basics - this is a film that's largely about three people trapped in a house for one night - which means pretty much everything has to be firing to make it work. The body horror, the gore, and the big action moments largely deliver the goods.

If there's a weakness here it's that the family stuff, which really needs to be the film's solid emotional core, doesn't stand out quite like it needs to. The basics are conveyed effectively enough, and the horror of being taken away from your family by a disease is definitely effective, but the family here is more of a sketch than a deeply felt portrait.

There's also a distinct lack of howling at the moon. That's the real tragedy right there.

- Anthony Morris

Review: Conclave

Conclave is a reminder that there's a good reason why the Best Picture award at the Oscars is given to the film's producers. This is a very good film, verging on excellent: it's also a film that was clearly put together, a puzzle the likes of which Hollywood seems to have largely forgotten how to complete.

Based on a (short, pacy, punchy) novel by Robert Harris (Fatherland), it's the story of what happens after a Pope dies - the cardinals get together, they have a vote and keep on voting until they have a new Pope. Once the election has begun, no-one gets in or out (technically), so the pressure's on.

While the former Pope's right hand man, Cardinal Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes) works to keep everything above board, various power blocs emerge. The forces looking to head back to the past - an Italian Pope, masses in Latin, social attitudes out of some previous century - are unified and strong, while those looking to keep moving forward are divided, their votes sloshing behind one candidate then another. 

Lawrence's duty is to the church, though he sides with the progressives. Scandals must be investigated; better to lose a weak candidate than elect a fatally flawed Pope. But all the scandals seem to dog those on his side of the vote; as one after the other drops out, is there anyone who can unite the Church in its time of need?

Harris has been writing thrillers for decades now, and Conclave touches on issues both modern and eternal via a twisty plot featuring a number of memorable characters. The people here are almost all creatures of politics, their words and expressions always looking to shore up their positions - and as in real life, the most powerful players are the ones who don't seem to be playing at all. 

The setting is a mix of vast opulent rooms where people make speeches about charity and piety, and utilitarian stairwells and corridors where the real moving and shaking gets done. Even when the rooms are bland and functional, they're telling us something about the mechanisms of power - and seeing a Cardinal in full costume in a room with modern office equipment is always good for a chuckle.

The credits are full of names (Stanley Tucci, John Lithgow, Lucian Msamati, Isabella Rossellini) who have been perfectly cast, the kind of actors who are subservient to their roles and work within a film rather than trying to go big and be a breakout star. If they're in a bad film, they're rarely the cause or the cure; here, in a good film, they each play their part to perfection without trying to attract attention with over-the-top performances. Except, of course, for those cardinals for whom "over the top" is a power play.

Not everything here is perfect, especially if your attitude to the Catholic Church is a skeptical one. This is a story that admits the Church has flaws, but also sees it as an organisation still capable of good. Within the confines of the film, it works; thinking about it afterwards is another matter.

But the pleasures here are mostly small and nuanced, even at those times when the characters go big. The plot is a well-(holy) oiled machine, carefully laying the groundwork for the next big twist even as the current one is playing out. All the main characters get one big scene, and all the actors take full advantage, a string of Oscar clips that all fit perfectly into the wider story.

It all comes together in a satisfyingly mature fashion, entertainment for grown-ups. It's serious but light on its feet, a good time for an audience that doesn't need everything explained to them but likes everything to be wrapped up tidily. In the current cinematic climate, it's a blessing.

- Anthony Morris