At least my 5th viewing; first in cinema.
A film about which it is impossible for me to be objective, so entangled are my initial impressions of it with those heady moments of falling in love with The Girl, my persistent social anxiety, and my troubled relationship with my family. As I age and mature, I experience it in ineffable swells of emotion.
“Here we go,” indeed.
It’s a quirk of some Australian horror that it tries to both scare you and also entice you to visit the Gold Coast. But at the end of the day, one can’t forget that everything here wants to kill you, including Jai Courtney (who is the most consistently fun part of this movie). Alternatingly tense and cheesy (a compliment). Hassie Harrison is the Final Girl dreams are made of.
Somehow both too much and too little. Breathlessly (and repeatedly) tries to inject meaning into things you will never care about even as it ignores things you’d desperately like to know more about. The stunts were great, as always, and I do enjoy Ethan Hunt vs The Entity as a parable for Tom Cruise (practical filmmaker) vs AI [in moviemaking] but even that high-minded interpretation is “too much” for a movie that should, above all, be something this rarely manages to be: fun.
Second watch.
This one wisely backseats the mystery killer element — far from a source of horror, the existence of a killer is mostly regarded by the characters as an inconvenience — and instead leans into its multiverse conceit to give us more of what we liked the first time, albeit in a novel flavour. If we must have time loops and multiverse shit, make it this.
One need not scratch much varnish off the surface of Australia’s easygoing reputation to uncover darkness. I went into this prepared for a critique of the “locals only” mentality that continues to foment social unrest on beaches in Australia (see also: the Cronulla race riots). Instead, my brain got turned inside out in the best way.
My read is, it must be said, highly idiosyncratic. As an immigrant to this country, it’s easy for me to view tensions from a safe remove that borders on anthropological. A study like this one, then, can stun me without damaging my pride.
But there is also the part of me that is from a place (West Virginia) that, as I grow older and spend more time in Australia, I struggle to accept will never be “home” again. I spent 25 years in the USA and am in my 16th here. Eventually I’ll have lived in Australia — a place where I’ll never be “local” — for longer than I lived in Appalachia, a place that will never again see me as “local”. There will never be a place I can surf, as it were. Existential dread in that same vein is rendered here with heartfelt texture.
Just Alain Delon being beautiful, even with his lil moustache. You come to Melville for vibes and set pieces, and this movie has plenty of both. Perfectly and deliberately paced; wins you over nice and slow like.
Holy hell, this is one of the most intense movies l’ve seen in a long time. Juliette Gariépy is absorbing — a black hole at the centre of a morbid and constricting obsession. The score overwhelms in the best way. I wish I could have seen this in a cinema.
Bonus — It had two split diopter shots for my collection:
I’m an unapologetic lover of this kind of sweeping genre-masher; one which echoes itself even as it unfolds from within those echoes. Léa Seydoux puts her whole heart into a performance that earns its final moment (the emotion of which I will not spoil).
An encounter with art has two sides: you find the art as it is but on the reverse, art finds you as *you* are. The latter consideration is as underappreciated as it is salient; all we have is our emotional response. Suffice to say, l’ve been “going through some stuff” and it turns out, so have these characters. This film moved me to tears and intellectually stimulated me in a way l’d have never thought possible for a Marvel movie.
Had the thought “I would’ve loved this back when I was first getting into movies” and that’s the headline: I’ve simply seen too many movies and this one didn’t care to subvert my expectations.
(Also: it didn’t seem to know how to be commentary on abuse despite manifestly wanting to be, and this felt somehow offensive)