Top 50 for 2016 Part 2: 40–31
--
40. The Void (Canada, dir. Jeremy Gillespie & Steven Kostanski)
Police officer Daniel Carter (Aaron Poole) is almost done with his shift when he sees a man stagger out of the woods and collapse in the road. He gets the man into his cruiser and heads for the nearest emergency room, which happens to be the only thing left operational in the local hospital after a fire severely damaged the building. Carter’s estranged wife Allison (Kathleen Munroe) is running a skeleton crew, and shortly after Carter arrives a cult of white-robed figures and two men bent on killing the man Carter brought to the hospital arrive. But those are the least of their problems when they’re forced to defend themselves against an otherworldly threat.
Directors Jeremy Gillespie and Steven Kostanski are two members of Canadian comedy filmmaking collective Astron 6, and it’s no surprise they’re so adept at creating truly horrific atmosphere–even some of Astron 6’s comedy is really disturbing. In some ways, The Void is a familiar siege horror film with characters barricaded in one location and dealing with threats from inside and outside. What sets it apart are its absolutely incredible practical monster effects and a grasp of what makes Lovecraftian horror so unsettling. This captures the feeling of that style better than anything since From Beyond. In world where “Hello Cthulhu” exists, The Void brings terror back to cosmic horror.
39. Realive (Spain, dir. Mateo Gil)
In the year 2015, successful artist Marc Jarvis (Tom Hughes) learns he has terminal cancer. In the year 2084, he becomes the first cryogenically frozen person to be reanimated. Realive follows the two parallel tracks of Marc’s lives that have distinctive tones: the 2015 segments are a romantic drama, and the 2084 scenes approach cryogenic reanimation as quasi-hard science fiction. The early parts of this, leading up to and immediately following the reanimation process, are especially interesting in the film’s nuts-and-bolts way of looking at this speculative process turns it into a sort of twist on Frankenstein.
Writer/director Mateo Gil deftly balances the tone of the stories, and the result is a film that is reminiscent of Andrew Niccol’s Gattaca. It’s a smart, touching film that very slowly evolves into something quite different than it is at the beginning and ends with a gut-punch that throws everything that came before into a new light. We could always use more of this kind of intelligent, thoughtful science fiction, and I honestly have no idea how this hasn’t already been picked up for distribution in the States. Fingers crossed wider audiences get a chance to see it sooner than later.
38. When Black Birds Fly (USA, dir. Jimmy ScreamerClauz): Amazon, Google
Jimmy Screamerclauz’s debut feature Where the Dead Go to Die was (in addition to being genuinely disturbing) technically rough, which is not surprising given the fact that he’s a one-man show who basically taught himself to do the animation while he was in the process of making the film. His follow-up is still ragged around the edges, but it’s a major step up on pretty much every conceivable level. When Black Birds Fly is a lot less serious than his previous film, featuring moments of effective black comedy, and he’s created a fully-formed universe and mythology.
The swipes at organized religion are broad and obvious, but the specifics of the stories here are compellingly strange and much of the characterizations are convincing and poignant with great voice acting that gives the film a strong emotional anchor (just as it did in “The Masks That the Monsters Wear,” the strongest segment of Where the Dead Go to Die). This is also a impressively dense assault on the senses, especially from a visual standpoint. When Black Birds Fly is packed to bursting with insane visuals that would be literally impossible to achieve in any other medium. This is a funny, creepy, unsettling film totally unlike anything else out there.
37. A Dark Song (Ireland, dir. Liam Gavin)
Sophia (Catherine Walker) enlists occultist Joseph (Steve Oram) to assist her in an extremely difficult and protracted magick ritual, one that will take months and which requires the two of them to stay inside a house together for its entirety. Joseph balks when they meet, but when Sophia reveals her true intentions for wanting to perform the ritual, he reluctantly agrees. As they seal themselves inside the house and begin the rites, reality seems to break down and the nature of their relationship fluctuates dangerously as the fragile nature of their progress is constantly threatened by forces they cannot comprehend. A Dark Song is a claustrophobic drama in horror finery. Walker and Oram are the only people on-screen for nearly its entire running time, and they’re both excellent in a pair of emotionally and physically demanding roles. Debut feature writer/director Liam Gavin has crafted something truly unique here. There are countless films about the occult, but I can’t recall any others quite like this.
36. Psychonauts, the Forgotten Children (Spain, dir. Pedro Rivero & Alberto Vázquez)
After an apocalyptic struggle, a community of anthropomorphic animals live isolated on a small island. Dinky, a young mouse, wants to escape the island but wants her secret boyfriend Birdboy to come with her. Birdboy is deeply troubled and damaged by the terrible events of his childhood. While Dinky and her friends attempt to make their way across the island to a boat that will take them away, Birdboy is tracked by the vicious police dogs who want to kill him. Psychonauts, adapted from a graphic novel by its co-directors, is a dark animated feature starring a roster of very cute characters in very bad situations.
However, while that could have been played easily for shock value, Vázquez and Rivero use this as a jumping-off point for a melancholy portrait of its young characters. While the film is unquestionably dark, it’s also quite touching in its portrayal of friendship and doomed young love. Thankfully there is also some weird humor to keep things from becoming oppressively sad, and those moments grow out of the strange world Vázquez and Rivero have created so it never feels out of place. This is a beautiful, fascinating animated film for older audiences — again, despite its characters and design, it deals with some tough issues — which is an exceptionally rare thing in modern cinema.
35. Elle (France, dir. Paul Verhoeven)
Michèle Leblanc (Isabelle Huppert) is a woman who has made a successful career in the male-dominated field of video games. When she is brutally beaten and raped by a home invader, the most likely suspect could be any one of the man-children who work at her software company. But Michèle has a lot on her plate to deal with in addition to finding out who attacked her: a shiftless grown son and his hateful pregnant girlfriend, an affair with a married man, a strained relationship with her mother and a looming secret from her childhood that has haunted her entire life. When she discovers who her attacker was, they enter into a strange relationship while Michèle tries to keep her life and career from falling apart.
Nothing much to see here, just the world’s greatest living actress in a film directed by Paul Verhoeven, back with provocative vengeance after a lengthy hiatus from feature directing after 2006’s Black Book (although he also directed the short crowd-sourced feature Tricked in the intervening time). For the most part Elle is obstinately unclassifiable. There’s an element of tension in Michèle’s dealings with her attacker and there are shades of corporate thriller in her business, but this is also a pitch-black family comedy and above all an incredibly nuanced character study of its heroine. Huppert is a perfect marvel in the role; it’s impossible to imagine anyone else playing such an enormously demanding, complicated character. No other film this year could make audiences this deeply uncomfortable while simultaneously entertaining them. Elle is astonishing and unforgettable, and at its center is a collaboration between a director and actress whose first feature films were over 40 years ago. All of us whippersnappers should be taking notes.
34. Hello, My Name Is Doris (USA, dir. Michael Showalter)
Doris (Sally Field) is the oldest and longest-standing employee at her company by probably a couple of decades. After the death of her mother, Doris’s brother Todd (Stephen Root) and his obnoxious wife Cynthia (Wendi McLendon-Covey) try to talk Doris into selling the house where she and her mother lived, but Doris is seriously distracted by a crush on a handsome new guy at work named John (Max Greenfield) and can think of almost nothing else. Her best friend Roz (Tyne Daly) is understandably wary of Doris’s infatuation, but Roz’s granddaughter Vivian (Isabella Acres) is excited to help Doris navigate dating in the world of Facebook, which naturally includes some light stalking. When Doris shows up at a concert by John’s favorite band in an outlandish outfit, dancing wildly, she becomes an ironic sensation among John’s hip young crowd of friends.
Michael Showalter has been mining absurd and frequently uncomfortable material for comedic purposes for years on his own and along with his cohorts from 90s comedy troupe The State, but his 2005 feature directing debut The Baxter (2005) was a surprisingly sweet-natured and straightforward romantic comedy. In the years since that film, he’s worked on more outré projects including Stella and Michael and Michael Have Issues as well as writing They Came Together. If there’s one inarguable thing to be said about his second feature, it’s that nobody could have anticipated this. Sally Field gives a fantastic performance as Doris, and Showalter gives her room to be hilarious and deeply affecting. This is very funny and a little weirder than The Baxter while retaining a sweet and bittersweet edge that gives it an unexpected emotional depth.
33. Diana (USA, dir. Scout Tafoya): Vimeo
Scout Tafoya released three films this year including a stripped-down modern take on Jane Eyre (I Am No Bird) and an epic drama about life in a suburban brothel (House of Little Deaths), but my favorite of the three is his “horror” film Diana. It’s useful to think of it as “Chantal Akerman’s Michael Mann’s Female Vampire.” The protagonist is a female serial killer/cannibal, but the film itself is more interested in the mundane details of the world in which she lives — architecture, city lights, construction traffic, leaky pipes, etc. — than in typical lurid exploitation. Initially confounded after watching, I liked this more the more I thought about and digested it.
32. The Alchemist Cookbook (USA, dir. Joel Potrykus)
Sean (Ty Hickson) is holed up in a tiny trailer deep in the woods with his cat Kaspar. He’s working on something that requires precise mixtures of chemicals and speaking incantations. Occasionally his cousin Cortez (Amari Cheatom) drops by with supplies, but otherwise Sean is alone in the forest with Kaspar and something sinister and powerful. And one incredibly creepy opossum. Joel Potrykus’s follow-up to 2014’s Buzzard is another blue-collar horror show, but with a much different approach and tone. It’s much quieter and less urgent, taking its time establishing a claustrophobic atmosphere and its lead character’s isolation. The long periods of quiet are punctuated with bursts of supernatural dread or surprisingly goofy humor. One scene in particular using cat food as a central prop is flat-out hilarious, and Potrykus uses these breaks in tension expertly to build toward a powerful finale. Hickson is a compelling lead, which is important since large chunks of the film are without dialogue. The end of the film is a little jarring and abrupt after all that comes before it, but that’s a minor nitpick. The Alchemist Cookbook confirms Potrykus as a unique voice in independent cinema.
31. Hunt for the Wilderpeople (New Zealand, dir. Taika Waititi): Amazon, Google, iTunes
As far as recent unexpected Hollywood success stories go, Taika Waititi getting the gig directing Thor: Ragnarok after What We Do in the Shadows is right up there among the most bizarre. That’s not a knock on his previous film work, but it’s tough to overstate just how enormous the jump is from directing comedies in New Zealand to helming a Hollywood tentpole blockbuster. His work has been consistently excellent and funny, but this just seemed totally inexplicable until Hunt for the Wilderpeople made its way to the States. It’s still a massive change in scope for any director, but given the early reports that Marvel was making the next Thor movie something of a buddy/road movie, Waititi suddenly makes a lot more sense.
Juvenile delinquent Ricky (Julian Dennison) has been bouncing around the foster care system for years when he finally ends up at the remote home of warmhearted Bella (Rima Te Wiata) and her gruff husband Hec (Sam Neill). After some initial friction, Ricky starts to feel at home. But after Bella’s sudden death, distant Hec is unwilling to take care of Ricky. Through a series of odd circumstances, Hec is injured in the woods and Ricky takes care of him, but when they’ve been out in the forest for several days a country-wide manhunt begins when the authorities assume Hec has kidnapped Ricky. What follows is a very funny and touching adventure with touches of absurd humor in the margins. It’s hugely entertaining and irresistibly warmhearted, and it promises something very different for Waititi’s take on the Marvel movie.
(Also worth checking out is Waititi’s short “Team Thor,” a brief look at what Thor has been up to after the events of Avengers: Age of Ultron. Hopefully this gives us a little taste of what we’re in for when Ragnarok hits the big screen.)
2016 Film Round-Up:
Honorable Mentions, Special Recognition, and Favorite Documentaries
