UNHINGED – Caren Pistorius honks her horn at the wrong moment. Russel Crowe goes mad in a car. On the surface, ‘Unhinged’ feels like a throwback to the nineties social thrillers, ‘Falling Down’ being one obvious reference. There’s stuff to do with raging males, the ubiquity of surveillance tech, the pressures of living on the breadline – all quite standard really, but it’s also surprisingly nasty when it gets its fangs out and there’s fun to be had in watching Crowe trash his life and everyone else’s.
DAWN BREAKS BEHIND THE EYES – This reminds me of a horror tendency from the last twenty years or so, the ‘neo-Giallo’ that perhaps began with films like ‘Amer’, which basically ratchet up the genre’s style till it pops. In this case the accent is more on broad Euro horror, but there’s still that infatuation with seventies atmospheres. It’s about a couple falling apart in an old castle where the air hangs heavy with supernatural weirdness… or maybe something else entirely. Very atmospheric first half, a pile-up of lovingly filmed gothic sets, but then tonal shifts make other demands as the story and ‘feel’ splinter. I wanted to get more from it. Festival fave still worth checking out.
ESCAPE ROOM: TOURNEMENT OF CHAMPIONS – I like movies that seem to be about the underlying malevolence of a mechanistic, meaningless universe - ‘Final Destination’, ‘The Cube’, ‘The Game’. There’s something very gripping about watching plot, narrative etc being reduced to a series of game-based ‘fight for your life’ encounters, like The Crystal Maze on the rampage. This sequel doesn’t do much to extend the already derivative original, but the appeal in this case is ‘more of the same’, and that’s what we get. I really enjoyed this one, and I like where this franchise appears to be heading.
THE UNINVITED – This is an American studio remake of Kim Jee-woon’s masterful ‘A Tale Of Two Sisters’. The original had a really elegant atmosphere that fused melancholy with a sense of oblique foreboding. As expected, the multiplex-friendly revision takes a relatively ‘meat and potatoes’ approach, but in some ways it’s actually more satisfying as an overt thriller, with the original’s Hitchcockian elements centre stage in the mind games that play out between Emily Browning and Elizabeth Banks. The wrap-up and the supernatural elements are rote, but overall this was an enjoyably suspenseful watch.
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