★★★★
David Cronenberg’s seminal 1983 body horror Videodrome begins with a shot of a TV screen and ends with its main character re-enacting what he’s just seen played out on another screen. In-between, there are scenes of extreme brutality, physiological weirdness, philosophical debate, and sexual ambiguity, but Cronenberg repeatedly returns to the relationship between the screen and the viewer, assembling a caustic appraisal of society’s growing reliance on technology, and the uneasy way it infects and affects our everyday behaviour. Though the film is now over 30 years old (and, for the most part, looks it), its relevance only grows with the passing of time.
Max Renn (James Woods) is president of local TV station CIVIC-TV and on the hunt for something groundbreaking to offer his viewers. “It’s soft. Something too… soft about it,” he opines of content brought to him by his staff. “I’m lookin’ for something that’ll break through, you know?” That something turns out to be Videodrome. Plotless, shot in Malaysia, and depicting seemingly real scenes of sexual torture, the show borders on snuff, but Max wants it. Meanwhile, he defends his philosophy on a talk show where he meets radio host Nicki Brand (Deborah Harry of Blondie fame), explaining that he provides a safe outlet for society’s darker fantasies.
As Max and Nicki strike up a relationship, their sadomasochistic encounters signal a queasy journey into a circus of body horror. Released just two years after Cronenberg made Scanners (with its exploding heads and sinister psychics), and eight years after Rabid (with its phallic mutations), Videodrome is a distillation of everything the Canadian director represents. At the time, Videodrome was by far Cronenberg’s most sophisticated offering, and saw the writer-director expertly navigating themes of voyeurism and violence through a prism of intelligent horror.
With the help of special effects expert Rick Baker, Cronenberg draws us into a terrifying nightmare where technology and flesh combine. After discovering Videodrome is broadcasting out of Pittsburgh, Max attempts to track down its creators, then encounters the mysterious Bianca (Sonja Smits), who’s continuing the work of her father, Professor Brian O’Blivion (Jack Creley), a pop culture analyst who dreamed of a world where TV replaces reality. And when Max returns home, he suffers horrific hallucinations in which a gaping slit like a VCR opens in his torso. Bianca tells him that watching Videodrome causes viewers to develop brain tumours in which reality and fiction become horrifically distorted.
“We’re entering savage new times,” remarks one character in Videodrome’s mindfuck third act, and he’s not wrong. There are pulsating, groaning betamax tapes, guns welded to hands, and fleshy arm-grenades, all lovingly crafted by Baker’s team of effects mavericks; schlocky but they stand the test of time. Under it all, though, runs a sinister undercurrent that tackles ideas about violence against women, our culpability as viewers, the power of the voyeur, and even the question of what defines reality. It makes for an uncomfortable watch, and Cronenberg’s film is at times unbelievably quiet and restrained, which could test some viewers’ concentration spans.
If Videodrome sets out to do anything, though, it’s to test its audience. It wants to provoke and question; it demands we confront ourselves and ask why we keep watching. In the early ’80s, most viewers weren’t ready for something so self-aware (Videodrome bombed on release, making just $2.1m on its $5.9m budget), but modern, media-savvy audiences will appreciate its febrile subtext. Now, we really do rely on technology to survive, and most of us have our phones welded to our hands in much the same way Max’s gun becomes welded to his. In that respect, Videodrome is shockingly prescient, predicting how we have become physically and psychologically bonded with technology.
While Woods and Harry are fantastic, they inevitably play second fiddle to the impressive prosthetics and hotbed of ideas. Woods plays Max as wide-eyed and naïve even as he chases dark dreams. He’s almost a noir detective, navigating our nightmares and shuddering at what he finds. It’s also through Max that Cronenberg continuously challenges us to distinguish the real from the artificial. His film refuses to do so, shooting the ‘real world’ and Max’s hallucinations in the same way so that it’s impossible to tell them apart. That’s sort of the point. Nowadays, we’re unable to distinguish between a piece of plastic and the real world, existing in social media bubbles, emotionally attached to our inboxes and news feeds.
Ahead of Pixar’s WALL-E (with its tech-reliant space humans) and even the more recent Nightcrawler (with its carnage-obsessed TV execs), Videodrome offers a chilling glimpse into a possible future – and it’s a future that seems more and more possible with every passing year. At 87 minutes, Videodrome is a short, sharp jab to the solar plexus. Cronenberg has called making the film “cathartic”, but watching it is another matter. A bracing, unnerving watch, Videodrome is packed full of stark, intelligent ideas. It wriggles under the skin and stays there for days.
This review originally ran at Frame Rated.
Forget The Lone Ranger and The Man From UNCLE, Armie Hammer finally lands a role that reveals the full breadth of his talent in Luca Guadagnino’s third feature (after I Am Love and A Bigger Splash). As an academic who spends the summer of ’83 in northern Italy with a professor and his family, Hammer is breezily charismatic, his enigmatic brainbox soon catching the eye of 17-year-old professor’s son Elio (Timothée Chalamet, fantastic), with whom he shares an adjoining bedroom. Their friendship gradually deepens into something more profound, and amid the apricot trees and watchful ruins of the Italian Riviera, Guadagnino unspools a transcendent love story brimming with warmth, passion and feeling. Unmissable.
“The only thing worse than being incompetent, unkind or evil,” says Amanda (Olivia Cooke) midway through this savage teen drama, “is being indecisive.” Deadly observations are Amanda’s thing, especially when – as in this case – she accompanies them with vase-smashing violence. A borderline sociopath with a murky past, Amanda’s cold-hard-truth approach to life first repulses, then beguiles study buddy Lilly (Anya Taylor-Joy), who’s got a few secrets of her own – and an irritating step-father she daydreams about killing. Expertly playing with light and dark, director Cory Finley’s stark debut is a moody semi-chamber piece that delights in Heathers-esque wit and dreamy visuals – and a firecracker final turn from Anton Yelchin. It’ll haunt you for days.
It’s not quite Gore vs Trump, but the newly-inaugurated US President casts a long shadow over this follow-up to 2006’s Oscar-winning doc An Inconvenient Truth. In a year when Trump was on everybody’s lips at Sundance, the current White House resident punctuates this engaging if not entirely revelatory sequel by appearing in news footage and sound bites, threatening more dark times ahead. Elsewhere, An Inconvenient Sequel catches up with Al Gore’s anti-global warming campaign a decade after he first unveiled his Powerpoint presentation, revealing the devastating toll it has already taken on the polar ice-caps and cities like New York. It’s a brisk, engaging watch.
You want weird? How about Cate Blanchett playing 13 different characters in one film? Want MORE weird? How about Cate Blanchett playing 13 different characters then reciting the art manifestos of scholars like Jim Jarmusch, Andre Breton and Claes Oldenburg? That’s the hook in German artist/director Julian Rosefeldt’s second feature, inspired by his own art installation (currently touring the globe) and a bold, beautiful, surprisingly funny sermon on the current state of the creative landscape. Naturally, it’s all about Blanchett – whether playing a homeless man, a newsreader, a punk or a puppeteer, she’s utterly riveting, ensuring that while Manifesto may challenge more mainstream audiences, it’ll captivate those with an appetite for audacious cinematic experimentation.
Salma Hayek delivers a career-best performance as the titular holistic practitioner in this radiant comic drama from director Miguel Arteta. Mousy and watchful, Beatriz offers Buddha hugs to everybody she meets, but butts heads with ruthless businessman Doug Strutt (John Lithgow) when she’s inadvertently invited to a client’s ritzy dinner party. At first playing as a fish-out-of-water comedy, Mike White’s script incrementally pulls focus on Beatriz, revealing a woman whose admirable if steely beliefs make her unexpectedly formidable. Hayek has never been better, glowing with a quiet magnetism, while Lithgow is terrifyingly plausible as the Trump-like Strutt. There are echoes of White’s TV series Enlightened here, and Beatriz At Dinner boasts the same lingering power – and, in light of the presidential election, it couldn’t be more timely.
Notable for its remarkable central performance by Brit newcomer Harris Dickinson, this gritty, Brooklyn-set drama caused a flurry of controversy over its exploration of sexual identity, but the ambiguity director Eliza Hittman paddles in perfectly mirrors her film’s roving teen protag. In a mesmerising and, uh, revealing turn, Dickinson plays teen Frankie, who kills time smoking, doping and chasing girls by day – then surfing the internet for older men by night. Shooting on grainy 16mm, Hittman follows Frankie from beaches and bedrooms to the dark woods he uses as cover for gay hook-ups. Her camera lingers lovingly on Dickinson, whose troubled eyes at once hint at Frankie’s seeming denial over his sexuality, then at his lack of awareness at how his actions impact others. At once brutal and empathetic toward a floundering young man, Hittman’s film will inevitably be spoken about in the same breaths as Mysterious Skin and Moonlight.
The YA adap craze may be waning, but it was far from dead at Sundance – a bit like Before I Fall’s high school heroine who, after a car accident, keeps reliving the same day she and her friends seemingly died. Yeah, Groundhog Day comparisons are there for the taking, but director Ry Russo-Young squeezes the time-loop hook for all it’s worth. As Samantha (the excellent Zoey Deutch) runs the gamut of frustration, smoky-eyed rebellion and beyond, there are surprises at every turn in an atmospheric exploration of fate and redemption. Russo-Young plumbs honest emotion with minimal sugar-dipping, while shouting out to everything from Carrie and Mean Girls to Pretty Little Liars. And, yes, Groundhog Day.
Silicon Valley star Kumail Nanjiani co-wrote this comedy drama, basing it on his real-life relationship, which goes part way to explaining why its warmth and wit earned him rave reviews at this year’s Sundance. Kumail plays a version of himself, a soft-spoken Pakistani-American and wannabe stand-up comic whose mother is so desperate for him to marry that she spends most of her time setting him up with suitable Pakistani women. But when Kumail falls for non-Muslim Emily (Zoe Kazan), he risks losing his family in the name of love. The Big Sick was produced by Judd Apatow, and the comedy mogul’s influence manifests in the film’s winsomely awkward comedy – particularly the hour-long segment in which Kumail attempts to win over Emily’s parents (a brilliantly cast Holly Hunter and Ray Romano). Though it’s long at two hours, this should rightly make an even bigger star of Kumail, who has a gift for incendiary one-liners and bumbling charisma.
The devilish conceit at the heart of 2013 short Lights Out was so scary it went viral on YouTube, prompting horror guru James Wan (Insidious) to hire its director – Sweden’s David F. Sandberg – to expand it into a feature, and in the process deliver one of the scariest, most surprising films of 2016. The conceit? Basically: lights on, you’re safe. Lights out, something’s gonna get you. Something that crouches in dark doorways, hugging shadows before pouncing.
Josh Winning 