In the Earth

Ben Wheatley’s ninth film, In the Earth, stalks similar territory to his first few. It’s a stripped-back affair—shot mid-pandemic in Maidenhead over the course of a couple of weeks—and makes efficient use of its very limited resources. At times, production limitations show as quality of image fluctuates from shot to shot. But, by and large, Wheatley’s editing finesses this sort of thing into a disjunctive, unpredictable, Frankenstein’s monster of a style. Much of this film feels as though it was discovered mid-process. Actors ad-lib, and narrative focus shifts and wobbles erratically.

In the Earth is ostensibly a horror, but beyond that it’s difficult to categorise or even describe. Its closest recent analogue is Lovecraft adaptation Color Out of Space. That film Nicholas Cage and family turn wibbly after a meteorite crashed in their back garden and contaminated its surroundings in grotesque ways. In the Earth inverts the dynamic. Our protagonists venture into a profaned forest, actively travelling towards evil. Like the caravan trip at the centre of Sightseers, the deeper they journey, the more primacy their surroundings take on. Elements of the environment puncture the protagonists’ bodies and minds. The territory invades them back.

We also meet two earlier casualties of the forest. Both have been stuck there for an interminable amount of time, and are lost in fruitless attempts to understand the forest. One practices idolatry, worship, and human sacrifice—and, at some point, gave up on receiving divine revelation in return. The other conducts experiments, measuring responses to light and sound—but has introduced some deeply unscientific ideas into their process. These characters turn out to be complementary halves of one whole. Through this the film draws parallels between mysticism and reason.

While these characters are conceptually interesting, their dialogue can come off overwritten. Frequent Wheatley co-writer Amy Jump doesn’t get a writing credit in this film—at a guess, logistics prevented her involvement from what was likely an on-the-set process. Wheatley doesn’t quite have her knack for dialogue, but he still gives it a respectable stab. Nothing approaches the giddy heights of A Field in England’s script, but there’s no real eye-rollers, and Wheatley's nasty sense of humour comes out at all the right moments.

Where In the Earth does equal A Field in England is in its formal experimentation. The film’s kaleidoscopic final act was a bit much for some audiences—but anyone with an interest in avant-garde cinema or video art will eat it up. Despite the undeniable patchiness of what precedes it, the film’s climax is an overwhelming and brilliant stretch. It’s like if Lis Rhodes was given a few thousand pounds and told to make Avengers 5; a bombastic, noisy, and brutal assault on the senses. You get such a battering it's hard to think straight afterwards. It might not be perfect, but by the time the credits roll on In the Earth you may feel transformed in ways you don't understand.

In the Earth is available to stream here. Bezos is already rich enough, so updates as and when on a better source.

Words: Andrew O’Keefe

Where Does a Body End?

Marco Porsia’s documentary Where Does a Body End? is a labour of love. This near-three-hour film [in its ‘Extended Cut’ home release version] assembles interviews and unseen archival footage into an affectionate portrait of the legendary experimental rock band, Swans. It follows the band through their roots in the New York no-wave scene, mid-career reinvention, hiatus and reunion—and even makes time for some solo-and-side projects. Porsia crowdfunded this very personal passion project—essentially the band’s sizzle reel, by and for existing fans.

Condensing forty years of wildly eclectic music into one film is a tall order. Porsia, though, is determined to do so. Swans’ first fourteen studio albums, and near-innumerable EPs and live albums, all receive some level of lip service. The only (egregious) omission is 2019’s leaving meaning—no doubt being finalised at the very same time as this film. It’s dissatisfying to end on a cliffhanger to which we know the resolution—“what’s next for Swans?”—and feels like it could’ve been avoided. A little card of explanatory text at the end would’ve sufficed. Instead, there’s an odd, wilfully ignorant tension to the film’s closing limits; it dusts its hands and nervously proclaims, “nothing to see here”.

In areas it actually does cover, the documentary’s approach is rather rote and superficial. It neglects to dig into the meat of Swans. The fan-wank is especially jarring when Swans’ frontman Michael Gira appears, speaking in much more esoteric and spiritual terms than his interviewer. Gira emblemises a vital essence to his band that Where Does a Body End? largely skates over. The doc bids to explain Swans’ sublimity with shots of gacked-out crowd members and gawky and adrenalized second-generation fans (all desperately trying not to mention Anthony Fantano or 4chan). But this says nothing—Beatlemania was still Beatlemania, even when they were playing shit like ‘Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da’. Sadly, Where Does a Body End? seems more interested in Swans as a phenomenon than a band, and their work ends up playing second-fiddle to their mythos.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the documentary’s unforgivable side-lining of Swans’ neofolk era. 1987’s Children of God and 1991’s White Light from the Mouth of Infinity feel included out of historical obligation. In reality, they represent Swans’ most dramatic shift in approach and are the missing link between their origins in stark industrial rock, and the 35-minute psychedelic jams of their post-reunion work. Vocalist Jarboe is unduly skirted around as well—portrayed as a muse who tempered Gira’s galaxy-brain genius, rather than a creative force in her own right. The film sacrifices these subjects for hordes of hyperbolising gig attendees and super-fans.

For the most part, Where Does a Body End? is exactly the documentary Swans’ fans have been craving. Turns out, that isn’t a good thing.

Where Does a Body End? (Sept. 28th) is available for UK pre-order here.

Words: Andrew O’Keefe

Swans documentary Kickstarter trailer https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1000942931/where-does-a-body-end-a-documentary-on-the-band-sw?ref=creator_nav

I'm Thinking of Ending Things

I’m Thinking of Ending Things, an adaptation of the Iain Reid novel of the same name, represents celebrated writer/director Charlie Kaufman’s second non-original screenplay. His first was the aptly-named Adaptation, a nutty postmodernist comedy, itself about the pitfalls of adapting texts (which featured Nicolas Cage in a starring role as both Charlie Kaufman and a fictionalised neurotic twin brother). If that sounds bewildering, don’t worry—that’s sort of Kaufman’s M.O.

I’m Thinking of Ending Things plays it comparatively straight—though many of its source novel’s story beats are altered, some sequences extended and others truncated, spirit and tone are transposed faithfully. Kaufman speaks explicitly through his texts, using characters as vehicles for his own insecurities, particularities and goofy jokes. But here his voice isn’t so loud as to swamp everyone else’s; it’s newly mature, almost reticent. The barbed, punk-rock spirit of Being John Malkovich yields to balanced consideration, sentimentality; the nostalgia of middle age. It would be tempting to say Kaufman has lost his edge—but the truth is, it just feels more like he doesn’t want to be edgy anymore.  

The film follows a young couple, Jake and an unnamed woman, who journey through snowy roads to an engagement with Jake’s dysfunctional parents. To no one’s surprise, the trip is psychogeographic; an expedition through blizzards of forgetfulness and dark locuses of childhood trauma. Through its perpetually confounding setting—and some magnificent performances from David Thewlis and Toni Collette—the film invites us to witness the terror of ageing; of being confined in bodies and minds which rebel more in their uselessness every day. As a consequence, while this film (and its source novel) are primarily concerned with mundane everyday activities—putting on a wash, cooking, dusting, ordering slurpees—the tone is one of heightened, exaggerated, Lynchian horror. For long stretches, humour is either absent or so dry that it’s completely invisible. This is likely to rankle anyone who struggled with Kaufman’s earlier Synecdoche, New York—a similarly dour and oblique affair. This new work is an easier watch, but it rivals Synecdoche for confrontational auteurism.

Kaufman is unlikely to win new fans either, as I’m Thinking of Ending Things will rile that wave of rationalistic, plot-hole-poking teenage filmwatchers by leaving much up in the air as the credits roll. In a world inundated with ‘ENDING EXPLAINED’ youtube videos, Kaufman’s expressionism and de-emphasis on narrative seems twice as bold as it used to. But he’s a writer who understands that questions are invariably more compelling than answers—and the questions I’m Thinking of Ending Things invites are some of the trickiest of his career. Sure, it’s not on the same level as his earlier stuff—but it’s still better than everyone else’s.

I’m Thinking of Ending Things is available on Netflix now.

Words: Andrew O’Keefe

Motion Graphics, Theatrical Mark Woollen & Associates Co-designed with Ralf Leeb

Strasbourg 1518

Jonathan Glazer is one of the UK’s most unique cinematic voices. His work is better-known than his name; from the music video for Radiohead’s ‘Street Spirit’, to 2000 Ray Winstone classic Sexy Beast. He is a director whose confidence and technique deepen with every release. His sense of poetry and attention to sound impart a singular lyricism to his work—as though each film is a tapestry of its own soundscape. Allegedly planned for next year is an adaptation of Martin Amis’ The Zone of Interest. Glazer has been busy in the interim, directing last year’s stellar short The Fall, and now Strasbourg 1518.

Strasbourg 1518 doesn’t sound like much on paper—contemporary dancers juxtapose the COVID-19 lockdown with a sixteenth century “dancing plague”—but the film is elevated by the touch of Glazer and long-time musical collaborator Mica Levi. The pair first collaborated on 2013’s Under the Skin, to memorable effect. The most successful moments of the film were when, tugged by Levi’s score, it plunged from hidden-camera vérité into bizarre surrealism and horror. Strasbourg 1518 sustains the same surrealism and horror for its fifteen minute duration.

Besides its title, Strasbourg 1518 contains no direct reference to the dancing plague. Instead we witness similarities between our world and the ‘upside down’ society of the mid-millennium. Now, as then, our population fears an impending apocalypse; we, too, feel powerless to stop it, our every move in service of greedy landlords and a corrupt and sexually-deviant ruling caste. There is a strange comfort in sharing afflictions with such distant ancestors—and a depressing absurdity.

Performers move in loops of varying styles; straining and slapping at the walls, framing the home as a prison, and rendering daily routines like washing surreal through repetition. Strasbourg responds to confinement more than anything else. It's interesting to note this is a response from those too self-searching and artistic to default to press-ups and crunches. Much of this work feels retaliatory; the cubic rigidity of a bedroom a taunt, dancers’ free-flowing movements their retort. The dance on show here, paradoxically, doesn’t feel performative. It instead looks like the painful act of wrangling with one’s own demons, excising panic, and reckoning with a denial of freedom.

Mica Levi’s score pounds with frustration, and is closer in tone to her early work as Micachu than her relatively more austere film scores. It’s a piece which feels both kinetic and stagnant—like the dancers of Strasbourg it goes nowhere, but does so with a huge amount of violent energy. It mirrors the mania leaking from performers, and punctuates each of their loops like a typewriter’s carriage return, noisily signalling the end of a line of text.

If nothing else, Strasbourg 1518 shows the BBC do still have an ounce of courage knocking about somewhere. No doubt this film will attract ire; many will disapprove of their license fee funding something they see as self-aggrandising luvvie junk. But fifteen minutes of contemporary dance per year inadequately represents the vivacious and renowned UK dance scene. Perhaps detractors should question why they find Strasbourg any harder to stomach than Strictly Come Dancing, when the latter elects exclusive representation of a style rarely seen outside Butlins. The UK is a vibrant, colourful country that houses thousands of talented artists. Public service broadcasting has a responsibility to show this. That Strasbourg is such an outlier in the network’s programming is rather sad. Conversely, that it’s such an oasis allows its waters shine even bluer.

Strasbourg 1518 is available until the 20th of August on BBC iPlayer. For those Stateside (or cheeky VPN users), the film is being hosted for free by A24.

Words: Andrew O’Keefe

Family Romance LLC

Werner Herzog’s feature filmography can be cleaved into two halves: documentary and fiction. What’s more difficult is deciding into which of these categories each of his films belongs. His documentaries meddle and manufacture; his fiction captures moments of truth and acts of God. During the filming of Aguirre, the Wrath of God a flood beset the cast and crew, destroying rafts and sets constructed for the film. Without hesitation Herzog shot and incorporated the flood into the film’s story. Herzog works in liminal spaces, blurring the boundary between real and unreal. Family Romance, LLC. represents his purest habitation of these spaces so far.

In real life, Ishii Yuichi heads an infamous agency in Japan called Family Romance. The agency employs a roster of actors to fulfil vital roles in the lives of its clients. The bereaved and lonesome can resurrect dead family, conjure kinship as if from clay—signatories, guardians and friends wait a card payment away. Ishii serves Herzog’s film by playing himself. We follow fictionalised interactions with clients, colleagues and confidantes. The story is constructed. Its players are as real as you or I.

Family Romance, LLC. is more than a little reminiscent of Leos Carax’s Holy Motors. Ishii’s roleplaying fills vacuums in the lives of others, but we soon learn that he is something of a shell himself. Ishii is a “chameleon” splayed across conflicting roles with uncertain self-identity. In his line of work, neither party can submit to emotion. An illusion must be upheld and—ironically—clients must never receive the connection they’re paying for. Family Romance, LLC. explores a violation of this boundary. Ishii befriends a fatherless girl, Mahiro, at the behest of her mother. When he ultimately leaves, Mahiro loses a father for the second time.

The intent of Ishii’s real-life work is a lie which generates revelation. Many are taught: confront truths to heal and therapise. Ishii instead attacks truth’s monopoly. It’s likely Herzog found, in him, the kindred spirit of an artist. Herzog is an editor of images—a distorter of reality who once rejected the label “fly-on-the-wall” in favour of “hornet who stings”. Our own discomfort with Ishii’s theatre arises from its shattering of illusions; the obviousness of its construction reveals the ones we surround ourselves with.

Prayer is one such construction lensed in this film. Few pray expecting an answer—some pray without belief. But prayer allows us to conceptualise wishes, order priorities, and explore our needs in undisturbed silence. When we make wishes, the act of wish-making alone is enough. Conversely, if we admit the absurdity of the act it crumbles and becomes useless. In a deeper irony, sometimes these exact social constructions are what demand Ishii’s services. In the film a bride must be given away by her father, whose absence leaves the marriage ersatz and disrupted. One of Ishii’s employees thus fills the role to satisfy tradition.

In its form, Family Romance, LLC. is a replica of Ishii—a truth-seeking façade. Its presentation is in guerrilla-style with digital immediacy; a kind of new-vérité. Filmic warmth and intimacy freezes over in the face of its vloggy videography. We cannot ignore Herzog holding the camera, the camera itself. In one early POV shot Mahiro films the audience with her own iPhone. Through commitment to reality the untruth of Family Romance, LLC. is, paradoxically, heightened and emphasised.

Herzog also toys with his own mythology; his uncanny ability to magnetise to interesting real-life events. In Family Romance, LLC. we witness simulated feudal conflict, hara-kiri, and a practicing circus troupe in Yoyogi park. Birds surround Mahiro and land on her hands. A bystander, after taking a picture of Ishii and Mahiro together, launches into an impromptu mime show. Herzog’s filmic legacy is so indelible we take these displays as read—but it later transpires they were all written into the plot and staged.

Iconic imagery is also resurrected. In the same park, Mahiro animates a dancing Oni, coin-slotted in a case. A cheap arcade attraction, the demon jerks in a pitiful and robotic imitation of life. Later an elderly Japanese oracle tumbles in similarly weak movements across her floor. One recalls the chicken from Stroszek dancing for coins, the deaf-blind subjects of Land of Silence and Darkness, fed and sustained by those whose names they will never know. Ishii’s organisation serves a pathetic and troubling need. But it’s the symptom of something even more troubling: our plays at nobility which trap us, alone, in interior worlds which do not reflect reality. I suspect this is Herzog’s ultimate point: only when we abandon attempts to exist as anything but fumbling and ridiculous animals may we judge Ishii and the work of Family Romance.

Family Romance, LLC. is available for purchase through MUBI here.

Words: Andrew O’Keefe

Genre: Drama Directed by Werner Herzog Writing credits: Werner Herzog Starring: Mahiro Tanimoto, Ishii Yuichi Produced by Roc Morin Production company: Skell...

Da 5 Bloods

Since the mid-twentieth century, America has engaged in almost innumerable “forever wars”. Its conflicts have had no clear state of resolution, fought against ideologies rather than opposing forces. In most cases, you needn’t look further than the name (the “War on Terror”, the “War on Drugs”). The most infamous remains Vietnam—a confused conflict fought under the pretence of destroying Communism. American troops, whose homes faced no danger, encountered a fierce resistance of home-turf defenders. U.S. resolve evaporated and its troops returned, broken; left to rot in financial ruin by their own apathetic home.

Spike Lee’s Da 5 Bloods cuts between the present-day reunion of an outfit of American soldiers in Ho Chi Minh City, and their experiences during the war. The platoon embarks, Wizard of Oz-style, on a journey to retrieve a stash of hidden gold. While serving, they witnessed a CIA carrier plane crash deep in the jungle. There it remains, entombing a lost payment from the CIA to citizens who opposed the Viet Cong.

Lee’s squadron comprises of black soldiers, and the director emphasises means of segregation the military employed throughout the Vietnam War. When Lee drops statistics into his story (like contrasting the U.S.’s black population of 11% with an above-30% rate of military service), it never feels hackneyed or inelegant. It instead scrutinises the way racism pervades society at large. More often than in direct, person-to-person instances, racism inhabits the structures of a country built on stolen land. Black Americans’ status as Vietnam cannon-fodder is one of its most discomforting aspects—and Lee’s talent is to directly confront truths that many filmmakers don’t have the stones to.

In one sequence, the platoon hears news of Dr Martin Luther King’s death while on service. They must all reckon with the fact they are laying their life down for a country which ascribes that life no value.

Within Da 5 Bloods, the outfit are perceived as an invasive, unwelcome force in both Vietnam and the U.S. alike. They revisit the site of a trauma inflicted on them by their country to find the site spits in their face. They are troops who paid the worthlessness of their own lives forward. When a Vietnamese child throws firecrackers at their feet to trigger their PTSD for amusement, it’s suggested that same child is avenging the loss of their leg after treading on a decades-old mine.

In Da 5 Bloods, trauma, both on a personal and national level, is inextricably entangled in itself. Vietnam and its invaders stew in a stasis which dooms them to repeat the mistakes of the past. This stasis defines Delroy Lindo’s impressive performance as Paul—a man who, in attempting to repress his damage, further damages himself and those around him. It’s that most paradoxical of male weaknesses: the desire to always maintain strength.

Da 5 Bloods is too complex and thought-provoking a film to summarise. It labours some points, glosses over others. But for a film spinning so many plates, it’s miraculous how few of them tumble. It's the work of a director who doesn't care if they are found disagreeable.

For years, Lee has been restricted by distributors too spineless to support black voices in cinema. But digital distribution models allow a far greater reach. It turns out that people outside Central London watch art films, too. Da 5 Bloods rocketed to the second-most watched film on the platform this week. Netflix’s confidence in filmmakers like Spike Lee and Martin Scorsese—in both cases ponying up for the biggest budgets of those directors’ careers—is encouraging in a world where cinema’s sole interest seems to have become pushing inoffensive family fare produced by Disney and its affiliates.

Film should focus and engage the mind, not leave it idle and half-distracted. Spike Lee is a vital and radical voice in cinema, and he’s finally been given the megaphone he deserved thirty years ago.

Da 5 Bloods is available for streaming on Netflix.

Words: Andrew O’Keefe

The Lighthouse

From the glowing reception enjoyed by 2015’s The Witch, you’d think Robert Eggers was an industry old-head. In reality, it was the New Hampshire director’s feature-length debut. With it, Eggers established a style of film-making indebted to many, but entirely his own; one fastidious and detail-oriented, visually sparse and striking, and saturated with singsong period dialects. Eggers himself has expressed disdain for the genre trappings of The Witch, and is on record as saying it only got made because his “weirder” treatments had all been rejected.

The Lighthouse finds Eggers, along with a laundry list of returning collaborators, unleashing that weirdness. This time, Jarin Blaschke’s cinematography is more experimental, Mark Korven’s score enmeshes itself in the film’s aggressive sound design, and Linda Muir’s period-authentic costumes are sourced from museum pieces and private collections. Restraints placed on the production of The Witch have dissolved in the wake of its acclaim. The Lighthouse is a production whose budget enabled everyone to take the difficult route—and their passion is plain to see on the screen.

There is little story to speak of—two lighthouse keepers are stranded together in a storm—but the aforementioned elements of the film’s production combine in a poetic whole. Atmospheres succeed one another, rather than acts. Tension is summoned from the image of a churning sea at night (a wonder to behold in 16mm monochrome), the blast of a foghorn, the creak and clatter of a storm which threatens to blow the windows in. The tone of The Lighthouse overwhelms so completely it’s like watching something shot on Mars.

And all this swaddles its centre: two performances (Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson) in a constant fight to out-eccentric each another. The pair scream, burst into hysterics, drunkenly jig, chew cheeks at one another—you name it. What could come across as a hyper-condensed drama-school showreel is grounded in mysterious, sometimes contradictory character motivations which further contribute to the film’s disorienting effect. Like Eraserhead before it (surely a sonic and visual influence), The Lighthouse balances between hilarity and horror—but where Lynch pointed to the existence of this contrast in the real world, Eggers uses it to hurtle us further into space. There is almost nothing familiar in The Lighthouse—and what greater praise can a work of art receive?

SUBSCRIBE: http://bit.ly/A24subscribe There is enchantment in the light. From Robert Eggers, acclaimed director of 'The Witch,' and starring Willem Dafoe and...

 The Lighthouse is out now.

Words by Andrew O’Keefe

Parasite

Bong Joon-Ho resolutely rejects being labelled a genre filmmaker. Despite this, his name was earned through a series of taut, socially-conscious thrillers. The twist is that Bong’s films are characterised—as is the case with Korean film more widely—by abrupt and sometimes extreme tonal shifts. Scenes may suddenly flip from farce to terror and back again to disorienting effect. Outside of arthouse superstars like David Lynch, general audiences in the West do not have the requisite conditioning to stomach this uneasy frisson. Bong has always sat on an uncomfortable fence between the arthouse and blockbuster crowd; never quite taking off, never quite finding acclaim.

Parasite is the director’s most successful film yet in both spheres. It picked up a BAFTA, and there’s now a full-steam campaign for it to win Best Picture at the Oscars—a ceremony in which foreign-language features have always been shamefully marginalised. But it’s also proved to be a box-office hit, hauling in over a hundred million dollars worldwide (and still counting).

None of this speaks to much at all—but it does indicate that Bong has perfected the balancing act he’s been putting on his whole career. Parasite has all of Bong’s usual eccentricity, but this time raising its head only in service of a script which is as controlled as it is crazy. Cineastes may marvel at Bong’s canny use of space, the brash but beautiful handling of subtext, the ghostly glide of his camera, the film’s impeccable costume design. But none of that flim-flam will get in the way of someone who just wants to enjoy a blackly-comic ride through the lives of its dysfunctional characters.

These characters fall into two groups—a working class and an upper class family. One by one, the working class family infiltrate the upper-classers’ house, taking on jobs as drivers, chefs, private tutors. But as they occupy the richer family’s house, they find their headspaces invaded by unfamiliar new concerns, their freedom more restricted than ever. And that’s without getting into the ghost who lives in the cellar.

For all its twists and turns, Parasite is a film which may not keep you guessing until the last reel—but it starts out the gate strong, introducing its ensemble with remarkable economy. Performances across the board are phenomenal (special mention to the ever-dependent Song Kang-ho, Bong’s personal Buster Keaton; and the quietly powerful Park So-dam), and give its broadly-drawn characters tactility and depth. And its in these moments of truth that Bong the auteur can be found; the man who elevates everything he makes with a sensitive, intelligent and wickedly funny touch.

Parasite is out in cinemas now.

Words by Andrew O’Keefe

Uncut Gems

In the closing years of the last millennium, Harmony Korine was one of the most agitative forces in independent cinema. Admired and admonished in equal measure, Korine placed front-and-centre the stories and faces that cinema widely ignored. Like his New Hollywood forebears (John Waters immediately springs to mind), Korine filmed at the fringes of society; addicts, outcasts, weirdos. There was no pandering, manufactured nobility in Korine’s depiction of working-class America—instead, a candid street-level actuality.

The Safdie brothers have made a career of fusing this realism with entropic character arcs that come off like fables. Korine was nihilistic and detached. The Safdies present a moralistic world in decline; one corrupted by its inhabitants’ self-interest.

Their breakout piece, 2017’s Good Time, followed a psychopathic opportunist (Robert Pattinson) as he ran out of opportunities. Uncut Gems—their latest—employs the same structure. Adam Sandler portrays Howard, a sleazy jeweller; one we tellingly first meet through a full-screen endoscopy, who spends his days juggling dysfunctional work and home lives. One of the film’s iconic images, a jewel-encrusted Furby, subtly underlines in its tackiness that these elements of Howard’s life are fundamentally incompatible.

Sandler’s performance is what holds the threads of Howard’s life together. A duck in water, the oozy, schmoozy bullshit merchant he’s played for his whole career is as present as ever—it’s the world around him that’s changed. The Safdies are careful to limit sympathy towards Howard. But he is a compelling pair of eyes to be stuck behind; a camera carving flues through chaotic, neon-splattered Diamond District streets.

And what streets they are: shot in beautiful 35mm, soaked through with colour, alive with headache-inducing pandemonium and verbal sparring. In an offbeat and self-parodying cameo, there’s even time for a performance from The Weeknd. The film’s scattered and anxious energy is provided a scaffold by Daniel Lopatin’s score (one of the film’s many criminal Oscar snubs), a suite whose dizzyingly wide range includes both buoyant, Vangelis style synth-prog and thundering gamelan jegog. It’s another technical tour-de-force from the Safdies, whose canny directorial decisions have amalgamated into a film of impossibly high quality.

The panic, idiosyncrasy, style and dark humour of Uncut Gems merit comparison to Scorcese’s Mean Streets. But there’s something more contemporary at play here. The decline of protagonists’ lives in New Hollywood are almost always the fault of a system which excludes them—of a world unprepared for their radicalism.

The Safdies’ protagonists, by contrast, chauffeur millenial concerns; too deep into these systems to escape; driven by quick fixes, moment-to-moment pragmatism and unsustainable decision-making. Howard’s life is one we’ve all lived at some point—with no means of escape, no option to stop, suspended between unattainable success and inevitable failure. Uncut Gems lets you see it all from the passenger seat.

SUBSCRIBE: http://bit.ly/A24subscribe A Safdie Brothers film starring Adam Sandler, Kevin Garnett, Idina Menzel, Lakeith Stanfield, Julia Fox, and Eric Bogosian. UNCUT GEMS - Now Playing.

Uncut Gems is available to stream on Netflix now.

Words by Andrew O’Keefe

A Hidden Life

The career of Terrence Malick, now seventy-six years old, can be divided into two distinct halves; the early and late work. Malick was once a filmmaker of almost farcical repute. His films arrived so irregularly that each and every one was considered an event. Badlands, Days of Heaven and The Thin Red Line are some of the most critically lauded and influential American films ever made. They are also the only three that Malick produced between 1973 and 1998; a space of twenty-five years. To use an old cliché, Malick was the living embodiment of “quality over quantity”.

The general conception of his late work is as a reversal of this earlier period. The director is more prolific than he’s ever been—but he’s also patchier. His work is loose, improvisational and meandering. Cameras dizzily spin, invert, and float around their subjects. A far cry from the focused features, the measured compositions, of his youth.

A Hidden Life is Malick’s first successful marriage of these two styles. He’s jettisoned a recent penchant for tales of wealthy Angelenos, and turned his lens on an isolated mountain village in Austria during World War Two.

A farmer undertakes a campaign of contentious objection as Nazism begins to sour the atmosphere of his idyllic home. The film is based on the life of Franz Jägerstätter—now a martyr of the Catholic church. Shunned by peers and former friends, and eventually imprisoned, Jägerstätter refused to swear allegiance to Hitler, even in the face of execution. Malick does not attempt to deify, glorify or criticise Jägerstätter’s actions—he simply presents them as they appear in the farmer’s diaries.

There is a skilfully-woven political undercurrent to A Hidden Life, as self-appointed figures of moral authority—ironically, given Jägerstätter’s current status, these are clerical figures—meekly submit to the dictatorial Nazi regime. Member’s of Jägerstätter’s community harass and ostracise his family (it’s worth nothing at this stage a wonderful performance from Valerie Pachner as Jägerstätter’s long-suffering wife Franziska). Those not living in the name of Nazism are spat on, abused and distrusted. It’s a welcome contrast from the happy-go-lucky Nazis of Taika Waititi’s Jojo Rabbit. Malick’s are crueller, but that makes them even more human.

These elements could easily obstruct or disperse the focus of a film. But Malick is too smart a writer—thankfully, once again using scripts—to allow this to happen. Instead, the servility and cowardice of these institutions and people vindicate Jägerstätter’s protests. We gravitate to figures like Oskar Schindler, who “made a difference”. But Malick argues morality is not a goal-oriented pursuit. There is as much valour, as much purpose, in an act of rebellion which achieves nothing as one which saves lives.

This is the reason for the film’s title, taken from a passage in George Eliot’s Middlemarch: “…the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”

A Hidden Life is many things: a slice-of-life drama, packed with naturalistic performances, which exposes how Nazism took root in isolated rural communities; a thoughtful critique of groupthink, bandwagoning and perceived moral certainty; a koan-like, open-ended mediation on martyrdom and sacrifice; and a tourist-board worthy showreel of beatific Bavarian hills. But above all, it commemorates an ordinary man who died thinking they would remain anonymous forever. This is all a roundabout way of saying: Malick’s back.

Based on real events, from visionary writer-director Terrence Malick, A HIDDEN LIFE is the story of an unsung hero, Franz Jägerstätter, who refused to fight for the Nazis in World War II. When the Austrian peasant farmer is faced with the threat of execution for treason, it is his unwavering faith and his love for his wife Fani and children that keeps his spirit alive.

Words by Andrew O’Keefe