April didn’t bring any showers to the movie theater, but it did bring a bloodbath.
I am of course referring to Sinners, easily the month’s best movie (that didn’t initially receive a proper writeup) and possibly the best movie of writer/director Ryan Coogler’s career. With blockbuster season just around the corner, the franchise fare about to be loosed upon the multiplex has a high bar to clear.
“You see people for who they really are when they think no one’s watching” is among the more eloquent justifications for voyeurism you’re likely to hear; it’s also a compelling theory as to the unique — and inherently voyeuristic — appeal of cinema. Shot on pleasingly grainy 16 mm on nights and weekends over the course of two years and making excellent use of a tape recorder as a central plot device, Gazer has a DIY throwback vibe befitting its paranoid-thriller forebears. Frankie (Ariella Mastroianni, who co-wrote the script with director Ryan J. Sloan) suffers from a rare, degenerative, and apparently fatal condition that renders her incapable of accurately perceiving time and forming new memories; it also makes her the perfect in-over-her-head heroine of just this sort of neo-noir.
Sloan, whose brief bio describes him as “an electrician turned filmmaker from New Jersey with no credits you’d recognize,” is the rare student of New Hollywood auteurs to absorb those filmmakers’ lessons rather than merely ape their style. Gazer shows its shoestring budget at times, but it also shows cleverness and ingenuity. When it isn’t making you wonder what the next twist in Frankie’s ordeal will be, it has you pondering a question as insightful as it is dispiriting: how can time heal her if she can’t feel time passing?
“You’ve made a career out of bodies,” Karsh (Vincent Cassel) is told late in The Shrouds. That’s true — he’s the founder of GraveTech, which allows the bereaved direct access to their departed loved ones’ decomposing corpses via 24/7 livestreams from within their proprietary burial shrouds — just as it’s true of David Cronenberg. The progenitor of body horror, whose own body of work includes such all-timers as Videodrome, The Fly, and Eastern Promises, has always been fascinated by the intersection of natural bodies and unnatural technology. Here he’s also fixated on the joining of tech and terra firma: GraveTech resting places are dug up and defiled as a statement from whoever’s responsible that they find the company’s entire existence an affront to the natural order.
With his shock of grey hair and penchant for dark suits, Karsh bears more than a passing resemblance to Cronenberg himself, a connection made all but explicit by the fact that the director, like his latest protagonist, lost his wife of 38 years to cancer in 2017. A minor Cronenberg movie is still a major event, not least because the 82-year-old luminary has found it increasingly difficult to secure financing in recent years, but both The Shrouds and 2022’s Crimes of the Future feel like footnotes. In its portrayal of cancer, the film nevertheless settles on a profound truth: nothing Cronenberg or any other filmmaker can imagine happening to the body from without is as horrifying as what can actually happen to it from within.
If you, too, are a viewer of simple tastes, merely reading the description “Irish-language folk horror” will be all the persuasion you need to watch Fréwaka. If you prefer your genre movies to actually be good, well, friend, consider the luck of the Irish upon you. With a title loosely translating to “roots” and a story of generational trauma, Aislinn Clarke’s second film is available exclusively on Shudder and warrants at least signing up for a free trial. It isn’t until after arriving at her new patient’s home that Shoo (Clare Monnelly) is told that the woman she’s to care for (Bríd Ní Neachtain) may be suffering from dementia, just as it isn't until later that night that Peig informs her new caregiver that they live in “a house under the house.”
Who they are is for the movie to know and us to find out, of course, but suffice to say that both we and Shoo would do well to heed the warnings of the seemingly off-her-rocker elderly woman whose entire vibe could be generously described as ominous. You’ll eventually start to question whether what you’re seeing is real in the strictest sense of the word, but not whether Clarke is in control of the proceedings as they grow increasingly untethered — a fine line the writer/director stays on the right side of more often than not. What follows is no Wicker Man (1973), but at least it’s no Wicker Man (2004) either.
Everyone knows they’re out there, but few have ever seen one. They only come out at night, and a curfew is in place to ensure that none of the townsfolk run afoul of them. If that sounds like the premise of a horror movie, well, not quite — writer/director Isaiah Saxon’s The Legend of Ochi is a PG offering from A24 that’s about as close as the studio is likely to come to making a kids’ movie. Taking place on the fictional island of Carpathia — no relation to the European mountain range, though the vibe is very much a Continental mishmash — and starring Helena Zengel as a girl named Yuri who doesn’t fear the eponymous creatures as much as she’s been taught to by her eccentric paterfamilias (Willem Dafoe), Ochi feels like a remake of a live-action Disney movie from the ‘70s that doesn’t exist.
The creature itself is reminiscent of The Mandalorian’s Grogu in its baby-bird adorableness; you’ll pout your lips and “aww” with concern when Yuri inevitably happens upon a wounded baby Ochi, doubly so when she says exactly what you’re hoping she will: “I won’t hurt you.” But Saxon undercuts his own attempts at gravitas with a series of disorienting tonal shifts that veer between ‘80s nostalgia and arthouse quirk. As she dedicates herself to the questionable task of returning her new ward to its home, Yuri occasionally gets lost along the way to learning that sometimes you can go home — as does the movie.
You don’t have to like vampire movies to like Sinners. In fact, it’s probably better that you don’t: all the better to be blown away by how damn good this one is. Not that anyone who’s seen Black Panther, Creed, or Fruitvale Station will be surprised that Ryan Coogler has made another great movie. His latest takes place in the Jim Crow South, where identical twins Smoke and Stack (both played by Michael B. Jordan; why limit yourself to just one, after all?) have returned from Al Capone’s Chicago with money, a chip on their shoulders, and plans to open a juke bar. With a top-shelf supporting cast led by Delroy Lindo, Hailee Steinfeld, and Jack O’Connell, what follows from that innocent-enough setup is paced similarly to From Dusk Till Dawn, both in the sense that the action unfolds over one long, bloody night and in how long the movie takes to reveal its true vampiric self.
Evil manifests in many forms, and here it’s a Southern Gothic trio of white folk musicians who ask to come into the juke on opening night — a request Smoke and Stack wisely decline, for all the good it does them. When characters you’ve come to care about over the first hour so inevitably turn, it’s raw, visceral, and upsetting in a way movies of this kind seldom are. Coogler excels at the requisite genre thrills, just as he excels at infusing them with rare depth: the undead are likened to a cult who, when they aren’t draining their victims’ blood, are attempting to convert them with silver-tongued eloquence. There may be nothing new under the sun — or moon, in this case — but at least there’s Sinners.
