Mehnificent

If there’s a chill in “The Stranger”—and there is, a gray-blue, suffocating fog that seeps in under the doors and seeps, ultimately, into your bones—it is not the chill of intellectual rigor, or even of well-honed genre machinery. No, what Thomas M. Wright (whose name, one suspects, is stiflingly respectable but also suspiciously absent from the pantheon of directors who actually terrify us) gives us is a thriller so restrained in its horror, so unsure of its own human subjects, that it might have been devised by police proceduralists who, after a long day filling out forms, briefly remembered they had souls. “The Stranger” is heavy with atmosphere, but the air is so thick it deadens more than it haunts.

What we have in Until Dawn is less a horror film than a breathless round of charades performed at the world’s noisiest sleepover—everyone putting on their most rubbery "terrified" faces but nobody remembering quite what play they’re in. The filmmakers, with the game’s title in one hand and an empty grab bag of horror clichés in the other, seem to have asked themselves, “Should we tell the story so many cared about?”—and then tossed the question straight down the mineshaft.

If there is one thing the Netflix machine does better than most of the Hollywood conglomerates that blunder through genre as if they’re bobbing for apples in a vat of clichés, it’s churning out the kind of shredded comfort food that coaxes out your half-remembered adolescent idiot grin. Night Teeth is exactly the sort of movie you suspect you’ll find yourself loathing on principle—supermodel vampires, neon-L.A. nightlife, and a plot straining to be both “gritty urban” and “Instagram ready”—but, half an hour in, you’ve stopped counting the script’s shortcuts and started absent-mindedly tapping your foot to a bass-bloated, mortifying soundtrack. So: maybe you feel a little ashamed to admit how much you’re enjoying it. I wouldn’t blame you.

If “Inside Man: Most Wanted” were a painting, you’d see the fingerprints of more talented artists beneath a slapdash coat of knockoff red—Money Heist jumpsuits, borrowed swagger, and all the desperation of a studio aching to wring one more drop from a well gone dry. What’s most astonishing is how a sequel about robbing the Federal Reserve manages to steal absolutely nothing from the intelligence, suspense, or style of Spike Lee’s superb original.

As directors go, David Mackenzie always struck me as someone who refused to drift through genre on autopilot. Hell or High Water was a jolt to the “modern Western” in the way an electric current perks up a tired body—full of sunbaked grit and genuine desperation. So it’s almost a perverse accomplishment that Relay, despite carrying all the trappings of a high-concept, glossy paranoia thriller, manages to take the zeitgeist by the throat and promptly doze off. You can practically hear the film’s pulse rate dropping as the credits roll.

When the news broke that Spike Lee and Denzel Washington were reuniting, I imagine half of New York felt that pulse of anticipation: the sort of glee you reserve for a holiday, or spotting Brando’s name in a cast list again. What could go wrong with this pairing? Everything, it turns out—at least, in that most poignant way of contemporary American filmmaking, where the result is less artistic combustion and more accidental kitchen sink fire.