Movies

Some movies limp over the finish line; The Long Walk manages to trip flat on its face and somehow keeps crawling, dead weight and all. For nearly two hours, I watched a parade of doomed teenagers shuffle alongside an endless highway, and no, this is not a lost “Hunger Games” outtake, though you’d be forgiven for thinking so - Francis Lawrence directed both. To call it familiar is to undersell déjà vu. By minute thirty, I recognized the blueprint: kids, endurance, grim spectacle, draconian rules, broadcast violence, and a regime that puts the “fun” in fundamental oppression. Only, the “fun” is nowhere in sight.

What kind of mad, magnificent nerve does it take to thread blues, Jim Crow, juke joints, and bloody fanged vampires into a single, haunted hymn, then have the whole thing vibrate with a weary, unvarnished soul? In “Sinners,” Ryan Coogler’s blood-spattered Delta opera, the answer is: more nerve than most directors have in their little fingers. For a movie that starts off with the horror bag’s oldest two-bit trick, jump cuts and sulfurous flashbacks, as if auditioning to be the next entry in The Conjuring Industrial Complex, this one slinks out of its corner, trades its fangs for a microphone, and spins its story so slow and deep you could fall into it and drown in its music. Ten minutes in, I nearly scoffed. Ninety minutes later, I was reeling, what fuckery is this?

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 you ever wondered what would happen if you left a beloved childhood character unattended in a leaky canoe, drifting down the stagnant waters of cheap horror, Popeye’s Revenge arises as your answer — but not so much with a punch as with a dispirited flop. Somebody somewhere, perhaps haunted by the nightmares of public domain, gazed at E.C. Segar’s iconic spinach-munching sailor and thought, “Why not transmogrify him into a slasher villain?” Why not, indeed.

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.

There’s a particular horror only dreamt up by the American psyche—a suburban quiet punctured by a bang in the night, an inexplicable exodus of children, doors creaking open into bottomless dread. One can almost smell the musty carpet and the creeping anxiety that sinks in with it. Weapons, Zach Cregger’s vigorously anticipated follow-up to Barbarian, turns that queasy dream into a waking nightmare, and just when you start to think you’ve mapped out where it’s taking you, it flashes a mad grin and tightens the screws another turn. I hated horror movies once, almost on principle, but Cregger’s deviously entertaining sensibility—his ability to lace his darkness with a grim, cackling wit—has pried open a new door in my head.

There’s something irresistible about the clamor a movie like Us creates, like a distant siren, it lures you not just to watch, but to theorize, to fret, to explain yourself (or explain away the film’s shortcomings with a gesture at its “genius”). Jordan Peele’s sophomore feature has become one of those post-screening litmus tests: Did you see the twist coming? Did you catch all the “clues”? Congratulations, you’re either too clever or, more likely, you’re scrambling in the dark just as Peele wanted. Us is that rare horror film which, above all, wants to be iconic, and while it achieves a kind of feverish originality, it also proves that cleverness can be both a blessing and a curse.

Jordan Peele remains the elusive showman of modern American cinema, and with Nope he pulls off his boldest hat trick yet—a genre spectacle that is as enthralling as it is unnerving, as self-consciously mythic as it is eerily ambiguous. At a time when every new alien movie tries to out-gloom its predecessors, Peele has the audacity to make the unknown not just frightening, but beautiful and indecently entertaining.

It’s tempting, fatally easy, really, to call Jordan Peele’s Get Out a “game-changer” or the sort of genre-bending thing destined to lard itself in film syllabi until the discourse wrings it dry. But here is a rare debut that actually lives up to the clickbait: a film that sears itself into your nerves, not just for the way it jolts and twists, but for how it rebuilds the entire nervous system of American horror from the ground up.

This review contains spoilers.

There are films that hit with the brute-force exhilaration of a madman hammering on your front door, and then there is 28 Years Later, Danny Boyle and Alex Garland’s triumphant resurrection of their own, personal apocalypse. What do we call it when a once-buried genre franchise lurches (or, in this case, sprints, full naked dicks akimbo) back into the light, louder, stranger, more ludicrously alive than ever before? Sometimes, art sneers at gentility and sends in the swinging cocks as a greeting committee.