Darkness Risible: The Forest

[Note: This review contains minor spoilers.]

It is possible to make a searching and cathartic horror feature about suicide. Director Jörg Buttgereit’s experimental anthology film The Death King demonstrated that. It’s possible to make such a film that specifically wrestles with the relatively high suicide rate in contemporary Japan. Sion Sono’s contentious but undeniably blunt Suicide Club illustrated that. It may even be possible to set such a film in Japan’s Aokigahara forest—a notorious real-world suicide site for at least half a century—without stooping to cut-rate exploitation. Unfortunately, director Jason Zada’s debut feature The Forest is the not the feature to achieve this distinction. The film, which takes Japan’s infamous “Sea of Trees” as its central locale, ultimately proves artless, wearisome, and a tad dehumanizing.

In a foreword that unnecessarily and somewhat confusingly cuts between past and present, the viewer is introduced to Sara Price (Natalie Dormer), an American woman who has recently learned that her identical twin Jess (also Dormer) has vanished. An expatriate who teaches English in Tokyo, Jess reportedly disappeared during a field trip to Aokigahara forest. (This seems like an oddly morbid destination for a school excursion, but, then again, American middle schoolers are routinely shuttled to battlefields where soldiers have been slaughtered by the thousands.) When she did not reappear by the next morning, the Japanese authorities concluded that Jess had likely taken her own life, given that this is the usual reason people withdraw into Aokigahara’s embrace. However, Sara harbors an absolute conviction that her sister is still among the living, and promptly sets off for Japan to track her down.

Following a stop at Jess’ school and apartment—as well as some gallingly lazy moments of “Japan Is Weird” gawking—Sara proceeds to the ominous forest near the base of Mt. Fuji. (Location filming in Aokigahara is not permitted, so a Serbian forest serves as a credibly lush, misty stand-in.) There she bumbles about for a bit, having unsettling encounters that are (mostly) attributable to nerves, before conveniently running into another English-speaking foreigner. That would be Aiden (Taylor Kinney), an Australian travel writer who just happens to be planning his own foray into Aokigahara’s wilds. He has made arrangements to accompany Michi (Yukiyoshi Ozawa), a ranger who uses his free time to search the forest for the remains of the recently departed, and for the occasional living soul who is wavering about their fateful choice. After hearing Sara’s tale, Aiden convinces the ranger that she should be permitted to tag along. For his part, Aiden admits that his magnanimity is mostly about getting a juicy story for a new article—and a little bit about getting into Sara’s pants.

Everything up to the point where Sara, Aiden, and Michi journey into Aoikigahara proper is essentially a glorified prelude. What follows is a series of encounters with supernatural entities who are apparently bent on scaring Sara shitless—while also luring her deeper into the woods. The restless dead admittedly don’t have to work too hard at this endeavor. Sara’s adamant certainty that her twin still lives functions as kind of will-o’-the-wisp: a slim hope that flits just out of reach, coaxing her into increasingly perilous situations and foolish decisions. By the time she defiantly declares that she will spend the night at Jess’ abandoned campsite on the off chance that her sister will return, it’s clear that Sara has progressed from sisterly instinct to something like grief-fueled monomania.

This certitude that Jess is alive—a belief that is resolute at first, then desperate, then farcical—is the only defining feature of Sara’s character, and a shallow one at that. Even in its flashbacks and dream sequences, the film doesn’t present much substantiation of Sara’s allegedly intimate bond with her sibling; it is urgently declared but not otherwise buttressed by the screenplay. This leaves Dormer flailing: There’s nothing for her to engage with other than Sara’s obsession and, at a distant second, her Ugly American disdain for Japan. Accordingly, Sara emerges as a rather uninteresting and unpleasant protagonist. Dormer can be a beguiling performer with the proper material. Her tragic two-season arc as Anne Boleyn in Michael Hirst’s The Tudors is one of that series’ standout acting achievements. However, The Forest largely abandons her, and the resulting wreck of overcooked neuroses and clumsy histrionics is tedious at best and painful at worst.

Admittedly, there’s a murmur of potential in the the film’s screenplay, which is credited to Nick Antosca, Sarah Cornwell, and Ben Ketai. In an anemic sort of way, the script at least acknowledges the connection between self-harm and mental illness, and its depiction of trauma’s deforming effect on the mind gives the film’s generally puerile tone a needed dose of adult complexity. The moral conveyed by The Forest’s late narrative swerves is a noble one, at least: Namely, that one cannot identify a suicidal individual by appearance or even by stereotypical melancholic behavior. In what is possibly the solitary revealing moment for an otherwise underfed character, Sara unconvincingly revises her parents’ gruesome murder-suicide into a car accident when relating the story of their deaths, highlighting the societal shame that so often clings to mental disorders.

Such smatterings of intelligence are few and far between, however. Mostly, The Forest just utilizes Jess’ evident suicide as a disingenuous plot device. The viewer learns little about what precipitated the woman’s chronic depression and previous self-harm episodes, beyond the vague assertion that she is “troubled” for reasons connected to the deaths of the twins’ parents. (A murder-suicide? Who wouldn't be?) Jess’ disappearance is merely a means to compel Sara to delve deeper into the haunted wilderness, despite all omens that this is a Bad Idea. At bottom, then, The Forest is a fairly conventional horror flick about a hapless victim being gaslit by ghosts, which makes the paper-thin suicide conceit (and the Aokigahara setting specifically) all the more puzzling.

Befitting its PG-13 rating, The Forest’s ambitions are plainly pitched towards the psychological end of the horror spectrum. Notwithstanding one or two gory moments and some indisputably startling jump scares, The Forest strives to be nervy thriller that gradually constricts the heroine in its coils. It’s perhaps telling that the film's better sequences have nothing to do with the unquiet dead. Unsurprisingly, Aiden is eventually revealed to have been less than truthful about what brought him to Aokigahara. Once the cracks in his story begin to show, the film quite skillfully conveys Sara’s creeping, chilling realization that she is in the middle of nowhere with a strange man who could easily physically overpower her. Some of the screenplay’s few bright spots revolve around the cat-and-mouse games that Sara and Aiden play as mutual mistrust starts to swirl around them.

The writers and director Zada maintain a coy ambiguity about whether the terrors that Sara witnesses are the work of undead spirits or simply figments of her fatigued and panicked mind. There’s a certain Jungian appeal to the notion that Aokigahara gives form to one’s unsettled fears, much like the fetid cave where Luke Skywalker confronts a phantasmal Darth Vader with his own face in The Empire Strikes Back. There are also shades of John Baxter’s wanderings through a sepulchral, crumbling Venice in Don’t Look Now, led by glimpses of what appears to be his deceased daughter. Writer Antosca is no stranger to this sort of heightened symbolism, as he had a hand in successfully re-translating Thomas Harris’ twice-adapted seminal pulp thriller Red Dragon for the final season of Hannibal.

Praise where praise is due: Several of The Forest’s jump scares are executed with the precision of an icepick to the brainstem. Even this jaded horror movie aficionado found himself flinching in terror at the film’s more frightful jolts. However, The Forest lacks much in the way of vitalizing substance between these sporadic heart-pounding highs. The film’s scares often amount to mere seconds of funhouse exhilaration, surrounded by minutes upon minutes of thickheaded dialog and ponderous plot. Moreover, Aoikigahara’s apparitions seem to have no clear motivation beyond frightening Sara out of sheer spite, leaving one with the distinct impression that the filmmakers simply threw arbitrary creepy elements at a wall, and then assembled a movie out of the parts that stuck. The whole affair feels weirdly uneven and unsatisfying: flickers of technically spot-on horror filmmaking in a gray expanse of dreary, bleary storytelling.

While it is hardly the film’s fatal flaw, The Forest’s faintly racist depiction of Japan and the Japanese people is probably its most obnoxious and embarrassing trait. Early scenes traffic in an off-putting Lost in Translation-style exoticism: “Oh, those wacky Japanese and their funny ways!” Zada even slips in a bit of gross-out gaping at a plate of still-wriggling raw cuisine, indicating that in some circles at least, cinematic depictions of Asian cultures still haven’t progressed much beyond Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Far too often, the film’s jump scares rely on the assumption that non-Asian viewers will find a grimacing or cackling Japanese countenance inherently frightening. Japan isn’t a developed nation-state in The Forest: It’s an otherworldly, modern-yet-backwards realm where even rational authorities like teachers and police whisper portentously of the restless dead. There’s something perplexing about a mainstream 2016 film that is more retrograde regarding a non-white culture than Wes Craven’s 1988 voodoo exploitation chiller The Serpent and the Rainbow.

This writer is normally loath to lecture filmmakers on their artistic choices—the perennial critical game of “I Would Have Done It Differently” is a pet peeve—but it’s sort of remarkable how much more appealing The Forest might have been had the Price twins just been written as Japanese-American women. Ditching the ungainly white protagonist might have permitted the film to more frankly explore the controversial topic of Japan’s alarming suicide rate. Moreover, the contrast between the twins might have been sharper and more germane to the plot had Sara been conceived as the assimilated sister and Jess as the Japanese revivalist who travels to her ancestors’ homeland in order to plan her final exit. Reconfiguring Sara’s outsider role as one characterized by simultaneous ethnic identification and cultural disconnection might have transformed the film’s stranger-in-a-strange-land conceit into something much more textured and intriguing. Alas, one is left with The Forest as it is, not how one might wish it to be.

A War of All Against All: The Green Inferno

[Note: This post contains spoilers. Updated 1/23/16]

It’s tempting to dismiss Eli Roth’s The Green Inferno as little more than a horror enthusiast’s tasteless homage to the Italian cannibal films of the 1970s and 1980s, with a dollop of gleeful hippie-bashing thrown in for flavor. Like that of its antecedents, the marketing for Inferno promises grisly acts of violence perpetrated on hapless captives by an isolated, indigenous tribe. Roth’s film adds a twist of cosmic irony: Said victims are idealistic college students who originally traveled into the wilderness to “save” their captors from rapacious developers. Superficially, Inferno’s entire raison d’être is to immerse its viewers in stomach-churning cruelty, to push their tolerance for animal terror and abattoir-level gore to the breaking point. A moral scold would not even need to delve into the film’s reliance on discomfiting racial tropes—more on those later—to characterize Inferno as a nasty, exploitative feature.

Granted, Roth seems to pride himself on nasty, exploitative works. His feature debut, Cabin Fever, borrows themes and motifs from numerous sources—Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Last House on the Left, The Crazies, The Evil Dead, Outbreak—but the freak show appeal of the film stems from its (literally) skin-peeling body horror. His Hostel and Hostel: Part II duology, meanwhile, is regarded as one of the touchstones of the mid-00s “torture porn” trend in English-language horror cinema. Compared to the Rube Goldberg absurdity that came to characterize James Wan and Leigh Whannell’s Saw series, the Hostels are relatively straightforward stuff. Where the seemingly endless Saws quickly lost their way in a pointlessly convoluted plot and mythology, Roth’s films stand up reasonably well as blunt, repulsive tales of survival and revenge. There’s nothing Grand Guignol about the Hostels: They are ugly, ugly films with an aesthetic that can best be described as anonymously dank. Their sophomorically transgressive character rests primarily on copious carnage, and secondarily on their blending of The Most Dangerous Game’s high concept with echoes of historical Nazi and Soviet atrocities.

At their worst, Roth’s films are little more than shallow endurance tests, wherein the characters are subjected to grueling abuses and the viewer is double-dared to keep their eyes open. The Green Inferno resembles this sort of feature initially, but it slowly reveals a brainier and more philosophically knotty side. Its significance within Roth’s small oeuvre should not be understated: Beneath the juvenile gags and grindhouse shocks, the film engages sincerely with political and moral concepts that were merely toyed with idly in the Hostels. The Green Inferno is not just Roth’s most fascinating and morally sophisticated feature to date (a low bar, admittedly). It also represents the kind of tough-minded rumination on violence that director Tom Six claims to be striving for with his vacuous Human Centipede series.

The film’s protagonist and obligatory Final Girl is Justine (Lorenza Izzo), an idealistic freshman at a New York City college. She and surly roommate Kaycee (Sky Ferreira) are awakened one morning by the chanting of campus activists, who on this particular day are campaigning for the labor rights of the college’s maintenance workers. Kaycee has only vehement contempt for such do-gooders, whom she regards as guilt-wracked poseurs, but Justine is intrigued, partly by the group’s principles and partly by their dreamy leader, Alejandro (Ariel Levy). Justine has her own admirer in smitten activist Jonah (Aaron Burns), who urges her to check out the organization. However, when Justine drops in on a meeting, Alejandro rebuffs her by harshly questioning her motives and dedication. He later walks back his misgivings, however, offering Justine a place in the group’s upcoming trip to the Peruvian Amazon. The goal of this expedition is purportedly to protest a natural gas development that is threatening a nameless indigenous tribe. Alejandro warns that these rainforest people will likely be hunted down and murdered by corporate mercenaries, all for daring to resist the tacitly government-approved theft of their lands.

Justine agrees to join the cause, disregarding the advice of her roommate and her father (Richard Burgi), a prominent attorney affiliated with the United Nations. Soon Justine is stepping out into the blazing heat of tropical South America with a gaggle of fellow activists. These starry-eyed global citizens are mostly anonymous background props, but a few are named and distinguished by a single trait: pothead Lars (Daryl Sabara), bad girl Samantha (Magda Apanowicz), and so forth. As the group travels through towns and then upriver to the leading edge of the gas company’s swath of destruction, Alejandro elucidates his plan for direct action. Disguising themselves in the corporation’s jumpsuits and hardhats, the activists will surreptitiously chain themselves to trees in the construction area. Hacking into the company’s satellite communications, they will then use their smartphones to stream their protest to the world as it happens. 

Alejandro claims that the presence of a live video feed will dissuade the security forces from making any rash moves against them. In reality, things go south quickly: Alejandro’s green-eyed girlfriend Kara (Ignacia Allamand) secretly gives Justine a defective padlock, allowing the mercenaries to quickly unchain her. One on these soldiers-of-fortune then put a pistol to the terrified young woman’s head and seems prepared to summarily execute her—until Alejandro smugly reveals Justine’s familial connection to the U.N. The protest thereafter ends almost as quickly as it began. The activists are detained, turned over to Peruvian police, and packed onto a puddle-jumper plane to fly them out of the region. Alejandro and the others are ecstatic about the exposure that the protest has gleaned (“We’re blowing up Twitter!”), but Justine is understandably angry at being used as a human shield. She doesn’t have long to ruminate on her feelings of betrayal, however: Shortly after takeoff, the plane’s engine suddenly explodes, sending the aircraft plummeting into a crash landing deep in the rainforest.

There’s no getting around the fact that, prior to the plane accident, The Green Inferno is a tiresome, faintly obnoxious film. Its palpable eagerness to get to the cannibalism results in a first act that uncertainly juggles elements of a travelogue, Third World thriller, campus melodrama, and repellently “edgy” comedy. Several aspects of the screenplay are downright unpleasant, from the way that Alejandro’s self-satisfied dickishness is presented as charming, to the sheer venomousness of Kaycee’s disdain for the very notion of progressive activism. Roth’s dialog has a mannered tackiness that might have been salvageable by the right actors, but The Green Inferno’s D-list cast simply isn’t up to the challenge.

Still, the ham-fisted writing and acting are occasionally redeemed by an unexpected twist on a stock situation. A prominent example is a Chekov’s gun scenario in which an anxious Lars gingerly takes a loaded pistol ashore for protection during a bathroom break. When the film throws in an enormous tarantula, the viewer is primed to expect a fatal mishap. Instead, Lars simply shoots the poor arachnid several times and runs back to the boats in a panic. This transforms a moment of R-rated Scooby-Doo hokeyness into a withering aside on American overreaction to trifling threats. It also echoes Chef’s encounter with a tiger while mango-gathering in Apocalypse Now, one of several situational and thematic allusions to Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 film that Roth drizzles into his feature.

The Green Inferno finds its footing once the activists’ plane plummets out of the sky. It’s not that the slimy dialog or the plastic performances improve substantially—they don’t—but that Roth is plainly much more comfortable with the tangible darkness of blood and gristle. It helps, certainly, that the narrative’s sudden left turn into a twisted National Geographic nightmare permits the filmmaker to play in a genre sandbox he clearly admires. As the aircraft dips below the tree line and the fuselage rips asunder, sending passengers hurtling out to certain death, it’s all too easy to envision Roth rubbing his hands with relish, muttering, “Okay, now the real fun begins…”

Naturally, Justine and the seven other named activists are the only passengers to survive the crash, and their situation quickly turns from bad to worse. Drugged by blow darts fired from the dense foliage, they are abducted by a band of indigenous hunters and taken further upriver in canoes. Led by a fearsome bald warrior (Ramón llao) who is covered from head to toe in black pigment, the party soon arrives at a riverside village. The tribe that dwells there—identified much later as the fictitious Yagé people—speaks no English, but it’s clear that they aren’t interested in discussion, any more than they would parley with the peccary piglets that trot about underfoot. Upon arrival, the terrified captives are scrutinized by a sinister Matriarch (Antonieta Pari) who has one milky blind eye and skin painted a hideous jaundice hue. The activists are then herded into cages, save for poor, oblivious Jonah, who is singled out for a horrendous fate that leaves no doubt as to the Yagé’s intentions.

Some narrative back and forth aside, the remainder of the The Green Inferno consists primarily of one extended sequence of imprisonment. Far from slowing the proceedings down, the activists’ capture is the point at which the film truly picks up steam. Given that this is a Roth joint, it goes without saying that the film’s bloody practical effects are as nauseatingly peerless as the CGI is laughably phony. However, as pure horror cinema, Inferno is surprisingly slow-burn in character. As the captives are plucked out one by one to satisfy the Yagé’s hunger and the Matriarch’s murky ritual needs, a cold-sweat torment settles over the story. Roth excels at utilizing the activists’ situation to create gut-twisting dread. While it quickly becomes apparent that they have little hope of escape, the grisly details remain unclear until the actual moment of agony arrives. Lacking a shared language with their captors, Justine and the rest are left to contemplate all the horrific possibilities as they watch the Yagé sharpen hooked bone knives and tend the embers in a voluminous claystone oven. Indeed, while each captive is subjected to a fresh flavor of suffering—the activist who is hobbled, staked, and baited to lure swarms of stinging army ants actually gets off easy—the stretches of time spent stewing in the cage are somehow more agonizing that the most gruesome evisceration.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the appearance of the village is where the ghastly design of The Green Inferno shines. The production design team, overseen by Marichi Palacios, is plainly aiming to approximate the look of the apexes of the cannibal film subgenre, Cannibal Ferox and Cannibal Holocaust. The village’s structures appear to be those of an indigenous Amazonian people, but the film overlays the environs with a slathering of gore. Human bones ornament every nook and cranny, and rotting heads top the village’s wooden palisades. There are no carefully maintained midden heaps, just bones and bits of viscera strewn about like detritus, while flies and clotted blood cling to seemingly everything. The entire settlement has a repellent vermillion cast, as though untold quantities of blood had soaked into every fragment of wood and stone. What’s more, most of the Yagé wear a cinnabar pigment that matches their gruesome surroundings. Not incidentally, this permits the yellow Matriarch and her ebon enforcer to stand out from the other villagers in the film's wide shots. It also contributes to one of the most stunning images in the film: the captured activists in their fluorescent yellow jumpsuits, surrounded by a surging sea of scarlet bodies. 

While Inferno presupposes a familiarity with racist colonial fairy tales about savage cannibals skulking in the world’s equatorial regions, whether or not the film sustains and reinforces such myths for a contemporary audience is difficult to say. Certainly, it is discomfiting that there are barely any indigenous peoples depicted who are not cannibals. While it seems disingenuous to argue that Roth should have made a nuanced ethnographic study out of his horror film, the mere decision to make a cannibal feature in 2015 seems, at the very least, irresponsible. There’s something a little distasteful and (dare one say it?) privileged about a white director going out of his way to keep the myth of the feral jungle anthropophage alive in the public’s imagination. Roth previously defended his depiction of Slovakia in Hostel by comparisons to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, asserting that no reasonable viewer would glean from the latter film that all white rural Texans are serial killers. However, this retort is less salient to The Green Inferno. Context matters: The race-based colonial history of South America renders the politics of the white-authored The Green Inferno distinct from those of standard slasher fare. (Now, a cannibal horror film made by an indigenous South American director? That would be something to see.)

For this viewer, the most repugnant aspect of the film is its use of female genital mutilation as a threat against a captive white woman. Shoehorning the predominantly northeast African practice of FGM into a story about indigenous Amazonians betrays Roth’s willingness to substitute reality with racist fiction if it titillates. (“Primitive brown people do this, right? Let’s throw it in there.”) Quite apart for the racial angle, however, it’s a move that at once trivializes a genuinely horrific issue while also finding a way to backhandedly dehumanize millions of FGM survivors. Obliged to dream up the most appalling fate imaginable for an American woman, Roth went right to the disfigurement of her sex.

As important as it is to acknowledge and criticize the fundamental recklessness of The Green Inferno, it’s also vital to address how the film actually portrays its indigenous bogeymen. Far from serving as proxies for real-world Amazonian tribes, the Yagé are presented as stewards of a culture that has gone monstrously askew, deformed by contact with a ravenous global corporate empire. Like Colonel Kurtz’s patchwork tribe of Cambodian forest people and AWOL Americans in Apocalypse Now, or the degenerated Austronesian culture of Skull Island in King Kong, the tribe of The Green Inferno is not a Stone Age remnant, but a reactive mutation. (Similar to Kurtz’s clan, they revel in gore, something few real-world hunter-gatherer societies would contemplate, given the diseases it would invite.) The activists are no innocents ensnared by devils, but naïve fools caught in the crossfire of a shifting economic and cultural conflict. Underlining the point, one activist observes that it is their gas company disguises that doomed them once they fell into the Yagé’s clutches: “They think we’re the enemy.”

Ultimately, the script by Roth and Uruguayan filmmaker Guillermo Amoedo approaches every faction—native, activist, corporate, governmental—with an acidly skeptical eye. Cannibal Holocaust might have been a significant influence on The Green Inferno, but Roth’s feature contains neither the older film’s then-innovative found footage conceit nor its accusatory jabs at the viewer for gobbling up depictions of sensationalistic violence. This makes the new film a much less audacious work, but also evades the hypocrisies that cling to Cannibal Holocaust. Roth and Amoedo are more interested in undermining the viewer’s faith in an abundance of institutions and movements. Often, the screenplay flirts with a cheapjack species of omni-directional South Park-style cynicism, with a corresponding penchant for sneering at liberal activist strawmen. 

That said, the film’s swipes at activist Norteamericanos are often pointed. While they talk a good human rights game, most of the activists are motivated by less altruistic concerns, and for some the Peruvian protest is plainly a glorified vacation. (Given that she is the Final Girl, guileless but kind-hearted Justine is the exception.) Their ballyhooed direct action amounts to little more than a weekend stunt to rake in social media attention. Even prior to their abduction, the activists’ concern for the Yagé seems paper-thin. Paradoxically, there’s a kind of quasi-colonial tone to Alejandro’s scheme: swoop into a foreign country, extract some resources (Twitter mentions), and then return home while cracking open beers and back-slapping each other for bravery. Tellingly, none of the campus do-gooders bother to learn anything about the people they claim to be defending, and once in Peru their sympathies seem to shift to the forest ecosystem rather than its inhabitants. (One added knife-twist to the activists’ unfortunate situation is that knowledge of even a few words in the Yagé tongue might have saved them.)

Such disregard is consistent with the sanitized “rainforest chic” that peaked in liberal circles in the 1990s but still lingers on. It's an ostensibly green mindset that fetishizes the flora and fauna of the equatorial world while erasing its indigenous human inhabitants. Indeed, the fallacious bifurcation of the physical world into “nature” and “humans” is a theme that emerges from almost all stories about cannibalism, The Green Inferno included. Disgust-based social taboos are often predicated on artificial categories, after all. To both the animistic hunter-gatherer and the post-Darwin rationalist, humankind is indivisible from the natural world. Meat is meat.

Initially, it appears that The Green Inferno might be aiming for a facile, “plague upon both your houses” nihilism that plays to the vanity of the armchair curmudgeon. The worldview that the film eventually settles upon, however, is more reflective, akin to a broad sociological pessimism. The Green Inferno sees no nobility in humankind, just competing claims on property and lives that can only be effectively resolved through warfare between political entities. It’s a vision that, weirdly enough, echoes the political philosopher Thomas Hobbes in his opus Leviathan, absent the fussy Christian sectarianism that preoccupied much of the seventeenth-century Englishman’s writing.

Hobbes described the natural condition of humanity as one of anarchic violence, where thievery, rape, and murder prevail. In such a state, civilization would not be possible, and every moment would be characterized by unremitting fear and peril. Human life would be, as he memorably described it, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” a “war of all against all.” Hobbes believed that humankind could only ascend out of this state by organizing into social groups under democratic, aristocratic, or (ideally) monarchial leadership. To achieve harmony, our species must abdicate its natural freedom for a muscular government, preferably one invested with absolute power.

At first glance, one might assume that the Yagé of The Green Inferno embody the vicious, atavistic state that Hobbes posited as the factory mode of our species. Unquestionably, a cannibal presents a vivid contrast with the sentimental conception of the “noble savage”—even though they are actually complementary caricatures on the same racist coin. However, a moment's consideration reveals that the Yagé lead an existence that bears little resemblance to Hobbes’ conception of the primeval condition. While the tribe is engaged in a brutal war with the world beyond their village—most conspicuously with the corporation that aims to seize their land—their attitude towards one another appears to be peaceful. There is no significant evidence of intra-tribal violence in the film, and under the unconditional rule of the village Matriarch, in-group harmony appears to be the rule. Indeed, the ritualized acts of cannibalism that consume the luckless activists serve as a social glue for the Yagé, providing opportunities for religious devotion and village-wide socialization. Revealingly, The Green Inferno lingers on banal scenes which could have been plucked from a documentary on indigenous peoples: village women talking and laughing blithely as they chop tubers and salt freshly slaughtered cuts of “long pork.”

The solitary cannibal might be a murderous savage, but a village of cannibals is a polity, albeit one with traditions that put it in inherent conflict with all outsiders (who, as a rule, prefer not to be eaten). Hobbes used the term Leviathan to refer to a powerful European nation with imperial ambitions, but the word could easily be extended to any organized group of people that asserts its political sovereignty. The Yagé certainly fit the bill, as they do not appear to acknowledge the authority of either the Peruvian government or its grasping corporate allies. Under Hobbes’ formulation, anything a Leviathan does to protect the wealth and lives of its people is de facto ethical—presumably, up to and including cannibalism. (Nourishment, intimidation, and social cohesion: It's win-win, really.) While The Green Inferno drapes the Yagé in a kind of bestial exoticism, there is little suggestion that they are intrinsically evil. Their consumption of human flesh is, rather, an adaptation to extraordinary circumstances in which their nemeses give no quarter. The gas company might be fighting over wealth, but the Yagé are battling for their very existence. In such a scenario, the most shocking sorts of asymmetric warfare are not only permissible, but mandatory, at least according to Hobbes. For the Matriarch to not gouge out a captive's eyes and gobble them up would void the social contract with her tribe, resulting in the forfeiture of her position. In its roundabout way, Roth's film seems to advocate that fearsome shibboleth of American reactionaries, "moral relativism".

What emerges from The Green Inferno is therefore a decidedly grim vision: a world locked in ruthless conflict, with each self-styled Leviathan forced to adopt ever-more ruthless tactics. Underlining the point, Justine eventually extricates herself from the grasp of cannibals and soldiers-of-fortune alike by slipping through the gaps in their otherwise monolithic societies. While in the thrall of the Yagé, she coerces a village child to contravene the Matriarch’s wishes and set her free by appealing to a shared love of aesthetic beauty. She then stares down the corporation's mercenaries by threatening to stream her own execution live on a recovered smartphone, thus subjecting their paymasters to an embarrassing international incident. (A bitter twist: This was, of course, Alejandro’s original plan.) These imperfections in otherwise comprehensive systems of control are fortuitous for Justine, but the film hardly presents them as hopeful glimmers. Her escape is an isolated, exceptional event on a global battlefield in which escalation among numerous Leviathans is the norm. Indeed, The Green Inferno points to bleak but eerily plausible future in which a vast majority of the world’s population is subject to the rule of a “mega-Leviathan”: a hydra of collaborating authoritarian nations-states united under a capitalist ideology. In such conditions, “nano-Leviathans” such as holdout indigenous tribes, religious separatists, anti-government guerrillas, and other nominally sovereign partisans would be forced to adopt increasingly beyond-the-pale methods. When the alternative is annihilation, the choice to eat one’s enemy becomes no choice at all.

My Goodness, What Sharp Teeth You Have: The Visit

[Note: This post contains mild spoilers. Updated 9/21/15.]

Upon learning that writer-director M. Night Shyamalan’s first horror film since his laughable 2008 misfire The Happening is a faux found footage thriller, a cinephile could be forgiven for becoming wary. After all, the distinguishing features of Shyamalan’s more durable films are their aesthetic beauty and meticulous mise en scène. Witness the alternately idyllic and demon-haunted mists that suffuse the firelit gothic environs of The Village, or the proliferation of reflections and comic-esque quadrilaterals in Unbreakable’s steely blue visual vocabulary. Nine years into Shyamalan’s increasingly dire creative slump, what possible good could come from subordinating his once-striking cinematic aptitude to the jittery, willfully unpolished first-person camera gimmick?

Quite a bit, as it happens. While The Visit finds Shyamalan’s facility for striking visuals and cunning compositions at low ebb, it’s an unexpected showcase for his screenwriting talents. Indeed, in spite of its frequently cheesy horror methods, The Visit boasts the filmmaker’s most thoughtful and intricate script since at least The Village. However, unlike the latter film with its biting but overwrought allegory, The Visit is more content with the first-order business of delivering midnight movie creepiness. By relaxing his ambitions, Shyamalan paradoxically permits his sharper, multifaceted storytelling abilities to emerge. There’s a surprising amount of substance burbling gratifyingly beneath the surface of this demented little flick, which mashes up elements of Rosemary’s Baby, Burnt Offerings, and Motel Hell and then liberally seasons them with Grimm fairy tales.

In contrast to many found footage horror pictures, The Visit establishes a semi-believable rationale for its central conceit. What unfolds on the screen is presented as the documentary film project of aspiring filmmaker Rebecca (Olivia DeJonge), a precocious high schooler with appropriately over-inflated artistic pretensions. Rebecca and her younger brother Tyler (Ed Oxenbould) are the product of their mother Paula’s (Kathryn Hahn) illicit adolescent marriage to her substitute teacher. That union caused a seemingly unrepairable rift with Paula’s parents, John and Doris, whom she has not spoken to in fifteen years. However, Paula's marriage eventually fell apart, and she has recently re-established tentative contact with her parents via the Internet. Given that they have never even met their grandchildren, Paula’s folks invite Rebecca and Tyler to spend the week at the family farm in rural Pennsylvania. This visit serves as the focus of Rebecca’s amateur documentary, but the teen’s ambitions are broader. She longs to unravel the mystery of what occurred the day her mother left home—Paula won’t elaborate, but hints that it was an ugly scene—and to hopefully persuade her grandparents to forgive their only child for her youthful lapses.

The Visit therefore consists of the footage shot over the course of the week by Rebecca and Tyler using the girl’s dual video cameras. (“Am I co-director?,” Tyler inquires hopefully. “We’ll say camera B Operator,” Rebecca replies with a scowl.) The film is murky as to whether the material shown constitutes raw or edited footage. The presence of bad takes and miscellaneous junk shots suggests the former, but Rebecca (or someone else) has clearly spliced the two-camera footage into cohesive scenes, added intertitles and dissolves, and generally sanded down the rough edges for audience consumption. Given the awareness that Rebecca exhibits with respect to documentary practice—the ethics of filming non-consenting individuals becomes a notable plot point—the most reasonable assumption is that everything in The Visit is there by her design.

From the moment that Rebecca and Tyler arrive at their mom’s childhood home, something seems a bit off about Pop Pop John (Peter McRobbie) and Nana Doris (Deanna Dunagan). They appear to be the picture of elderly folksiness, but their behavior carries a whiff of overcompensation. Cheerful Nana is perpetually baking up goodies in the kitchen, Pop Pop stoically tends to the farm’s never-ending chores, and the couple listens in respectful bewilderment as Tyler shows off his impressive improvised rapping talents. However, things start to get strange at bedtime, which arrives at the early hour of 9:30 p.m., to the disappointment of the WiFi-starved kids. Investigating weird sounds outside their room at night, Rebecca discovers Nana wandering about the house in her nightgown, vomiting prodigiously. The next day the kids observe Pop Pop repeatedly depositing small, mysterious parcels in the shed out back, and later they are maniacally accosted by Nana during an impromptu game of hide-and-seek—in the crawlspace under the house. Thereafter, the grandparents’ behavior rapidly escalates to the surreal, unsettling, and downright terrifying.

One of the more novel aspects of The Visit is how openly Rebecca and Tyler wrestle with the conflicts and uncertainties of their tense, increasingly perilous situation. Particularly in the found footage subgenre, the viewer doesn’t typically learn much about the mindsets of characters in contemporary horror features. The framework of Rebecca’s documentary—and her desire to understand the psychology of her family—means that The Visit can linger on scenes of brother and sister urgently discussing what the hell is going on, without seeming distractingly contrived about it. Given that Pop Pop and Nana are essentially strangers, the siblings have no basis for judging their grandparents’ bizarre behavior. Likewise, neither Rebecca nor Tyler seem to have much experience around the elderly. “They’re old. They’re just different,” is a mantra uttered by several characters, including Rebecca in a desperate attempt to convince herself that nothing is out of the ordinary. The yawning generation gap leaves the kids with little recourse but to Google terms like “dementia” and “schizophrenia” and make an educated guess about how much danger Pop Pop and Nana might pose to themselves or others. Unlike many horror films, the choices presented by The Visit are not easy ones: The kids’ terror at each fresh slice of menacing weirdness is at war with their genuine, familial concern that something might be seriously wrong with their grandparents.

The Visit’s success as a psychological thriller is helped immeasurably by the fact that DeJonge and Oxenbould have authentic sibling-like chemistry, enabling Shyamalan and his performers to gradually reveal more rounded personalities for Rebecca and Tyler, beyond their interest in documentaries and hip hop, respectively. Arguably the best scene in the film involves the siblings interrogating each other in makeshift interviews, wherein Rebecca coaxes he brother into talking about a formative moment of childhood shame, while Tyler zeroes in on his sister’s hidden self-loathing. Details from this scene later become relevant, not in the typically neat and tidy way of most Shyamalan plotting, but as a means of explaining behavior and creating poetic echoes. As characters, the kids aren’t always likable, but they are smart and good-hearted, and their situation, for all its outlandishness, is based on a cluster of relatable, real-world anxieties.

If the The Visit’s protagonists were middle-aged adults, the fears that the film plays upon would be more straightforward in nature. To a grownup, a senior citizen functions as a glimpse into their own future fate, and the elderly accordingly become vessels for the terrors of loneliness, illness, and mortality. For children such as Rebecca and Tyler, however, old people represent an alien Other: survivors from a far-flung time who eat, dress, and act differently than modern citizens of the world. The tension at the heart of The Visit is therefore partly one of cultural confusion. The initial challenge that that kids face is to decide whether they are over-reacting to innocuous events based on their ageist and ableist biases. Eventually, this mutates into the even thornier problems that many people face when dealing with an illness that makes their loved ones unpredictable, antagonistic, and even abusive.

These are sobering matters for a film that is otherwise a by-the-numbers (albeit modestly effective) exercise in jump scares and chilling imagery. Shyamalan unfortunately leans a bit too heavily on funhouse facileness, e.g., a disheveled old person suddenly popping into the frame. Such hokey methods can work when used sparingly, but the director is overly reliant on them, and dispiritingly eager to lazily reuse the aesthetic tropes of contemporary horror. (Are there hissing, stringy-haired figures skittering around on all fours? You bet!) Conversely, the most frightening sequences in The Visit are those predicated on the nerve-fraying uncertainty about Pop Pop and Nana’s behavior. For example, after their grandfather delivers an unprovoked beating on a stranger in an apparent moment of paranoid senility, the threat of explosive violence from Pop Pop makes Rebecca doubly wary about correcting his absent-minded mistakes.

Visually speaking, The Visit is just as undistinguished as one might expect given its found footage premise. This is not an implicit slap at cinematographer Maryse Alberti, whose résumé includes an impressive array of documentary features and the low-fi triumph The Wrestler, making her a judicious choice to lens this sort of film. Shyamalan, to his credit, seems to intuit that the low-budget sensory blandness of The Visit requires a complementary dose of subliminal uncanniness. Accordingly, he provides the film’s screenplay with a robust undercurrent of folk and pop cultural resonance to boost the hair-raising factor.

The entire film is, in essence, a riff on “Little Red Riding Hood,” complete with the unnerving notion of finding something unexpectedly and conspicuously Not Grandma sleeping in Grandma’s bed. More subtle allusions abound: the kids are warned not to linger on a woodland path, Pop Pop is observed chopping wood out by the barn, and it is mentioned ominously that Nana has something “inside her” trying to get out. Tempting treats are everywhere at the farmhouse, and Nana even sweet-talks Rebecca into crawling inside her cavernous oven to clean it, in a bit of “Hansel and Gretel” inspired creepiness. Like Bluebeard’s locked room, both Pop Pop’s shed and the allegedly mold-infested basement are forbidden to the curious grandchildren. Shyamalan even drizzles in chilling allusions to other genres and his own prior works. Pop Pop tells a disjointed story about being fired from his night shift factory job after he repeatedly witnessed a “white thing” with glowing eyes, which no one else could see. Nana later spins a rambling tale concerning invisible space aliens that live in a pond and send their victims into eternal slumber. These anecdotes suggest bits of The Sixth Sense, Signs, The Village, and Lady in the Water, but ultimately their purpose is not so much meta-textual cuteness as to inject an extra dose of eeriness into the film.

The one aspect of The Visit that is somewhat troubling is the film’s use of dementia and mental illness as a source of horror, in that individuals suffering from such conditions are presented as frightening and potentially violent. While Shyamalan’s script doesn’t assert that the elderly and/or mentally disordered are to be feared and shunned, The Visit’s moral could be construed by less attentive viewers as “old people are weird and dangerous,” or, more problematically, “mentally ill individuals are unhinged sadists who will kill you with little provocation.” It’s not necessarily that the film is glib or irresponsible, but that its depiction of an extraordinary situation could be construed as a bigoted generalization. (One is reminded of the viewers whose short-sighted takeaway from Gone Girl was “women are manipulative bitches.”) That said, the depiction of mental illness is a problem in essentially every horror film that involves a murderer slicing his way through hapless victims based on some deranged motivation. The Visit at least has the nerve to engage directly with the matter: the discomfort that nonconforming behavior elicits in the neurotypical; the distress that the mental degeneration of one’s elderly loved ones creates; and the maddening haziness as to what the right choice might be when health, safety, devotion, and pride are in multi-dimensional conflict.

Further and Furtherer - Insidious: Chapter 3

[Note: This post contains major spoilers for Insidious, Insidious: Chapter 2, and Insidious: Chapter 3. Updated 6/17/15.]

Now that three Insidious features have been released into the wild (so far), it’s apparent that the most eccentric aspect of the series as a whole is how defiantly different each chapter is from its fellows, at least in terms of the story structure and rhythm. Whatever its merits and flaws, the franchise certainly hasn’t relied on a formula. Where some horror sequels are content to replicate the original film’s story beat-for-beat with mild changes in window dressing, Insidious: Chapter 2 instead scurried off in pursuit of one of its predecessors’ unanswered questions, splitting into two parallel plots and delving into some daft, disturbing places. Insidious: Chapter 3 mixes things up yet again, as it is not a sequel but a prequel, antedating the Lambert haunting that was the focus of previous installments by the weirdly ambiguous span of “a few years.” The new film echoes the first Insidious in some crucial respects: Once again medium Elise (Lin Shaye) is called upon to save a young person who is being parasitized by an entity from the spirit world, known in the series’ mythology as the Further. In other ways, however, Chapter 3 is insolently its own thing, a standalone tale that contains elements of both a ghost story and demonic possession tale.

While the Insidious films are scrupulously conventional contemporary horror features in most respects, there’s something bracingly incongruous about the way that the saga fits together. It is that uncommon film franchise where one truly cannot predict where the next installment will lead. If one is going to attribute this to a particular individual, the obvious candidate is Leigh Whannell, who has scripted every Insidious film and takes over directing duties from James Wan with Chapter 3. For better or worse, Whannell has undeniably kept the series fresh—or sent it hurtling off the rails, depending on one's perspective. The new film illustrates that while he has absorbed the expected directorial tics from Wan and other contemporary horror filmmakers, he seems staunchly unwilling to give the viewer precisely what they might expect from each new chapter. There’s something weirdly admirable about that, particularly given how indistinguishable the individual entries were in Wan and Whannell’s Saw franchise.

Insidious: Chapter 3 centers on the ghostly tribulations of high school senior Quinn Brenner (Stefanie Scott, baby-faced and sweetly vulnerable in the role), whose mother died a year and half back. Quinn’s harried father (Dermot Mulroney) has mostly checked out, but the 18-year-old is clinging to the tiniest signs that her mother's spirit might be lingering nearby, watching over her. This is the reason that Quinn calls upon Elise, who at this juncture in the saga is retired from the ghost whispering game. Although Quinn’s earnest grief moves Elise, the older woman is unable to help, on account of a malevolent spirit (Tom Fitzpatrick) that has a particularly murderous hatred of the medium. (This darkling being would be, of course, the Bride in Black, a.k.a. Parker Crane, the same ghost that once attached itself to a young Josh Lambert.)

Elise sympathizes with Quinn's state of mind, having recently lost her husband to suicide, but the best that she can do is to admonish the girl from any further attempts at contacting her deceased mother. Unfortunately, Quinn does not heed this advice. Upon returning to the old apartment complex where her family lives and her father work as superintendent, she continues to whisper to the darkness each night, hoping that her mother hears her. As Elise warned, something responds to Quinn’s pleas: a presence that emits rattling sighs from the apartment’s ventilation system, and which eventually appears as a shadowy figure that stiffly waves at her. Following a botched drama school audition, Quinn spies this person out on the street, which distracts her just long enough for a speeding car to hit her.

The left-field abruptness of this development is the first major sign that, despite initial appearances, Insidious: Chapter 3 intends to deviate from first film’s template is modest but significant ways. Quinn is critically injured in the accident, and briefly enters the Further when her heart subsequently stops in the emergency room. Unfortunately, this brush with death seems to solidify the attention (and power) of the malign spirit that she’s been unwittingly attracting. Weeks later, she is released and sent home to recover with two broken legs, whereupon the supernatural craziness starts in earnest.

The ghost that haunts her (Michael Reid MacKay) appears as a gaunt, blackened corpse wearing nothing but a hospital shift and an oxygen mask, through which it draws ragged, wheezing breaths. The mischief perpetrated by this entity—which Quinn dubs the Man Who Can't Breathe—starts with minor poltergeist activity but quickly escalates to shockingly violent assaults. It’s a marked change of pace from the much more gradual build-up of Insidious, which took its time tightening the screws on the viewer with comparatively lo-fi haunted house scares. In comparison to other spirits that have been depicted in the series, the Man Who Can’t Breathe is a chillingly aggressive apparition. He is not content to merely terrify mortals for his own sadistic glee, or even to imprison a soul who wanders unwittingly into his underworld territory (as was done to Dalton Lambert). Instead, the Man forcefully intrudes into the world of the living with the intent to take control of Quinn’s body and then slay her, perhaps claiming a few bonus victims along the way.

This is a disturbingly grim fate for a young woman who has committed no sin but pining for her dead mother. Despite all of the The Exorcist knock-offs that have been cranked out over the decades, Insidious: Chapter 3 is the rare possession tale that taps into the sense of fundamental, horrific unfairness that characterized William Friedkin’s masterpiece. Whatever the viewer thinks of Quinn, she certainly doesn’t deserve the vicious torments inflicted on her. The brutality of those assaults is one of the main reasons that Quinn’s tale is worthy of attention, for it eventually drives her desperate father to Elise’s doorstep.

Insidious: Chapter 3 is thus revealed as the story of how Elise was lured back into the medium profession, notwithstanding her fear of the Bride in Black, or her despair at her departed husband’s silence. The dire threat posed by the Man Who Can’t Breathe compels Elise to enter the Further in search of answers. She eventually discerns that the ghost appears to have perished in one of the apartment complex’s units, and that he has enslaved several other souls from the building into a kind of unholy menagerie. (This contrasts the new film with Insidious and Insidious: Chapter 2, which subverted the centrality of place in ghost stories by attaching the malevolent spirits to the Lamberts themselves.) Unfortunately, the Black Bride is waiting for Elise, and her near-fatal encounter with the ghost is so frightening that she has second thoughts about her ability to rescue Quinn.

This gives Whannell an oh-so-convenient narrative pause to throw more familiar faces at the viewer. Elise’s fellow medium and friend Carl (Steve Coulter) from Insidious: Chapter 2 pops in just long enough to provide her with some anodyne reassurance and encouragement. Meanwhile, Quinn’s family brings in the series’ goofball ghost hunters Specs (Whannell) and Tucker (Angus Sampson) to pinch hit for Elise. Unfortunately for Quinn, Specs and Tucker are essentially just Internet-famous charlatans at this point in the franchise’s timeline, and their inexperience with actual ghosts puts everyone in severe danger. Fortunately, Elise eventually returns to help clean up their mess. In a climax that becomes frustratingly rushed and confusing at its apex, Elise faces down the Black Bride and then wrestles Quinn’s body and soul from the grasp of the Man Who Can’t Breathe.

In most respects, Insidious: Chapter 3 is an effective but fairly forgettable spook story. Of the franchise’s three films, it is the entry that feels the most like a scream-inducing amusement park ride, although as always Whannell presents everything but the bumbling Specs and Tucker in a remarkably straight-faced manner. Most of the film’s frights are of the jump scare variety, and while Whannell isn’t especially imaginative in presenting these jolts, he does know how to milk them. He exhibits particular skill at drawing out each strand of tension for a just a bit longer than expected. In short, it's the kind of pop entertainment designed for people who liked to be scared, but not necessarily stupefied.

The film's apartment setting isn’t exactly distinctive, but production designer Jennifer Spence does an fine job of making it feel like a formerly posh mid-century building gone faintly shabby, its fixtures outmoded and its surfaces marred by cracks and water damage. (Spence and Whannell also add in several visual nods to the The Shining’s Overlook Hotel, thankfully without being overbearing about it.) There are a few memorable creepshow details here and there, such as the tarry footprints that the Man Who Can’t Breathe leaves in his wake, and even a couple of downright disturbing elements. The eyeless, handless, footless faux-Quinn that is chained in the Further like a hobbled pet is pure heebie-jeebie fuel, as is the moment where a possessed Quinn smashes her own casts to powder and proceeds to wobble forward on grinding, unhealed leg bones.

Intriguingly, Insidious: Chapter 3 is just as notable for what it doesn’t do as for what it does. Unlike Insidious: Chapter 2, which practically wallowed in the Bride in Black’s convoluted backstory, the viewer learns very little about the Man Who Can’t Breathe, other than the fact that he is evil and has nasty designs on Quinn. This is by no means a shortcoming. After delving into the series’ baroque mythology in the previous film, Whannell here provides the audience with a bit of a palate cleanser: a straightforward innocent-in-peril scenario where the aim is to deliver a quota of screams while fleshing out an existing character. While Quinn’s fate drives the plot, Elise is the true protagonist, and Insidious: Chapter 3 is essentially a vehicle to elevate her from a Wise Old Woman to an Orphic heroine. (In this, the film is fairly distinctive. When was the last time a female septuagenarian filled the central role in a horror picture?)

This shift illustrates Whannell's surprisingly shrewd, holistic approach to storytelling, particularly for a genre that’s usually all too willing to simultaneously repeat itself and totally disregard continuity. While there is an undeniable banality to the Insidious series’ surface features, there’s always been a bit of auteurist gleam underneath, epitomized by Whannell’s fixation with world-building and his almost casual disregard for the Syd Field screenwriting paradigm. Even Whannell's shallowest characters resemble actual human beings who are responding to outrageous supernatural events, rather than mere tokens to be moved around in the service of a formula. It’s this sense of unruliness that still stimulates, three films into the franchise. Like a pack of teenage vandals roaming a subdivision on Halloween night, Whannell provides that ever-so-slight sense of uncontrolled, dark energy to an otherwise benign, prepackaged horror experience.

Future's So Bright: Tomorrowland

[Note: This post contains major spoilers.]

Tomorrowland, writer-director Brad Bird’s absurdly sincere paean to the techno-utopianism of yesterday, is that rare feature in which the message significantly outshines the surrounding film. It is a miraculously eccentric work, in that a $190 million movie based on a cluster of Disney theme park attractions is just about the last piece of cinema one would expect to reflect the filmmaker’s ethos in such a pronounced fashion. Yet Tomorrowland unmistakably emanates from the same worldview that gave filmgoers The Iron Giant, The Incredibles, and the screenplay to the all-but-forgotten *batteries not included. If anything, Bird’s latest film represents a distillation of the wonder, optimism, and humanism that have characterized much of his work, such that their concentrated essence permeates every frame. Given that Tomorrowland positions itself at an antidote to the paralyzing hopelessness that typifies the vast majority of contemporary genre fiction (and much of the news cycle, for that matter), the film’s heart is unquestionably in the right place. The problem is that the actual work of cinema encasing that heart is rife with problems.

Things get off to a rocky start with the framing device, in which a tetchy middle-aged man and an unseen younger female speaker—eventually identified as David Walker (George Clooney) and Casey Newton (Britte Robertson)—bicker for several minutes about the particular point at which their tale should begin. This conversation, in which Casey cheerfully and repeatedly interrupts the increasingly exasperated Frank, neatly previews the dynamic of their relationship: A world-weary grump is prodded out of his dismal yet comfortable beliefs by the sheer unbridled positivity of an adolescent who reflects his own mindset in earlier, less cynical times. Unfortunately, the exchange is a dreadfully unfunny drag, inclining one to wish that Bird and co-writer Damon Lindelof would just get on with the damn story.

Eventually, the narrators settle on David’s childhood as a starting point. It was a time when, as he wistfully observes, “the future was different.” That future was exemplified by the 1964 New York World’s Fair, which is where an excitable and precocious young David (Thomas Robinson) arrives to gawk at the technological marvels of mid-century America. (Not incidentally, the fair was also a showcase for Walt Disney’s revolutionary Audio-Animatronics robotics system, which received its most notable debut in the “It’s a Small World” attraction.) While showing off a quasi-functional jetpack he has built to an unimpressed judge (Hugh Laurie) at an inventor’s competition, David encounters Athena (Raffey Cassidy), a similarly precocious British girl who give him a souvenir pin emblazoned with a “T.” This object eventually admits David into an astonishing, hidden metropolis filled with the kind of science fiction wonders that make the fair’s exhibits look like relics from the Dark Ages. This city is Tomorrowland, and although young David exhibits unabashed delight upon discovering its existence, old David claims that his arrival there ruined his life.

In the present day, the viewer is at last introduced to Casey, a Florida high school senior with a passion for furturism. (Robertson is unconvincing as a teenager, but so exuberant and charming in the role that it doesn't matter.) She also has a nocturnal hobby sabotaging the demolition equipment positioned to tear down the launch pads at Cape Canaveral. From her father (Tim McGraw), a former NASA engineer, she’s plainly inherited a keen interest in science—and in space exploration specifically—but her fannish enthusiasm and forthright sanguinity about tomorrow’s possibilities are all her own. Bombarded in the classroom by glum prophecies of war, riots, disease, famine, drought, and myriad forms of environmental devastation, Casey inquires brightly, “What are we doing to fix it?”

It’s this unflappable attitude that draws the scrutiny of Athena (mysteriously still tweenaged in appearance,) who secretly plants a Tomorrowland pin among Casey's possessions. When the girl later discovers the memento, it is revealed to have properties quite unlike the glorified keycard that David received some five decades earlier. Upon touching the pin, Casey is transported to a sunlit wheat field on the outskirts of Tomorrowland, which gleams in the distance like the proverbial city on a hill. This relocation is temporary, lasting only as long as pin-to-skin contact is maintained. It is also illusory, as Casey quickly determines after cracking her head on a couple of real-world walls while hurrying towards the metropolis. Eventually she gets the hang of the physics and spends several minutes on a dizzying exploration of Tomorrowland’s wonders, which include aerial mass transit, a bustling spaceport, levitating swimming pools, and, naturally, jetpacks complete with auto-deploying, self-inflating safety cushions. At once bleeding-edge fantastic and vaguely anachronistic, the city reflects the kind of retrofuturism that William Gibson described as “the tomorrow that never was”.

In monomyth terms, one can regard the Tomorrowland pin as Casey’s Call to Adventure: a glimpse of a heretofore unseen world that pushes her out the door on a life-changing journey. However, as the viewer eventually learns, Casey’s vision is actually more akin to an advertisement: a glossy, 3-D promotional video designed to entice the recipient to seek out the real Tomorrowland. Serving as both a sanctuary and laboratory, the city is a gathering place where great altruistic minds can develop the solutions to humanity’s problems in relative peace. Unfortunately, Bird and Lindelof’s screenplay takes its sweet time making this clear, and in the interim there’s a great deal of tedious shouting, arguing, running, driving, fisticuffs, and plasma pistol gunplay. This points to what is the film’s most glaring flaw: its penchant for padding out the plot with tiresome quarreling and lackluster action sequences that amount to so much narrative wheel-spinning.

To be clear, the problem is not that Tomorrowland’s dimension-hopping plot is convoluted, or even that it exhibits a typically Lindelof-esque frugality in dribbling out explanations for What the Hell Is Going On. (Both of those things are true, but this writer followed the plot just fine on the first pass. Never mind that Tomorrowland is literal kids’ stuff compared to the likes of Primer, The Fountain, and Inception.) Rather, the film’s stumbles are those of pacing and presentation. One suspects that there is a much more engaging 90-minute movie lurking somewhere in the screenplay, if Bird had had the courage to slice out significant chunks of go-nowhere dialog and wearisome action. The whole film simply feels flabby and clumsy in too many places, in a way that seems utterly inconsistent with Bird’s impressively nimble direction of Ratatouille and Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol.

After taking an inordinately long time to actually get moving, Tomorrowland’s plot eventually starts to snap into focus. To exactly no one’s surprise, the ageless Athena is revealed to be a Tomorrowland android, albeit one who has been disavowed as a rogue unit. The truth is the opposite: Athena hasn’t strayed from her programming, but continues to follow it in both letter and spirit, pursuing her mission long after the masters of Tomorrowland have deemed it a worthless endeavor. Her assignment is to find “dreamers”: brilliant scientific and creative thinkers with an unwavering confidence that the world can be transformed into a better place through human ingenuity.

It was this task, of course, that initially brought Casey to Athena’s attention. Normally, a potential recruit would be left to find their way to Tomorrowland on their own—and thereby prove both their intellect and passion—but the present moment in human history is too critical for such niceties. Accordingly, Athena eventually delivers Casey to the doorstep of the now-grizzled Frank, who has evidently been exiled from Tomorrowland for decades. Holed up in a ramshackle house that resembles a junkyard Batcave, Frank has withdrawn from the world to anxiously monitor an intricate doomsday clock, which indicates a 100% probability of imminent global apocalypse (and apparently has for some time). However, the mere proximity of Casey’s sprightly confidence causes this secular Rapture Index to momentarily flicker to 99.99%, which is sufficient evidence to convince Frank of her super-specialness. This is roughly the moment when a regiment of smiling, plastic-haired Tomorrowland androids arrives to cheerfully vaporize the pair of them.

More forgettable action ensues, and after escaping the Stepford hit squad, rendezvousing with Athena, teleporting to Paris, launching into orbit, and then plunging through a dimensional portal, the group eventually reaches Tomorrowland. They find that the city is startlingly dilapidated and underpopulated, and that the “Plus-Ultra” leadership represented by the contemptuous Governor Nix (Laurie again) has wholly given up on humanity, preferring to hunker down and weather the looming Armageddon from its extra-dimensional perch.

In an obviously audience-directed monologue, Nix laments humankind’s refusal to take decisive action even when given ample evidence of impending calamities, speculating that people actually prefer dystopia, at least when the alternative is getting off their behinds and doing something. After sending out warnings both overt and subliminal for decades, the masters of Tomorrowland have thrown up their hands. It is, naturally, Casey who points out that conveying an incessant message of approaching catastrophe for years on end is likely to have crushed humanity’s hope, paradoxically ensuring that no action is taken to save the future. However, Nix isn’t interested in any last-minute gambits to forestall the apocalypse the Plus-Ultras’ calculations indicate to be just weeks away. And so a climactic escape and struggle ensues, with an outcome that is predictable but nonetheless agreeably rosy.

It’s challenging to recall a recent film as overtly message-oriented as Tomorrowland, which is the cinematic equivalent of a flashing Time Square advertisement written in hundred-foot, neon orange letters. It is not subtle in the least, but the film’s Popular Science optimism feels like a welcome breath of fresh air, given the ubiquity of dystopian and apocalyptic fiction in contemporary pop culture. So earnest are Tomorrowland’s pleas for hope and so intense are its ambitions for a lustrous tomorrow, defensive aficionados of more dismal scenarios will likely regard the film as interminably naïve, or worse yet as a scornful, schoolmarmish admonishment.

That would be a shame, for despite its narrative and formal defects, Tomorrowland is a much-needed corrective to the glut of urban hellscapes and ashen wastelands that have swamped the imagery of the future. Regardless of how much stock one puts in the film’s Mickey Mouse pop psychology—All You Need Is Hope!—it’s undeniable that a great swath of speculative fiction has become distressingly lazy and repetitive. Conceits and designs that were once innovative in features like Dawn of the Dead, The Road Warrior, Blade Runner, and Brazil have become de rigueur. What was formerly a radical reaction to the perceived squeaky-clean utopianism of the science fiction genre has itself become conventional, the dominant ideology of the future, so to speak.

In this landscape, even the aesthetics of Tomorrowland seem weirdly transgressive. Combining elements of Streamline Moderne and Googie design—with a hefty dose of glossy, friendly simplicity one might term “iBlanco”—the film's future is a safe, spotless, orderly place, where toil and struggle are replaced with leisure and discovery. It is not unlike Disney's theme parks in this respect, highlighting a curious correspondence: The Tomorrowland pin fulfills much the same function as Walt Disney World's Epcot, in that both constitute glorified commercials for an idealized, inspirational future. (Epcot, it should be recalled, was originally an abbreviation for Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow, and was initially conceived by Walt Disney as a model city that would prod America into tackling the most intractable challenges of modern living.)

In one respect, Tomorrowland is a resounding success: While its elementally a Brad Bird film, it's also the first Disney feature in ages that feels as though it reflects the outlook of old Walt himself, who was an outspoken modernist and futurist. One needn't assume a blithely credulous stance toward the Disney conception of tomorrow---and all its attendant capitalist, imperialist, racist, and sexist baggage---to acknowledge the veracity of Tomorrowland's fundamental observation: that ceaseless visions of despair can create despair, and despair can create paralysis. The tribal disbelievers and professional dissemblers who deny the reality of global problems are justly seen as the primary enemies of progress, but the film proposes that misanthropic fatalism is a more insidious obstacle.

Despite Bird's supposed (and mostly groundless) notoriety for sprinkling Ayn Rand's Objectivist philosophy into his films, Tomorrowland's villains aren't the putative witless, mediocre masses who refuse to save their own skins. Rather, the antagonists are the Plus-Ultras like Nix, who first inundated the world with their frantic alarmism, and then disdainfully threw in the towel when the world preferred to wallow in the inevitability of destruction. Indeed, the crumbling Tomorrowland glimpsed in the film's present-day sequences can be regarded as an acidic satire of Galt's Gulch from Atlas Shrugged: a sanctuary where Earth's best and brightest withdrew to create a utopia, and instead ended up building little more than a cushy scenic viewpoint for the End Times. (In this, Tomorrowland the city bears some resemblance to the scathing depictions of a collapsed Objectivist paradise in the video game Bioshock.)  It's a far cry from the egalitarian, multi-ethnic Shangri-la that Casey's vision promised.

Fortunately, the film's epilogue illustrates the can-do response that this discrepancy provokes. Freshly in command of Tomorrowland's destiny, Casey and Frank dispatch a new batch of androids to Earth, bestowing each with a set of pins and orders to find the dreamers that are needed to right the city and the future. The candidates that the robots are shown selecting pointedly represent a broad range of nationalities and ethnicities, as well as numerous disciplines: not only scientists and engineers, but artists, activists, and caretakers. The street musician, the film posits, is just as essential to tomorrow's innovations as the geochemist. A cynic might argue that this notion represents self-flattering myopia. However, in Tomorrowland's final moments, as the music swells and dozens of starry-eyed, prospective Plus-Ultras simultaneously reach for that “T” pin and, by extension, for a more luminous future, it's almost impossible to remain in a cynical frame of mind.

The Play's the Thing: Clouds of Sils Maria

[Updated 11/19/15.]

It's tempting to regard French filmmaker Olivier Assayas' latest feature, the numinous Clouds of Sils Maria, primarily as an exhibition for the talents of its lead actresses, Juliette Binoche and Kristen Stewart, and to a lesser extent for the film's artful, multi-layered screenplay, penned as usual by Assayas himself. Although it arguably fits Clouds, that dreadful descriptor, “actor's movie,” has always seemed like a bit of a backhanded compliment, hinting that a film's direction is blandly functional or devoid of stylistic imprint. This is not a critique that one can seriously level at Assayas' latest work, which illustrates the director's mature command of the mise-en-scène, as well as a few of his curious signature flourishes. (In particular, Clouds is a showcase for the Assayasian abrupt fade to black, concluding scenes a beat earlier than a more formulaic editing approach might suggest.) Still, Clouds is ultimately a film in which the actresses—and it is overwhelmingly, fundamentally a story about women—take center stage. Rather that crowding them with formal floridness, Assayas gives his performers the space to uncover the endless, twisting corridors that snake through his dialog.

Set primarily in the breathtaking, crystalline landscape of the Swiss Alps, the film focuses on the travails of Maria Enders (Binoche), a renowned French actress of stage and screen. When the viewer first meets Maria and her harried yet resourceful American assistant Valentine (Stewart), the pair are bound for Zürich, where the actress is scheduled to accept an award on behalf of Swiss playwright Wilhelm Melchior, a long-time friend of Maria's and now a virtual recluse. It was Wilhelm's lesbian romantic tragedy Maloja Snake that first catapulted Maria to international fame: When she was just 18 years old, Maria famously portrayed Sigrid, the tale's brazen young office assistant, first on the stage and then in a film adaptation. In the play, the character of Sigrid seduces and then discards the company's middle-aged president, Helena, eventually driving the older woman to an apparent suicide.

Unfortunately, while en route to the awards ceremony, Maria and Val receive word that Wilhelm has died. The subsequent celebration of the playwright's work thus takes on a funereal tone, and Maria's slim enthusiasm for the whole affair slips into grief-fueled doubt. Nonetheless, the actress puts on her red carpet smile and endures the proceedings, despite the distraction of her ongoing divorce and the hovering presence of a despised ex-lover (Hanns Zischler). The post-awards dinner providers her with some face time with celebrated theater director Klaus Diesterweg (Lars Eidinger), who has been courting Maria to star in a new production of Maloja Snake, this time in the role of Helena. For the new Sigrid, Klaus confirms that he has been seeking Jo-Ann Ellis (Chloë Grace Moretz), a volatile American film actress who is presently straddling the line between It Girl and D-list punch line. Maria had previously been cool to the notion of revisiting the play, but after discussing the project with Klaus she is more receptive.

The aforementioned events essentially constitute an extended prologue: The bulk of the film unfolds some weeks later, as Maria and Val arrive at Wilhelm's hideaway in east Switzerland, near the village of Sils Maria. Overwhelmed by the memories that permeate the place, the playwright's widow Rosa (Angela Winkler) vacates the house and hands the keys to Maria so that the actress can rehearse in peace for her upcoming role in the revival of Maloja Snake. During the subsequent weeks, Maria and Val run lines amid the placid alpine surroundings, at least partly under the theory that the place Wilhelm chose as his sanctuary from the outside world might provide some inspiration. Besides rehearsing the play, the women wander the misty mountain trails, swim in the frigid lakes, and make infrequent forays into the nearby village. On one occasion, they meet with Maria's co-star Jo-Ann and her novelist boyfriend (Johnny Flynn) at a posh local hotel. Having seen the American actress in a dreadful superhero film and perused her tabloid exploits online, Maria is disarmed by Jo-Ann's poise and magnanimity. (“Of course you liked them,” Val snarks at her employer with a grin, “They spent the whole night flattering you.”)

Such detours aside, however, the lengthy middle section of Clouds functions as a sort of cabin fever drama, one focused on the mounting strain that the situation puts on Maria and Val's ambiguous bond. Val's lack of theatrical training notwithstanding, she dutifully plays the part of Sigrid to Maria's Helena, rehearsing the play's emotionally fraught scenes over and over. Although Val is loyal and accommodating, she doesn't keep her opinions to herself, freely offering Maria criticism and even insight into the subtleties of the play. Meanwhile, the older woman grows increasingly frustrated with the role of Helena, a character she finds pathetic and alienating. Both women smoke relentlessly to relieve the tension; the frustrated search for a misplaced package of cigarettes becomes a recurring motif. When not rehearsing, the pair discuss the play's meaning and the motives of its characters, with occasional digressions into related matters, such as the ups and downs of Jo-Ann's career, or the artistic worth of Hollywood blockbusters. In this way, the play and everything adjacent to it begin to consume Maria and Val, stirring up discomfiting undercurrents and revealing fissures in their ostensibly professional relationship.

The contrasts between the lead actresses and their performances are an essential aspect of Clouds. Binoche has gravitated toward a distinct type of character since reaching middle age, but it's a consistently engaging one: the outspoken, put-upon, slightly frazzled professional woman who nonetheless harbors profound self-doubt. (The quintessential Binoche moment is one in which she hurriedly juggles multiple tasks while pleading with pursed lips into a cell phone, “No, no, no, no!,” inevitably at some self-important male listener.) Maria is yet another version of this same ur-woman, whose incarnations have previously appeared in films such as Caché, Flight of the Red Balloon, Summer Hours, Certified Copy, and the otherwise forgettable Elles. Binoche is characteristically ferocious in the role, which highlights how distinct her style is from Stewart's. The younger actress' approach is casual and almost detached, befitting a character who has subsumed her will to the ego of a larger-than-life celebrity. Yet Stewart portrays Val as a woman who is self-aware and comfortable in her own skin in a manner that Maria could never hope to be. While some of Val's Maloja Snake line readings have a tossed-off slackness—befitting a non-actor who is just trying to get through them—at crucial moments she delivers them with matter-of-fact bluntness, and the effect is like a wet towel snapping Maria on the nose.

What's most impressive about Clouds is how Assayas and his performers create multiple levels of conflict within the narratively simple scenario of “Maria and Val rehearse a play." At the proximate level, there is the play-within-the-film drama of the Helena and Sigrid's passionate affair and their inevitable, blistering breakup. The viewer is only permitted scattered glimpses of this story, and Assayas pointedly never shows any scenes in Klaus' final production of Maloja Snake, but the broad strokes are apparent. Despite the straightforward outline—girl meets girl, girl loses girl, girl kills herself—everyone in Clouds seems to have a different interpretation of the play, with each individual perceiving a novel pattern of culpability and weakness in the main characters.

At the same time, Maria's grappling with her role functions as a drama about the actress' discomfort with aging, loneliness, and death. Early in the film, Maria insists that she is Sigrid, and that she has always been Sigrid, ever since the play's original premiere. That fact that middle-aged Maria continues to identify with a character she portrayed as an adolescent reveals a vain denial of time's passage, as does her inability to relate to a more vulnerable older character. Her reaction is pitiable but also wholly understandable. The margins of Clouds are scrawled with the particular indignities faced by actresses as they age, from cruel verdicts of sexual undesirability to wholesale exile from the sort of leading roles that are routinely bestowed on their male peers. Moreover, Wilhelm's death—actually a suicide, as Rosa reveals solely to Maria—has quite naturally nudged the actress into a morbid frame of mind. At one point Maria observes that the performer that first created the role of Helena perished in a car accident not long after the original film was complete. Maria brings up this fact in order to brush it off as a source of superstitious fear, but it's clear that her mortality is weighing on her as much as professional and romantic obsolescence.

On another level, and a bit unexpectedly, the erotic obsession that Helena feels towards Sigrid serves as a proxy for Maria's convoluted feelings bout Val. The intense scenes that they rehearse together gradually become thick with deeper meaning, often conveying emotions that neither woman seems able to confront in other contexts. Maria's dependency on Val is not just that of an overwhelmed celebrity who needs assistance in navigating photo shoots and press tours. Val represents a portal to a generation that Maria simultaneously disregards, disdains, and envies, as much for its youth as for its tastes and affinities. It is Val who gives her employer the lowdown on the celebrity gossip about Jo-Ann, and Val who keeps up with banalities outside the glamorous bubble of Maria's personal affairs. When Val leaves one night to visit a man in a neighboring village, Maria doesn't seem to know what to do with herself, wandering the house aimlessly just as Wilhelm's widow Rosa might have. There is also a subtle but potent sensual component to the women's interactions. Neither Binoche or Stewart overplay it, but it is there, in the way that the women sit and stand in relation to each other, in the touches that occur from living in such close proximity, and in the giggly flirting that seems to emerge once they've had a few drinks. When the pair take a dip in a freezing lake, Maria sheds all of her clothing, while Val leaves on her underwear, a detail that reflects their nationalities but also says much about their perceptions of (and hopes for) the relationship.

As if all these emotional nooks and crannies weren't enough, there is another, metatextual layer to Clouds' drama. It's no accident that Binoche is playing a character whose biography resembles her own in many respects, nor that Jo-Ann—the ingenue-turned-scandal-magnet whose acting abilities are widely questioned—bears some similarity to a younger Stewart. Indeed, much of the dialog in Clouds concerning performance and celebrity has a particular resonance in light of the actresses who are delivering it. Val often finds herself arguing in favor of the culture of contemporary pop entertainment, in light of Maria's vociferous scorn for everything Hollywood. When Maria snorts derisively at big-budget features about werewolves or mutants, it's all too easy to imagine it as a catty, elitist swipe at Stewart's own filmography. When Val advocates for Jo-Ann's point-blank, modernist acting style and for the virtues of her rough-edged public persona in a sea of Hollywood phoniness, it's tantalizing to imagine that Stewart is defending herself against critics and cultural tongue cluckers. While this meta dimension to the film is unmistakable, Assayas refrains from presenting it with the sort of arch knowingness that might have eventually rendered it insufferable. Instead, it glides over the surface of the drama, providing another level of substance but never threatening to overwhelm the story.

As one might surmise, Clouds of Sils Maria is an incredibly dense work of drama, in which every line seems to have a double, triple, or even quadruple meaning. There is even a bit of reflexiveness to be found in the film's script. An argument over the ambiguity of Helena's fate at the conclusion of Maloja Snake foreshadows Clouds' most conspicuous mystery: Late in the film, a character abruptly vanishes from the story, similar to the sudden evaporation of Rita in Mulholland Drive. While there are mundane if eccentric reasons that this disappearance may have occurred, the event has a weird-fiction uncanniness that's hard to shake, particularly given that it corresponds to the appearance of the Maloja Snake referenced in Wilhelm's play: a rare atmospheric phenomenon in which low clouds drift in meandering coils through the high alpine valleys near Sils Maria.

Despite its myriad dramatic strata, Clouds consistently retains a powerful sense of humane immediacy, in that the tale of Maria and Val never gets lost in a snarl of too-clever-by-half curlicues. This, ultimately, is the film's standout achievement: its elegant conjuration of an almost literary-like complexity of meaning within a relatively straightforward, character-driven drama. It's the film's unflinching lead performances and Assayas' terrifically fecund script that enable Clouds to work so effectively in this respect.