Saturday Evening Movie Post: Oddity, plus The Vourdalak and Red Desert [moviegique]

There were a couple of points of note on our journey to see the Irish horror film, Oddity.

It had opened on July 19th, after a flurry of other horror flicks, and The Boy and I had gambled on The Vourdalak, a peculiar French film based on a story by Aleksei Tolstoy. (That's the 19th century's Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy, not the 20th century's Aleksey Nikolayevich Tolstoy. Even Russian authors have confusing names.) We enjoyed this folkloric tale of a French dandy who finds himself adrift in the Balkans among a family whose ancient patriarch has gone to fight the Turk and returned...a vourdalak!

Two things really stood out: First, the French dandy is a rich character, vain and spoiled and definitely #metoo bait, but while not especially brave, he has a moral core and actually does a few right things at some personal risk. It was frankly a more strongly drawn character than we see these days in serious dramas.

Second, the vourdalak himself is played...by a puppet. A large puppet, but a puppet nonetheless, or maybe even just a doll. This probably knocks a few potential viewers right out, but The Boy and I loved it. It was far superior to using CGI, and it created a different kind of "uncanny valley", an edge of insanity to the spooky proceedings.

It's actually strongly reminiscent of pictures of people rescued from the camps in WWII.

While it certainly must have been low-budget, there's real brilliance in some of the camera work, in the acting, and the creation of a feeling (like The Witch) that just a few miles outside of major cities lies barbarism the courtly types are unsuited for.

They're all looking at the recently returned Vourdalak. Great blocking. (That's two new films in the last three weeks that used blocking in their storytelling: Will filmmakers bring this technique bak?)

But moviegoing is, for no reason I can fathom, feast or famine. There just wasn't much out, and Oddity had already left most of the local theaters.  I dragged The Boy to the 60th anniversary of Red Desert, a Michelangelo Antonioni film, he was too tired to appreciate. On the other hand, I wasn't tired and I also didn't appreciate it all that much, being of that period I don't particularly care for—the era of washed-out Technicolor—but which I sample periodically looking for gems.

This story of a depressed housewife looking for meaning in life culminates with her cheating on her husband—no spoilers, it's obvious from the get-go this is going to happen—and discovering that only makes her feel worse. It reminded me, actually, of Melancholia, though it is nowhere as splashy nor self-indulgent. And it didn't have the "leave your husband and child to be happy" vibe of Louis Malle's The Lovers, which we saw back in June. Still, it's two hours of a woman being depressed.

It is shot-after-shot of evocative cinematography, however, so I get why the film school types like it.

Our presented maintained that it was ground-breaking for pointing out the dangers of pollution, which inverted my thinking as I watched it. I was thinking "Oh, her emotional state is reflecting the pollution in the environment." I'm sure now that's backwards: The pollution was the external reflection of her internal state. (Again, not unlike Melancholia.)

It's not something I would watch for enjoyment but it's masterful in its storytelling of a kind of story I'm not crazy about. Antonioni would follow this with The Three Faces and then his most famous directorial effort, Blow Up, which per IMDB, is almost as good as Red Desert.

Also, Italians from the '60s were weird. Bocaccio '70—heck, almost all the Italian movies of the '50s and'60s, have this otherworldly character of poverty being right around the corner. And here, where the characters are upper middle class (for Italians), a bunch of grown-ass adults hang out in a shed in the wharf for a day playing teenager drinking and spin-the-bottle type games. (This stuff is interesting for historical reasons, at least.)

Meanwhile, Oddity hadn't quite gone away. It had very high ratings for a horror film (anything above 7 on IMDB is remarkable, and it was at 7.5), and we had one day to catch it at the Music Hall in Beverly Hills, after which it would only be playing in  distant Long Beach. So up, over and down we went.

There was a premiere for Neil Marshall's new film, Duchess going on. Marshall directed the excellent horror flick The Descent almost twenty  years ago (currently 7.2 on IMDB), and he's never made a good movie since. He's apparently done some top-notch TV ("Game of Thrones", "Constantine", etc.), but that's entirely different from the auteur films he's famous for.

The lead actress was posing for pictures on the red carpet (horror stalwart Charlotte Kirk), which always cracks me up because (short of the mega-events), the carpets are pretty small and the surrounding environs rather shabby.

The theater itself has gotten shabbier, too, since 2019. The Laemmle family stopped leasing it in 2019 after decades. (They wisely own most of the land their theaters are on.) Most assuredly this was due to the rent-being-too-damn-high—Laemmle theaters have always been the lowest price for first run theaters (and their popcorn, which is topflight for movie popcorn). But the staff was very nice and competent, and I'm very appreciative of both in 2024.

(Movie review begins 800 words in):

Problems facing the modern woman: Do I let the maniac at the front door in in case there's a maniac in the house?

The most surprising thing about The Oddity, The Boy and I agreed, is that it's a good movie. Not "good for a horror movie" or "good for a low-budget movie" or "good for a movie made in the 2020s"—but just a good movie. And it's good in a lot of ways we don't see much these days. It begins with a simple premise, reminiscent of an urban legend: Somewhere in Ireland, A woman, Dani, whose husband works nights at the insane asylum decides to stay in this (gorgeous) old house that they're restoring.

Dani's lost her cell phone, so she goes out to her car to look for it, and when she comes back, there's a banging on the door. A one-eyed vagrant-looking guy named Declan tells her someone snuck inside when she went to the car. (This is in the trailer, so no spoilers.) This, of course, raises the question of why Declan happened to be watching her very isolated country house. It turns out he's a recently released patient of her husband.

Cut to months later, and we discover Dani was murdered that night, presumably by Declan.

Months later, our new widow, Ted, gives Declan's fake eye to Dani's twin sister Darcy, a blind psychic who runs an oddities shop where all the items are cursed (curses are removed at the cash register to deter shoplifting). She's still a bit piqued about her sister's death and wants to do a reading on the eye.

This is when your daughter grows up and goes goth but still loves tea parties with her dolly.

Well, before you can say "too ra loo ra lie", Darcy's invited herself and her family's treasured wood golem to the old Irish house because (as noted in the trailer), Dani never would have opened the door to the crazy man. So what really happened?

That's when things start to get weird.

There's so much good here. First of all, there's a solid underlying story. This is at heart a murder mystery with supernatural elements. The supernatural elements are pervasive without being substantial. That is, it feels like there are ghosts everywhere, but they're not being used as a crutch for the plot. (You know, that sense you get in some horror movies of "well, wait, why did that happened?", and the answer is very clearly, "because the movie formula requires it, and besides Ghosts Did It".)

And I'm being tongue-in-cheek, calling it a "wood golem": It's essentially the creepy doll trope, only the doll is six feet tall. It mostly exists to unnerve the characters, as it's always turning up in different attitudes and positions, even though no one ever seems to move it.

The characters are really well developed, which makes the story cohere well. For example, Darcy had convinced Dani to set up her camera so it took pictures every few minutes. This could seem incredibly contrived, except that it's perfectly in character for occult-obsessed Darcy. Ted's a jerk, but a somewhat indulgent jerk, who suffers his wife and sister-in-law's interest in the supernatural while being "a man of science". Yana, Ted's new squeeze, is bitchy and shallow, but not to where you want to see her die for it (probably).

It's one of those movies where you think the actors must be playing to type, they're so natural at it. But then you realize Carolyn Bracken plays both the sweet, domestic Darcy and the acerbic, fierce Dani. (I mean, they're twins in the movie, but I had to keep reminding myself it was the same actress.)

It's positively the same dame!

There's actual blocking in this film, which is something I harp on a lot. But because today's filmmakers are allergic to setting the camera down, actual good shots in movies are hard to find. This movie has none of that. It lets the camera do a lot of the storytelling using lighting and color and framing and blocking—moviemaking techniques, in other words—to create suspense.

And there is actual suspense in the film. For those who don't know, "suspense" is almost like "justice". Any modifier added to "justice" means "not". ("Social justice", e.g.) Well, any modifier to suspense means "Nothing happens but we can't just say boring." Last year's Anatomy of a Fall, for example, was often described as a "suspense drama". But in order for there to be suspense, at some point something has to happen. You can't create suspense without a credible threat of action (sorry, Skinamarink!).

This movie has half-a-dozen genuinely suspenseful scenes, from the opening "will she, won't she" open the door to "you're not really going to stick your fingers in the wood golem's mouth, are ya?" And it works because sometimes the dreaded thing happens and sometimes it doesn't and sometimes a third, unexpected thing happens.

Seriously: Is she gonna do it? If she does it, is it gonna bite her fingers off? The movie hasn't tipped its hand to where you know the answers to these questions.

There's comedy! I mean, very dark Irish humor, and comedy-of-manners stuff, as Darcy exploits her blindness to try to get to the bottom of things, but it works without breaking the atmosphere.

And there are jump scares that actually work! We've noticed lately a lot of filmmakers moving away from the jump scare, which is good because the Blumhouse formula has made them more irritating than anything. But Oddity earns its scares. It tells you, "Yeah, you're gonna get scared. This is going to happen. You know it, we know it, and you're gonna jump out of your seat anyway." And jump scares are just one of many horror techniques it employs.

A lot of movies we see get worse the more you think about them (last time's Longlegs, or Avengers: Infinity War), but this one we walked out of the theater the four blocks (the closest parking) to our car liking it more and more as we went. There's nothing wrong with a movie that entertains you for its runtime, but it's nice not to feel cheap afterwards.

Oddity has made only about $1.1 million, which isn't great for a movie that opened in nearly 800 theaters. (Hundreds of Beavers was still playing at the Music Hall, and its B.O. has crept up to $500K, and it's never been in more than 24 theaters.) Hopefully it will catch on in the home theater market when it becomes available on August 20th.

The Internet is increasingly flooded with AI generated imagery which someone based on a movie. I believe this is a genuine shot from the film, however.

posted by Open Blogger at 07:30 PM

| Access Comments