4v291o

Somehow even gayer than the tv show that had actual homosexual sodomy in it.

Just good clean fun.

Not good. Really flat, samey pacing, after the early dinner party scene which had some promise absolutely nothing exciting or surprising happens at all. I was expecting Soderberghian romp and this delivered in precisely zero ways.

Still really fun even when you watch it at home and ask your (Catholic) boyfriend every five to seven minutes whether he thinks it’s any good or not.

Way weirder than the White Lotus/Triangle of Sadness type movie I was expecting.

Found the balance of gore and careful, quite beautiful filmmaking really effective.

Mia Goth is so good at what she does.

My favourite portion of the book so disappointing to see it done with so little inspiration.

Has its moments - it’s fun to do a sort of creature feature Dracula, and the gore is well done and a fun choice - but overall really flat. Script is nothingy, it maintains basically the same pace and tone throughout so there’s no real building claustrophobia or tension of any kind.

I think maybe my problem is that there’s no Dracula that is as good as the novel Dracula.

Watched on Thursday March 27, 2025.

Hard times make boring sons, good times make failsons, failsons make hard times, and so on.

I think basically every part of this is perfect. All timer Ben Wishaw compelling performance of someone annoying, of which he is our greatest living artist.

Watched on Friday February 7, 2025.

It is frightening when children behave like adults, because the adult world is a frightening place and it horrifies us to see it reflected back to us in the faces of those we assume to be most innocent. It is frightening when children behave like children, too, because we rely on children to give up some parts of their childishness for the world to continue. A world where no one ever shed the solipsism and sometimes callous impulsiveness of childhood would be very different.

How especially frightening might it be for children to truly be the future - for them to learn from the world around them and reproduce the next generation of social relations according to the values they have observed. Over 80 million acres of the United States is dedicated to corn farming, in the 1980s an already highly subsidised agricultural practice. Who is god in the great seas of monoculture corn?

Picking through the belongings of the dead boy they hit on the road, Vicky finds a cross with a crucified corn figure, and it repulses her. It isn't a disgusting object at a glance, but she is repelled by its sacrilege. Bart remarks that it looks like 'primitive art'. The children have upended every aspect of religious and civic life in their community, in church, school, and home. But they haven’t only subverted symbols or put institutions to new uses, they have discarded everything that isn’t in direct service of the corn. The school is empty and full of corn; home life appears gone; the high street is empty and it is unclear what they have been eating, or if they have been producing any food at all. We see little to no actual farming labour at any point in the film.

The practices of the nascent cult itself are also strangely empty. We are briefly introduced to a blood rite, and there are fleeting allusions to subverted scripture, but this is not a symbolically or ritually dense practice. Theirs is a religion of only control and sacrifice. They do not worship the corn for itself, only feed its hunger, investing it with greater and greater power. America has a rich, originally pre-settlement, history of stories, art, religious practices, and husbandry of and around corn. None of this is what compels the belief of the children though, they are the children of the corn of the settler state.

Their focus on the corn’s hunger is so singular that the new land relation that they create removes the human element of agriculture entirely. We till and harvest to feed ourselves, to produce commodities for trade - the value of this labour is distributed among human beings (however deeply uneven this distribution may be). We see the adults of their world choke on the fruits of this agricultural industry and the great web of global commerce in which it is enmeshed, right before being put to death with the very tools of that industry’s labour. A violent realignment of interests: now it is the corn that is hungry, and this hunger has become an end unto itself.

The corn already covers the land to the horizon, how little it would take for it to suddenly be strewn inside homes, restaurants, in cars. Monoculture corn farming is ecologically damaging and likely unsustainable in the long term. At the film’s climax of horror we see the anxiety of industrial farming’s dominance in American life and economics expressed fully and explicitly: the monster of the corn field sucks the life out of a living human being, a crop that has become grotesquely, entirely, extractive.

Not good.

The bits that are nodding at Wicker Man aren't good, the bits that are explicitly supernatural are not good. As a period piece it also isn't very good.

Michael Sheen is having an absolute whale of a time though, acting circles around everybody else.

Watched on Wednesday January 22, 2025.

Watched on Wednesday January 22, 2025.

Watched on Wednesday January 22, 2025.

Watched on Wednesday January 22, 2025.

Watched on Wednesday January 22, 2025.

Watched on Wednesday January 22, 2025.

Watched on Wednesday January 22, 2025.

Watched on Wednesday January 22, 2025.

This review may contain spoilers.

Impressions

- Some of this is really good, but I’m not sure it quite came together for me as a whole? Giving it 3* because the parts that were good really were good - the castle scenes absolutely stood out for me.

- When Nicholas Hoult was on screen I was having a good time, I totally bought it, his fear, his possessiveness, his helplessness, great stuff.

- Really good Count - camp and frightening in equal measure

- I don’t think Rose Depp’s by turns epileptic and sexual writhing really did it for me at all, found it mostly uncompelling and felt like watching an actor be badly directed. Confused and confusing choices

- Criminal underuse of Ralph Ineson

- Defoe makes a great Van Helsing type, but I felt like those parts were competing with the rest of the film for what sort of movie it was going to be - it was strongest when it was really leaning into expressionism and toying with silent film forms, wish it had either fully committed to that or made more of an effort to make disparate strands really gel together

- Ultimately it is not at all an erotic film - to the point where that must be a deliberate choice rather than a failure to create an effect - and I do not know what you’d make that choice for any Dracula story, let alone this one. There is no visual, tactile, sensory eroticism of any kind to highlight or underscore the conflicted desire, and fear of desire, that supposedly drives the whole plot. There is no real seduction at any point - not even of Thomas, and the seduction of a man is quite an important part of building the vampire anxiety imo. There’s plenty of anxiety here, but without eroticism as its counterweight and at least partial cause, you lose the real terror of Dracula. The contamination anxiety played out as plague is well played as disgusting and frightening, but it is just that. If you don’t combine it with penetration anxiety, and its inevitable erotic core, you lose the text.

This review may contain spoilers.

Pearl is a witch. She spends her time with animal familiars. Her family fear her as a conduit of contagion. She transforms inanimate objects into lovers for ungodly sexual congress. We see her most comfortable in her own domain, at the edge of the farm, where the bounds of domestication bleed into the swampy encircling water. On this edge between organised life and animal wildness, she communes with the beast, throwing chunks of livestock - and eventually human beings - to the crocodile she befriends. She thinks of her courtship of her husband as a form of bewitchment, in which she lured him away from comfortable stability that she both envied and desires. She strives at every point to make fantasy into reality, to force - often violently - the material world around her into the images she has conjured in her mind. In the classic, fairytale sense, she is much more of a witch than any of the putative witches in The VVitch.

At the emotional crest of the film, the dance troupe audition, we are shown something irresistibly shaped like a witch’s trial; here in the house of god, by the crosses on the wall and before the magistrates of her future, she dances for her life. And she finds that perhaps worse even than being dunked and found a witch, is to have no magic at all, and she drowns. Drowns in great floods of unstoppable tears.

I didn’t like this film very much, I think in large part because it doesn’t have very much criticism to make of why witches are scary. It is clear enough that Pearl belongs to Nature, and so cannot or will not submit to the disciplining forces required for productive farm work. This lack of discipline is disturbing to her mother who despairs not only of her daughter’s lack of labour, but hates her unwillingness to put aside her dreams outside of the farm, and fears her as a source of contagion across its boundaries.

But Pearl is also undisciplined in ways that are disturbing - or meant to be disturbing to us. She wantonly kills animals, is emotionally unregulated, and extremely quick to violent anger. We might think we’re beyond the fear of a woman who refuses the disciplining forces of agriculture, but the film throws us more contemporary morsels we might consider make her a bad seed. At their eventually murderous confrontation, Pearl's mother insists that there is something wrong with her, that she “does things” when she thinks others cannot see. It’s unclear whether these “things” are her masturbation, her dancing, or her killing geese.

In her long, tearful monologue she offers various explanations for what is ‘wrong’ with her. She gives tick-box indications of psychopathy, talks at length about her unique inability to be happy. But this is the therapeutic confessional of the twenty-first century, jarring both in its 1918 context and the much older world of fear the film has so far built. This movie shows us a witch, and then gives us a grab bag of other reasons we should perhaps find her monstrous. It then continues to show us a witch. Her monologue is a prelude to the peak of the film's horror: a Black Sabbath where Pearl says grace over a putrid dinner at a table of the dead.

This is a film that for all its nods to more contemporary ‘monsters’ or sources of evil and misery, ultimately does just fear the witch. Before she kills her lover, Pearl says she knows he is lying to her “because I feel things very deeply”. This is what the film is afraid of, of the witch whose knowledge is emotional and disorganised, whose behaviour does not follow predictable norms, but rather inverts those norms and so debases their meaning. When her husband returns from the war he steps inside her witch’s cottage - cosy and welcoming from the outside, but sinister and corrupted within.

This review may contain spoilers.

Nature - with a capital N - argues Jason W Moore (among others) is not a description of what we find outside of human society, but an ideological structure for organising both that society itself, and its relationship with the resources it consumes. Developing in tandem with imperial capitalism, Nature becomes a very useful conceptual ‘place’ for everything that is outside of the society being created by the ascendant economic order. Native people to the lands conquered by colonising Europeans were consigned to Nature, to ‘savagery’, childishness, unpredictability, and in this way could become a (natural) resource for exploitation in the imperial system that had cast them outside of itself.

Women, too - even those within the incipient imperial core, became part of Nature. Women’s work became ‘natural’, uncompensated work, and women’s subjectivities also rendered childish and unpredictable. Silvia Federici of course tied this social reorganisation of gender and labour explicitly to the great witch panics of early modern Europe. Many popular, Romantic readings of Federici hold that women had special areas of knowledge that were per se threatening to incipient racial capitalism, and that this knowledge was expelled from society by casting these women as ‘witches’. I do not find this particularly convincing. The more compelling argument is that women were expelled from knowledge production as a whole - whatever the content of that knowledge actually was. It is not what the witch knows, then, that is at issue, but that she knows anything at all.

Thomasin’s family do not know anything. Or rather, they have access to no system of knowledge other than that which they have brought with them, and that knowledge is totally insufficient in the environment in which they now find themselves. In isolating themselves so completely, they have constricted their ability to learn anything new almost entirely. They are far from the doctor who knows things; they are far from the unnamed native people we learn they sometimes trade with, who presumably know quite a bit about farming the land the family now tills unsuccessfully. In their lone farmstead, they have withdrawn from participating in the production of new knowledge within their settler community itself.

In a shouting argument with her father, Thomasin tells him he doesn’t know how to do anything but chop wood. This in itself is perhaps no crime, but where the family does fail is in their inability to learn. They do not know how to farm by themselves, and they are unable to learn how. Caleb thinks he has found an apple tree, but later decides he must have been mistaken. In such a Christian story, this is surely not without meaning. Once returned from the witch and in cursed delirium, he regurgitates an entire apple whole. This is a family who are unable to take new knowledge into themselves.

We see that their faith is highly disciplining, with much of their prayer being about labour, atonement for their own sloth, for their own inability to do the mental work required to uphold this system of belief even within their own minds. But it is not an ideology that is serving them particularly well in the performance of productive labour. Their faith has nothing to teach them about the environment in which they find themselves, and cannot create a productive relationship between them and the land they farm.

Knowledge is produced by inquiry, argument and invention, by experimentation and experience. People re-produce knowledge when they encounter and respond to explanatory frameworks and meaning-making ideologies. It requires memory of the old and the ability to connect it meaningfully with experience of the new. It is a process that is piecemeal, never complete, and participated in on some sort of ordered lines - whether hierarchical or communal. As such, it requires community, a sufficiently expansive social relation to other people and what they know as individuals and as a group.

A six person farmstead that eschews with others is not a community. There is no one else to observe at work in the fields, no one to discuss agricultural problems with. There is no body of knowledge to draw on. Their knowledge space is so small, and so empty of substance, that even ing basic information becomes fraught. Within it, lies become truth incredibly quickly. Thomasin teases her siblings by claiming to be a witch, and they are very ready to believe it. The twins then repeat this to their parents, and it becomes true almost instantly.

Without the ability to produce knowledge, they are left to rely on a poor analogue: the creation of ‘truth’ through Christian confession. When he finally explicitly accuses her of being a witch, William begs and bullies his daughter to confess the truth of her witchcraft. We know that she can do no such thing, but the world of the farmstead offers no way for her to correct him. Theirs is a world of competing assertions, whose ‘truth’ is assigned by individuals in the blink of an eye and that they have no tools to dispute.

The real terror of the film is felt in these moments, when reality is created entirely dislocated from any ordered process. It is highly individualised and chaotic - Katherine decides a wolf has taken her child, then a witch; William insists that his daughter is no witch, then that she is. The twins’ games with the goat are considered harmless play right up until the point that it isn't. Very little process connects one state of belief with the next. The family do not produce these truths as a group, nor does any hierarchy operate in their organisation of information (children have a marked ability to create truth in their world, despite the apparent patriarchy within which they live).

By the end, we are given no compelling reason to think Thomasin should not follow Black Phillip into the forest. Her transformation into witch is neither the Biblical temptation of the garden, nor the revisionist Romanticism of 'special' female knowledge: Thomasin becomes witch when she chooses to participate in the process of acquiring knowledge. She tells Phillip she cannot write, and he replies that he will show her. As she enters the community of the sabbath she finds she can fly. She becomes the film’s only character to learn anything new.

Really incredibly bad. The parts which are remake are bad, the parts which try something new are bad. The attempts to be playful with the original are also bad. It has absolutely nothing to say about anything. Not about agriculture, apiculture, or ritual, or about women or men. The world of the island makes no sense at all, no one does anything for any believable reason. Which I suppose might be acceptable to you if you were sufficiently misogynist in your approach.

The very final frame is the only part of the film that made me feel anything other than annoyance. But, Nic Cage is always somehow mesmerising, even in a bad film. Maybe especially in a bad film.

In the commodity monograph Palm Oil, Max Haiven writes about capitalism as a system of production that doesn’t just create disregard for human life, but actually requires human sacrifice. The success of capitalist economics demands not only that profit is chosen over life at every turn, but that profit is itself built on loss of life - whether through direct killing or degradation of the conditions for human life. Even anti-capitalist analyses will emphasise the violence of supposed rationality, of schematising and quantifying the world. Human sacrifice is a story that we tell ourselves about pre-capitalist and 'irrational' violence; how provocative then to consider it as a core requirement of capitalism itself.

It is easy to imagine an inverse Wicker Man, where a person encounters the particular logics of production and violence of Neil Howie's world for the first time. How horrified might they be by the sacrifices made to the police, made in the name of Christ, made for the upholding of The Law. What strange rituals and totems would they encounter, in uniforms that confer the right to do violence to others, in strict sexual self denial?

As Howie prays to God in the rising flames, we are given no real reason to believe this carries more or less weight than the hymn to spring the islanders sing around the pyre. But he is also the only one who is really concerned with whether his beliefs will eventually prove to reflect reality. Everyone else is concerned less with truth than with power and possibility - what can be achieved, and what is permissible. Summerisle's insistence in the end is not so much that his gods are real - indeed, we know he knows that they are not - but that the sacrifice will work.

Maybe Summerisle is right, the sacrifice will work, not because his gods are real but because his religion is - and sacrifice, punishment, and the bonding of an in group will push people to greater labour and greater tolerance of hardship. Because this isn't a film about belief, but about land relations, and the social disciplining required to create and maintain new relationships to the land.

The microcosm of the island has created an island gigantism, where one man can discipline a whole population for his desired mode of production; and where the behaviour of individuals like Howie can be minutely and predictably directed. The island is frightening in part because instead of broad sweeps of ideology whose edges we often cannot see, and whose effects are stochastic, we see a relationship of land and belief that is entirely self contained to the point of being deterministic. In miniature, we are able to see the entire history of a mode of agrarian production here, and the human sacrifice always required by farming.

While folkloric symbols loosely associated with pre-capitalist and/or communitarian lifeways abound (and plenty of apparently liberated sexuality), there is no indication that land work on the island is collectively or democratically owned in any real sense. Indeed, we know that this lifeway has been imposed by one family, is at its core paternalistic, and that the islanders in no way participate equally in shaping the disciplining ideology that upholds their food production.

We don’t know for certain what effect this farming experiment has had on its local ecology, but that it has - like food production everywhere - reordered animal alongside human and plant life is strongly hinted at. We see comparatively little wildlife given how many lingering shots on a bucolic setting we are shown, perhaps native species did not survive this agrarian transition. We know that wild hares can be killed in service of the island Lord’s schemes, and livestock of course burn with Howie on the pyre.

It is neither Christ nor the orchard gods that are key here then, but the systems of social reproduction and land use in which they are enmeshed. And not only are these two systems themselves not so different under the surface of ritual aesthetics, in the film they come to represent the same system. Snapshots of the same land system in different points in time and geography. Neither Howie's world nor Summerisle's is the world without violence, nor is the violence of the island an alternative to the violence of the mainland: the island is precisely the type of outpost relied upon to develop the farming system that Howie believes is 'natural', outposts kept out of mind by either distance or time.

Pleading for his life, Howie claims that the local crop failure is due to 'unnatural' farming practices, that the strains of fruit will not grow in the Scottish climate. Of course all farming is unnatural. Agriculture is the practice of forcing strains of plants to grow in new places and new ways, and almost without exception this has demanded blood sacrifice.

We are encouraged to believe that beyond competing spiritualities there is something 'real' here, that we can hold onto as an audience, both safe and absolved. God will not save Howie, and the wicker man will not save the crop: but sensible agricultural practices, and a belief in the real natural order, could save them all. Howie prays to Christ for deliverance, knowing that he is doomed. But we can grab onto his final attempts at rational argument with the islanders - stop trying to force these farms into this environment and there will be no need for gods or violence at all.

But the careful scientific work of matching strains of produce to climates is only half of the story of the farm. We hope and theorise that it's possible for a farmed food system that does not require the violence of human sacrifice to exist, but we have never lived in one. The establishment of an industrialised capitalist food system required the mass killing and immiseration of the plantation economy. Enslavement and labour trafficking is still endemic in the agricultural industry. The neolithic transition to farming itself likely killed millions of people, before lifespans sharply increased where this new food system had stabilised. The establishment of every farming system has sacrificed somebody, for the food security of those distant either in space, society or time.

Farming continues to kill, every year, at the geographic and social peripheries of the system. Breaking new frontiers of farming at geographic edges - to create oil palm fields where there was jungle, to plant fruit in the Scottish Isles - also requires tremendous violence. Despite increased automation, farming is dangerous and requires and produces whole disposable categories of labour, workers who are drawn from and kept at the edges of the wealth that farms create for a core society.

Howie, too, finds himself at the edge of his world. Whether Christ will save him or not isn't a question of whether his god is real, but of whether he is real to anyone around him; just as his status as an officer of the law requires him to be surrounded by a world that believes in that law. Removed from the world he recognises - and recognises him - he is vulnerable. But it is a vulnerability that goes deeper than simply being a man outside of his own norms. Howie is not only far from the core of his own society, but he is at the periphery of someone else’s.

An edge can be neutral - there are many things in the world and they have to stop and start somewhere. But a periphery is a structured place, and a place with a relationship to a core. When he becomes peripheral, in a landscape where he does not belong to the core of the social order, he is now in the pool of life from which blood sacrifice is drawn. Systems of production must create and maintain peripheries - those who are available for sacrifice. This is not a side effect but a set of deliberate and expensive processes. On Summerisle, a significant coordination of resources is made to create the peripheral sacrificial person. Outside of the island, those processes may be less specific, consist of overlapping political and economic elements, but they are equally real: the closed border, the racial hierarchy, the prison factory, all facets in producing a proletarian periphery.

The sacrificial human is a person both crucial and disposable; it is crucial that they are disposed of - we must have the person who can be killed so that their killing will produce something new. This is as true on the factory farm as it is inside the wicker man.

Watched on Friday January 3, 2025.

Watched on Friday January 3, 2025.

Watched on Friday January 3, 2025.

Immensely bad. Charmless, sexless, with three or four interlocking plots none of which I cared about at all. Maybe there was more of a fun, silly movie in there to be found, but unfortunately I could barely see a thing that was happening. Almost every scene is tonally identical, fizzing with too many postproduction effects and drowned in blue and purple filters.

The one exception - the one bit that is good - is Roxburgh’s Dracula. The only actor in it who appears to know what film he’s in, he’s selling every poorly written line with perfect camp and total commitment. Somehow his scenes are even lit and framed properly, which barely any of the rest of the film is.

It’s a bad movie, there’s no chemistry between any of the characters, the monsters are unconvincing, the writing is awful, it looks terrible and sounds worse. It is also a huge waste of a take on the Van Helsing character, something the film probably realised on some level as they give him a different first name to Stoker’s. But this distancing from Stoker is part of its problem: Van Helsing as written has something to say about fear, and what we do when we are afraid. Van Helsing isn’t a swashbuckler working on contract for the church, he’s an annoying guy who’s read too many books about things other people have actually had to experience, who it turns out you need anyway because someone has to schematise the sources of terror for monsters to ever be defeated.

Van Helsing is the victory and inherent weakness of Victorian scientism all at once. He is the need for careful, taxonomic inquiry even in the outermost frontiers of reality, and the frustration with a scientific establishment that cannot fully describe the world without also giving itself over to the reality of the monstrous and the arcane. He sits right on that edge, frustrating his comrades in vampire hunting by insisting on approaches that are experimental, counterintuitive and slow. He approaches the fear of evil from the other side, recognising patterns in events from afar, events that we’ve previously experienced while inhabiting single characters’ points of view. This matters to a good take on the subject matter because Dracula more than anything else is an anxious text, it is about not knowing - not knowing what is happening, not knowing what to do, no longer feeling safe in the structures of reality you are used to as your world becomes contaminated by unknown forces. Young, sexy Hugh Jackman doing quips in a hat - even if they were good, which again, they are not - is the very opposite of that.

We love to see practical effects don’t we folks.

Watched on Friday January 3, 2025.

Watched on Thursday January 2, 2025.

Like a lot of famous films I’ve absorbed through pop culture but never actually seen, I’d imagined this as a slightly different movie - one more conversation based and taking place largely on the train. I was expecting a film where two men convince one another to do violence. That isn’t the film that this is, but its actual premise (and the execution) is equally compelling.

I don’t know what it was actually like to ride the train in the 1950s, but the closest modern analog to the texture of this movie is having a conversation in a gay bar smoking area at 1am, thinking you’ve politely shrugged off a slightly over keen, intense stranger, then finding them doing lines in your kitchen at 9am the next day.

The insinuation into Guy’s life is played so masterfully, especially Bruno’s swinging between calculated and frightening, and chaotic and even more frightening. I think the film loses it slightly in the final act as it has to resolve a story and can no longer just play on that manic tension.

It’s very beautiful also, some really breathtaking shots - while being a lot less mannered than some of the other earlier Hitchcocks. Maybe this is as much to do with the source text being a novel not a play as anything, but the camera feels freer, like it’s relishing the shapes it can make.

That shot where Guy flick’s the light on to reveal Bruno lying propped up in his father’s own bed - cinema!

RIP Phillip Seymour Hoffman.

If I operated in the Mission Impossible universe I would simply yank a bit on everyone’s face before I even started talking to them.

Look this isn’t a good film, but the motorcycle with cars chase, and mad homoerotic fight to the death in the sand? Really great.

I love da movies babey

They should do this as a play I think. Electrifying.

When she asks him for some food at his flat and he gets a whole fish out of the fridge by the tail and says “do you like haddock?”, is that 1930s normal or a joke?

Great movie. I love watching something so old that you can see it inventing bits that have since become canon.

Watched on Wednesday January 1, 2025.

I feel like I understand Frasier on a much deeper level now.

Delicious. Disgusting. What a hoot.

While it has the shape of a basically well made thriller this is of course an absolutely preposterous movie, preserving all the important elements of the source material, like pointing at paintings and solemnly indicating the shape of a vagina.

Paul Bettany is acting his balls off in a film all to himself.

Very bad of course, and yet I have seen it once or even maybe twice before. The few moments where someone does some actual acting rather than read exposition to each other are to be savoured.

I’d actually forgotten that the film takes place during the course of a conclave, so I did enjoy comparing the production design choices made here and in CONCLAVE. Everyone loves to see cardinals having a ciggie.

Watched on Sunday December 29, 2024.

I spent most of this thinking about Tom Cruise. I was far too young at the time to understand how sublimely beautiful 90s Tom Cruise was, and in my adult life he’s been such a bizarre figure, sad and sinister by turn. I always wonder when watching actors who are also movie stars relate very ordinary things, what that feels like for them. When a megastar with a household staff chops vegetables on tv, does that feel strange to them? Tom Cruise is both such an enormous star - surely a way of being in the world that is basically totally divorced from your own personhood - and such a very strange man, that seeing him perform ordinary jealousies and insecurities, and finding him beautiful and compelling, both feel almost surreal. I like knowing almost nothing about actors outside of their work. I know almost nothing about Nicole Kidman. I wondered how much extra Tom Cruise has to get paid to be called both short and a f*got in the same scene.

It’s a beautiful film of course, but what works for me in it are the smaller moments. Drunk Kidman almost kissing a man at a party; Cruise’s face understanding his wife as a subject, not just object, of desire for the first time. The mansion sex party stuff looks great, but I don’t find layers of secrecy and threat, nor intricate ritual, a properly gripping vehicle for sexual anxiety. Maybe it’s because 00s Dan Brown saturation washed all that out; maybe it’s because I’m just not that worried about casual sex.

What really shines as a little thread all through the film is Bill’s kindness. Even as he’s splashing money and credentials around to get where he wants to be, there’s a consistent courtesy (sometimes tenderness) in his interactions with all these strangers he’s encountered trying to get some sort of internal revenge on his wife’s desire. Dunno what that’s about, maybe I’ll figure it out some time.

Ridiculous. Loved it.

Truly one of the worst films I’ve ever seen in my life.

Risible.

I don’t understand why there was so much hooha about a little bit of bath water drinking in a film that also contains a scene where the protagonist fully fucks a freshly turned grave.

There’s a really nice - warm and subtle - lesbian family drama in the first act of this that I would have loved to see a full film of. Rest of it left me a bit cold.

Farming horror

• The Wicker Man
• The Wicker Man
• The Witch
• Straw Dogs
• Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror
• Harvest
• Murrain
• When Evil Lurks
• Midsommar
• Doomwatch

...plus 25 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• Get Out
• Eyes Wide Shut
• Baramasi - Daughters of the Immortal Tree

• Bram Stoker's Dracula
• Dracula
• Van Helsing
• Nosferatu