The Paragon

2024 has been a good year for nostalgia-driven genre cinema so far. Especially with the widespread popularity of films like I Saw the TV Glow or Love Lies Bleeding, aesthetic homages to older, bygone media formats or revisionist interpretations or appropriations of those seem to be the dominating trend within the not-so-indie-anymore cinema — to the point that one can’t help but wonder if the future of genre films will solely depend on pastiche. Surely, this question begs for a lengthy, in-depth article, but it is still valid to stress on a smaller scale when discussing a film such as The Paragon, which, at first glance, hits close to the likes of A24’s lot but differs considerably from them through its bona fide lo-fi roots.

Set in Auckland, New Zealand, The Paragon tells the story of Dutch, a mouthy tennis coach who, after a hit-and-run accident, survives a near-death experience but is left crippled for life. Losing his job, his wife — his whole life, basically — and with nothing left but a gnawing need for revenge and a vague recollection of the car being a silver Toyota Corolla, he decides to find the person who did this to him. One day, during his Sisyphean quest, Dutch comes across a tear-off flyer promoting private coaching to “find hidden objects,” and is visited by the mysterious Lyra, a psychic who parades around wearing an unassuming cape and a face tattoo that looks like it was done at a temporary tattoo stand near a beach. Lyra is determined to teach Dutch the ways of psionic power through a strict yet nonsensical protocol that includes rules like sticking to a color diet. In a full-blown vindictive mood, Dutch complies, though his sole focus on the tele-location skills needed to find the culprit driver irritates the ever-disciplined Lyra. Ultimately, they strike a deal: Lyra will help Dutch find the car, and in return, Dutch will help her locate the Paragon, an extremely powerful cosmic crystal that yields hyper-dimensional power, and destroy it before it falls into the hands of her evil-spirited brother, Haxan.

In narrative terms, The Paragon very closely and faithfully follows the well-known tropes of good-versus-evil and the transformation of a self-serving, inept character into a hero. Yet, the self-awareness of its modest scope and its position with respect to the genres it nods to is what makes the film so endearing and delightful. The plot might have as many holes as a pair of worn-out socks, especially when it comes to space-time travel shenanigans, but it sure does know how the emotional machinery within a story usually operates — through empathy, identification, heroism, and sacrifice. Having worked on TV productions for nearly 15 years as a director, The Paragon is Michael Duignan’s first feature-length film, and since it’s the first thing that comes up on the Internet once you look it up, it’s worth mentioning that Duignan made the film with an almost nonexistent budget. Yet, The Paragon’s DIY-ness definitely achieves more than simply being part of catchy trivia for promotional purposes.

While many B-movie, oddball sci-fi, and fantasy re-imaginings with relatively big budgets try to emulate or, even worse, imitate existing tropes and films but end up either mocking or infantilizing them, Duignan stays faithful to their heart and soul through his means of production and approach to creativity. (Since we mentioned I Saw the TV Glow above, The Paragon feels more like how an episode of The Pink Opaque would have been than it was shown in the film.) From the costume department to visual effects, the practical and simple choices Duignan makes align with the well-dosed balance between seriousness and humor. The Paragon might tell a story with moral lessons, but it’s also a film in which the drawer of a hotel room, where the precious crystal is hidden, contains a Holy Bible as well as a butt plug. Thousands of cosmic years and parallel universes away from the postmodern cynicism of contemporary takes on sci-fi and fantasy, The Paragon takes the concept of genre back to basics and forms a psychic bond with its predecessors, so to speak. — ÖYKÜ SOFUOĞLU

Timestalker

In Alice Lowe’s first feature since Prevenge in 2016, which announced the actress and writer as a talented director to boot, we are witness to an epic romantic saga of unrequited love through the ages, a time loop of reincarnated passion being placed in all the wrong places. The metaphorical setup to Timestalker, playing up gendered stereotypes about the woman who can’t give up on the uncaring object of her affection, could have threatened to overwhelm the film in its simplicity, but in Lowe’s capable hands, it’s delivered with as much imagination and humor as one could hope for. 

Pulling us from 1680s Scotland to the far future, and stopping along the way in several centuries in between, Timestalker is a deceptively ambitious film that makes the most of its relatively low budget, using garish colors and costumes with a playful spirit and hazy editing to emphasize the slippages of time. From a basic premise recognizable enough to us all — we all have that one friend who keeps falling for the wrong person, over and over again… maybe it’s you — Lowe charts a centuries-long version of the idea, with enough visual and thematic panache to help it hit just right. 

Best of all, the film is consistently hilarious, with sharp wit that passes by at a rapid pace and suffused with plenty of gags — Lowe is not above a well-timed and executed pratfall, or using the rule of threes with a Georgian-era dildo. The comedy is weaponized quite expertly to send up familiar romance narratives and tropes across time and space, rarely through direct parody but instead via tightly-observed patterns and repetitions. It all ultimately manifests itself into a crude but powerful joke about the elusive nature of self-determination in love and in life, leading to an inevitable, if ever-so-slightly un-cathartic, ending stinger. 

Timestalker is not without its flaws, most notably in its handling of queerness. While clearly tuned right into heterosexual romance clichés, the film has less to say about queer love in the same way, instead largely using it as a simple crutch through the character of Meg (Tanya Reynolds), who is likewise perpetually pining after Agnes (Lowe). Unlike the comparably nuanced development of Agnes’ self-discovery throughout the film, or even simply the variety of tropes she comes to embody, Meg is rather one-note, often the butt of the same repeated punchline — as Agnes, 1980 version, bluntly puts it to Meg, “I’d rather be a slave than a lesbian.” Perhaps the Timestalker for queer romance is for someone else to make. 

That notable limitation aside, Timestalker is a genuinely riotous ride, rarely staying in one time period long enough to overstay its welcome, whizzing through the eras of attachments, passions, fantasies, and intensities, lived through the experience of a single woman. The search for eternal love is fraught and potentially foolish, but the romance resonates through generations nonetheless. Lowe, whether dressed up as a wealthy kept woman in the 1700s or a punkish future rebel in the late 2100s, suggests that, well, it’s all a bit silly, isn’t it? speak. — JAKE PITRE

Black Eyed Susan

Every now and then, it seems, a genre film with an especially topical message enters the discursive fray to stimulate debate, provoke reaction, and tick a few boxes on some survey of cinematic miscellany. This rings true especially for horror, for which there have increasingly been two diverging camps: elevated horror and elevated horror’s wannabes. Elevated horror wrestles with pre-packaged themes and ideas including but not limited to fear, prejudice, and bodily autonomy, although most end up harking back to the tried-and-tested routines of impossible grief and indelible trauma. Its wannabes, not as sophisticated in their sophistry and deceit, that aim for the lower-hanging versions of these themes, sometimes yielding unintentionally sincere if dreadfully deadpan results. Who would fault, say, Lorcan Finnegan’s clunky and tepid Nocebo for its heavy-handed metaphors on racism and capitalist exploitation when the strictures are written into its screenplay? In contrast, who would not have something snarky to say about Brandon Cronenberg’s big nothing-burger Infinity Pool for squandering genuine philosophical anxiety for cheap money-shots and titillation? Either way, there’s a lackluster quality to the film factories’ output, possibly incentivized by algorithmic cues and branding considerations: be bold, but not overly so.

At last year’s Fantasia Film Festival, Pascal Plante made waves with Red Rooms, a cyber thriller “teeming with the equal promise and peril of forbidden fruit” in its exploration of the eponymous urban legend. Red Rooms stood out with respect to its garden-variety ilk in both its premise and execution: it crossed into taboo territory very quickly, dispensing with the pleasantries of caricature and going straight for the jugular with depictions — thankfully offscreen — of snuff videos and child sexual abuse. Eschewing graphic representation for psychological interiority, the film relegated both victims and perpetrator of a heinous crime to the backdrop of legal wrangling, highlighting instead the spectacular potential of violence through the mysterious persona of a young woman observer. This year’s Fantasia, similarly, brings us a film of equally disturbing import, slightly less tacit in its themes but consequently more visceral in its brutality. Black Eyed Susan, the third feature from underground filmmaker Scooter McCrae, carries with it a troubling air of portentous realism;  unlike Red Rooms, whose findings still have some plausible deniability, the subject of Black Eyed Susan is a disarmingly factual one.

Robots, the successors of simple automatons, are imagined to have built-in functions surpassing the latter. They perform tasks and meet expectations at a rate and level far above the average human. What they cannot quite do is be human, although what they have increasingly been programmed to do is act as if they were. The premise of Black Eyed Susan is simply the taking of robotic mimesis to its logical, libertarian conclusions: could a robot be designed with the express purpose of being debased and destroyed? Derek (Damien Maffei), a cab driver down on his luck, has the luxury of answering this question when he’s enlisted by Gilbert (Marc Romeo), an old friend, to work quality control for a curious business venture. The goals of the venture are variegated, but their end product lies in a female, if somewhat androgynous-looking, sex doll named Susan (Yvonne Emilie Thälker). Susan, we learn, is to stand in for the many recipients — consensual or otherwise — of hard physical abuse, and the justification espoused by Gilbert remains rooted in pragmatism: better a human housewife suffering domestic violence, or a non-sentient fembot programmed to take, even purport to desire, such violence?

The stakes of McCrae’s films have always been deceptively conceived. Shatter Dead, his lo-fi 1994 debut, conjectured a world in which living and dying lost most of their distinction in the figure of the still-functioning zombie. Sixteen Tongues, his 1999 follow-up, concealed in its madcap narrative a prescient thesis of surveillance and cybercrime, more in common with Abel Ferrara’s similarly baffling New Rose Hotel than with Richard Kelly’s post-9/11 dystopian opera Southland Tales. With Black Eyed Susan, however, a more grounded sensibility takes center stage, reflecting perhaps the satirical face of reality right back at us. “One small slap for man,” Gilbert describes his project in partial jest, likening himself to the “Neil Armstrong of doll-fucking.” As Derek is enjoined to perform more sordid actions, striking and castigating Susan verbally and in the flesh, the veneer of superego respectability soon comes apart and tears, predictably, into both his conscience and his paranoia. For wired into Susan’s programming is an artificial intelligence capable of assessing her clients’ profiles — and iterating itself — with uncanny accuracy.

Given such topicality, Black Eyed Susan excels, on the whole, in its balancing of realism and speculative investigation. There’s hardly any scarcity of existing scenarios, whether in pornographic fantasies of domination and control (one thinks of the Pure Taboo series) or in the actualized wet dreams of tech bros (just recall the A.I.-powered pendant “Friend” launched days before the film’s premiere), to remit a matter-of-fact, almost didactic exposition of its terms. Relinquishing the freneticism and explicit detail of Sixteen Tongues, McCrae’s latest work evinces greater maturity and restraint in patiently unveiling our queasiness and resistance toward the proposed solution. Its characters are dutifully staged: Maffei and Romeo convey, through their expressions alone, a cat-and-mouse game of entrapment, although it’s Thälker ultimately who embodies their role with a most eerie visage of unknowability. Is anyone home? Whereas Emma Stone’s Bella Baxter, in Poor Things, decidedly affixed indomitable consciousness to her child-like demeanor, the question is purposefully open here. And for all its graphic and sometimes vaguely erotic sequences, Black Eyed Susan concludes with the sobering realization that we always underestimate the reach of our conclusions. If one treats only the symptom, expect the cause to metastasize. — MORRIS YANG

Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In

After almost 20 years of shuffling through a laundry list of some of the most famous Hong Kong directors and actors, a filmed version of Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In — based on both a novel, City of Darkness, and a manga adaptation of the same name — has finally come to fruition. At one point set to be directed by John Woo, and later Johnnie To, the production found an ideal fit in Soi Cheang, a specialist in both gritty, despairing urban crime thrillers and more populist, big-budget fare. Here, he synthesizes these modes into an unlikely blockbuster — as of this writing, Walled In is the second-highest-grossing domestic film in Hong Kong history. In some ways a standard post-heroic bloodshed crime saga, with bonds of brotherhood tested by familial relations and old-fashioned codes of honor, Walled In is also a portrait of a now bygone era, featuring an elaborate reproduction (reportedly at a 1:1 scale)  of the famous Kowloon City (A.K.A. Kowloon Walled City), which was demolished in 1993. It’s a stunning feat of production design, an intricate series of dense, decaying alleys and apartments, all towering toward the sky and threatening to topple at any moment. Wires, pipes, clotheslines, neon signs, and awnings all intersect in a wild bric-a-brac that rivals the visual density of someone like Josef von Sternberg. It’s a kind of German Expressionist ghetto, with only occasional glimpses of CRT televisions to situate it in a specific time period. 

The film begins with a brief prologue, detailing rival gangs fighting for dominance over the Walled City. A man named Cyclone emerges victorious and claims the territory as his own. Fast-forward to the mid-’80s, and mainland refugee Lok (Raymond Lam) has arrived in Hong Kong seeking a new life. After winning an illegal street fight, Lok takes his prize money to a local gangster, Mr. Big (Sammo Hung), to buy counterfeit identity documents.  But Mr. Big and his right-hand man, King (Philip Ng), are angry that Lok refuses to work for them, so they give him shoddy papers and refuse to return his money. Desperate and angry, Lok steals a bag from them and escapes into the neighboring area, the Walled City itself. Once inside, he realizes that he has actually stolen a huge amount of drugs, and immediately runs afoul of the city’s local gangsters. They beat him and drag him to see their leader — a now-aged Cyclone (Louis Koo, made to look beyond his 54 years via a shock of dyed gray hair). 

Eventually, everyone realizes that Lok is not a threat to them, and he is slowly integrated into the community. Cyclone himself, for reasons not made clear until later in the film, takes a liking to Lok and further helps him with meals and living quarters. After several brief, but impactful, action sequences, the film slows down to take in the lives of the city’s residents. We see Lok learning how to prepare food for a street vendor, deliver propane tanks to other businesses, interact with neighbors, and witness Cyclone’s magnanimous leadership style. It’s here that viewers get the full breadth and width of the Kowloon sets; it’s a dark, claustrophobic world, a single opening in the center of the city allowing in the only natural light (and occasional glimpses of airplanes, a constant reminder of other people’s freedom of movement). Cheang doesn’t sentimentalize this world, even going so far as to include a brief aside where a man murders a woman and dumps her body, only to himself be dealt with via vigilante justice. But by and large, the city’s population exists in a kind of equilibrium, having carved out a meaningful existence even in this inhospitable place. Visually, Walled In is very much of a piece with Cheang’s own Limbo and even Dog Bite Dog, both desolate visions of borderline apocalyptic urban spaces that seem to make literal the soul-deadening violence at the heart of their respective protagonists. Walled In isn’t quite that bleak, but it’s close.

Eventually, the plot must kick in and take precedence over Lok’s burgeoning sense of belonging. The prologue comes back into play, as increasingly detailed flashbacks reveal more of Cyclone’s backstory; he turned against his best friend, feared assassin Jim (Aaron Kwok), who was employed by rivals to Cyclone’s boss Chau (Richie Chen). Chau now lives in luxury outside the confines of the Walled City, although Cyclone still pays him monthly rent collected from various tenants. But tension is in the air; Mr. Big wants a piece of the action, while Chau knows there is an increasingly popular movement to evict the residents of Kowloon and demolish the whole thing. Further, Chau does not know that Cyclone has secretly vowed to protect the progeny of Jim, all of whom Chau has vowed to wipe off the face of the Earth as vengeance for the loss of his own wife and children. It’s a complicated web, and it all comes to a head thanks to the machinations of Mr. Big and King. 

Much of Walled In’s last act, then, consists of a series of stunning action sequences, first as Big takes control of the area, and then as Lok and his crew of fellow warriors attempt to take it back. Working with cinematographer Cheng Siu-keung (a longtime Cheang collaborator and Milkway Image Productions house DP) and stunt coordinator/action designer Kenji Tanigaki, Walled In eschews much of the flamboyant CGI that has plagued contemporary American, Hong Kong, and Chinese blockbusters. There are certainly special effects being used to enhance and extend the otherwise practical sets of the city, and there is obvious wirework where rigs have been digitally erased. But the film feels very much like a deliberate throwback to a more classic mode of HK action, where precise editing and careful choreography take center stage. There’s a remarkable amount of fighting here, and the filmmakers use every inch of the widescreen frame to give a sense of depth to these fighters and the space they are moving around within. It’s a masterclass, in other words, and likely the best pure HK action film since Cheang’s own SPL 2 (no offense to Benny Chan and Donnie Yen). It’s also a fascinating document of anxiety and impending change; the HK handover back to the mainland is on everyone’s mind, and the emphasis on real estate deals and mass displacement of poor folks is perhaps even more relevant now than in the past. This free-floating apprehensiveness and schism between the old and new is even reflected in the film’s casting, with the elder statesman Sammo mixing it up with the younger Lau and an even younger crew of fighters who make up this world’s colorful gangs. All of this is to say that the film has clearly struck a chord with modern audiences, especially if the box office returns are anything to go by. Come for the kinetic, non-stop action; stay for the misery enacted by neo-liberalism and the cold vicissitudes of fate. That’s the Soi Cheang touch. — DANIEL GORMAN

Confession

Anyone who follows any artform closely — in this case, cinema, but it’s equally true for music, painting, sculpture, literature, what have you — knows this very specific feeling. You hear the name of an artist, and, as the meme goes, you realize that, in fact, you haven’t heard that name in years. Artists emerge, and they often just drop out of sight. This isn’t always due to a drop in the quality of their work, although sometimes it is. A critical establishment that thrives on newness and discovery can often allow promising makers to fall through the cracks.

A case in point is the Japanese director Nobuhiro Yamashita. He started working in 1996, and broke through on the Western festival circuit with his second feature, No One’s Ark (2003). It was a sort of relationship-based road movie about two young losers trying to find their way into adulthood. No One’s Ark was championed by Asian cinema aficionados, in particular Tony Rayns, who was then a programmer for the Vancouver International Film Festival. Following the success of No One’s Ark, Yamashita seemed to be going from strength to strength. His filmmaking comedy Ramblers (also 2003) got some attention, but three subsequent films were particularly well received:  Linda Linda Linda (2005), a fast-paced comedy about a teenage rock band; The Matsugane Potshot Affair (2007), a black comedy about a violent crime in a backwater town; and A Gentle Breeze in the Village (2007), a Kore-eda-esque coming-of-age tale about two schoolkids who live in an overwhelmingly geriatric town.

Yamashita’s films of this period were defined by a wry, bemused outlook, the sense that our foibles, amusing though they may be, were also what made us most obviously human. But at this point, Yamashita appears to have taken a turn into genre material, primarily gritty crime films and overly sincere, Shunji Iwai-like teen-pop vehicles. For the most part, international film festivals stopped caring. But this year, Yamashita returns, with two new films screening at Fantasia. Swimming in a Sand Pool bears some resemblance to the carefully observed young adult films that made his reputation.

Confession, however, does not. Clocking in at a lean 76 minutes, this is essentially 10 minutes of premise followed by an hour of grueling, bizarre consequences. The story is almost negligible. Three high school friends were in the climbing club: Asai (Toma Ikuta), his girlfriend Sayuri (Nao), and Korean exchange student Jiyong (Yang Ik-june). One day, Sayuri dies on a climb, and the two male friends subsequently go up the mountain once a year in her honor. But on a climb 16 years after Sayuri’s death, Jiyong is badly hurt, and the two men are caught in a punishing snowstorm. Thinking he’s about to die, Jiyong makes the titular confession to Asai: he murdered Sayuri.

Alas, the pair make it to a cabin, and it looks like they will survive. This makes Jiyong’s “deathbed” confession, shall we say, problematic. Soon, Jiyong has gone berserk and is trying his best to kill Asai. The ultraviolent cat-and-mouse game, complete with broken limbs, snapped necks, stabbing, bludgeoning, and a great deal of screaming, comprises the majority of Confession’s runtime. While Yamashita certainly makes the most of his claustrophobic scenario, there’s not much here beyond some prime red meat for genre hounds. There is a Grand Guignol spirit to the men’s makeshift gladiator contest, although there seem to be some small cheats. If you try too hard to figure out the layout of the cabin, you’ll notice some clear discrepancies.

Perhaps more troubling are some ideological undertones that Yamashita seems quite unconcerned about. Sayuri, for example, exists solely as the dead girl, guileless in flashbacks and with no identity apart from being an object of guilt. (If one were conducting a negative Bechdel Test, Confession would pass with flying colors.) But there are also the rather disturbing implications of the Asai/Jiyong relationship. There is, of course, a long history of anti-Korean racism in Japan, with Koreans stereotyped as being violent, barbaric, and untrustworthy. (This is the explicit theme of Nagisa Oshima’s 1968 masterwork Death by Hanging.) Jiyong embodies these traits, and although we learn that Asai is hardly blameless, the Korean man goes on about how his Japanese friends “looked down on him,” shouting at Asai like a red-state MAGA dude railing against the cultural elites. None of this exactly cancels out Confession’s more straightforward, midnight-movie pleasures, but it does suggest that Yamashita’s compassionate humanism has taken a backseat to grindhouse gore. Based on his earlier work, the director is probably capable of reconciling the two impulses, and the fact he didn’t bother implies a workmanlike, job-for-hire attitude, a subtle disdain for the project and its audience. — MICHAEL SICINSKI

The Roundup: Punishment

Four films into any series, you either change or die, and the copaganda finally outruns the action choreography in the fourth installment in The Roundup series. The wild box office success of the series, the most successful action enterprise in the history of the South Korean box office, will survive at least a bit longer, and that’s to the credit of the filmmakers, or perhaps the series’ showrunner and leading man Ma Dong-seok (as Detective Ma Seok-do). This time around, the now dried-up formula of gangbusting reinvigorates faintly with the introduction of limitations to Seok-do’s fists… — JOSHUA POLASNKI  [Read the full previously published review.]

The Dead Thing

Genre fare has sunk to new depths with The Dead Thing, Elric Kane’s first solo-directed feature — and an enervating one at that. There’s a decent 15-minute short located somewhere in there, but owing to the puzzling obligations of narrative to its subtext, it’s become six times longer, and correspondingly thinner. Like Mimi Cave’s debut Fresh some two years earlier, The Dead Thing deals with the ever-present frustrations, not to say paranoia, of securing a good date in the modern world. At best, it seems, the sex is lifeless and the love fleeting; at worst, he’s a psycho killer with a woman-hating bent. But the similarities end there, as Kane’s film isn’t quite sure what it wants to be. A passionate, if ham-fisted, diatribe against serial creeps and stalker behavior would have at least spun a clean thematic web upon which the viewer may — no matter how cursorily — tread. Gore and guts, likewise, would titillate the hounds of horror, whether committed freaks or curious edgelords, and provide the spectacle so fundamental to horror’s enterprise. Neither extreme holds up in our case, and all for the worse.

At the film’s heart is the inability to find a stable relationship, and this affliction is borne by Alex (Blu Hunt), a taciturn and wavy-haired young woman whose several one-night stands on a dating app — “Friktion” — yield only emptiness and a shallow yearning for more. She’s got a handle on her life for the most part, working at some kind of graphic design agency (though curiously almost always at night) and bed-surfing at her friend Cara’s (Katherine Hughes) apartment. But this is L.A., and all attempts to get something more invariably have to stem from the same few bars, sipping the same overpriced cocktails and rehearsing the same tired icebreakers. So when Kyle (Ben Smith-Petersen), sporting a buzzcut and a seductive if generic smile, hazards a change of pace (“We don’t really need to talk, do we?”) with her, it’s a green light for Alex, whose only other regular male presence in her life comes from her creepy and cringeworthy co-worker Mark (Joey Millin) and — occasionally — Cara’s ex, Paul (Brennan Mejia).

Naturally, Kyle isn’t all what he seems — indeed, he’s not even all there. Worried that she might’ve been ghosted by him after several nights together, Alex pays his workplace a visit, only to learn the ugly truth. Yet little else changes, aside from a co-worker replacement — Chris (John Karna), infinitely friendlier — and Kyle coming back into her arms, aware of his predicament and having exposed, in a way, his malevolent tendencies. But try as Hunt may to imbue her character with an aptly listless disposition, the same can’t be said of Kyle, who comes off as a comically confused man-child who clings to Alex relentlessly, kills several people with little motive, and even does a Tommy Wiseau impression at one point when she finally calls it quits. More damning than bad acting, however, is bad writing: there are little stakes in the game, little moralizing to be gleaned from Kyle’s aggression, except for perhaps the faintest hint of a “hurt people hurt people” message. The Dead Thing appears content to coast along as a mood-piece, relying wholly on low-light cinematography and an ominous cliché of a score (that doesn’t always fit the tone) to engender its brooding sensibility. Strip both away, and what remains is, true to its title, deader than a doornail. — MORRIS YANG