Ababooned

There’s a good chance you’ve never heard of André Forcier, the writer-director of the new comedy Ababooned. But he is actually one of the grand old men of Québécois cinema, and this latest film is his sixteenth feature in a career that began in the early 1970s. Despite this, Forcier’s work has had some difficulty making it across Canada’s southern border, and judging from Ababooned, there are a couple of reasons for this. For one thing, Forcier is committed to a sort of madcap form of magic realism that had its day in the sun in the 1990s — think Caro and Jeunet’s Delicatessen or Kusturica’s Underground — but has generally fallen into disfavor. But there also appears to be a dogged parochialism to Forcier’s filmmaking. It’s extremely specific to the Québécois experience, and so, like most popular comedies from France, there’s a bit of a cultural translation problem.

Granted, there seems to be a unique fixation on fanciful coming-of-age stories in French Canadian cinema, and some of these films have indeed found a wider global audience. Jean-Claude Lauzon’s Léolo, Léa Pool’s Set Me Free, and Jean-Marc Vallée’s C.R.A.Z.Y. are among the most successful of this strand, and one could arguably include the more recent dramedies of Xavier Dolan in this category. But Ababooned is something altogether stranger. It takes place in the late 1950s and is specifically about the period known as the Grande Noirceur, or “Great Darkness,” a 25-year reign of conservative politics in the province that was largely administered by the Catholic Church.

This broader context helps to explain a roiling anger simmering beneath the seemingly lighthearted exterior of Ababooned. It is told from the point of view of Michel (Rémi Brideau), a young boy with polio who loves poetry and baseball, and hates the bible-banging sanctimony he sees controlling his little pocket of Montreal, a factory district referred to as Molasses Town. After his elderly friend, Archange Saint-Amour (Gaston Lepage), publishes a pamphlet entitled “For a Secular Quebec,” Michel and all his nonconformist friends are targeted by local honcho Cardinal Madore (Rémy Girard) and his toady, Vicar Cotnoir (Éric Bruneau), who runs the local Catholic school.

There are several bizarre elements in Ababooned that are simply taken for granted, which means that many of Forcier’s most interesting ideas go unexplored. Why does the Cardinal have a posse of enforcers, the Zouaves, who are dressed like 14th-century court jesters? Why is there one student in Michel’s class, Tomcat (Miguel Bédard), who looks like he’s 22 years old, and has werewolf hands? And in a film so virulently anti-clerical, why does Forcier conclude with events that can only be described as miraculous? Even the title refers to an under-explored throughline involving the kids’ secular teacher (Martin Dubreuil) compiling a sort of dictionary of made-up nonsense words, none of which are ever defined.

But the real problem has to do with Forcier’s wild tonal shifts, some of which lead to spectacularly misjudged plot developments. For the first half of Ababooned, Vicar Cotnoir is depicted as a cartoonish bad guy, the sort of square who thrives on squelching the fun of others. But he is eventually revealed to be a child molester, having groomed the most religious girl in the class (Maïla Valentir), whose misplaced devotion to the priest makes her a target of her classmates’ scorn. Perhaps there is some weird variety of black humor specific to Quebec within which Forcier’s choices make sense, but more likely Ababooned is just the film of an old auteur, an unreconstructed liberal who doesn’t have time to accommodate present-day sensitivities. Either way, the result makes Ababooned an inscrutable and at times intolerable experience. — MICHAEL SICINSKI

Hell Hole

With 2024 marking the arrival of their eighth co-directed feature (with a couple additional co-director credits going to daughter Zelda in recent efforts), the projects of husband-wife duo John Adams and Toby Poser (known collectively as The Adams Family) have been improving in quality and increasing in visibility of late. In some ways, their latest, Hell Hole, feels inevitable within their catalog. The Adams Family have been cycling through horror iconography as jumping-off points for a while now, checking in with metal music and witchcraft (Hellbender), carnivals and on-the-road serial killers (Where the Devil Roams), tarot cards and foreboding woods (The Deeper You Dig), and creepy dolls (Plastic Smile, an entry in the upcoming r/NoSleep-inspired horror anthology series Tales from the Void), and leveraging their DIY aesthetic and reverent yet rarely derivative style to overall distinctive ends. With Hell Hole, they go the way of creature feature, steeping their usual horror preoccupations in a broth of gloopy sci-fi.

Hell Hole’s quick prologue witnesses a group of Napoleonic soldiers set upon by a mysterious, barely glimpsed something that makes quick work of them. Jump to the present, and we catch up with an exploratory U.S. fracking team and local laborers on assignment in remote Serbia who, upon commencement of their first dig, uncover one such buried soldier: still alive, babbling in French, and clearly terrified of something. It’s at this point that the differences between Hell Hole and The Adams Family’s most recent projects begin to reveal themselves. The hilarious non-reaction by the crew marks a wackier sense of humor this time out, one that follows through in the inevitable carnage to follow — less guts and gore than outright meat splatter. That’s not to say their other projects are po-faced horror exercises that lack humor — Where the Devil Roams, for instance, masterfully imbues its carnie-killers narrative with a winking nonchalance and orchestrates the aftermath of kills with compositions careful to emphasize the “Entrance of the Gladiators” of it all — but Hell Hole certainly skews broader, especially once it becomes clear the film’s slimy scoundrel is of the cephalopod variety. 

But by and large, the textural differences felt here are to the film’s deficit. Care has been taken in Hell Hole’s practical effects and creation of the octo-creature troubling the fracking crew, but in execution, the sequences feel of the B-movie variety, often looking like a jelly-dunked stuffie thrown onto characters’ faces. (One wishes that Adams and Poser had instead opted for something altogether weirder for their sucker-centric material, along the lines of, say, The Untamed.) This affect is perhaps intentional, certainly, but in either case, it reflects a larger tonal seesaw; as does the balance of no-nonsense characters and those pushed toward more comedic characterization, and that’s before even mentioning the do-nothing sorta romance thrown in the mix for no discernible reason. Then there’s the scientist who is narratively tasked with ensuring as much ethical treatment of the land as is possible when fracking, but who is really here to unnecessarily explain Hell Hole’s “science” — a teaspoon of basic parasite factoids and a hogshead’s amount of gobbledygook about octopuses living on land or some such nonsense that didn’t need explained in a movie about polypi forcing their phallic tentacles down human throats — and to act as foil to any endeavor to kill the creature, once he becomes obsessed with studying it. 

Similarly empty and lazily executed are the nods toward contemporaneous discourse. The punishment doled out for fossil fuel reliance is baked into the film’s premise, but there’s also a thread here about how the octo-parasite is only hostile toward men. It’s barely explored beyond mere implication, though it does take on a little more weight within the co-director’s filmography, which broadly surveys the essential leech of parenthood and the life-death cycle within this particular context. Still, like most else in Hell Hole, it’s an idea that barely breaks the surface before just sort of fizzling out. The result is a film that ushers in a series of false starts for most of its runtime and feels entirely out of rhythm throughout, ultimately fast-forwarding through its climactic stretch and dispatching of characters with strange haste. It does all culminate in a brilliant final shot, one that suggests a more compelling film and one better situated to probe the thematic material Adams and Poser just sort of scatter on the ground here. As is, Hell Hole isn’t much more than a slightly spunky but otherwise run-of-the-mill “delved too deep” horror effort — gleefully gooey, inclined toward bodily obliteration, but far more of an outline than a final product. — LUKE GORHAM

Azrael

After several festival dates in 2023, Simon Barrett and E.L. Katz’s Azrael seemed to fall off the face of the Earth. Given the current state of the industry, with steamers and corporations dumping fully completed projects for tax breaks, there was genuine concern that Azrael would go the way of Batgirl or Coyote Vs Acme. Thankfully, this legal quagmire seems to have been resolved, with the film now set to be released courtesy of IFC Films and Shudder. Genre fans rejoice, as Azrael is an absolute blast, a brutal bit of post-apocalyptic survival horror featuring a remarkable performance by Samara Weaving. The bold gambit here is that (almost) every character in the film is mute, and therefore there is virtually no dialogue in the entire movie. Plot is simply suggested via actions, character relationships and the dramas detailed only through gestures, looks, and who kills who.  

The film begins with text: the Rapture has happened, and survivors have rendered themselves mute in penance for their perceived sins. It’s unclear how literally viewers are supposed to take this, or how far in the future the narrative is supposedly taking place in. If we don’t get details, Barrett’s screenplay works well enough in the broad sense that everything makes sense on a scene-by-scene basis. Weaving’s Azrael and her romantic companion Nathan Stewart-Jarrett on the run from forces unknown. He starts a fire and she frantically puts it out, gesticulating wildly at him for his dangerous faux pas. He looks sheepish, and she reassures him with a loving embrace. But soon, some unsavory types catch up, kidnap them, and tie Azrael up. Someone cuts her leg, the sudden emergence of blood summoning strange figures from the woods. Are they zombies? Demons? Mutated humans that have devolved? It’s unclear, but their skin is a deep, charred black, they move in strange, halting lurches, and they crave human flesh. 

Much of the film, then, plays out as a cat-and-mouse scenario, with Azrael evading both these ravenous creatures and the people trying desperately to catch her, but the filmmakers also expand their scenario in intriguing ways. Eventually, we are introduced to the community that Azrael has escaped from, a small ramshackle collection of tents and a church. There’s a woman who appears to be a priestess of some sort, and elaborate drawings on the church walls suggest a prophecy in which Azrael plays some part. At one point, Azrael is given a ride by a man who can speak, driving a fully equipped truck complete with working radio. He’s speaking a foreign language, and there are no subtitles for the audience, but his words are less important than the fact that he can say them aloud. For all the intimations of a larger story that viewers can’t quite grasp — the lack of exposition here is truly thrilling rather than being utilized as mere gimmick — Azrael is ultimately a triumph of unrelenting, propulsive action. Weaving has proven herself an adept physical performer in a series of fairly extreme genre films, like Mayhem, Guns Akimbo, and Ready or Not, and she’s remarkable in this wordless role; using her expressive face and especially eyes to convey all manner of emotions, she gives a fully realized performance in utter silence. Azrael is perhaps a little too offbeat to be a big mainstream hit — surely its original studio seemed to decide it wasn’t worth bothering. Let’s hope IFC gives it a better shot to win over audiences receptive to its idiosyncrasies. It’s quite simply a great time at the movies. — DANIEL GORMAN

Me and My Victim

The modern straight white male, as an ideal, is an emasculated species: living under cosmopolitan values with none of its urbane anachronisms, he knows his place, recognizes his privileges, and respects — to quote his deity and muse, Kamala Harris — “the context of all in which [he lives] and what came before [him].” If so permitted, he would love art, lounge in cuck chairs, and live in New York. Nothing fazes him more than the inability to think critically, or rather to think about thinking critically; his sincerity must be pegged to the contours of irony in order to demonstrate its authentic, unyielding value. His haters have all kinds of names for him, but these have little more than exculpatory, possibly emancipatory effect. Being “gay” allows him to own it and be one with fashion, being a “normie” enables him to fire back at the loonies and losers of history, and being a “soy boy,” the worst of them all, is a badge of honor for seeking the validation of strong, independent women. It is a mundane existence, to be sure, with stress, bills to pay, the works and all — but it’s nothing that therapy and solipsistic inquiry won’t fix.

Of course, as ideals go, this is itself fashionable nonsense, fabulous caricature. But it’s one which has endured, perplexingly, in an age where the violence of dialectics has never quite diminished. The suffragettes championed feminism, the civil rights movement advocated equality, and love would go on to conquer the world. It didn’t, because it was almost always imposed and universalized, and sometimes even adopted by simpering chimeras of hate. Thus came the bifurcation of two children, light and darkness; darkness chose ignorance, while light found knowledge. But knowledge of what? “The self,” drone the peddlers of autofiction. One of them is Billy Pedlow, and his ultra-micro-budget, NYC-set Me and My Victim — co-directed with Maurane, a Montreal-based multimedia artist — speaks best to this elusive husk of an identity. A multimedia diary entry of sorts, its editing and visuals courtesy of Maurane, Me and My Victim is an exposé and vindication of poetic mediocrity that’s utterly Pedlow’s own. Bookended by the start and (possible) end of a casual relationship, the film manifests the creation of a semi-professional, pseudo-collaborative one between the duo as they trawl through memories and text messages of their desire and disgust for each other.

It’s no Possession, and neither is it even close to the deep-fried saturation of a high school drama. They met on Tinder, went to a bar. They talked, talked politics, had fun, slept together. After a couple dates, they were each seeing someone else. They met up again, and he pushed himself onto her drunkenly, unconsented to. He says it isn’t strictly “rape.” She tells him to Google the word. He’s written a poem about the incident, “unpublishable” as he admits but not enough for him to be “worried about anything. I’m ready to be canceled.” Does it “mean that you’re ready to rape me kind of?” she asks. Liking someone, comes the reply, is tantamount to being canceled these days; the poetic metaphor at hand really revolves around the idea that someone may “trust someone to rape them.”

The temptation to ascribe candidness to the casual and complexity to the candid is arguably a symptom of modern expression’s decrepit state. Me and My Victim is no doubt a confession, embroiled in sheafs of diversions and genuflections that conceal and castigate the fragile white male superego, leaving the id free to revel in all its repressed taboo glory. Pedlow whines like Woody Allen, except that Allen has both literary sense and leftover empathy on his side. For 100 minutes, the ego-tripping ramblings of one co-director assume control and overrule that of the other: sitting at a podcast table, Maurane submits while Pedlow dominates, her native French accent undermining the articulation of her English whereas he plods on, ever determined to justify, if not her misrecognition of their situation, than at least his recognition of himself. Caveh Zahedi’s The Show About the Show is name-dropped for its “intense honesty in the face of everything.” Pedlow reenacts a casting couch sequence with Maurane, the sleazy countenance of James Franco felt in every glib laugh and tousled clump of hair. The film desperately wants to be relevant, cutting-edge; it’s all but cut itself to shreds on its edginess.

But could this all be a bit? The chronically online tell us that media are their messages, that all publicity is good publicity, and in this vein we must read the bare-faced admissions of romantic impotence not as contempt for a jeering audience, but as culpability in constructing the fiction of a post-political male. This is a sketchy argument, not least for its immensely self-absorbed posturing. Similar to Ben Hozie’s PVT CHAT, contemporaneous with the pandemic, Maurane and Pedlow’s film digs deep into the discomfiting reality of American sexual politics as inflected by op-eds and #MeToo. But where PVT CHAT had a minimal — if woefully incomplete — awareness of the myopic cringe culture that was to form the staple of ritual sexual humiliation, Me and My Victim merely suppresses, on instinct, the criticisms of said culture. As a shining exemplar of a love letter both to New York’s art scene and its sad grifters, the film resembles less a cri de cœur of the Jordan Peterson variety than it grotesquely parades its beacon of perverse, creative bankruptcy. All the worst tendencies surface, gradually at first: Pedlow’s insecure and bottomless self-reflexivity, his pathetic and fake emasculation by way of ironically villainizing himself, and — somewhat less damning — the tired homogeneity of Maurane’s flashy and psychedelic Tumblr-esque collages. After the umpteenth panegyric of yet another “fucked up shitty poem about how fucked up I am,” one wonders if self-depreciation and self-aggrandizement are one and the same thing. — MORRIS YANG

Steppenwolf

Kazakh filmmaker Adilkhan Yerzhanov has directed 15 films in the last 12 years, a breakneck pace to rival even Hong Sang-soo. Not many seem to have received any kind of US distribution; his most recent work to be properly released was 2020’s Yellow Cat, a charming if shallow bit of quirk-infused deadpan comedy that freely mixed Wes Anderson, the French New Wave, and Tati. His new film, Steppenwolf, is an altogether different animal. A bleak, dystopian parable of hope versus savagery, the film wallows in violence and depravity on its way toward a desperate grasping at hope for a better future. Indeed, Yerzhanov has fully discarded the borrowed twee aesthetic of Yellow Cat and replaced it with a pronounced dose of Béla Tarr… — DANIEL GORMAN   [Read the full previously published review.]

The A-Frame

When 20-something pianist Donna (Dana Namerode) receives a diagnosis of bone cancer in her hand, she explores different avenues for physical and mental health treatment, including alternative new age therapy involving crystals, a support group meeting led by Laketa Caston’s Linda (who has cancer herself and stresses acceptance), and an oncologist whose recommended course of action is an amputation as soon as possible. While waiting for an appointment to discuss the latter, she meets Rishi (Nik Dodani), a stand-up comic presumably also receiving cancer treatment, and Sam (Johnny Whitworth), who claims to be a purveyor of yet another alternative treatment. Not wanting to lose her hand to the cancer, believing that would end her ability to play piano, Donna entertains Sam’s proposal. She soon learns that he is something of a rogue quantum physicist, and from there unfolds a familiar story of human technology reaching into unknowable dimensions and finding horror, in conversation with such films as Stuart Gordon’s From Beyond.

Where much of Calvin Lee Reeder’s body of work has focused on horror and sci-fi intersecting with comedy, including a number of tight short films that culminate in single jokes, the horror/sci-fi rubs up in The A-Frame against a cancer drama — a combination which brings out both strengths and weaknesses. Where many cosmic horror films might focus squarely on the Promethean scientist, here we spend more time with his cancer-ridden human test subjects. We build a quite emotional connection to Rishi in particular, whose constant bad jokes cover a debilitating fear of the unknown after death and endear us to him, strengthened by a solid performance from Dodani. But the genre mashup also leads to some spinning wheels, where support group meetings and moments of detailed backstory tend to drag on a bit. Even so, the hit-or-miss drama lays the foundation for the moments of horror to really pop.

After an apparently successful treatment for Donna, in which a small quantum chamber dips her hand into another dimension and pulls it back sans cancer, Sam, of course, needs to ramp up his experiments. He enlists Donna to quietly spread his gospel and recruit people with cancers worse than hers. The small device was just a prototype for the titular A-Frame, a large pod with some resemblance to those in The Fly and Altered States. Where the prior sleeve-like device was built for test-rats and localized human cancers, the larger one fires the whole human through the other dimension and back into this one, aiming to rid the body of cancers in more advanced stages. This too-quick snowballing of experimental scale leads to gruesome, bloody consequences with some brief but excellent creature effects, and some truly alarming screams by Namerode.

Each “quantum cycle” sequence is shot (by Brandt Hackney) and edited (by Zach Clark) with an imaginative DIY spirit, using simple means to craft some striking images, such as faces quick-cutting around the frame and composited on top of one another in a feedback pattern, with mirrored faces sharing an eye, emphasizing the dimensional splits taking place. Once things start to get out of hand, even the idle connecting shots of the landscapes between locations begin to feature quietly impossible geometries like street lights populating the sky, composed matter-of-factly. David Wingo’s score shines too, finding diegetic resonance with the in-world, wavefolded oscillations of the A-Frame itself, which Sam describes as a “snoring,” giving the machine a sinister anthropomorphism.

These set pieces are worth the wait, and do tend to work wonders at getting under the viewer’s skin, despite some considerable unevenness in balancing the film’s human drama with its horror. While there’s the lingering sense that there’s a more consistent nightmare of a film just out of reach, Reeder and his cast and crew accomplish quite a bit with their modest resources, and the film stands as a spirited entry in the tradition it occupies. — ALEX BROADWELL