Flush

Setting one’s low-budget genre film in a single setting is a time-honored tradition, a money-saving maneuver that makes for a simple calling-card exercise but which nonetheless requires a high level of ingenuity to pull off in any sort of satisfying way. It’s a testament to the skills of director Grégory Morin and writer David Neiss that one quickly forgets the gimmicky logline of their new film Flush — man gets head stuck in a toilet — and instead becomes deeply invested in the trials and tribulations of middle-aged loser Luc (Jonathan Lambert). The trick is to make the proceedings just plausible enough, an absurd scenario that never quite tips over into surrealism or fantasy. 

The film rushes through its setup with aplomb; Luc has arrived at a nightclub to confront his ex, Val (Élodie Navarre), over visitations with their seven-year-old daughter. Luc steps into the men’s room, enters a stall, and immediately starts doing lines of blow. A phone argument with Val ensues, and while he is flummoxed and distracted, Luc gets his foot stuck in the toilet (a European style floor toilet, typically called a “squat,” is essential to this particular story). After much exertion, Luc frees his foot from the floor, but his shoe is still stuck. When he goes to fish it out, he discovers a stash of cocaine concealed in the squat. Of course, being a degenerate loser, Luc steals it, just as a dealer enters the stall. He demands to know what has become of his stash, and Luc lies and says he has no idea what the dealer is talking about. The bar owner enters, and the two men proceed to beat the hell out of Luc, stomping him into the ground and shoving his head into the squat. The men believe he is dead, and decide to close off the bathroom and come back after business hours to dispose of the body.

Clocking in at a brisk 70 minutes, Flush is mostly concerned with charting various escalations in something approximating real time; Luc regains consciousness, the camera now cutting between closeups of his head stuck underground, inches away from a drain pipe, and his body, splayed out on the floor above ground. Luc hears someone through echoes carried through the pipes, and tries desperately to get their attention. This proves fruitless when a toilet flushes and fills up the plumbing with water, almost drowning him in the process. Luc quickly realizes that increased struggling against the porcelain trap isn’t going to get him anywhere, and groping about blindly he instead tries to locate his phone. There’s also a drug-sniffing rat running around the stall, a real Chekov’s gun kind of deal, that ends in a shockingly harsh manner. We won’t spoil more plot details here, as much of the film’s pleasures lay in the particulars of how the situation keeps getting worse and worse, and how Luc manages to stave off death one incident at a time. Val eventually makes an appearance, and the bar owner eventually comes back, too, making the film more than just a solo show for Lambert. It’s all very funny, in a bleak kind of way, and Morin articulates the limited space here in pretty ingenious ways. Flush is such a short film that the whole thing threatens to settle in as little more than a bad joke, or a tossed-off lark, but its ending has some real oomph to it. Luc might be a loser, but when push comes to shove, we all have something to live for.. — DANIEL GORMAN

The Wailing

What proves fascinating about horror beyond its jumps and scares is a creeping sense of unknowability, a sense which violates our morals as much as it does our prevailing views of the world. Not knowing the location of a threat stimulates the adrenal gland; not knowing the locus of a thing’s malice uncovers a much more primal fear, presupposing a world intolerant to patient reason and understanding. Great horror often confronts this latter unknown, whether a matter of cosmic indifference, warped pathology, or merely evil as a metaphysical precept writ large. Its imitators — not to use the term unkindly — do the same, but fail to leave this confrontation unscathed by the more trivial sins of inconsistency and obfuscation. Trivial these may be, but a good horror narrative is as much an engagement of belief as it is an exercise in tension, and may easily unravel without both.

In The Wailing, Spanish filmmaker Pedro Martín-Calero’s feature debut, a sinister presence stalks each frame, lurking just beyond sight and upending the lives of three very different women. Andrea (Ester Expósito), a college student, is in the middle of a long-distance relationship with Pau (Alex Monner) when she receives word that she was adopted; her birth mother, Marie (Mathilde Ollivier), had suffered from an unspecified mental illness and killed someone, and was more recently found dead halfway across the world in La Plata, Argentina. While Andrea contends with a mysterious apparition, blurrily manifesting in images and video clips on her screen, she registers an equally unsettling sound — the titular wailing — in the heart of present-day Madrid across a dilapidated apartment block. The same block appears 24 years earlier in La Plata, where a film student named Camila (Malena Villa) rushes headlong into a voyeuristic project, capturing a young woman and complete stranger on her camcorder. So do the wailing and apparition, in a triptych tale of ominous terror recalling the hauntings of the Conjuring and Insidious franchises.

Yet while The Wailing does venture to be sufficiently, even exceedingly, eerie at times, its central gimmick lacks clear definition. What is the glue that viscerally holds both Andrea and Camila hostage to a trauma shared across time? The film’s screenplay, co-written by Martín-Calero and Isabel Peña, is scant on the details, preferring a more oblique angle to tease out its palpitating threads. Through the process of excavation, Camila uncovers with her camcorder a dreadful secret harbored by her unwitting subject, just as the viewer is made, through a journey spanning hi-res laptops and home video, to participate in the unknotting of an enigma wrought with red herrings and frequent detours.

Lest this be taken as a refutation of subtext, it must be clarified that the subtext in question hides too often behind the camera’s prop to meaningfully come into being. As an epiphenomenal motif, the wailing’s unseen presence could constitute a loose metaphor for female suffering or its broader societal negligence, but the chief effect it produces here, sans context, is contrivance. Camila’s professor, attacking her hip pretensions, says of her film: “I didn’t get it at all because it doesn’t stir anything in me.” A similar charge may be brought to The Wailing despite its doleful and piercing sequences, many of which hint at the grisliness of malevolent forces operating behind the scenes. That’s just the problem: they refuse clarification, and in so doing threaten to saddle the viewer with a growing irrelevance. — MORRIS YANG

LifeHack

The world has changed a lot since The Collingswood Story pioneered Screenlife storytelling in 2002. Nickelback had the top single that year, mid-budget films still penetrated the top of the box office, and George Bush was president. Tate McRae wouldn’t be born for another year, and George R.R. Martin was still working on the fourth book in A Song of Ice and Fire. The biggest change between 2002 and now, however, is the omnipresence of the screen. Technological interfaces and electronic devices grip our world so tightly that one can no longer order McDonald’s without touching a massive and greasy screen. Filmmakers in 2002 and well after were all digital immigrants, people who spent a significant portion of their lives without the ubiquity of digital screens, and they still make up the majority of established filmmakers. LifeHack, the newest Screenlife venture from maverick producer Timur Bekmambetov and Bazelevs Entertainment, looks a bit different from most of the Screenlife films that precede it, and 29-year-old first-generation digital native director Ronan Corrigan likely has something to do with that. 

The most well-known and noteworthy Screenlife titles — The Collingswood Story, Unfriended, Searching, Profile, Host — exploit the screen for a unique assortment of fears. Unfriended: Dark Web ventures into the darkest corners of the Internet and encapsulates the best of the format’s ability to harness digital incel-y consternation. Even the sci-fi Resurrected ends up on the more fanatical and dystopian side of things; indeed, the most notable Screenlife titles share a general apprehensive awe of the horrors of the web. They are thrillers and horror flicks with a technological pessimism at heart. (An irony considering how innovative these films use technology to tell their stories.) LifeHack, though still hanging around in the thriller-adjacent genre of heists, emphasizes a different and more personal side to the omnipresence of screens: they can also create community. 

The community in this case revolves around Kyle (Georgie Farmer), a savvy British high schooler with a difficult home life and an absent father. He sulks through his waking hours (and some hours he should certainly be sleeping) in first-person shooter games and bezzles other Internet bezzlers with three very-online friends. The four’s petty “gotcha” crimes evolve into a targeted operation to drain tech plutocrat and right-wing media guy Don Heard (Charlie Creed-Miles) of his crypto fortune. It’s an equal bit Robin Hood and Reddit-fashioned trolling, and the four friends, as inseparable as bread and butter, begin to feel their community threatened for the first time as the operation escalates. 

They all have trauma or household problems to escape from; their online friends become a sanctuary of safety and a beacon of belonging. Kyle’s childhood friend who moved to America, Petey (James Scholz), does his best to be the moral voice in the Discord server and also brings a self-taught coding expertise while trying to live up to the schooling standards of his Asian immigrant parents. Kyle crushes on Alex (Yasmin Finney), another American and the only woman in the group. While her expertise is in creating fake IDs, she refuses on moral grounds to make them for minors or anyone over 21 (whose purposes she assumes would be more sinister). Her mom is also a drug addict. The last friend is fellow countryman Sid (Roman Hayeck-Green), another tech genius and communications hacker. His abusive father might be the film’s ugliest domestic problem. 

Bekmambetov, Screenlife’s greatest evangelist and producer, loosens the form’s definition a bit with Corrigan’s debut. Everything still originates in the capture of video screens, but Corrigan takes more liberties with what it’s like to be on those screens than ever before. The displays and monitors are used more as dynamic canvases with constant movement and never-ending possibilities than as actual replicas of real computer and phone screens. The most obvious difference in this regard is between what we would see on our screens and the narrowed focus present on the screens of LifeHack. The chaotic interfaces of Unfriended or Transformers: The Premake and the simplicity of a Zoom meeting room in Host or email inboxes in Profile are substituted for multi-layered windows zoomed in to the portion of the computer or phone that Corrigan wants us to pay attention to. Everything is captured on screen, but, similar to a cinematographer pulling focus, more of those screens are removed after the fact than in most earlier Screenlife iterations.

The heist that ultimately comes is one of the most engaging cinematic heists in years, and that’s in large part because of how different it is. The computer they need to access is offline, so they still need an on-the-ground presence to pull off their trick — but most of the heist is dependent on coding, USBs, and GPS tracking. And, even more so than in real life, new obstacles can arise in a fraction of a second on the Internet — and don’t need a human subject with a visible and predictable geographical presence — and that makes for a more enthralling burglary. There is also the enigma of the security systems and coding hacks: we only know as much as we need, which is more than in similar tech scenes in something like Mission: Impossible, and the rest remains a mystery. Anything can happen at any time.

Corrigan made LifeHack in his late 20s, which means that he comes from the first generation of digital natives who have never really known a world without the Internet in our pockets, and he captures what it feels like to age with the Internet better than most digitalist filmmakers before him. From Club Penguin and goth Tumblr to porn pop-ups and Discord gaming and even some unfortunate hentai, LifeHack understands the aesthetic experience of the World Wide Web better than most films. The specific viral YouTube videos and the comings and goings of certain apps and platforms contextualize the digital world of his first feature film in the same way that old-timey clothing or music does in a period piece, iterating a shared language between the film and the passing years of technology the characters live within. 

If Unfriended: Dark Web is Screenlife showing the Internet at its worst, LifeHack, while not unafraid of that darkness, is much more optimistic about its potential. (The still unreleased R#J adapts Romeo and Juliet to the age of Letterboxd and celebrity lockscreens, but, as we all know, romance doesn’t mean happy endings.) The friends here endure their conflicts, but they remain friends in the end, realizing an online life that translates to real-world relationships and where the world seems better off because of a tight-knit Discord server. It’s a fitting place to land, since Corrigan moves farther away from laptop screens and more toward Snapchats, phones, and security cameras than Bekmambetov’s earlier productions. The script also understands that the Internet is a deeply silly place where, the more time one spends on it, the sillier the real world likewise seems. Even the double entendre title points to a more positive spin: who couldn’t do with a helpful life hack here and there? — JOSHUA POLANSKI

All You Need is Kill

Celebrated as the long-awaited and much-anticipated anime adaptation of Hiroshi Sakurazaka’s novel and the subsequent manga, Kenichiro Akimoto’s All You Need is Kill will nevertheless be saddled with comparisons to Hollywood’s existing version, Edge of Tomorrow with Tom Cruise. That film, it must be said, is a more successful piece of storytelling, but its visual inventiveness pales in comparison to Akimoto’s and the abilities of STUDIO4°C. For a premise that is so easy to sell — Groundhog Day but for defeating a giant alien plant monster — there is something satisfying about seeing it told simply, kinetically, and with so much verve — and that’s exactly what we get here. 

The storytelling, nevertheless, falters, largely because it feels so rushed. The central friendship, between our hero Rita, a young volunteer warrior for dealing with the alien’s infection to the planet, and Keiji, a more technical peer, is the greatest victim of this pacing, since it has so little time to develop before we move on to the next thing, and the next thing, and the next thing. All You Need is Kill feels restless in its middle section especially, clearly chomping at the bit to reach its finale, but in so doing risking the emotional weight that ought to go accompany it to this endgame. In the moment, it’s easy enough to be distracted by the film’s gorgeous animation and the humor that is mined from the repeated-day time loop narrative device and the cartoonish violence that it provides for. But before you know it, the film makes a concerted effort to pull on viewers’ heartstrings, but without having taken even a beat along the way to let that emotion breathe and develop.

The film’s core themes — of humanity’s response to war and to the unknown, and to the loss of identity and self in both conflict and love — at least emerge unperturbed, and if you can accept the narrative shortcuts taken to illustrate them then All You Need is Kill may be your preferred version of this story. And it can’t be overstated how much of a marvel the 3D animation is to behold, with a hefty number of hugely evocative images deployed throughout. Still, a little more time spent nurturing these characters and their bizarre courtship would have made for a stronger, more well-rounded experience. There are considerable pleasures to be had, but they are unfortunately burdened by essential limitations. — JAKE PITRE

Noise

Much like two recent films by major Japanese horror auteurs — Takashi Shimizu’s Sana (2023) and Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Chime (2024) — South Korean filmmaker Kim Soo-jin’s feature debut, Noise (2024), explores aural menace. Noise also speaks to a long-lasting tradition of tenement-set horror cinema, which has achieved varying levels of commercial and artistic success — from Polanski’s classic triptych of Repulsion (1965), Rosemary’s Baby (1968), and The Tenant (1976), to John Carpenter’s expertly crafted TV movie, Someone’s Watching Me (1978), to the ‘80s sequels Demons 2 (1986) and Poltergeist III (1988), to Rob Zombie’s The Lords of Salem (2012), Lee Cronin’s Evil Dead Rise (2023), and beyond. Noise provides a conceptually intriguing but ultimately middling new variation on this theme. 

The film opens with a distressed woman, Joo-hee, frantically soundproofing her apartment unit against grating noises from an unknown source. She documents her experience on a video camera and an audio recording app, desperate to prove the existence of her tormentor. When Joo-hee suddenly goes missing, her deaf sister Joo-young requests time off from her factory job to investigate. Joo-young soon finds herself contending with potentially supernatural forces, while also grappling with a spiteful building chairwoman and a menacing downstairs neighbor who believes Joo-young is responsible for all the noise. 

In conceptual terms, Noise thinks intelligently about its apartment building’s omnidirectional potential for danger. The eerie noises tormenting the characters deceptively seem to emanate from units above, while below, tenants have turned the building’s basement into a site for unauthorized garbage disposal. Years of refuse have become unmanageable, and the basement’s stinking mountain of trash is now locked away like a dirty Gothic secret. Noise sets one of its most effective sequences in this basement, a search for clues that becomes a deadly chase. Another chilling scene sees Joo-Young trapped between a spectral figure on her back balcony and a deranged neighbor tapping his knife against her front door. Noise finds ripe potential for mystery in its tenement setting, too: high renter turnover means a greater concentration of unknowns, traumas, and ghosts. 

However, Noise crucially lacks a sense of accumulating tension. Its first act effectively establishes a sense of unknowable dread, but the film quickly becomes repetitive, and then eventually stagnant. It’s consistently too timid with its horror, opting for quick relief and cutaways, unwilling to linger in its darkness long enough to create genuine discomfort. It majorly missteps by undermining several frightening scenes as mere nightmares. Kim Soo-jin is an intuitive director who demonstrates a good sense of visual and audial space, and Lee Sun-bin is a solid lead actor, but on the whole, Noise fails to substantively transcend its narrative shortcomings. — MIKE THORN

Night of the Juggler

Originally released in 1980, Night of the Juggler bears all the trappings of an exceptional cult thriller, though it’s one that has never been terribly easy to find, due in part to the film’s lack of a proper DVD release. To celebrate its 45th anniversary, Night of the Juggler — the title of which refers to the manipulation of accounting books, and has nothing to do with circus performers — is now the recipient of a brand new 4K restoration, thanks to the good folks over at Kino Lorber, who are planning a physical media release due out later this fall in addition to a theatrical re-release in August. The film, whose plot has a proto-Taken feel to it, charts the determination of a single father, played by James Brolin, scouring New York City for the psychopath who kidnapped his daughter. In that regard, one could say that Brolin walked so that Liam Neeson could run, though that’s not quite true; rarely is Brolin not an object in motion, whether it be running full sprint through Central Park, furiously driving a stolen preacher’s car in the Bronx, or hopping a turnstile to catch the subway. Coupled with its tremendous snapshot of a seedy NYC that no longer exists, Night of the Juggler is a marvelous film about exemplary dedication to parenthood, exposing no limits to what a father would do to save his child.

The kidnapper in question is one Gus Soltic (Cliff Gorman), a mentally deranged, disgruntled tunnel worker with a terrifying knack for violent tendencies and a loathsome chip on his shoulder toward minorities. Looking to score big, Gus plots the kidnapping of the daughter of a real estate mogul, with a plan in place to intercept her on the way to school and hold her ransom for one million dollars. Brolin is Sean Boyd, an ex-cop turned blue collar truck driver, now divorced and splitting the duties of raising his own teenage daughter Kathy (Abby Bluestone) in the Big Apple, while ex-wife Barbara (Linda Miller) expresses her desire to move their daughter out of the city to the proposed safety of Connecticut. When Gus sets his plot in motion, he inadvertently kidnaps Kathy instead of his intended target, leading Sean on a wild chase through the city to get her back. Also on the case is Lieutenant Tonelli (Richard S. Castellano, Clemenza from The Godfather), a politically-minded cop using what resources he can to get the girl back safely.

As directed by Robert Butler, who took over for Sidney J. Furie one-third of the way through production, Night of the Juggler is a propulsive experience, moving forward with terrific economy. When Gus kidnaps Kathy, Sean happens to witness this, and he does not let her go easily. What follows is an impressively sustained, 10-minute-plus chase sequence that finds Gus desperately fleeing with his hostage while Sean is in hot pursuit, escalating from foot to multiple cars to even the subway system. In exploring the grimy netherworld of NYC, Butler has a distinct vision of the city in mind, refusing for one second to romanticize his central location. Filthy rodents, street gangs running rampant, coin-operated sex clubs, the slick subterranean dwellings that keep the city running: Night of the Juggler is a potent time capsule, capturing the once omnipresent for all to see.

Sporting a rugged mane and a thick, glorious beard, Brolin is an absolute force of nature here, transforming into a human wrecking ball as he tears through NYC to save Kathy. He’s fantastic and frenetic to behold, delivering a performance that is the very definition of scorched earth and handily demonstrating the implacable resilience of a determined father. Gorman matches him well with his own physicality and despicability as Gus, a vile beast who’d benefit the world best if he were put down indefinitely. Other familiar faces populate the film as well: Dan Hedaya plays Sergeant Barnes, a former colleague of Sean’s who bears his own grudge against the man, resulting in a genuinely insane sequence with the former chasing the latter down the streets of New York while firing off a shotgun with abandon; Julie Carmen takes on the role of Maria, a sympathetic ally to Sean who helps him navigate the streets of unfamiliar territory; and Mandy Patinkin briefly pops up as a helpful cabbie in the initial chase sequence, offering some flavorful bits of character work to add more spark to the proceedings. Long unavailable to see in most markets, the new 4K restoration of Night of the Juggler is stunning, capturing all of the sleaze and grime that 1980 New York had to offer in this incredible, action-charged thriller. Here’s hoping the film now finds a proper audience enthusiastic to celebrate its triumphs. — JAKE TROPILA

Holy Night: Demon Hunters

The most reliable formula in action cinema today is having Ma Dong-seok one-punch a bunch of anonymous stuntmen into a wall. After hitting it big (so to speak) in 2016 with Train to Busan, the man also known as Don Lee has been brawling his way into our hearts with the likes of The Roundup series (three sequels to his 2017 The Outlaws, with another one on the way), Badland Hunters, and even a foray into the MCU with The Eternals. This year’s Ma vehicle is Holy Night: Demon Hunters, which dares to ask the question: can even the armies of Satan himself withstand the blows of Ma Dong-seok’s mighty fists? Of course, they cannot. 

Ma stars as the brawny part of a trio of exorcists. While one of the team, Sharon (played by Seohyun, from the K-pop supergroup Girls’ Generation), does the actual exorcising by putting her hands on the victims’ forehead and chanting in a strange language, and the other one, played by Lee David (from Bong Joon-ho’s Mother and Lee Kwang-kuk’s underseen classic Romance Joe), hangs around in the background filming everything, Ma stands guard. As the forces of darkness, humans who may or may not also be possessed, come to prevent the exorcism, Ma punches them so hard their demon souls come flying out of their bodies. It is, like every Ma Dong-seok action sequence, both hilarious and extremely cool.

The world of Holy Night: Demon Hunters is an eclectic amalgam of religions, mostly Catholic Christianity of course, but with Eastern twists (bamboo fronds, magic mirrors), a mix that matches its tone, pitched somewhere between the serious horror of the American exorcism genre and the gleeful silliness of Korean action cinema. The debut film from writer/director Lim Dae-hee, the project almost feels less like a movie than an elaborate pilot for a TV series, something along the lines of Evil, but with more punching. 

The plot revolves around the apparent possession of a young woman whose sister, a neuropsychiatrist, begs the heroic trio for help. There are hints here of a possible skepticism toward the supernatural, but they’re as quickly banished as the anonymous bad guys who run into Ma’s beefy mitts. Instead, we’re whisked from one action scene to another, with flashbacks liberally thrown in to flesh out both the possession story and that of the three heroes. With these the film adopts a suitably creepy found footage approach, in contrast to the spectacular effects of the present-day exorcism scenes. The heroes’ story seems more designed to set up future episodes than is relevant to this movie, but the main plot remains satisfactory enough and the whole thing just flies by at barely 90 minutes long. The final result is plenty pleasing enough that no one should complain if more entries do eventually arrive. — SEAN GILMAN