‘Soft liquid center’
Rent or buy on the main platforms.
Steph (Steph Holmbo) starts a new life after leaving her horrible boyfriend and getting a new apartment and a new group of friends. But he has strange dreams in which he walks through the forest and, what’s worse, sometimes his furniture moves by itself. Then, in the strangest scene in this strange film, Steph extracts the flesh of a giant watermelon, turning the ground where she sits into what looks like a brutal crime scene: a taste of the spectral horrors that will collapse time to come.
For their first feature film, directors Joseph Kolean and Zachary Gutiérrez, known as Perry Home Video, made an experimental horror film that will perplex some people but hypnotize me. (When a friend tells Steph, “I’ve been feeling really weird lately,” I started doing it too.) Holmbo, who co-wrote the script with the directors, told the What Sleeps Beneath blog that the film was inspired by past stories. relationships of his that were “deeply toxic and unhealthy, often especially in inexplicable ways.” That notion of heartbreak and survival as ends of supernatural means comes to life here, thanks to a disorienting story, a slow visual style, and a score, by Roberto Garza, that left me off balance.
‘Naga’
Stream it on Netflix.
Critics are divided over Saudi writer-director Meshal Aljaser’s crazy feature debut. Detractors think he is busy and empty. Fans are in love with the visual and narrative thrills of it. They are both right.
Set over a single day, the film follows Sara (Adwa Bader, electric), a young woman who, in an act of furtive rebellion against her wealthy, traditionalist family, runs away with her secret boyfriend, Saad (Yazeed Almajyul), to a lavish party in the desert. But as Saad speeds down a dark road, he crashes into a camel, a fatal fate that the animal’s mother laments off-camera with a scream that sounds like she’s coming from the waiting room of hell. From there, this genre-hopping film, equal parts psychological thriller and hipster black comedy, shifts at breakneck speed.
Watching the movie gave me an emotion similar to that of “Run Lola Run.” Aljaser’s camera almost never stops descending and reversing. It seems like angles have a hard time getting them. A very long shot appears to have been filmed from Mars. After almost two hours, I fell in love with the attractiveness of it. But I was also left wanting a Saudi genre film so crazy and bold that it offered a clearer conclusion.
‘Saturn Bowling’
Rent or buy on the main platforms.
Armand (Achille Reggiani) agrees to take over his late father’s bowling alley, much to the relief of Armand’s policeman half-brother Guillaume (Arieh Worthalter). Boyishly handsome Armand has no problem taking home a young bowler one night. But what begins as an affair turns into a horrific rape, a scene that director Patricia Mazuy depicts with the same unflinching brutality that made the monstrous assault in Gaspar Noé’s “Irreversible” a deal-breaker for many viewers. It turns out that Armand is a serial killer and Guillaume is the investigator assigned to the case.
Mazuy’s film explores many dark themes (animal cruelty, sins of the father, toxic masculinity) that don’t always add up. However, she is such a confident director that she makes this sometimes difficult to digest drama worth watching, and I mean that narratively and sometimes physically. As a police procedural, the film strains credulity, but as a neo-noir drama about a psychopath and his corrupting emotional zigzags, it shines. Reggiani has a somber countenance that makes her deeply disturbing performance seem effortless, which she should take as a compliment. Simon Beaufils, the cinematographer, makes a bowling alley look like the devil’s playground.
‘Spirit of fear’
Stream it on Tubi.
Chris (Chris Page) wakes up in a room of a large, randomly furnished house that he doesn’t recognize. One of his arms is covered in blood. There’s a sticky note telling him not to go out and another on the bathroom mirror that says “Don’t stay here too long.” Another note is even more sinister: “Don’t let me see you.” His handwriting matches that of the person who wrote the messages, but that doesn’t solve the mystery of where he is and why a creepy claw is trying to get through the shower curtain.
That’s the cryptic setup for writer-director Alex Davidson’s twisted film, but I don’t want to say any more. Because what I thought was a psychological thriller with sci-fi overtones (and almost no dialogue) turned out to be a remake of a genre that I won’t mention, so as not to spoil the final surprise of this film.
Better known devil than unknown devil: good advice, in general. But what if the devil you know is your dad? That’s the disturbing premise behind Sebastien Blanc’s strange sci-fi/horror hybrid, his feature debut.
William (Tobi King Bakare) wakes up from a coma, unable to speak, after being seriously injured in a car accident. His adoptive father, Richard (Steve Oram), takes him home to recover, but warns him that his mother, Amelia (Ramona Von Pusch), who was with William in the car, does not want to see him.
But wait: why is Dad digging a big trench in the backyard and being evasive about his wife’s whereabouts? And why is the refrigerator full of rotten food? And what is that shiny-eyed thing in the kitchen?
With a script that is both contemplative and chilling, Blanc offers a terrifying meditation on fatherhood and the promise and perils of an afterlife. Race, too: William is black and his parents are white (they talk but he doesn’t), which infuses issues of adoption, forgiveness and conscience with an awkwardness similar to that of “Getting Out,” even with an ending that veers toward the B-movie territory.
