1990′s The Reflecting Skin, directed by Philip Ridley, is a weird movie and rather obscure. It’s very interesting, and quiet, bizarre, grotesque, over-the-top, and terribly beautiful, all at once. Visually, it’s amazing. The cinematography is gorgeous, very unforgettable. It has such atmosphere… Eerie, chilling, ominous, cryptic, ascetic yet lush. Admittedly some of the acting is just god-awful (especially the child actors!), but the movie overall is kind of brilliant. Destined to be thought terrible and intolerable by many, I loved it. It is quite possibly the movie that most embodies an “American Gothic” quality/aesthetic, a haunting sense of desolation and hopelessness, mirrored by the land, and a hypocritical, unforgiving puritanism.

Taking place in rural America in the 1950s (whose landscape of yellow wheat fields and desolate, isolated, gray wood frame houses standing in the midst of them is shot very impressively and gorgeously), The Reflecting Skin is, sort of, about child abuse, innocence, imagination, death, mortality, and love. The main character is a young boy named Seth Dove who creates an elaborate fantasy around a mysterious, otherworldly-seeming English widow who lives nearby, believing her to be a vampire who is preying on his loved ones. I suppose it’s partly about the unimaginable innocence of youth… Instead of registering and owning a sense of evil in the world, Seth displaces it onto this mysterious figure, a source of external, supernatural evil, thus allowing him not to understand these strange, horrific, traumatic events around him.

The “vampire,” pale, regal, and obsessive, is such a strange, lovely, macabre, spectral, enigmatic character, with the most absolutely haunting speeches, remote yet intense, vehement, and unnerving meditations on aging and love. Icily menacing yet alluring, preternaturally quiet with sudden outbursts of piercing, violent, grotesque, deeply primal, forlorn emotion, mercurial as a madwoman, she was played pretty much to perfection by Lindsay Duncan. She should be an iconic figure, in my opinion.

This movie is fascinating, and even if you end up not liking it, you should definitely see it. The cinematography alone is worth it.

The entirety of the film (from the Japanese DVD) is up on YouTube.

I saw this a few weeks ago, so this is kind of late, but here goes anyway. There’s “spoilers,” just FYI.

Sleeping Beauty (2011) is an Australian movie directed by Julia Leigh, starring Emily Browning and Rachael Blake. It’s about a young college student named Lucy who joins a high-end erotic waitressing service that caters to the wealthy, in order to make ends meet, and further agrees to be one of the “sleeping beauties,” so to speak, who form a more specialized subset of the girls. For each engagement she is driven to the madam/Clara’s house, where she takes a powerful sedative in a cup of tea that induces a very heavy, undisturbable, deathlike sleep for a short period, and while she’s out like the eponymous Sleeping Beauty, some client who has paid for the privilege, usually an older man, gets into bed with her and can do whatever they like with her unconscious body, short of actual penetration, for the duration of an hour. She is promised that when she wakes up, she will not remember a single thing, and for her it will be as if it never happened.

I liked this movie, and I’d been looking forward to it for a long time, ever since I saw the amazing trailer. I will have to watch it again sometime to see how I feel about it after a second viewing. But I suspect that it’ll only grow on me. I love Emily Browning. She’s so gorgeous, and there’s a sadness about her, a “vulnerability,” though I don’t know if that’s the right word; her character seems strong and indomitable, but also appears fragile, with her delicate, pale, doe-eyed, diminutive beauty.

Lucy has a perfect, easy grace; she is armored and dainty, utterly unapologetic, independent, very capable…she seems to be a rebel and individualist and vaguely insolent, while always remaining perfectly gracious. And a bit “mysterious,” I suppose…many of her actions are unexplained, though they don’t necessarily perplex me as things that need to be “figured out” or made sense of. She’s opaque without being an enigma. There’s something youthful and alive, and slightly fierce or feral, about her, an understated intelligence and sensuality, without an excess of explanation. I don’t feel that the movie really tries to explain away Lucy’s actions and characteristics too much (just as the rest of the movie is very much veiled), or to victimize her.

One of my favorite moments is near the beginning, a brief scene where she shares a line of cocaine in the bathroom with some Asian woman she’s just found in the bar/club, which I find kind of powerful, and I think it has more of a low-simmer sensuousness somehow than the more overt displays of sexuality in other scenes. My other favorite moments are the moments when she shows raw emotion, in which she’s more naked, and shows her vulnerability, her tenderness, and gives vent to her sadness, grief, fear, terror, frustration, ragged anger, confusion, etc. One of these is the scene where she’s lying with her friend after he’s OD’d, and she starts to cry in his arms. Another, and the most obvious, one, is at the end, when she wakes up from her enchanted sleep to discover what’s happened during that deathlike slumber.

This movie is very quiet and restrained. At no point is it overwhelming or over-demonstrative. It’s like a series of vignettes, each revealing just a little, which is rather obscure and doesn’t readily reveal its “meaning,” and the whole movie has a certain opaque quality. Visually, it’s quite beautiful. It has an austerity but also a gorgeousness…a rare visual elegance that parallels the somber classiness of Clara and her world. The style is extremely precise, crisp, tightly controlled, flawless; just very different from most movies. I feel like there wasn’t a single shot that wasn’t necessary, that could be considered “excessive,” and each shot is perfectly framed and controlled. Its leanness stands in contrast to the trend in modern movies for more highly-wrought, chaotic qualities. It’s evocative of vintage cinematic styles, and gives the film its intangible retro vibe. It also has a – I don’t know what to call it, a…slightly…frightening?, haunting quality, a sense of foreboding, a hint of something sinister, chilling. The sense that something bad is going to happen – that expectancy is always there, just around the corner, beneath the surface. I’m not sure how it achieves this, but for me it definitely has an undertone of still, sterile, white eeriness, though very low-key. This comes through in the trailer, I think.

{My interpretation of the ending}
I see the ending as a kind of total inversion of the traditional story of Sleeping Beauty, where the prince wakes her with the kiss of true love. A repeat client (the first one Lucy had, in fact: a dolorous, cryptic old man who just gently touched and admired her sleep-heavy, milk-pale body, and then lay side by side with her in a semblance of sleep) has requested that he be allowed to die in bed with drugged Lucy. (Presumably the body would be taken away before she comes to, with her being none the wiser.) So at the start of the session Clara doles out for him a lethal dose of the same drug that gives such a total, beautiful sleep to Lucy. Afterwards, Clara is sitting at the foot of the bed, having checked the old man’s dead body, and observing that Lucy is still deathly-still and doesn’t respond to her touch, she panics, in sudden and uncontrollable fear, thinking that she may have died…and she tries very hard to wake her up…shaking her by the shoulders violently, and even trying to give her mouth-to-mouth respiration (the “kiss”). When Lucy suddenly awakens, disoriented and shocked, coughing and sputtering, she looks around, only to see the old man lying dead in the bed next to her. It’s not her prince, but this sick old man who’s used her to fulfill his strange macabre-erotic death wish. It’s not the prince’s kiss, but Clara’s breath of blind panic and terror. At this point she breaks down, screaming, sobbing, and pounding her hands against the headboard, in a long, unbroken torrent of pure, vented, naked, piercing emotion.

2009′s Enter the Void is the third film I’ve seen by French director Gaspar Noé, the other two being Irreversible and I Stand Alone. It’s my favorite of the three. This post is long overdue, as I saw (and was blown away by) it several months ago.

From the very beginning, with its blaringly colorful, garishly flashy, epileptic seizure-inducing opening titles, Enter the Void is obviously striving to do something visually very different and impactive, aiming for sensory overload and trippy, mind-bending experiences. And it succeeds. Destined for controversy and lots of hate due to its graphic sexual content and themes, I think few people would deny that visually, it’s pretty interesting and innovative.

So here’s a brief description of the plot:

{ A young drug-dealing American in Tokyo named Oscar, who’s been separated from his younger sister Linda since they were children (when their parents died in a traumatic car accident), and has recently been reunited with her, is killed by police in a bar called “The Void.”

The first part of the movie introduces us to the protagonist in his apartment from a first-person perspective, showing us his hallucinatory, out-of-world experience after he takes a particularly powerful psychedelic drug. He heads over to the bar.

After Oscar dies in the filthy bathroom of The Void, the movie shifts to a wider, disembodied, more abstract, even metaphysical perspective, soaring amazingly, vertiginously over the city, past and through normal boundaries, penetrating walls, and focusing again at certain places/times as he observes Linda and other people in the wake of his death. It also shows experiences that happened earlier, but the structure is basically linear. }

It’s something that sort of just needs to be experienced by the viewer, ultimately. The constantly flashing, pulsating, shifting-colored visual quality of the movie is impossible to describe, and it’s also accompanied by an uncanny, throbbing, experimental, sometimes unsettling soundtrack.

Noé is interested in tapping into intense, violent, primal emotions in his characters, dark and gritty themes, and Enter the Void definitely follows this vein. I see him as always combining grittiness and tenderness in his art. Oscar’s relationships and psychic explorations are semi-incestuous; there are Oedipal undertones. There is lots of explicit sexuality, violence, harsh events, and all in the midst of the neon-enwrapped, garish, sordid underbelly of the Tokyo urban nightlife. And there’s definitely a rather strange death/sex/rebirth-cycle theme running through it all. Oscar’s post-death, physics-transcending wanderings push at and disturb and alter the ordinary boundaries of individual consciousness, expanding them incredibly outwards.

At 161 minutes, Enter the Void is pretty long, and I didn’t particularly love the last part. Nevertheless, I love the movie as a whole, so I basically accept every part of it. It’s one of the most interesting films I’ve seen recently and ever, and I definitely recommend it. Maybe not for the squeamish, though. Though I will never understand people bashing movies just because they find them personally repulsive or obscene, or perverse, or whatever. Just because it’s transgressive doesn’t mean it’s automatically a piece of trash.

I’d give it, oh, maybe a 9 out of 10.

(I personally found the movie a lot more interesting than I thought I would from the trailer, though.)

Martyrs is one of those movies that are considered so controversial and I don’t quite understand why. Maybe that’s because I’m not fazed by anything. After watching 2008′s Deadgirl, I think I’ve plumbed the depths of exploitation that a film can indulge in (and I liked the movie). Lots of people emphasize the “gore” aspect of Martyrs for some reason, but I really don’t think the movie is that bloody, the gore isn’t even as extreme as in many mainstream movies.

This movie is a little tricky. It takes huge, drastic, nearly schizophrenic turns in plot; what’s kind of odd is that it’s sort of about three entirely different things, and sectioned into different parts. It tells the story of Lucie, the main character (during the first part of the film), who as a young girl was kidnapped and horribly abused and tortured by this married couple and escaped, permanently traumatized. She carries a sort of “ghost” around, a vicious feral woman that Lucie perceives as physically attacking her in rage, and for a while it’s hard to tell what this ghost really is, to figure out the reality. (Initially I thought that she might be the grown-up “ghost” of the little girl who was locked up and abused in that basement, that it was who Lucie would have been if she hadn’t in reality escaped; I don’t know if that makes any sense, though).

So the first part, the first path the movie takes, is about trauma and revenge against a couple of psychopathic serial killers. In the second part, the truth about the ghost woman is revealed, and the movie takes on more of a theme of psychosis, and doubt about what’s right and wrong. The rest of the movie focuses on Anna, Lucie’s best friend. Without giving too much away, the third part is about people who try to create “martyrs” in the modern age: martyr in the sense of a witness to another plane of being, not someone who sacrifices their life for their beliefs. But what happens is very specific (almost science-fiction-y), and the premise is sort of silly and ridiculous. So the plot shifts completely from the beginning to the end. And it’s not quite like anything I’ve ever seen before. As a character says in the movie, “It’s so easy to create a victim” (but not a martyr).

The opening scene of the movie I absolutely loved, and it reminded me a little of The Orphanage (which is a great horror movie). It consists of old-fashioned video clips of Lucie and Anna at the orphanage where they grew up. It shows how deeply traumatized Lucie is by the events that happened, and how Anna sort of opens her heart to the vulnerability she sees in the other girl and longs to take care of her. How they become best friends. Sadly, the rest of the movie isn’t nearly consistently as good as the beginning.

Lucie is played by the gorgeous Mylene Jampanoi (made up to look really tired and worn-out). She is captivating, with the most intense eyes, and her performance is so visceral and seemingly natural. Anna is played by Morjana Alaoui, who gives a great performance as well. That’s one of the good points about Martyrs: the really intense, visceral quality of the characters, how they sort of throw their bodies around and express their emotions so powerfully. I quite liked the first part of the movie.

I can’t really say that I don’t like the latter half of the movie, however; no, it doesn’t quite work, and it’s really pretty silly and weird, but it’s still interesting. There’s something about it that captures the attention, and the whole movie is visually interesting.

Anyway, for both those who are looking for a thrill, over-the-top horror, and who want something more interesting/intellectual/artistic in a horror movie, you’ll probably get something from Martyrs. It’s definitely memorable, at least. I can’t deny liking it quite a lot. It’s just one of those movies that stick with me, even if it’s imperfect.

7 out of 10…ish.

The movie is divided into four chapters, titled “Grief,” “Pain (Chaos Reigns),” “Despair (Gynocide),” and “The Three Beggars.”

It tells the story of this nameless couple whose child dies accidentally and who go to a cabin in the woods to cope with the mother’s subsequent trauma. For me, it’s kind of divided into two parts, and it’s weird because these two parts are so different, in terms of what they give away about what the movie is “about.” In the first part, it seems very psychological, as if the movie is really about her psychiatrist-cum-boyfriend trying to help her overcome her anxiety and panic attacks. Nothing that happens in the first part isn’t within the realm of reality. Once they move to the cabin, strange things begin happening, and the movie shifts into an even more surreal, creepy, nightmarish atmosphere. But it never ceases being psychological.

Like I said, the movie is very vague, ambiguous, and doesn’t have a traditional narrative. It takes on this very mystical and surreal bent in the cabin, and gradually builds in horror. It has nothing to do with a literal Antichrist, except for the sort of archaic, cryptic mental atmosphere where such ideas come from.

What I sort of think it’s about is…primal evil. Deep, dark, obscure evil, like the horrific atmosphere surrounding medieval demons. The kind of evil that the woman (a Lilith-like figure) takes on, which seems to originate externally and just exists as evil. Similarly, nature and animals reflect the human happenings and aberrations, like in Macbeth. The bizarre stuff going on with the man and woman is manifested in the outside world, but external forces are also driving her and seeping into her psyche.

The cinematography is absolutely beautiful. It’s so interesting and a breath of fresh air, and even if you’re not that into the subject matter, you should probably check it out just for its visual effect. It’s surreal, eerie, highly atmospheric, and erotic. It has these lovely scenes of surreal, disturbing beauty, like the piles of pale limbs and naked bodies entwined with the tree roots in the promotional image above. Willem Dafoe is great in it, and so is Charlotte Gainsbourg, whom I love. Her character is so crazy and emotional in a very intense, visceral way.

This movie is definitely bizarre, and not for the squeamish, because it has quite graphic sex and some gruesome occurrences (the gore is not visually that over-the-top, just the idea of it is kind of squirmy).

A title like “Antichrist” evokes cheesy ’70s horror films like The Omen, but that couldn’t be farther from the truth. Antichrist is a gem of subtle, surreal horror, and of artistic, intellectual, and creative filmmaking.

An hour-long surreal horror film called “Imprint” is Takashi Miike’s contribution to the Masters of Horror series. It takes place (vaguely) in 19th-century Japan, but everything is spoken in English, and it’s very sort of ahistorical; it’s much more about a modern aesthetic interpretation of the times that the story takes place in rather than any real historical basis. Based on a traditional Japanese ghost story, an older American man travels to an island, where a brothel is kept, in search of his long-lost love, Komomo, who he promised he would take away one day long ago. Once there, he meets a disfigured/beautiful prostitute who tells him the story of (and many lies about) her life and Komomo’s. The girl’s appearance/disfigurement reminds me a bit of Yotsuya Kaidan, one of my favorite ghost stories.

This movie has such beautiful visual imagery. As Miike is known for, it combines eroticism and beauty, the grotesque and the macabre: there are cringe-worthy torture scenes and the incredibly intense cruelty of characters towards one another; and beautiful, imaginative visuals and cinematography that make it impossible to resist the pull of the movie. Totally perverse. Gorgeous girls, upon which the most horrible things are inflicted, including this weird erotic/absolutely horrific rope-bondage scene, and all the while there’s that eerie stillness and somehow elegant, serene quality that sets Miike apart from other, noisier horror movie makers.

I don’t know if the story or dialogue is that great, but it should be seen just for its visual element. I love how all the other prostitutes were contrasted with the main girl by their hair (huge, stylized wigs with giant hair pins) and clothes all being red while hers were blue. I really wanted to find some good pictures from the movie, but I couldn’t, really. I particularly liked the role of the main girl (unnamed), she was so alluring, and I loved her voice. And yet she became kind of repulsive later on; beauty and repulsion are constantly mixed in the female figures in this movie.

One of the downsides is that I thought the man’s performance was kind of amateurish, rather one-sided, and his voice didn’t really fit in at all, you could barely understand him at times. He seemed more like an amateur stage actor acting with misguided gusto or something, trying to come off as enigmatic, eccentric, and haunting/haunted. The “twist” at the end is also just bizarre and silly.

Anyway, the movie holds a lot of interest for me because of its imagination, visual concepts, and quirks. I think Takashi Miike gets categorized as a “B-movie” director a lot of times (which is bizarre whenever I hear that), but for me his work has a lot of beauty, I couldn’t ever see it as somehow bad or low-quality because it’s “shocking.” I’d give the movie maybe a 7 out of 10.