This week’s round of reviews includes “Starfish,” “The Hole in the Ground,” and “Captain Marvel.”
Starfish
“People are going to die anyways, but their stories don’t have to.”
Amid its eye-catching trappings, perhaps most succinctly illustrated as a fusion of Shane Carruth’s “Upstream Color” and Lars von Trier’s “Melancholia,” A. T. White’s “Starfish” tells a story of loss that resonates with a deeply intimate timbre. The high-concept thread of its story is straightforward enough: while Aubrey (Virginia Gardner) is grieving the death of her friend, Grace (Christina Masterson), an apocalypse-level extraterrestrial invasion begins. In this disorienting chaos, she discovers and follows a trail of cryptic, personal messages which seem to promise the resolutions of her external and internal odysseys.
Despite the potential power of this allegorical framework, a few fundamental issues work against its legibility, severely impeding a viewer’s ability to remain engaged. The foremost of these is that the film’s script internalizes too much, to the extent that viewers are partially shut out of Aubrey’s psyche for extended stretches of its running time. Gardner’s performance works with the film’s sights and sound to create deep emotional pools of sorrow and guilt, but, without a textual illumination of Aubrey and Grace’s relationship (at least not until well-toward the end), there isn’t much in which to ground these feelings. When exposition is delivered it is often in the form of abstruse flashback sequences, and these succeed in establishing visual motif (I keep thinking of one especially haunting recurring image) but they don’t present the viewer with much of anything tangible. Because the film is so innately about the journey of Aubrey’s mind and soul (and, presumably, taking the viewer on this journey), withholding the narrative bases for its key affectations ultimately reduces its impact.
Where the movie succeeds is in the craftsmanship of these affectations. Alberto Bañares’s photography is gorgeously tactile; the grainy allure of the film’s texture is one of “Starfish’s” unimpeachable strengths, uniting wildly diverse imagery under the umbrella of Aubrey’s subjective experience. The film also features striking moments of panoramic clarity that would be right at home in one of von Trier’s Depression Trilogy montages. Along with writing and directing, White also composed “Starfish’s” original music. It’s a sensitive score that feels entirely cohesive with the rest of the picture; its constitutive tracks tend to bleed across scenes, a quality that is initially disconcerting but ultimately effective at casting a unique sort of spell.
The strange, unfortunate reality of “Starfish” is that all of its technical prowess and raw emotional vulnerability can’t penetrate its oft-inscrutable syntax. There is no doubt that some will and very-well should find this work deeply affecting, but it speaks in too-esoteric a language to be parsed by most viewers.
Grade: C
“Starfish” is in select theaters now.
The Hole in the Ground
“Then tell me I’m wrong. Tell me I’m crazy.”
Lee Cronin’s “The Hole in the Ground” is one of those movies that affords viewers plenty of time to think about its process, and I mean that in a generous way, but also, in another equally real sense, a less generous way. It follows Sarah (Seána Kerslake), a young single mother, and her son, Chris (James Quinn Markey), as they move to a new home in the country. Late one night, the son wanders outside and gets lost in the woods, stumbling across a giant hole (in the ground). This discovery seems to change him in sinister ways—much to Sarah’s horrified bewilderment, but, sadly, not much to the viewer’s.
Shot in a dour, earthy palette and shepherded along by a score that forebodes relentlessly, the film is well-assembled and armed to scare. Nevertheless, for all of the technical proficiency behind the camera and for all of the emotionally sensitive performances in front of it, a poorly conceived antagonistic force will sink almost all of a given film’s frights. In fact, I’m willing to go out on a limb and say that a horror movie simply cannot work if its bad guy is just a very strong child, and that’s essentially what “The Hole in the Ground” offers. The picture is determined to scare you with something that just isn’t scary, and the results of this experiment do not surprise.
As a (largely valid) counterpoint, one could suggest that the film’s dread stems not from the moment to moment suspense of a monster inside the house, but instead from a monstrous turn of fate; its is an existential terror which grows from noticing that your child is suddenly unrecognizable in a jarringly fundamental way, and that the very relationship which once imbued your life with a revitalized meaning has turned it into a living hell.
This reading is muddied, however, by the film’s persistent efforts to make literal this threat. Could it be that the movie is trying to translate Sarah’s aforementioned dread into a tangible fear it can impart unto the viewer? If so, that’s fine, but Chris literally uses super-strength to lift and throw Sarah across their kitchen in a moment that serves as a near-perfect crystallization of the problems throughout the movie.
There is a legitimately scary sequence near the end of the film, one that departs pretty substantially from the imagery and rhythm established by earlier scenes. Its a refreshing turn that re-piques a viewer’s interest—
—just in time for the end credits.
Grade: C+
“The Hole in the Ground” is now available to rent on a variety of streaming services.
Captain Marvel
“Space invasion, big car chase… Truth be told, I was ready to hang it up. ‘Til I met you today.”
“Captain Marvel” does a whole lot of things, and most of them are good! It presents an entertaining narrative through Marvel Studios’ bombastic yet charming lens. It forges a unique (enough) identity among the twenty-or-so releases in the Marvel Cinematic Universe and remains nimble (enough) to navigate through multiple tonal shifts, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. It features an effortlessly cool, authoritative performance from Brie Larson who feels right at home as one of the most powerful Avengers. It makes me wonder if she is actually an Avenger, and also whether or not all of the good Marvel superheros are Avengers or if only some of them are.
Most importantly, it has alien Ben Mendelsohn, who delivers one line so incredibly well that I’m pretty sure I saw the face of God.
Honestly, I missed the boat on this one, timing-wise. If you somehow haven’t yet seen “Captain Marvel,” just know that it’s well worth your time. One last piece of evidence: among the best parts of the movie is a climactic showdown between Captain Marvel and a man who can best be described as “Debate Me!” personified. The way that she handles the threat should stand as an inspiration to people everywhere.
Grade: B for Ben Mendelsohn
“Captain Marvel” is in theaters now.
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