Darcy Read

MIFF 2024: Darcy’s Notebook

September 11, 2024Darcy Read

A year of avoiding the larger titles in favour of more independent films, my MIFF experience in 2024 went from the battleground of Gaza to the quiet family dramas in modern Seoul, with a unifying theme of perseverance and defiance throughout. Much like 2023, the curatorial efforts of the festival directors are its greatest gift, ensuring a high baseline of quality that guarantees a thoughtful and compelling time at the movies no matter your interest set.

All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt (2023) – Raven Jackson

A powerful combination of photographic and sonic qualities propels Raven Jackson’s All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt to incredible heights. Becoming larger than the sum of its modest parts, Jackson announced herself immediately as an important American artist to follow moving forward.

Flowing like a seasonal river with its rises and falls, the narrative follows Mack, portrayed seamlessly by Kaylee Nicole Johnson and Charlean McClure, as she journeys through 1960s Mississippi onwards, with all the love and difficulty that comes with staying in her hometown through a challenging time.

Squeezing every fleeting moment of thematic and emotional juice, this essayistic ode to womanhood, home, and the shared experience will wash over you if you let it, feeling reborn in the gleaning sunlight.

All We Imagine as Light (2024) – Payal Kapadia

The most soulful film of the festival, documentarian turned fiction filmmaker Payal Kapadia explodes onto the scene with the remarkable All We Imagine as Light. A powerful blend of personal womanhood inside the political in modern Mumbai, Kapadia’s gorgeous and lyrical film centres on three multigenerational nurses navigating a world unable and unwilling to accommodate their lives.

Kapadia, with a refined hand through documentary work, flourishes in small moments. Whether it’s the embrace of a rice cooker given by a distant-slash-estranged husband working in Germany, or the small gesture of helping an older colleague move her things back to her old home after being wrongfully evicted, All We Imagine as Light embraces the aching emotionality of the quotidian, knowing these fleeting moments create a mosaic that reflects the light of human experience.

Brief History of a Family (2024) – Jianjie Lin

The one-child policy of China casts a long shadow across Brief History of a Family, a taut and beguiling debut feature from Jianjie Lin. After an incident at school sparks an unlikely connection, the shy and reserved teen Shuo (Sun Xilun) begins to spend more and more time at his more confident classmate Wei’s (Lin Muran) upper-middle-class house.

Lin’s debut is atmospheric and tense and while its decision to bunt with its bases loaded, the film still demonstrates a skill set to operate in the genre world of modern thriller, a drought-stricken place with fans desperate for new, exciting voices. Went long on the film here.

Didi (2024)- Sean Wang

In what is sure to be the beginning of a wave in late 00s coming-of-age stories that will have those in their late 20s questioning all life experiences as being unique, Sean Wang’s terrific and humbling Didi shows you screwing up is an integral part of growing up.

Telling the story of a Californian skater and potential filmmaker Chris (Izaac Wang), on summer break (a bizarre theme across several MIFF releases) as he navigates girls, friends, and his family. With integral sequences playing out over AIM and MySpace (finally, a film captures the adolescent psychological torture device of the top friends section on film) that had the audience in raptures, Wang is an exciting new filmmaker that can deftly translate the modern malaise of youth into compelling cinematic storytelling.

I Saw the TV Glow (2024) – Jane Schoenbrun

A truly expansive cinematic experience that will define the year in movies, Jane Schoenbrun’s miraculous and tangly I Saw the TV Glow, is the best film I saw at MIFF and will no doubt contend with my film of the year. A film that explodes ideas of what a teenage coming-of-age story can be as it explores the push and pull between stagnation and liberation, ending on a unique note that seemingly has a different taste depending on the individual audience member’s life experience. That is no small feat.

I Saw the TV Glow follows Owen, a suburban teen protracted by Justice Smith in an outrageously good performance of youthful dysphoria and I will not hear arguments otherwise. Stuck in a liminal space outside of life, Owen finds solace in a fictional 90s too-adult-but-still-for-kids show The Pink Opaque, unlocked by fellow disenchanted teen Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine), who invited him into the world via burned VHS recordings of the show. The film is too dense to capture in a couple sentences, and the weight of Schoenbrun’s storytelling is in its ability to envelop a whole audience in the liminal world Owen feels locked within. Where most trans texts follow an embrace of transitioning, Schoenbrun’s film instead lingers and interrogates the suffocating space of dysphoria surrounding that place, a more evocative and unique lens to capture on film.

That Schoenbrun can bring a crowd down the psychological rabbit hole of dysphoria through a trans lens is a testament to their remarkable filmmaking powers. This is not just a film for ‘Twin Peaks: The Return (2017) is an 18-hour film’ Film Twitter folks (I am sometimes in the crowd), but for anyone who has felt lost in the liminal space that can be found along the path of life.

Janet Planet (2023) – Annie Baker

The smell of Autumn on a warm breeze as you stare, half bored and half awake at the misshapen clouds above, playwright Annie Baker’s filmmaking debut Janet Planet is the emergence of a major new voice in cinema, with all the confidence and assurance of an established artist.

Capturing a fascinating and enthralling pair in the owlish 11-year-old Lacy (a revelatory Zoe Ziegler) and her mother Janet (Julianne Nicholson) over a summer break, Baker’s precise use of silence and seasonal boredom is a beautiful ode to human connection, with the push and pull that can only come from someone you’ve known your whole life.

La Cocina (2024) – Alfonso Ruizpalacios

A frenetic, seething diorama of modern America through the lens of a Times Square super diner kitchen, Alfonso Ruizpalacios’ La Cocina blends the modern and the old-fashioned in this long but never tiring hospitality nightmare. Starring Rooney Mara and Raúl Briones, La Cocina wears its metaphors of American white supremacy and immigration inside the kitchen proudly, with Ruizpalacios’s impressive filmmaking style and farcical tendencies buoying these weighty ideas.

My Sunshine (2024) – Hiroshi Okuyama

Like the enchanting mist of a crisp winter morning, Hiroshi Okuyama’s My Sunshine captures a personal tale of adolescent passion and direction with a nourishing blend of nostalgia and honesty.

My Sunshine has the trappings of a film about childhood love and coming of age, but shines through as a potent story about the importance of teachers and the connection that is made through a shared passion. While the uplifting story of Takuya’s (Keitatsu Koshiyama) journey with figure skating and growing into himself is universal and soul-nourishing, the journey of Arakawa (Sôsuke Ikematsu) rediscovering his love through his pupil’s childhood enthusiasm shows the connection with a mentor and mentee shines both ways.

No Other Land (2024) – Basel Adra, Hamden Ballal, and Yuval Abraham

The only documentary I caught at the festival, No Other Land is a breathtaking on-the-ground experience in Gaza, with filmmaking collective Basel Adra, Hamden Ballal, and Yuval Abraham giving us a visceral document of the horrible situation in the Palestinian West Bank. Capturing Adra and his family’s village in Masafer Yatta in real-time slowly erodes any feeling of optimism in the region will hollow you out and leave you seething in rage.

On Becoming a Guinea Fowl (2024) – Rungano Nyoni

Despite our IMAX screening needing to be restarted 30 minutes in due to a lack of subtitles, Rungano Nyoni’s On Becoming a Guinea Fowl had cast a cinematic spell that proved impossible to break. A compelling and seething portrait of the friction between community repression and warmth in modern-day Zambia, Guinea Fowl is a difficult but necessary watch with its honest telling of the ways sexual violence permeates global communities in incalculable ways.

Anchored by a truly star-making performance by Susan Chardy as the modern Shula returning home to her community in Zambia only to come across the bizarrely dead body of Uncle Fred in the middle of the street, Nyoni’s strong filmmaking chops are in full force, beautifully balancing evocative and compelling characters in an awful situation. One of the leading new voices to watch coming out of MIFF.

Pepe (2024) – Nelson Carlos de los Santos Arias

The story of Pablo Escobar’s escaped hippo told through poetic voiceover by the impossibly gorgeous baritone of Jhon Narváez, Nelson Carlos de los Santos Arias’s Pepe has one of the loglines of the year but is a film that dives compelling depths in this potential silly tale of animal personhood.

An infinitely charming and divisive story of losing a home never seen, Pepe bites off more than it can chew but has more meat on its bones than the majority of films you’ll see this year. With some truly mind-blowing filmmaking inside its modest frame, Pepe will sneak up on you and leave you surprisingly emotional about these hippos.

The Seed of the Sacred Fig: (2024) – Mohammad Rasoulof

An enthralling family drama that devolves into an edge-of-your-seat thriller, Mohammad Rasoulof’s The Seed of the Sacred Fig deservedly earned second place at Cannes and easily finds itself in the conversation for film of the year.

Grounding itself in the reality of student protests in Iran, potently displayed through real phone footage, Rasoulof’s film about how politics and repression are bound to its people is at times overwhelming, but never melodramatic. The Seed of the Sacred Fig is one of the most impressive screenplays of the decade due to its difficulty and focused expression, moving slowly but confidently to its unexpected climax.

Through an emotionally overwhelming use of real social media videos of Iranian political protests and violence, Razoulof risked his life making this remarkable film that so of the moment it’s hard to believe. Brilliantly blending metaphors of family dynamics as stand-ins for the regime, The Seed of the Sacred Fig is a remarkable, must-see film that may be the most crucial piece of cinema to emerge from 2024.

Sing Sing (2024) – Greg Kwedar

The most emotionally overwhelming film of the festival, we are sure to be hearing a lot about Greg Kwedar and his incredible prison rehabilitation drama Sing Sing come awards season at year’s end.

Exploring the real theatre-based prison rehabilitation program at Sing Sing Maximum Security prison (RTA), with an open heart and boundless compassion, Kwedar and his collaborators have given audiences one of the year’s best and most open-hearted portrayals of the American prison system that will break your heart and put it back together.

Perfectly blending reality and fiction, with an awards-worthy pair of performances by Colman Domingo and Clarence Maclin (an alum of the program), Sing Sing avoids any missteps into gratuity and gawking through an endless stream of humanity and humble decisions that is inspiring. A true miracle of a film.

The Shrouds (2024) – David Cronenberg

A beguiling and disarmingly funny inward look at grief by a living legend, 81-year-old David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds is a film only he could make. While not on the level of Crimes of the Future (2022), Cronenberg’s outward display of grief for his late wife Carolyn Ziefman in 2017 here is poignant and more emotional than you’d expect.

With a deliberate caricature of the auteur in the lead with a white-haired and sunglasses Vincent Cassel as a cemetery-owning video content producer with a physical obsession with the deceased, The Shrouds bizarre humour reminds one of the late Argento, but with a framework and personality that only the Canadian legend can achieve. While feeling more like a sketch than a fully realised project, in the long arc of Cronenberg’s work, this still feels like a critical late tentpole.

Sweet Dreams (2024) – Ena Sendijarevic

A charmingly eccentric but slight look at the doomed Dutch colonialism of Indonesia, Ena Sendijarevic’s Sweet Dreams lives in the shadow of Yorgos Lanthimos and other Euro eccentric filmmakers, but still effectively skewers a worthy target.

As the death of a Dutch sugar plantation owner Jan (Hans Dagelet) plunges the land into financial turmoil, the arrival of a daffy married couple Josefien (Lisa Zweerman and Cornelis (Florian Myjer) threatens to sell off the depreciating land, much to the behest of Jan’s widow Agathe (the scene-stealing Reneé Soutendijk).

The demise of a certain vein of European colonialism shot evocatively through natural lighting with Barry Lyndon (1975) as a touchstone, Sweet Dreams is a minor work compared to the rest of this list of MIFF films but is an entertaining enough ride to enjoy.

Universal Language (2024) – Matthew Rankin

A poignant picaresque of Winnipeg through the language of 80s Iranian cinema, Matthew Rankin’s evocative film Universal Language charmed its way into the MIFF grand prize, the Bright Horizons award, and deservedly so.

A farcical tour through a Farsi-speaking imagined world of modern-yet-timeless Winnipeg, Rankin’s creative world-building leaves evocative nuggets around every corner, including one of the best locations in cinema this year with an Iranian-styled Tim Hortons.

One of the most rewarding and enchanting experiences in a wonderful suite of films, Rankin’s Universal Language is an idiosyncratic depiction of one’s home and cinematic loves combined, morphing into a must-see.

Bookworm Revives the Family Adventure Genre

August 29, 2024Darcy Read

Screener provided by Rialto.

A charming, off-kilter adventure story that stakes a claim as a story for all ages, Ant Timpson’s Bookworm (2024) offers a lot to an audience crying out for live-action family films made with care and respect. With a wry Kiwi humour that buoys the more rote storytelling choices to get to its uplifting finale, the film has the charm and enough evocative imagery to enthral both kids and parents.

After a tragic electrical accident leaves her mother Dotty (Nikki Si’ulepa) in a coma, 11-year-old Mildred’s (a spark plug Nell Fisher) world gets turned upside down as her estranged father, the washed-up illusionist Strawn Wise (Elijah Wood) returns from America to New Zealand to take care of her, whether she likes it or not. Eager to please a child he has avoided his whole life, Strawn agrees to go camping with Mildred, who is driven to dive into the forest to track down the fabled Canterbury Panther, a real New Zealand urban legend. Mildred is keen to capture proof of the fabled panther, which has a reward of $50,000 on its head, money we learn she and Dotty are desperate for.

The opening sequence, shot in a boxed aspect ratio, reflects the overprotectiveness Dotty had on Mildred, a cage she was desperate to prove herself larger than. As the unlikely pair emerge from the car into the glorious New Zealand landscape, the film expands into widescreen, a simple but effective nod towards the adventure we are about to embark on.

Mildred is not like other kids, a voracious book reader who is keen to show how mature and knowledgeable she is on all matters. Whereas Strawn is a down on his luck but an overconfident magician who only knows as much as he needs to to make a living in Vegas. The duo could not be more mismatched, creating friction that these two equally charming performers wield to delightful effect from beginning to end.

Elijah Wood and Nell Fisher in *Bookworm*.

The charm of seeing Elijah Wood back in the New Zealand mountains is never lost on this adventure story, and while Strawn is no Frodo, Fishers’ Mildred has all the heartful energy and tenacity of the legendary Hobbit. While the storytelling lacks cohesion, particularly in the back end that offers little thread between points, Timpson’s inventive and creative filmmaking carries us through the New Zealand countryside. While the gorgeous scenery certainly has no bad side for the camera, Timpson and cinematographer Daniel Katz’s charming use of camera setups gives us a fresh perspective on the space that easily could’ve fallen into being a tourism ad.

Surprisingly, the film arrives at the panther footage capturing sequence like it took a wrong turn. While the scene is charming and engaging, it leaves little room to continue on from, a decision it never recovers from, sputtering to invent a new take to continue on the story, with every plot exploration afterwards becoming increasingly bizarre. The off-kilter nature of the story and characters does assist the unbalancing impact of seemingly finishing our quest so early, but the film never arrives back on solid ground.

Ultimately, Timpson’s exploration into the dense, murky marshes of family entertainment is a unique trajectory for an indie filmmaker from our neck of the woods and should be celebrated. While not every piece falls into place, the chemistry between Fisher and Wood, on top of an enchanting visual palette, means Bookworm is creatively leagues ahead in a genre crying out for original voices.

Bookworm is in theatres now.

Alien: Romulus Strips the Franchise Back to its Core

August 16, 2024Darcy Read

Lean, grimy, and seemingly unkillable, Fede Álvarez’s instalment in the enduring Alien franchise, Alien: Romulus (2024) is for the fans crying out for the return of true horror in a world that has moved towards epic myth-making with the return of creator Ridley Scott in recent years. Álvarez focuses on a smaller story, wedged aggressively between Alien (1979) and Aliens (1986) to cater to the ever-hungry IP crowd, over the wider original stories of Prometheus (2012) and Alien: Covenant (2017) that many audiences dismissed despite its impressive scale and profound ideas on the totality of the human experiment, for better and for worse.

Our entry point into the instalment is Rain (emerging star Cailey Spaeny) and her out-of-date android helper, lovingly referred to as her brother Andy (Industry’s David Jonsson). Rain is an overworked colony worker desperate to get off-world and see the sun again, something impossible to do in their small hellhole of corporate dystopia. When some old acquaintances show up telling Rain and Andy of a plan to take over an eerily decommissioned ship out in space, one with enough fuel to get to a planet with more opportunity and the chance to be in the sun’s rays again, they jump at it. Chaos ensues, as is always the case with those eerily decommissioned ships floating in space, isn’t it?

Cailey Spaeny and David Jonsson are brought in to reinforce the sparse dramatic moments of a film almost solely focused on its sci-fi horror architecture. In Álvarez, the franchise has looked to a true horror filmmaker to re-establish its roots as a lean, tin-box-floating-in-space creature horror, and to that extent, the film easily clears the bar. However, the film’s limited scope does mean its final swing of a final act (which will not be spoiled here) does not land with the energy and propulsion of earlier, more effective horror set pieces.

Cinematographer Galo Olivares is driven to capture the natural eeriness of vacant space stations, with its distressing orange and red warning lights a stark contrast to the stale greys seemingly close to being subsumed by the encroaching blackness. Through its committed cinematography and sound design, Alien Romulus feels at times like a more direct sequel to Don’t Breathe (2016) — Fede Álvarez’s breakout hit — than its actual sequel. While some key dramatic moments are undercut by a simple inability to see in crucial corners of the frame, the atmosphere created by these choices is the impressive engine that powers the entire ship.

The Alien franchise is maybe the best for creatives to work within as it operates as a sandbox for compelling filmmakers to experiment with the genre, a place where Álvarez thrives. The Alien films have excelled in its close quarters suspense, but styled in unique ways that have made each instalment feel fresh and alive. With Álvarez, Romulus returns to a more strictly low-fi haunted house in space space-style horror film, weaponising the claustrophobia that made the original film an instant classic.

However, by tying itself in many ways to Alien, Romulus falls between a rock and a hard place separating itself as its own work. While the script is lean and efficient in getting to the action, we are given sparing amounts of meat on the bone which becomes an issue for many horror films. Spaeny and Jonsson are terrific young actors who can do a lot with a little, but here even their most triumphant moments come through direct Ripley echoes, leaving no room to stand on their own.

Fans of the deep lore of the long-spanning franchise will enjoy brief moments of service to the wider canon while never cratering its own narrative momentum, an issue more recent franchise stories have self-inflicted on their work. For fans of Roman history and mythology, the name Romulus can be used as its own entry point into the wider Alien mythos, as Prometheus (2012) did before it.

In a franchise that usually probes the depth of space to discover compelling ideas of humanity and our place within the wider universe, writing partners Álvarez and Rodo Sayagues instead delve into compelling depths of the inherent amorality of the mega-corporations that dictate the movements of humanity, and how AI is deeply entrenched in the amorality. These ideas are present throughout each Alien film, but with Romulus, they are highlighted and focused on as its primary directive. While not as emotionally enriching as the primal stories of motherhood and survival that were the heart of the Ripley story, Rain and Andy’s story is more than enough to compel us through this sci-fi horror, even if it won’t be enough to stand apart in the franchise.

Where the film attempts to stand apart, however, is in its wild swing of a final act, where Álvarez and Sayagues recall the much-maligned Alien Resurrection (1997) that will have audiences cheering and laughing in equal measure. Where the final of the strange 90s entry in the franchise leant of decades of emotional world-building of the Ripley character to a beguiling climatic choice, Romulus goes for a similar event but remains in the more core horror genre ideals that tie it closer to the original film. Álvarez’s horror roots were perfectly suited for this continuation of the original Alien, with its palpable tension rattling around a floating tin box in the vast emptiness of space.

Alien: Romulus is in theatres now.

MIFF 2024: Brief History of a Family is a Richly Suspenseful Family Drama

August 15, 2024August 21, 2024Darcy Read

Screener provided as part of MIFF 2024

The one-child policy of China casts a long shadow across Brief History of a Family (2024), a taut and beguiling debut feature from Jianjie Lin. After an incident at school sparks an unlikely connection, the shy and reserved teen Shuo (Sun Xilun) begins to spend more and more time at his more confident classmate Wei’s (Lin Muran) upper-middle-class house.

The first time Shuo enters Wei’s family home, he is immediately drawn to the large tree garden blooming out of the back window, his envy and wonder emanating off the well contained screen. In a mannered film like Brief History of a Family, where emotions and intentions are tightly contained, this moment shines brightly, working as a core grounding point the rest of the film is built upon.

As Shuo encroaches further and further into Wei’s family, the suspense and sinister undertones simmer at a low frequency, creating a palpable atmosphere that propels the story. The young boy quickly becomes the flower of affection for both of Wei’s parents, who are not given names in the film but are played wonderfully by Guo Keyu and Zu Feng. Their care and desire to help this teenager plays against the thriller style that Lin is seeping into every moment of the story, creating a wonderful contrast that makes for great tension.

Sun Xilun as Shuo in *Brief History of a Family*.

Lin’s camera and blocking choices are meticulously observed, wielded with a stern combination of remove and suspense that all the best modern thrillers embrace. However, when a filmmaker decides to withhold so much, an audience will begin to intensely scrutinise every morsel of information within a frame. The best thrillers can withstand this level of keen audience awareness, but most often the absence is felt.

With Shuo as the black hole at the centre of the frame, the film is barely able to support its own weight. The cinematography by Jiahao Zhang is deliberate and tense, accompanied appropriately by an abstract score by Toke Brorson Odin, which heightens the strong opening half of the film. However, all too often with indie thrillers that operate mostly on mood, style, and oppressive visual metaphors, the climax and resolution rarely reward the experience. The emotionality that Lin plays towards the conclusion of the film feels tepid and unrewarding, given the propulsive momentum and eerie suspense that takes up the majority of screen time. This is a delicate tightrope Lin is trying to execute in a debut feature, one that I’m sure will be more artfully handled in future projects.

That being said, Brief History of a Family’s conclusion does savvily leave you with more compelling ideas about the cost of oppressive government mandates like the one-child policy, and the impact it has on a family, from both the parents and the child. With a combination of strong performances and meticulous attention to suspenseful detail, Jianjie Lin’s debut feature will have you on the edge of your seat and questioning the next friend your kid brings home.

Brief History of a Family is playing at MIFF now.

Longlegs is Your New Horror Obsession

July 18, 2024Darcy Read

Beginning with a burn-chilling opening sequence that operates on a high level of performance, composition, and editing in only a few short minutes, Oz Perkins’ Longlegs (2024) creates an all-encompassing feeling of dread and paranoia from which there is no escape. With a claustrophobic boxed aspect ratio wielded with true maliciousness, the opening frames are the shocking jolt of electric current that flows through the rest of the film, which operates in a thrilling liminal space that will keep you destabilised.

In blending serial killer procedurals with the existential dread of an unexplainable nightmare, Perkins’ internal genre mashup will surely frustrate and bewilder those on both sides of the horror spectrum. With its uncompromising vision and style, Longlegs opens up into a compelling exploration of familial abuse that will catch up to you in the days and weeks after in ways all too rare in modern horror. As a young FBI upstart, agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe), put on the case of a serial killer who goes by (Nicolas Cage, weaponised to incredible effect), an unidentifiable killer of young families who has operated for decades. With her new partner Carter (the terrific and unheralded Blair Underwood), Lee must uncover and decrypt a series of seemingly occult clues, some seemingly linked to her life, to catch Longlegs before he targets another family.

For the crime procedural lovers, all the serial killer staple moments are here: suspenseful walks through suburbia, a tense microfiche scene in a library, and deep dives into the cult and religiosity, Longlegs has everything you could want from a modern-day homage to Silence of the Lambs (1991) inside the overused ‘elevated horror’ branding that infers hyper-considered compositions and atmosphere over ideas.

This has been Perkins’ issue in the past, with the son of legend Anthony Perkins and Berry Berenson putting image over story and script in his previous work, Gretel and Hansel (2020) and I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House (2016), but has broken through with easily his best script in Longlegs. The film is wider ranging and more compelling than recent entries in this new wave of American horror. Films that want to explore deep rooted causes of horror like child abuse and extreme religiosity but have no appetite to get into the true heart of this evil, something Perkins is keenly focused on conveying honestly and potently.

On the dread-inducing serial killer axis, Longlegs finds itself tightly drawn to David Fincher’s Seven (1995), with its internal focus on our central characters’ world and the encroaching evil building up around them. While his presence, and particularly his face is often obscured by the frame, Longlegs lingers in the psyche of its characters and the audience. Played with his customary intensity and ferociousness, Cage excels in limited time like Darth Vader’s limited but outsized presence in Star Wars (1977).

Lee is a fascinating character, played brilliantly — although is sure to be divisive, similar to how the performance of Justice Smith in I Saw the TV Glow (2024) has been judged — by modern horror stalwart Maika Monroe, who has as much anxiety meeting her partner’s daughter as encountering a horrific murder scene. The world weighs heavy on her mind, and Monroe gives her a level of dissociative tendencies that are incredibly difficult to portray on screen and in lesser hands would’ve derailed the film. This makes Longlegs‘ true beguiling mystery, and the beauty of the script comes from its ability to strip away Longlegs himself, leaving us compelled by the mystery of her story, the true engine of the film.

Longlegs as a film lingers in the corners of frames with the patient tension of a spider, as Perkins and cinematographer Andres Arochi revel in having an audience’s eyes dart from every inch of their considered and restrained frame that stretches out into eternity. Even in tense, quick-motion sequences, we cannot help but peer over the shoulder of Lee (which takes up two-thirds of the frame), expecting the worst in every moment.

Weaponising its extreme wide lens to a chilling effect, the film sucks Lee into the frame, increasing the opportunities for the menace and dread to creep in and linger. In modern horror, a tight perspective is often given to our protagonist, heightening the tension by playing with the fantasies of the audience of what lurks beyond the frame. In Longlegs, by extending the frame outwards, in both tense scenes and in standard dialogue moments, we are instead led to explore our fears head on, even as the film plays out in a more elegiac and liminal way.

With a work of mounting dread, the inevitable climax is unique but crucial to the final impact that can be felt days and weeks later. The greatest work of insidious evil and its unexplainable nature is Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s masterpiece Cure (1997), which operates in plain sight but questions what is capable within the banality of human life. With Longlegs, Perkins decides instead to spend the final moments explaining the hows and whys of the story, turning all the lights in a house we’ve been too scared to walk around at night, believing that the true lasting impact will be felt after these capital R revelations, not prior.

The closing 10 minutes are overwhelming, and the tensest you’ll feel in a theatre all year, but one can’t help but feel a more ambiguous ending with a tight grip of evil that propelled the entire experience would’ve lingered longer in the memory of its audience. This decision to enlighten that which was kept in the dark, while removing a juicy level of elusion to reward feverish rewatches, does allow the true meaning of the film in the case of Lee’s familial story and how Longlegs operates as an outsized metaphor within it. The fact this sharp decision can easily be argued on either side shows how evocative a story Perkins has been able to tell.

What we are left with is a deeply fascinating work of modern horror from an emerging artist, one that can work both inside and outside the trappings of where the genre finds itself in the 2020s. Flanked by a great ensemble of Monroe, Cage, Alicia Witt, and Underwood, with quality craftspeople across the production, Longlegs is a nightmare born into reality, with a level of tension that is overwhelming, adding to the top of what is shaping to be an excellent year in horror.

Longlegs is in theatres now.

The Promised Land is a Rare and Satisfying Danish Period Epic

June 22, 2024Darcy Read

Set in the glaringly inhospitable north of Denmark in the 18th century, The Promised Land (2023), is a period drama that could’ve easily slipped into historical mad-libs. But, through a nuanced script by director Nikolaj Arcel and Anders Thomas Jensen based on the 2020 novel by Ida Jesson, we are given an easily digestible and consistently compelling epic through a real focus on character interiority. Mads Mikkelsen, with a weathered face as sprawling and inscrutable as the sparse Danish countryside, captures our attention within every frame of the film that too easily could’ve faded into obscurity without his brilliant performance.

The heath, a term for the impenetrable countryside in northern Denmark is where we find ourselves. A land with murky jurisdiction between the Danish king and local landowners, recently retired army captain Ludwig Kahlen (the formidable Mads Mikkelsen) seeks to gain permission to farm this impossible land and in return, gain land ownership and an estate. A uniquely humble period drama, The Promised Land succeeds in the grounded, universal story of perseverance and cultivation that ties us to our global history.

This is an environment we don’t often see Mikkelsen in, as the lower-born striver amongst the bourgeoisie. He is in a more anxious state than the revered actor is used to, placing his weathered face amongst the terse and difficult countryside cultivating anything that will uproot him into a higher station.

Mads Mikkelsen and Gustav Lindh in *The Promised Land*

A film that reflects its brooding and unsettling environment in its subject matter and style, The Promised Land still finds new pockets of period cruelty in a tense scene at the local magistrate and estate owner Frederick’s (Simon Bennebjerg) ball, highlighted by the capture and horrible torture of a runaway alongside a children’s choir. Up until this point, Frederick is seen as petulant and weak, but in this moment the world Ludwig seeks to establish himself in is realised. Bennebjerg’s performance is a great counter to Mikkelsen’s resolve, matching his severe expressions with those of an adult toddler with too many toys at their disposal.

The Promised Land pairs closely with the modern masterpiece There Will be Blood (2007), albeit with a more classical Western approach to striving protagonists combating the established power structures. While not on the same artistic level as the Paul Thomas Anderson film (few new films are), The Promised Land thrives in its modesty, propelled by its strong ensemble cast highlighted by Mikkelson and Amanda Collin as Ann Barbara, an indentured farmer who fled the cruel Frederick’s reign.

But this is not just a film about farming and potato rustling. This is a rare modern period film that actually explores the role of faith, both in religion and in the monarchical institution that Ludwig wields as a symbol of righteousness amongst chaos. These are complicated, compelling ideas to show in a grounded way, and by focusing on the individual humanity on display over the broader concepts, you see both modern life and history at once, deepening the experience.

The revelation of Ludwig’s trump card in this land and farming war is the lowly and persistent potato is a charming one and well reflects the character’s stern resolve in his ambition, no matter the origin. The Danish winter is harsh with only the slightest glimmer of hope coming through the promise of spring that ties us physically and emotionally to this enduring farming tale of perseverance. The cinematography by Rasmus Videbæk is beautiful in its landscapes and use of natural lighting with a focus on fire while maintaining a groundedness that can too often be lost in these more natural environments.

The casting of Mikkelson is of course integral to the production of the film, but it does alter how the narrative unfolds. As one of the great unflappable performers working today, Mikkelson always appears entirely in control of his situation, with his desire to lift himself into a higher station an inevitability. His age also complicates the story, as the character of Ludwig on the page appears a more youthful character out of the army (there is a line in the opening scene informing us that Ludwig is recently retired that seeks to explain away his age) and eager to establish themselves with money and land, but at his more advanced age, the man Mikkelson portrays appears to be on his final attempt at making a life for himself. Whether intentional or not, this creates a weight of sadness and desperation that becomes the lifeblood of the film.

Through a well realised ensemble headlined by the great Mads Mikkelson, The Promised Land is an honest and compelling period drama set in a unique world that is still close to home. With its grounded farming story and classic Hollywood western narrative of a single, wandering force upsetting the local power structures, we are placed on familiar ground, allowing us to be swept up into this formidable drama.

The Promised Land is in select theatres now.

The Beast is an Unwieldy but Rewarding Art House Epic

May 30, 2024Darcy Read

With ideas of love, death, and a modernist interpretation of Buddhist reincarnation splayed out across 150 years, Bertrand Bonello’s wide ranging sci-fi romantic epic The Beast (2023) is a sprawling and fascinating film that somehow leaves you wanting more.

A film born of countless fascinating artistic and narrative choices, The Beast is stretched and pulled across multiple lifetimes and styles, from a modern-day LA, a 2044 future setting of all-consuming AI and monotony, and a love story set amongst the 1910 Paris flood. At the centre of it all is Gabrielle Monnier, played by the extraordinary Léa Seydoux. From an Age of Innocence (1993) inspired period drama centring on Gabrielle as a concert pianist, to a futurist worker being asked to wipe to purge her DNA of the memories and anxieties of her previous lives by AI overlords. Concluding finally with Gabrielle as a lonely LA actress trying to find her place in the world, The Beast is an unwieldy art house film that brings to mind the great films of David Lynch and Brian De Palma at its most kinetic, while struggling to leave a mark of its own in the space.

The film focuses on Gabrielle’s internalised fear and anxieties of an unknown catastrophe that she believes is just around the corner. This well understood anxiety that Gabrielle feels bleeds into her many lives, resulting in a profound loneliness and paralysis that impacts her on a near cellular level.

Léa Seydoux and George Mackay in *The Beast*.

While The Beast is centred on the many lives of Gabrielle and her compounding dread and anxiety across lifetimes, she is not alone in this experience. Passing through her life as a seemingly literal soulmate is Louis Lewanski (the surprisingly bilingual George Mackay) as a 20th Century bon vivant, a fellow future worker being asked to purge their DNA, and in an intriguingly jarring shift, a present-day incel with potentially violent ideations. The second half of the film weaponises this shift in temperament and character, moving from an ephemeral sense of peril and anxiety to something keenly modern and grounded that electrifies these once placid waters.

Where films like Mulholland Drive (2001) and Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind (2004) succeed in finding the intimate in the existential, Bonello’s film fluctuates wildly between the two emotional states, only rarely succeeding in finding this balance. The filmmaker clearly has a penchant for pretence which is occasionally buoyed by artistic risk-taking and playfulness, particularly in its modern setting, but the decision to spend an hour of semi-build-up to this place is confounding, making even the most alluring moments of the film felt at a befuddled remove.

But a 150-minute art film predominantly focused on Lea Seydoux’s wide expressions and emotions will never be an unengaging feature, even if there are valleys that under normal circumstances would derail the whole experience. Luckily, however, The Beast’s total commitment and unique narrative keeps one on the hook. Bonello has faith in his sharply drawn concepts on how an individual’s past impacts their future, shown through inventive filmmaking swings, which makes up for the loosely flowing structure of the screenplay, a faith that is justified more often than not.

Whether Gabrielle is unique in this feeling of past lives reverberating through her present is unknown to us, but we are given a strong sense that these other characters from the future setting have a similar sensation as they continue to inhabit these nostalgic clubs. Nostalgic events and content having purpose due to people’s past lives echoing forward into their future selves is a compelling notion situated tightly within this beast of a film.

A film both manic and mannered like The Beast, while inventive, ultimately arrives with a lack of kineticism to consistently work across its extended run time. The film will certainly improve across multiple viewings due to its mysterious narrative and entrancing chemistry between Seydoux and Mackay, with the depth of concepts and emotional stakes we crave from these sorts of wild cinematic swings.

The back end is brimming with a watered down but still palpable Lynchian dread and unease that breathes new life into the film. The closing sequences of the film wield a carnal heartbreak that will linger long in the mind of the audience. A profound feeling of past mistakes and inactions being placed at the doorstep of our future selves is the sort of existential dread found all too rarely in science fiction horror, a realm where The Beast emerges triumphant.

The Beast is in select theatres now.

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is a Worthy Entry in the Enduring Franchise

May 15, 2024Darcy Read

The under-the-radar but always enjoyable sci-fi franchise, the Apes films has always impressed with its top-tier CGI department and Shakespearean approach to storytelling taken straight from the James Cameron school of action cinema. With this new entry, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (2024), the franchise has evolved and shifted towards a more intimate scope, without lacking its compelling and nuanced storytelling vision. This latest entry is less interested in the do-or-die existential struggle for primates and humanity survival as a whole and more interested in the young individuals (on both sides) finding their place in an ever-shifting world. The Apes films have never been more relatable than with our hero Noa (Owen Teague), a young prince to a quiet colony of apes whose avian-centric culture shuts off the outside world, focusing on the establishment of their slice of the brave new world.

With Matt Reeves moving on to darker pastures with The Batman (2022), Wes Ball, central filmmaker for the Divergent franchise, has taken the keys to this generation-spanning tale of legacy and evolution, merging into his familiar abode of adolescents staking a claim in an uncertain, dystopian future.

Kingdom begins with a coming-of-age trial, as Noa and his companions, Anaya (Travis Jeffery) and Soona (Lydia Peckham), attempt to climb an overgrown skyscraper (in one of many evocative world-building choices the creative team have made here), in pursuit of eagle eggs to take home. The sequence is thrilling and economical in its storytelling, as the trio swing from floor to floor, learning just enough about each character to satisfy a full film. A central tenet of this trial is to always leave an egg behind, allowing the eagle cycle to continue mostly uninterrupted. As we come to learn of other colonies throughout the film, the acceptance of the eagle clans’ place in the wider ecosystem is stark and increasingly emotional as we see Noa having to adapt and find his own place in the world.

Noa (Owen Teague) in *Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes*.

What allowed the trilogy of modern Apes films to maintain a strong dramatic narrative is the Caesar character, seen from birth to death, performed extraordinarily across the films by the great Andy Serkis, the king of motion capture filmmaking. Serkis gave Caesar a soul deeper than skin and fur humanity, and his absence is plainly felt here, even as technology has rapidly grown.

Kingdom sets itself apart from the previous Apes entries with its relationship with humans through its far-future setting. Noa and his companions stumble upon the mercurial Mae (Freya Allen), a seemingly feral scavenger of a human, isolated from ape kind and potentially one of only a few humans on the continent. The film thrives when Noa is forced into trusting either Mae or the film’s domineering antagonist: the cunning and powerful Proximus Caesar (Kevin Durand). Whether Promixus is a true successor to the previous film’s Caesar is only vaguely touched upon, with both potential answers to that question compelling. This question of legitimacy and Durand’s sly performance add a richer depth of storytelling to the film’s villain, solving an issue the previous trilogy of Apes films have suffered from.

The exploration of religion in this Simian civilisation is compelling and something that was taking its first steps in War of the Planet of the Apes (2017), with the word of Caesar holding an incalculable weight, leaving an enormous hole in their society after his passing. In this new film, Ball and screenwriter Josh Friedman explore these teachings of Caesar through both Raka (Peter Macon) and Proximus. While Raka seeks to use Caesar’s words to teach cohabitation and compassion across Simian and humankind, Proximus uses the recurring “ape together strong” franchise moniker to dominate other apes, folding them into his fascist empire.

(From left) Noa (Owen Teague), Mae (Freya Allen) and Raka (Peter Macon) in *Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes*.

Similar to the previous entry War, Kingdom is interested in whether this new emerging primate civilisation is inherently similar to humanity or has become similar through their knowledge of humanity’s past through the characters’ desire to survive and dominate all others. The second half shifts towards a fight for survival between Mae and Proximus to break into an American army vault, with Noa stuck in the middle, disagreeing with both. While altogether a satisfying climax, these moments feel closer to retreads of similar set pieces and ideas than anything fresh and exciting to allow Kingdom to stand on its own in this enduring franchise.

There are suggestions of a continuation of this story at its conclusion, comically implying the franchise’s intentions to leave no stone unturned towards arriving amongst the zany 70s entries in the Apes story. But, even with our modern addiction to Hollywood IP storytelling, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes still manages to continue developing a vision for a more interesting and creative version of franchise cinema.

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is in theatres now.

The Taste of Things is a Glorious Culinary Drama

May 2, 2024May 2, 2024Darcy Read

From the opening moments of Tran Anh Hung’s sumptuous new film The Taste of Things (2023), we understand this is not your typical cinematic culinary experience. A glorious 38-minute sequence of its central characters, esteemed cook Eugénie (Juliette Binoche), gourmet chef and partner Dodin Bouffant (Benoît Magimel), as well as teenage assistants Violette (Galatéa Bellugi) and Pauline (Bonnie Chagneau-Ravoire), preparing a gastronomical adventure for a dinner party, is almost the antithesis of American kitchen dramas like The Bear and Boiling Point. The motions are smooth and articulate, and the pace is casual but never languid. Tran is keenly aware that an audience will be salivating over this high execution of French cuisine and intrigued by its characters, desiring to know more than just how to get their hands on a plate. The lack of score and dynamic sounds throughout this sequence and the film as a whole allows the quiet expression of the art of cooking and eating to dance across the screen.

Based on the popular French novel The Passionate Epicure (1920), written by Marcel Rouff, The Taste of Things operates closer to a prequel to the novel, expanding on and inhabiting this merging of equals between Eugénie and Dodin. Their relationship plays out in a slow simmer across the film, with Tran’s camera dancing calmly between their cooking and intimate dialogue scenes, while remaining an impressively clear eye for both situations as an opportunity to explore the characters. Binoche has always been an extraordinary screen presence and the film relishes in that from entrée to dessert.

Like a perfectly cooked meal at a dinner party, it is impossible to avoid becoming entranced in the moment-to-moment treasures of this charming film. From the opening frames, we are taught to embrace the pleasant ambience of crackling pork fat and the sizzling butter, allowing its narrative to surprise you like the pang of spice in a seemingly gentle soup. There is a simple plot of Dodin being invited to a prince’s palace that boasts one of the best chefs in the world (played by three-star chef and the film’s culinary consultant Pierre Gagnaire), whose response is to return serve with an invitation of his own, but Tran is only tepidly interested in this space. He is more keenly preoccupied with the relationship found between Eugénie and Dodin, a pair of incredible artists who want for life and to share their love of food and cooking with others.

Benoît Magimel and Juliette Binoche in *The Taste of Things*.

A gentle smile between Magimel and Binoche, during a gorgeously romantic dinner where Dodin cooks for Eugénie, simply melts your heart. The air of trepidation and expectation before someone eats the first bite of a meal you’ve sought to perfect is a difficult moment to reflect on screen and is perhaps the film’s greatest accomplishment. This powerful moment is achieved through the chemistry both behind and in front of the camera, from Binoche and Magimel, to cinematographer Jonathan Ricquebourg and director Tran Anh Hung, and importantly, culinary consultant Gagnaire who designed an extraordinary menu for the film.

The Taste of Things feels closely tied to Kelly Reichardt’s recent wonder Showing Up (2022), a gentle but honest depiction of the day-to-day craft of creativity and creation through the eyes of a sculptor. The camera weaves in and out of the patient crafting of stock and demi-glace alongside a spread of different meats, learning more and more about the characters in the kitchen as they prepare and cook. French cuisine is all about patience and simplicity, seeking bite-sized perfection from a large base, which is emulated in the filmmaking style on display.

Culinary and gastronomy nerds will savour the glancing mentions of famed chefs Carême and Escoffier, placing the film directly within the deep history of French cuisine and gastronomy. The Taste of Things could operate perfectly at any time, but there is an evocative nature to the period setting of the film, particularly inside the world of the kitchen.

Juliette Binoche and Benoît Magimel in *The Taste of Things*.

Much like Dodin’s decision to serve pot-au-feu (simple but delicious slow-cooked meat and veg) to the prince, the film’s narrative is simple and elegant with an undercurrent of complexity and nuance that heightens each scene, even when you know the destination. What allows us to connect with this simple narrative is Tran’s use of time, executed through a near-constant camera motion, weaved with some of the most seamless editing by Mario Barristel that you’ll see this year.

In its transcendent final sequence, the total emulsion comes together to leave you wholly satisfied. The combination of contrasting natural lighting, echoes of its rigorous but delicate opening sequence, and the compelling performances of Binoche and Magimel heightens the crescendo to a point of potency that arrives unexpectedly on the palate. The Taste of Things gives you just enough narrative and plot on your plate to satisfy, but it is this unique focus on naturalism and craft that is the aftertaste you are left with.

However, this is not a film of food porn extravagance, there is a compelling world of emotion and relationships steeped below. Like the perfect demi-glace, the most important component is time and patience. Give this film both and you’ll be richly rewarded.

The Taste of Things is in select theatres now.

The Sound of Christopher Nolan Movies Have Changed

February 26, 2024February 28, 2024Darcy Read

With Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer (2023) accumulating a swathe of awards wins and nominations, including its recent 13 Oscar nominations — which are all most likely to result in wins — now is the opportune moment to look through the last three features of one of Hollywood’s most influential 21st-century auteurs, in particular, the use of sound in these films.

Sound has always been a primary focus in the work of Christopher Nolan, a stylistic and philosophical choice in filmmaking that has been placed at the forefront of storytelling choices since 2017’s Dunkirk, the filmmaker’s towering achievement. This forward approach to storytelling through sound carried through to the controversial Covid defining feature Tenet (2020), a bombastic and jittery experiment in how much a celebrated auteur can push an audience to their breaking point. Questions of poor mixing and dialogue decisions became the opening remarks to the film’s obituary, offhand jokes that displayed a level of creative freedom that felt a necessary evolution for modern Hollywood’s straightest shooter. Gone were the days of lifeless exposition scenes, music, and sound design cues that drew comparisons to photocopies of Michael Mann and Stanley Kubrick, with Nolan finally settling into a dynamic cinematic experience that no one in the industry can be compared to.

In the language of cinema, sound is the primary form of subjectivity. Diving into the mind of a character is profoundly more effective going between their ears than their eyes, with the right mixture of score and sound design achieving a level of symbiosis with an audience that can last a lifetime. These are ideas Christopher Nolan has been building towards in recent features, with his latest, Oppenheimer, his landmark achievement in cinematic sonic storytelling, more than likely take home multiple Oscars including best score and sound. It is his greatest film to date through its culmination of skills the revered director has accumulated over the years.

Sonically, these three films are abundantly similar even though Nolan changed several collaborators between Dunkirk and Tenet, mostly a result of scheduling issues with Denis Villeneuve’s Dune (2020), but perhaps also an indicator of a filmmaker’s style shifting as his sensibilities develop. Even though revered sound designer Richard King has worked with Nolan since The Prestige (2006) — netting himself three of his four Oscars in the process — his approach has clearly adapted alongside the filmmakers shifting ideas on how a blockbuster film can sound and how it can challenge and overwhelm an audience’s senses.

Before this shift in sonic philosophy there was Interstellar (2014), Nolan’s scientifically precise sci-fi sentimentalist epic. The film has a large fanbase, with many viewing it as the auteur’s best, but its flaws of flat character archetypes floating along overly contorted plots that have plagued many a Nolan script felt like a true nadir, ushering in this new era which has opened up his style and filmmaking in exciting ways. Sound in Interstellar is used more as an absence, to create moments of awe while still maintaining the authenticity of muted space travel. There are still wonderful moments of sound however, with Hans Zimmer’s iconic score and Cooper’s (Matthew McConaughey) act of grounding himself on Earth when in orbit through a simple act of listening to the sounds of nature through headphones. What lets the film down ultimately is Nolan’s over reliance on dialogue to explain concepts he was executing wonderfully already, muting the emotional swells at every turn, particularly in its lopsided final act.

In cinema, dialogue usually gets placed on a separate physical (in a mono track in a separate speaker in the middle of the screen) and ideological track to music and sound design for increased clarity, but this mode of thinking has shifted for Nolan since Dunkirk. In the film, King and Nolan decide to democratise dialogue in the cinematic hierarchy, allowing the full breadth of audio to translate the stories being told. This approach challenged audiences’ ears, a rarity in American cinema, especially large-scale studio films, that should be commended even if you don’t agree with the result.

This is also where Nolan’s evolution as a screenwriter starts to deviate in strange and compelling ways after Inception (2010) and Interstellar. With Dunkirk, there is little characterisation or dialogue in general, with actors like Mark Rylance and Tom Hardy playing archetypes that give way to the overwhelming war narrative they find themselves trapped within. The film, now alongside Oppenheimer, is Nolan’s greatest cinematic achievement as it highlights all of his talents as a visceral filmmaker while avoiding all of his classic pitfalls: female character punishments as motivation for male characters, over-explaining concepts, and basic protagonist arcs based on core American archetypes. Nolan’s films have now become more akin to cinematic symphonies, where the artistic goal is a full sensory experience, guided through sound, to tell a simple yet engaging story.

Robert Pattinson and John David Washington in *Tenet*.

In Tenet, John David Washington’s character is literally called Protagonist, a nod of self awareness that allows the kinetic energy to overwhelm the audience instead of attaching ourselves to any characters, a wild filmmaking decision that works as a creative exploration in audience engagement, one that ultimately creates a hard ceiling for the film’s quality overall. Make no mistake however, there is not an absence of expository dialogue in the film. In fact, the film is mostly expository scenes with very little room given to characterisation or emotionality, but it is in the delivery method of these dialogue dumps that expresses to an audience that the words being said are only part of what is being portrayed in the moment. In understanding Nolan’s creative decision making with Tenet, there is no better scene than Neil’s (Robert Pattinson) walkthrough of the freeport before the heist.

With the dial cranked to eleven with Tenet, Nolan rolled back these experimental concepts of cinematic sound and narrative to a surprising sweet spot that will see him recognised by his peers at the Academy Awards. Oppenheimer‘s dialogue is stickier than his previous two films, brandishing the weight of historical record to great effect. The film is clearly detailed in its research from this time, taken often from the book American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin that the film is adapted from, which has allowed Nolan to ground the reality of the story, opening up space to create this vivid exploration in subjectivity and purpose, led through sound. Oppenheimer’s dialogue is not positioned on the sonic field as liberally as it is in Dunkirk or Tenet, valuing the historical accuracy of the people and events involved. It is, however, greatly influenced by the exploration Nolan and King took across those films, landing in a Goldilocks zone of sonic potency that is sure to define his future filmography.

Outside of Memento (2000) with its deliberately unreliable protagonist, all of Nolan’s lead characters have clear, defined minds that an audience can attach themselves to and connect with, until J. Robert Oppenheimer, a notably obtuse and withholding historical figure that even his closest friends and allies struggled to get inside the mind of. In Oppenheimer, the brilliant music and sound design allow us an entry point into an artist’s interpretation of this challenging mind through deep subjectivity, ideas that Nolan has never felt comfortable exploring until now.

It is impossible to talk about the relationship Nolan has with sound without delving into how music is used in his films, something that has also expanded in recent years. With a clear allergy to song cues, Nolan views the use of music and score like an opera, crashing waves that hurdles an audience towards the rocks of the drama.

In Dunkirk, much was made of Nolan and Zimmer’s collaborative writing through their mutual interest in the sonic phenomena of Shepard tones as both a film score and script writing exercise. In brief, Shepard tones are a phenomenon where a bass frequency either ascends or descends alongside another tone an octave high which creates an audible illusion of a perpetually ascending or descending sound. Zimmer used this as a jumping-off point for his tension-filled score, with Nolan using the Shepard Tone concept in line with the three intercut narratives to give the audience a similar sensation of perpetual movement and tension. At the time this was a radical approach to blockbuster filmmaking to offer little respite to an audience’s eardrums, but has now developed into Nolan’s post-Interstellar style.

Like Nolan, we will work nonlinearly here in regards to Ludwig Göransson’s work with the filmmaker, as his film score for Oppenheimer is in much closer discussion with Dunkirk than Tenet, his first collaboration with the director. Perhaps bluntly but no less affecting, Göransson’s score focuses on descending pieces in a work of musical allusion to the dropping of the bomb. Göransson’s piece “Can You Hear The Music” defines the film, with its swirls of strings, horns, and synths, beginning in a swell of glorious ascension, before plummeting down through descending scale progressions that are an inversion of the ascending progression. The piece also changes tempo up to 21 different times (from 180bpm to 350bpm!) in a deceptively short piece of music, placing us within the manic Neuron sparks of Oppenheimer’s brain that everyone in the film and in the audience is trying to match the wavelength with. Of all the incredible technical achievements that define the success of Oppenheimer from the editing, cinematography, performances, and production design, perhaps the most impressive artists involved in the production are the violinists that beautifully performed this piece in one take. The stuff of legends.

The film’s near-constant score which focuses on descending scales, accentuates the creeping dread that permeates the fringes of the film leading up to the Trinity test. Most of this frenetic opening two hours operate as a whirlwind of character establishments in tight office spaces and classrooms that can at times feel like Nolan directing an episode of Genius (2017) through the lens of his and Tenet editor Jennifer Lame’s emerging house-style. Where Nolan matches Göransson’s ominous tone is fascinating. With an early scene of Oppenheimer injecting cyanide into his Cambridge professor Patrick Blackett’s (James D’Arcy) apple (a disputed event in the man’s complicated life), Nolan is highlighting the undercurrent of malice and potential valuation of those that hinder his progress in his being that matches the tone set from the outset by Göransson’s score.

In Göransson’s first project with Nolan, Tenet, the composer centred his score on a layering of guitars, altering its structure through time shifting and inversion, mirroring the film’s text that has become more and more crucial to Nolan’s filmmaking process. This shift in ideology can be felt more prominently in the differences between Göransson’s work on Tenet and Hans Zimmer’s work on Interstellar. While Zimmer’s work on Interstellar is perhaps some of his best compositionally (Cornfield Chase is a masterpiece), it often soars above the film instead of permeating its core. Nolan asked the famed composer to write pieces with clear restrictions on information about the narrative which certainly allowed Zimmer to write freely, but in contrast to the following features, lacks that cohesion that allows those films to thrive.

In Oppenheimer, what allows the sound design to weave seamlessly throughout the continuous score is Göransson’s removal of any percussion. By removing this floor, King and the sound design team were able to oscillate between stabilising and destabilising the audience, matching the mind of Oppenheimer scene to scene as it is splayed out on the brilliant Cillian Murphy’s anguished face, at will. King and Göransson have a tremendous cinematic chemistry, striving for the mountainous peak of Walter Murch and David Shire in the masterpiece The Conversation (1974).

Blending sound design with score, there are sounds and music compositions that emit a mechanically demonic presence, with its metallic jittering edges and sub-bass heartbeat, which are used in the scenes leading up to the Trinity test — sure to be a defining moment in Nolan’s storied career — that becomes an overwhelming experience, titled “Ground Zero” in the soundtrack.

The explosion itself, the culmination of the previous two hours of manic motion of montage editing, near constant score (the first non scored scene doesn’t arrive till around the one hour mark), and propulsive soundscaping, is shown in near silence, opting instead for the introspection achieved through Oppenheimer’s anxious breaths. What else could be said in a seismic moment like this? Across three films, Nolan pulverises you with an almost constant barrage of overwhelming sound, but in this critical moment, he asks for your own moment of introspection. It’s impossible not to get swept up in the awe felt by the scientists at Los Alamos as a years-long theoretical exploration illuminates the desert sky in crystal clarity, but that feeling morphs into a solemn understanding of what this moment will mean for the rest of the world. In a film of chain reactions, this central colliding moment needed near silence, until the reality of its impact came rushing forwards in a world defining blast. No moment better captures the evolution Nolan has made as a filmmaker and storyteller in these past 10 years, and is why he will be rewarded come the Academy Awards.