Alex Wolff

A Quiet Place: Day One

06/07/24

Cineworld, Edinburgh

The arrival of A Quiet Place in 2018 had a dramatic effect in cinemas across the world. Customers even ate their popcorn extra-quietly, not daring to make a noise that might summon one of the predatory aliens that were the film’s raison d’etre. In 2020, a sequel arrived and, against all the odds, managed to pull off the trick a second time. Some viewers will remember that the sequel opened with a brief glimpse of the aliens arriving in New York and that’s where the action from this prequel also plays out.

There are few franchises that can successfully stick the landing a third time and the project’s creator, John Kransinski, has handed over the reins to writer/director Michael Sarnoski, giving him carte blanche to do something a little different.

Day One begins in a hospice in New York, where terminally-ill patient, Samira (Lupita Nyong’o), is coming to terms with her own imminent demise, comforted only by her regular companion, Frodo, a cat. Friendly nurse, Reuben (Alex Wolff), manages to persuade Samira to accompany the other patients on a trip into the city, where they will visit a marionette theatre. That’ll cheer her up. She agrees – on the stipulation that she will be able to buy pizza at Patsy’s.

Inevitably, the visit is rudely disrupted by the arrival of those pesky aliens, who, as in the previous films are only truly scary when we barely glimpse them. These early scenes of devastation are the film’s strongest suit: the ensuing chaos feeling pretty immersive. Samira eventually hooks up with English law student, Eric (Joseph Quinn, last seen in the low budget Hoard), who is understandably terrified, and the three of them – Samira, Eric and Frodo – set about the tricky task of staying alive. From this point the film becomes less a sci-fi horror and more a story of friendship and loyalty; whilst I applaud the valiant efforts to change up from what has gone before, I feel that the concept doesn’t entirely come off.

Although there are some admittedly touching scenes here, the atmosphere of steadily-mounting terror exhibited in Parts 1 and 2 feels somewhat eroded.

And then there’s Frodo. I appreciate that a lot of people adore our feline friends, but I nearly lose count of the times that the cat inadvertently plunges his human companions into peril. Quite how they manage to persuade themselves not to hurl him into the jaws of the nearest alien is beyond me. But maybe that says more about me than it does the film.

Suffice to say that, while the beginning and the end are well-handled, Day One has a decidedly flabby mid-section and, the more I see of the aliens, the less fearsome they become. Eagle-eyed viewers will spot a fleeting cameo from Djimon Hounsou as Henri, who had a bigger role in Part 2. Barely anyone else in this film gets a look in, other than a startled expression seconds before they are messily consumed. While Day One is by no means terrible, it still feels like a sizeable step down and I shall certainly be thinking twice should a fourth instalment rear its scaly head over the cinematic horizon.

Meanwhile, those who enjoy the antics of cute-but-irritating cats in disastrous situations should check this out.

3.6 stars

Philip Caveney

Pig

06/02/22

Now TV

I’m late to this, mostly because of my inability to find the film showing at a cinema anywhere near me. But I’ve heard good things about it and eventually, I chase it down on the small screen. My expectations are that it will turn out to be a kind of ‘John Wick with a pig’ scenario, which isn’t a prospect I relish, but happily it is gentler and a bit more nuanced than that.

Disturbingly, though, days after the viewing, I’m still not entirely sure what it is.

Nicholas Cage plays ‘Rob,’ who ekes out a precarious existence in a tumbledown cabin in the middle of a forest in Oregon. He makes his living from harvesting truffles, along with his beloved er… pig (Brandy), who has a snout for that kind of thing. Rob is visited from time to time by young entrepreneur, Amir (Alex Wolff), who sells those foraged truffles in Portland, where they are prized by chefs at the fancier dining establishments. It’s an odd arrangement but it seems to work.

But things take a nasty turn when Rob is attacked one night and his pig stolen. So, with Amir as his driver, Rob sets out for the big city with only one thing on his mind: to get his pig back. It’s nothing to do with the truffle situation, though. Rob loves her and cannot envisage life without her.

As he and Amir travel through the city, it soon becomes clear that Rob has been here before. Once upon a time, it transpires, a near legendary chef and the very mention of his full name – Robin Feld – is enough to invoke awe in everyone who hears it. (It’s hard to imagine that the names of Jamie Oliver or Gordon Ramsay could inspire such respect.) Along the way, Rob has some strange encounters. He volunteers to be beaten up in a private fight club (as you do), he cooks food for Amir and his ruthless father, and he makes it clear that he has nothing but contempt for his former career and for the customers who used to flock to him for his gastronomic delights.

Pig is an odd film, to say the very least. While it’s refreshing to see a Nicholas Cage project that doesn’t require him to chew the scenery, it’s also probably true to say that most of what’s going on here is in the subtext. Rob is a shambling, monosyllabic central character, covered with bruises and blood throughout the film – a scene where he books a table at a swanky restaurant and none of his fellow-diners raise so much as an eyebrow actually beggars belief – and he is single minded in his determination to get that pig back, come hell or high water.

Debut director/co-writer Michael Sarnoski’s fairy tale seems to be suggesting that greeting violence with love (and food) is the way to solve problems, and perhaps he’s right on that score, but ‘turning the other cheek’ is hardly a revelation, and it doesn’t seem enough to hang an entire movie on. While it’s also true to say that Pig never goes anywhere you expect it to, it feels somehow as though the stakes need upping a little.

Bacon sandwich, anyone?

3.4 stars

Philip Caveney

Hereditary

14/06/18

The advance buzz about this film has been powerful. There have been comparisons to The Exorcist – the movie that in 1973, caused me to write my first ever film review, a habit that has continued unbroken ever since. In its central theme, however,  Hereditary is much closer to another classic, Rosemary’s Baby, but – while it certainly has much to recommend it – it’s not really in the same league as either of those other horror milestones; moreover, it’s fatally compromised by an ending that’s so risible, it actually causes audience laughter in the screening I attend.

After the death of her estranged and secretive mother, Annie (Toni Collette), an artist who specialises in recreating scenes from her life in miniature, starts to unravel a series of clues from the odds and ends her mother left behind. Her 13 year old daughter, Charlie (Milly Shapiro), has clearly been powerfully affected by her grandmother’s death, behaving in a strange and very disconcerting manner, while her older brother, Peter (Alex Wolff), is more interested in the popular teenage pursuits of getting stoned and laid. Annie’s accommodating husband, Steve (Gabriel Byrne), just tries to keep everything rubbing along as best he can. But when Peter is a key player in a tragic and accidental death, something evil seems to settle around the house like a shroud, exerting an increasingly powerful grip…

The first thing to say about Hereditary is that first time writer/director Ari Aster has forged a powerful and highly effective debut. Eschewing the fast-paced jump cuts of many contemporary horror films, this is a real slow burner, a simmering pressure cooker that only gradually comes to the boil and manages to instil in the viewer an overpowering sense of creeping horror. The cinematography eerily manages to mix Annie’s doll’s house imagery with the actual interiors from the rambling, family home, while Toni Collette puts in an extraordinarily accomplished performance in the lead role, managing to convince us that she is genuinely terrified.

But then there’s that awful ending, which – to my mind at least – manages to destroy all the accomplishments that have gone before. And while I appreciate there’s a necessity to tie up the loose ends of the plot, it helps if that plot makes some kind of narrative sense. It must be said that other reviewers seem to have had no problem with this, so perhaps I’m just difficult to please – but trust me, the audience reaction on the evening I view this is pretty unequivocal. However, in an attempt to ensure fairness, I’ve decided to star-rate this film rather differently from our other reviews.

(Most of the film) 4.4 stars

(Last 10 minutes) 1 star

Philip Caveney

My Friend Dahmer

04/06/18

My Friend Dahmer is a serial killer movie with a difference: there’s no killing in it. In fact, there’s barely any violence at all. Instead, this is a study of the boy who made the man. Based on the autobiographical graphic novel by John ‘Derf’ Backderf, the film depicts Jeffrey Dahmer’s final year in high school. The young Dahmer (Ross Lynch) is troubled: his parents’ volatile marriage ends in an acrimonious divorce, his mother and father fighting for custody of his younger brother and ownership of the family home, without seeming to care what happens to him.

At school, he’s a bit of an outsider, but Derf (Alex Wolff) is intrigued when Dahmer ‘spazzes out’ in the hallway, pretending to have an epileptic fit. The audacity and impropriety are enough to make Dahmer a bit of a legend; in response, Derf and his friends Neill (Tommy Nelson) and Mike (Harrison Holzer) form ‘The Dahmer Fan Club’. At first, Dahmer is flattered: he has friends to hang out with and is no longer ignored, but he soon realises that the trio are laughing at him as much as with him, that he’s a kind of sideshow novelty who just amuses them.

Meanwhile, his fascination with ‘the inside of things’ is thriving, even after his concerned father tears down the shed where he has been dissolving roadkill in acid (‘I like bones,’ he says, like that explains something). Neighbourhood pets are found dissected; a local doctor (Vincent Kartheiser) becomes an object of malign fantasy as he jogs past Dahmer’s house each day. Dahmer starts drinking, knocking back bottles of vodka in the schoolyard. The future is beckoning; they’re all supposed to know what they want. But he just mumbles, ‘biology’ when he’s asked about his interests, and clearly has no real idea what path he wants to take. He tries to fit in; he even asks a girl to prom, but it’s all too much. He can’t.

This is a compelling film with an unusual perspective, demonstrating as it does that Dahmer is not that different from any other reluctant outsider, his quirks and perversions not so very peculiar. There’s a real attempt here to understand rather than monster him, to examine the distinct set of circumstances that inform his later crimes.

Ross Lynch’s performance is remarkable: the utter, unrelenting misery of the ignored, invisible child is conveyed in his shambling gait, his closed-off expression. Occasionally, Lynch shows us who else Dahmer might have become: the way his face lights up as Derf invites him to sit with him at lunch; the fumbling charm with which he asks Bridget to the prom. But these fleeting moments of belonging are dwarfed by isolation, and ultimately we are left with a sense of someone who’ll do anything to make sure people notice him.

It’s fascinating – definitely one to watch.

4.4 stars

Susan Singfield

Patriots Day

25/02/17

Oh, that missing apostrophe! It’s threatening to derail my review; it just looks like a mistake and I’m itching to add it. Why have they left it out, I wonder? It must be a deliberate choice (there are enough people involved in the making of a film to rule out simple ignorance, and it is included in the captions telling us when and where events take place). A design issue, maybe? Whatever, it’s annoying, and it’s distracting me.

Which is a shame, because this is actually a very good movie, addressing issues far more important than errant punctuation. It’s a docudrama, detailing the police response to the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, which killed three people and injured hundreds more. Mark Wahlberg is the ideal actor for the role of ‘everycop’ Tommy Saunders: he’s convincingly ordinary, driven by a mixture of ideals and selfishness, a flawed and sometimes self-destructive individual. The bombing tests him – and he comes up trumps. When it matters, he – and Boston – have what it takes.

Really, this is a film about humanity. We are introduced to all the main players – victims, police officers and terrorists alike –  in their domestic settings, so that we see what drives them and what they have to lose. Brothers Dzokhar (Alex Wolff) and Tamerlan Tsarnaev (Themo Melikidze) are depicted as nihilistic individuals, more akin to school-shooters than organised terrorists. Their affiliations are only to each other; they’ve self-radicalised, spurred each other on, building their bombs in Tamerlan’s kitchen, while his daughter plays in full view of them. Dzokhar’s childishness is especially poignant: he’s a little boy, despite his nineteen years. He whines and whinges at his older brother: I want to hold the gun. I want to drive the car. He’s a brat, whose teenage rebellion has been warped – and made him dangerous. He’s only a little bit different from his stoner friends, but that small difference is everything. It makes me wonder how he might have been saved.

But the heroes here are the police and FBI, working painstakingly to catch the bombers before they kill anyone else: reportedly, they’re on their way to New York to wreak more havoc there. The processes are made explicit in a way I haven’t seen before: it’s all logic and collation, sifting through potential evidence. The tension wracks up unbearably, even though the story is familiar, and the outcome is well-known. It’s the personal stuff that generates the suspense: will these people come out of this okay?

During her police interview, Tamerlan’s wife, Katherine (Melissa Benoist) remains tight-lipped, saying little. She does, however, contend that “worse things happen in Syria every day.” The tragedy is that she’s right. And goodness knows how those people cope, because this – one bombing, one day – is awful, and will have a profound impact on Boston’s population for many years to come. It’s a terrible excuse, of course: only a twisted logic justifies one atrocity by referring to another. But it should be enough to make us care, to make us want to help those for whom such events are devastatingly commonplace.

Writer/director Peter Berg maximises the impact by incorporating genuine CCTV and news footage into the mix, giving his film a realism and authenticity that makes it hit home.

4.6 stars

Susan Singfield