Horror
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Ageing in Style: The Shrouds
(I wrote about The Shrouds for The Hobbyhorse. Here’s a small excerpt. No spoilers, though you have to read to confirm it.) By making the body central to his films, David Cronenberg has established himself as a fastidious chronicler of our shifting anxieties and desires by grafting them onto the contours of our body. Thinking… Continue reading
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Capsule Corner #3: Muddled Temporalities
Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2010) For a film which explicitly mentions the “past” in its title, it is a bit strange that the last words from the titular dying man (Thanapat Saisaymar) recall a dream of the future. Conceived as a rite of passage of a body from the… Continue reading
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The Unbearable Heaviness of Class: The Housemaid
( The shape-shifting spoilers make it impossible to tell if there are spoilers or not, so why don’t you hedge your bets and find out?.) Aside from the problems of genre classification (which is a non-issue, really), The Housemaid’s uncompromising provocation and oblique social critique make it difficult to parse morally. A shape-shifting phantasm whose unhinged camp… Continue reading
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An Inferno of Inspiration:mother!
(SsssPPpooiiiiiLllerrrSSSSSsss!!!!!) Any Aronofsky film can be titled Escalating Obsessions, although that would be an understatement. Escalating Obsessions Escalating into Cataclysmic Explosions would sound more appropriate, but that might be too long and reveals too much. Escalating Obsessions suggests his intentions but retains the suspense until the end, for one film at least. His films can… Continue reading
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