BRING HER BACK (2025)

If Bring Her Back were the Philippou brothers’ first film, I’d feel the urge to be kinder to it. It has all the hallmarks of an early feature from filmmakers who show promise and move on to more daring, polished, and interesting projects. It displays a lot of the same thematic and visual elements that made their Talk to Me such a gripping film, but lacking the terrifying logic that guided it. It’s like looking back at Killer’s Kiss after watching The Shining, and seeing the filmmaker play the right notes but not quite master the music yet. The trouble is that Talk to Me was their first film, and Bring Her Back their second. It’s definitely a film by the same artists, but it backs off before ramping to the heights of terror that Talk to Me did. It feels like a less mature work.

It does, admittedly, feature two exceptional lead performances by two young actors, Billy Barratt and Sora Wong, that elevate it above what its facile story offers. If this movie puts them on the map, it's done its job.

When step-siblings Andy (Barratt) and Piper (Wong) find their father dead, Family Services has no option but to place them both in foster care. Because Andy will turn 18 in a few months, they're confident they can tough it out until then. Laura (Sally Hawkins), a former social worker who lives in a remote mid-century modern labyrinth of a house (an effective horror movie setting for any A24 movie like this one), is eager to take in Piper, who is sight impaired, but needs some convincing before she allows Andy to come along. It isn't long before Andy begins to notice warning signs that Piper doesn't, particularly the feral child named Oliver (Jonah Wren Phillips) who appears to be living there. When we learn (early on--not a spoiler) that Laura had a daughter who was also blind, and who recently passed away, it's pretty easy to put together who the Her is in the title, and who will need to go away for Her to be brought back.

Even with only their second feature, the directors already display a unique style that many filmmakers are likely to mimic in the years ahead. They have a way of composing a shot, through the use of close-ups as well as slow zooms, pans, and turns, that subtly suggests something is wrong even when everything seems to be in its place. The high point is in their portrayal of Oliver as the linchpin to the movie's plot: he's the only part of the movie with any mystery behind it, and a kitchen table scene between him and Andy is probably the only scene in the movie where I had truly no idea what would happen, and was gleefully and gruesomely surprised.

The directors mine a good bit of tension from Andy's growing frustration at knowing what his happening to him and his sister and having no way to get them out, and Barratt believably plays Andy as a flawed and often impulsive teenager who nonetheless still wants to be a good older brother. The relationship between Andy and Piper always feels genuine.

The story, though, isn't strong enough to sustain the movie. The plot feels very much like a Goosebumps novel: for better or worse, it pretty much goes where you think it will, and doesn't make many detours. Once we surmise what's happening, very early, a lot of it feels like going through the motions. Great horror filmmakers are able to tease us with what's going to happen but leave some mystery as to how it will get there, and there are some great moments in Talk to Me where we can sense what's coming but not exactly how. Here we mostly know how as well, especially in the last act, which involves a lot of characters driving back and forth to and from places, and features my least favorite movie trope: a car coming out of nowhere and smacking one of the characters by surprise. It should have been retired after Final Destination, and even the newest entry in that series chose to cheekily make fun of this cliche rather than repeat it.

The best I can say about Sally Hawkins's performance is that she embodies Laura in exactly the way the filmmakers need her to. They ought to have been more ambitious with her. Hawkins is capable of easily transitioning from an eccentric to a monster, but the filmmakers make her a little bit too much of each. The more subtle ways she tries to split up the two siblings are appropriately eerie, including baiting Andy into violence as well as one especially nasty way of gaslighting him that I won't reveal. However, certain scenes seem to set up a different, more explicitly cruel and crass character that doesn't jell with what follows. For instance, the scene at their father's funeral feels like it was included so the filmmakers could get something gross and off-putting into their movie; it paints Laura as a dangerous kook rather than a calculated villain. The horror might have arisen from her outward friendliness and trustworthiness while her devious side would come from her grief and desperation.

Bring Her Back is a swing and a miss, even if it's a more satisfying miss than most. Those who haven't seen Talk to Me will find a similar frightening intensity in that film that ratchets slowly throughout it, but with a better story. The Philippous are still the real deal, and I'm still excited to see what they come out with next.

** 1/2 out of ****

FINAL DESTINATION: BLOODLINES (2025)

One thing I appreciate about the Final Destination series is that it's managed to mine unthought-of opportunities for bloodshed and brutality on screen, yet it's usually stopped a thin, thin hair short of becoming cynical. As many tightly choreographed elaborate death scenes as there are, it always runs the risk of becoming Friday the 13th with the figure of Death as the killer instead of Jason. The better entries (1, 2, 5, and this one) treat their characters as more than just fodder for destruction; rather--and this is thanks to Glen Morgan and James Wong, who made the first and still the best one--they have actual questions and actual fears about (small D) death that are exacerbated when (big D) Death comes for them. The only truly bad entry (4--er, forgive me--The Final Destination) had characters that merely filled in the dull blank spots between the big death set pieces. (I have complicated feelings about Final Destination 3, which is some people's favorite but didn't quite do it for me.)

Because the series has become famous for its increasingly gruesome Rube Goldberg-esque death scenarios, it's easy to forget how meditative the first Final Destination was. It wasn't afraid to be about these kids truly emotionally grasping with surviving a plane crash they were supposed to die on, and coming to terms with having been psychically granted a second chance. This direction is especially clear if you watch the film's original ending, available on the DVD but rejected by test audiences for being too somber and having no big twist. I kinda like that one better. 

It was the sequel that upped the gore ante, and Final Destination: Bloodlines is much more in line with 2 than 1 in that regard (it even contains multiple cheeky callbacks to That Log Truck, which are welcome). Death is the star here, and the character drama often takes a back seat. That doesn't make the emotional side of the film less important, though I do wish the filmmakers would have put a little more than cursory effort into defining the family at the center. People come in and out of the movie with some perfunctory explanations for their presence or absence, and only the slightest justification for their existence beyond being impaled or immolated or crushed to death.

But still: ho boy, it is thrilling. The opening sequence is a stunner, probably second only to the highway disaster at the beginning of 2 as the best anchor scene for one of these movies. I won't reveal what happens: only that it involves a Very Tall Tower similar to the Space Needle in Seattle, a band playing "Shout" to a happily stomping crowd on the dance floor, and a kid who's the most awful little shit not born in Midwich or Derry. It's seen from the point of view of Iris (Brec Bassinger), but after her vision of mass destruction we fast forward two generations to Stefani (Kaitlyn Santa Juana), Iris's granddaughter, who after a series of nightmares drives home from college to investigate the grandmother she'd never known. This, of course, leads to Death targeting Stefani and the rest of her family in excitingly terrifying ways.

The family drama around Stefani's absence, her relationship with her brother Charlie (Teo Briones), and the disappearance of their mother (Rya Kihlstedt, wasted here*), seems like a rushed and functional way to get to the bloodshed. Still, the movie isn't exhausted of an emotional core: the relationship between Stefani's two cousins, brothers Erik (Richard Harmon) and Bobby (Owen Patrick Joyner), is surprisingly heartfelt and provides some moving moments amid the destruction.

The other surprisingly touching element of the film is the presence of the late Tony Todd, whose last film this was. He's become a staple of the series, even though his character has never quite been pinned down. He's either the devil, or an angel, or a survivor, or a psychic, or maybe he's all those things. His exact identity is revealed in this film, but that's not even the real point. His tall imposing figure and deep voice seem in themselves to intone some kind of knowledge from the Beyond. Here we see him visibly withered (he was already dying of cancer during filming) and there's a hint of resignation to his sage advice. It's a sort of farewell that I didn't see coming, and a cinematic sendoff that truly understands who Tony Todd was and what he meant for horror. In a series infamous for preferring the sloppy over the sentimental, this is a powerful moment.

The other welcome appearance from beyond the grave is Shirley Walker, who contributed the theme music that's been used for every one of the Final Destination movies. She was also one of the greats, and her haunting score has always perfectly suited this series. It's one of the many elements that has generally lifted these movies above simple slashers and into something a little more ambitious, and fun.

*** out of ****

*Note: Everyone should see Kihlstedt in Sebastian Gutierrez's made-for-cable remake of Roger Corman's The She Creature. She played the title and titular she creature.

THE SUBSTANCE (2024)

You've heard of a satire being too on-the-nose. The Substance is on the nose, in the eyes, all over the face, and gummed up in your hair. That works to its advantage sometimes, but at other times the whole-plane absurdity undercuts the truly interesting logic of its premise. As it is it’s an enjoyably wacko excursion in Cronenbergian body horror, but it might have been more.

Demi Moore plays Elisabeth Sparkle (no relation to the Japanese detergent magnate, I assume), a Jane Fondaesque actress who’s made her living in middle age by hosting a daytime women’s fitness show. When the network executive (a snarlingly disgusting Dennis Quaid, having a blast) fires her on her birthday, she coincidentally receives an invitation to partake in a treatment to make her younger again. I won’t reveal how it works (that’s part of the fun), but it involves injecting herself with the title and titular Substance, a vial of neon green liquid that looks like Ecto Cooler™️. This creates a young doppelganger (Margaret Qualley) with whom Elisabeth is allowed to trade places for a week at a time. The kit comes with an ominous message: “Remember, you are one.”

The shadowy corporate bioengineering surrounding the Substance is one of the movie’s more satisfying creations. Elisabeth is led through cryptic phone calls and professional but foreboding mailers to a property deep in the slums of Hollywood, through a rollup door that only opens halfway (forcing her to supplicate herself), to a sanitized white locker room where she picks up her equipment without any contact. The room mirrors the sanitized white bathroom at her apartment where most of the movie’s more gruesome action takes place. 

Like Coralie Fargeat’s previous film Revenge, The Substance is a gradually spiraling horror drama about a woman trying to claw her way back after being destroyed by men. But Revenge began with a truly terrifying situation (a young woman trapped in a remote location with a group of violent rapists) and gradually built to an oddly logical level of absurdity (if I recall correctly, a climactic scene featured the heroine attempting to evade her attacker while he slowly bled to death, all the while trying not to slip and fall in the blood). The Substance, unfortunately, is wafting through crazytown all the way through, with too little of the real horror it hints at. 

The male villains representing the sexist system that envelops Elisabeth and then rejects her are sometimes funny, but are generally too goofy to be as insidious as they ought to be. Buffoonish and threatening certainly aren’t mutually exclusive—just look at Christoph Waltz in Inglourious Basterds, or Dennis Hopper in Blue Velvet, or anyone in the Trump Administration. But Fargeat can’t find the right balance and the men end up as caricatures rather than as logical exaggerations of their real-world parallels. Harvey Weinstein, the namesake of the Quaid character, didn’t merely reject older actresses in favor of nubile youngsters; he used his position to take advantage of them physically and held their careers hostage for it. 

The movie’s version of that systemic assault is absolutely chaste by comparison. The symbol of the lowest level of cultural degradation is… a fitness show that allows people to stare at boobs and butts? Give me a break. All this cartoonishness does is allow any of Fargeat’s possible targets to escape unscathed. Would any of the Harvey Weinsteins of the world feel confronted here? Even Quaid himself, a vocal Trump supporter married to a yoga instructor half his age, seems not to have felt his ears burning. 

Though Qualley is believable as Elisabeth’s younger self and later nemesis (named Sue), her scenes are not as interesting as Moore’s if only because her dalliances in her younger body are conventional and expected. She sleeps with young hot guys, she drinks and does drugs, she uses her younger body at the older one’s expense. Her inevitable disobedience of the “rules” of the Substance leads to horrific transformations. Don’t google it before you see it, but the creators here seem to have taken a lot of inspiration from Rob Bottin. If that means something to you, you’ll know what to expect. 

The movie’s lone oasis of subtlety is Moore herself, whose performance is a deeply felt essay of a fallen idol whose self-loathing has been set in concrete by the men who control her career (much like her Hollywood Walk of Fame Star, the image of which begins the movie). She’s the reason the movie works at all, and imbues all of her physical transformations with a genuine hope and sadness. When the Substance takes its toll on her, her growing sense of being trapped in her aging body, while a younger person reaps the benefits, makes for the movie’s best and most heartbreaking scenes. A sequence in which Elisabeth is preparing for a date is probably the most tense in the movie, and it depends on no body horror or physical deformations or anything that isn’t in Moore’s performance. She’s fantastic, and deserves to win the Oscar for this.

It’s too bad that Fargeat doesn’t follow through on everything Moore brings to it. As she’s in the movie less and less, it loses its uniqueness. The climax follows through on the literal bloodbath it promises, and without giving away too much, I’ll say the makeup artists show quite a bit of respect to Beryl Lerman and Michael Morris’s work on The Elephant Man. But the ridiculousness of Lis/Sue’s surroundings comes too close to meeting the ridiculousness of what happens to her, and the line between them is never clear enough for it to be truly effective. It needs a bigger moment of catharsis. Think the ending of Rose Glass’s Saint Maud, which examines this sort of degradation in a way that The Substance fumbles. Still, I must admit I take some joy in this being the first Oscar-nominated movie in which… well, see for yourself. 

** 1/2 out of ****

I SAW THE TV GLOW (2024)

Jane Schoenbrun's magnificent debut feature We're All Going to the World's Fair was a definitive tragedy of cultural emptiness. Its lead character's cynical mining of a fictional arcade game as a replacement for a personality, as well as a bevy of niche internet content creators' eagerness to do the same, pointed to, as I wrote in 2022, "a culture that's been completely drained from all sides, has even run out of the fumes of past successes, and is now running on the fumes of past failures. To paraphrase Daniel Plainview, we're a milkshake that's been drunk up."

Their second film, I Saw the TV Glow, not only is a brilliant film itself, but lays even another layer onto World's Fair in its use of a retro pop culture reference point as a gateway to self-realization. Where World's Fair despaired at its characters grasping for human connection through pop culture that's been reduced to ashes, I Saw the TV Glow creates a piece of young-adult nostalgia that finds two lost souls and binds them together.

When 12-year-old Owen (Ian Foreman) sees a commercial for a Saturday-night young-adult show called The Pink Opaque, his life is changed. Then he sees 14-year-old Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine) reading an episode guide for the show, and asks her about it. His parents won't let him stay up to watch it. Maddy invites him to sneak away one Saturday night so they can watch it. Soon, the show becomes the conduit for both of them to discover themselves in ways they've otherwise been unable, and Owen (played as a teenager and grown-up by Justice Smith) is led to confront... something about himself that the show gives him an avenue to confront.

I say "something" because the movie does not express Owen's dilemma explicitly. It doesn't express it because Owen cannot. He has no emotional language to deal with it apart from what The Pink Opaque gives him. It most closely parallels the transgender experience--Schoenbrun is trans and has been open about how the isolation in their work springs from being trans in an unsupportive environment--but is not completely exclusive to it. When Owen is asked whether he likes girls or boys, he replies, “I dunno. I think I like TV shows.” He doesn’t know who he is, and the show is the only way he’s gotten close to finding out. 

Repression is the evil at the center of I Saw the TV Glow. Owen's home is not exactly conducive: Mom (Danielle Deadwyler) is loving but fragile, and often needs Owen's protection more than vice versa; and Dad (Fred Durst, who's very good) is aloof and dismissive. It isn't long before Owen is given the ultimatum of setting out on his own with only Maddy by his side, or retreating into the world of the devil he knows. The movie has clearly been delivered by someone who has tried the second option, and Schoenbrun’s portrayal of a closeted life here is as unnerving as anything in World’s Fair, or for that matter, Skinamarink (a movie that was championed by Schoenbrun on its festival circuit, also by a queer filmmaker, also about a child waking up to realize that his parents cannot help him).

It's a risk for Schoenbrun to include a fictional TV show within their movie, as art-within-art is often less credible than its characters claim it to be. That is not the case with The Pink Opaque, which feels as real to us as it does to Owen and Maddy. It's a blend of Are You Afraid of the Dark? with Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a horror anthology show on the Young Adult Network about two young girls (Helena Howard and Lindsey Jordan) who meet at summer camp and discover that they have a psychic connection. They live "on the other side of the county" from one another, and after summer camp they only communicate psychically. There's a "Monster of the Week" format a la The X-Files, as well as a "Big Bad" called Mr. Melancholy, a sinister Man-in-the-Moon who constantly hovers over the two heroines, a visual nod to the imagery of Georges Méliès's "A Trip to the Moon" as quoted by The Smashing Pumpkins in the video for "Tonight, Tonight" (covered by Jordan's musical alter ego Snail Mail on the soundtrack). 

It's the sort of show that early-to-mid millennials like Schoenbrun (born in 1987) and myself (1982) remember as being more genuinely scary than its tweener marketing seemed to suggest. But what appeals to Owen and Maddy is not just the scary monsters, but the idea that there's a kind of friendship that transcends an unsympathetic world. That even in Mr. Melancholy's world, there's someone out there who gets you. I'd have watched that show.

But just as we become comfortable with the idea that The Pink Opaque will be our savior, Schoenbrun pulls the rug out and immerses us in pain and confusion. Owen's few moments of clarity are buried, both literally and figuratively. Maddy disappears, and so does The Pink Opaque, in a crushing final episode sequence featuring a performance from Emma Portner (as a character I will not reveal) that is among the most visually arresting I've seen, and truly scary. 

Schoenbrun reminds us that as much as pop culture can offer us connection, friendship, commonality, it can be a scapegoat as well. It's the "real" world that morphs into the nightmare, and it becomes clear that what Maddy has offered Owen is not a TV show but a way out: of the closet, of town, of an unloving home.

In the end, Owen is submerged into a fantasy nightmare, but not the one we expect. Smith's and Lundy-Paine's deeply felt performances anchor the movie as their characters pass each other in the night: she going out, he heading further in. Her posture gaining more composure and confidence, his shrinking to the point where he is both figuratively and literally suffocating. A choice Schoenbrun makes which seems at first to be too on-the-nose is to have Owen break the fourth wall and narrate directly to us, but as the movie goes on we realize why it is Owen telling us this directly rather than showing us. We realize why Owen only hears what Maddy is telling him through the lens of a TV show.

I think the key is the central scene at the Double Lunch bar, where there are two musical interludes that function as Owen’s pivotal point, kind of like the Club Silencio scene in Mulholland Dr. The two songs, respectively by Sloppy Jane and King Woman, parallel Owen's state in the final scene: first a sedated, passive acceptance, then a guttural primal scream.

**** out of ****

Note: I Saw the TV Glow is rated PG-13. This is correct, as there are young people not represented sufficiently in media who will feel very seen by this movie.

UNFROSTED (2024): The toaster pastry exposé that the woke left doesn't want you to see

There's a moment in Jerry Seinfeld's 2002 documentary Comedian where we see an up-and-coming standup by the name of Orny Adams receiving notes from Seinfeld's close associate, George Shapiro, on his comedy. Adams, portrayed as the heel of the movie against Seinfeld's consummate professional, resists the criticism, insults Shapiro, insists that his jokes are funny the way he wrote them. 

I thought of that moment a lot while watching Unfrosted, Seinfeld's goofy supposition about the creation of the Pop Tart. Seinfeld, I assume, thought it was funny the way he wrote it, and I assume no one had the clout to tell him the truth. It is a movie severely in need of a note, and the note should have been "Stop."

Tongue-in-cheek docudramas are in vogue right now: spit into a Roku and you'll hit at least three seriocomic narrations of some innovation or another of varying significance. The iMac. The Blackberry. The Flamin' Hot Cheeto. I vaguely remember a movie from a few years ago about the inventor of the intermittent windshield wiper. Not the wiper itself, mind you--someone else did that--but the thing that makes it intermittent.

However saturated the market is, a somewhat ironic retelling of Kellogg's legendary breakfast treat's inception might actually have been an interesting idea, but that's not what Unfrosted is. Instead, director/co-writer/producer/star Seinfeld has spun what are presumably a few true details into a broad comedy of anachronisms, slapstick, and anthropomorphized commercial characters. He populates the movie with almost every comic actor alive. It's less like its docudrama and biopic brethren than it is an overloaded overbudgeted action comedy like The Cannonball Run. And like that movie (and the windshield wiper) its effectiveness is intermittent.

At least one critic has already deemed Unfrosted the worst movie of the century. It isn't, and it's not even the worst of the young year: the aftershock of Matthew Vaughn's dizzying, flavorless and brightly colored Froot Loop of a comedy Argylle still lingers. It would be very difficult with this cast for Unfrosted to come up completely empty. But with this much fruit pectin hurled at the wall, more should have stuck. If it isn't the worst movie of the century, it's bad in a way I never imagined it could be.

Bob Cabana (Seinfeld), a high executive at Kellogg Inc., run by the eponymous Edsel Kellogg (a made-up character played by Jim Gaffigan), happens upon a couple of street urchins in the rival Post company's dumpster. The little rascals are snacking on some jelly from an experimental treat. Cabana tastes it, and it's delicious. Right away he commissions a similar venture from Kellogg, and enlists the help of Donna Stankowski, a NASA technician (also not a real person).

Okay, I thought: he's making a point about how corporations capitalize even on their refuse. That would have been an interesting movie: putting Pop Tarts alongside Bunch'a Crunch, Oreo bits, broken lasagna, and all the other products that amount to packaged garbage. But nope, that's not followed through. In fact, it seems Seinfeld, along with co-writers Spike Feresten, Andy Robin, and Dave Marder, has made every effort to avoid any cultural significance whatsoever. Characters enter the film with only a passing resemblance to the real life figures they represent: Amy Schumer as a cunning Marjorie Post; James Marsden as a bright and buzzy Jack Lalanne; Bobby Moynihan as a Mario-esque Chef Boyardee; Jack McBrayer as a hesitant Steve Schwinn (of the bicycles). References are made to the Cuban Missile Crisis and January 6th, without much substance. I don't know why they choose to portray Walter Cronkite (Kyle Dunnigan) as a hostile drunk, or legendary Tony the Tiger voice Thurl Ravenscroft (Hugh Grant) as a prissy self-centered hack. Someone thought it was funny, I suppose.

A few disparate moments are amusing. I like the two scrappy kids (Bailey Sheetz and Eleanor Sweeney) who keep getting involved in the operations. As two Kellogg employees, Ronny Chieng and Sarah Cooper (remember her?) have some good lines. There's an in-character cameo appearance from Jon Hamm and John Slattery that works because there's some funny writing in it, and Seinfeld & co. don't simply rely on their appearance for a sole laugh. As President Kennedy, Bill Burr breaks through the hacky joke of the situation (JFK likes girls???) and gives an actual good comic performance.

I'd invoke these moments as whispers of what could have been, but to paraphrase Dr. Ian Malcolm, "could" doesn't necessarily mean "should." Unfrosted will leave no cultural footprint, has no social relevance, and has no real reason for existence other than to be funny for 90 minutes, which it mostly is not. Seinfeld, in his recent emergence as an anti-PC activist, has claimed he wanted to make his movie the opposite of Barbie. Mission accomplished, sir.

** out of ****

Note: Orny Adams is still working and he is very funny. Some of his shows are available on YouTube.

30 NIGHTS OF NIGHT, Night #2: NEFARIOUS (2023)

I should have pegged Nefarious as a Christian film before I started watching, but it pulled a fast one on me. I was expecting a regular ol' nasty demonic thriller like Sinister and Insidious and Malignant and other vicious adjectives, and it wasn't until the halfway point that I realized it had other aspirations. I like to consider myself smart enough to know a trojan horse when I see one, but the Devil is a wily one, as they say.

It's a shame that Nefarious doesn't know what a deft job it did at reeling me, a pro-choice liberal Catholic, into its procession, because that doesn't seem to be what it's trying to do. Rather, it seems squarely aimed at its own choir. It's one of those alternate versions of popular entertainment that's repurposed for the evangelical set: there's Christian rock, Christian pop music, Christian theme parks, and now there's a Christian horror movie. Sinister for Jesus Camp.

Except, well, Sinister itself should probably play pretty well at Jesus Camp: it was at heart a moral fable about ignoring one's family for fortune, and even cast a former Republican Senator--Fred Dalton Thompson--as the moral authority. A lot of mainstream horror movies tend to portray Christianity generally positively, from the questionable exploits of the benevolently portrayed Warrens in the Conjuring series to the admirable clergy in the Exorcist films. Nefarious doesn't realize that it actually doesn't need to stray far from the norm to make its point. So it's a shame when it stakes its claim firmly in its own yard and doesn't seek to go anywhere else. 

Dr. James Martin (Jordan Belfi) arrives at an Oklahoma state prison to deliver the final psychological analysis of a prisoner about to be executed, Edgar Wayne Brady (Sean Patrick Flanery). Mr. Wayne Brady (Whose Line fans laugh there) claims to be inhabited by an ancient demon who used him as a vessel to commit the murders. Nefarious, the closest approximation of the name of the demon inhabiting Edgar, boasts to James that he wants Edgar to be executed so he can return to Hell. James, an atheist skeptic, is confident he'll be able to see through the supposed demon's facade, but his confidence soon falls apart when the demon begins to tell him things no one else knows.

Nefarious doesn't take long to get under James's skin, and that's because writer-directors Chuck Konzelman and Cary Solomon (adapting a novel by right-wing media personality Steve Deace) make James into such a soft-headed bozo that he caves to the demon's will immediately. James is the evangelical bubble's version of an atheist secularist, with a self-assured cockiness that crumbles upon the first challenge. He's a human "Share this and make a liberal cry" meme.

The movie's best moments are the early ones between James and Nefarious in which the demon establishes his pomposity. It's here that Flanery really shines in one of his best performances, playing Nefarious as a properly dismissive and arrogant eternal being who's disgusted to be in the room with inferior humans. The writing shows some cleverness too, and Flanery and Belfi have a fun rapport in their early exchanges as Nefarious explains the origins of the human world through a fallen angel's eyes. Tom Ohmer, recognizable as the cop who tells Detective Crashmore that he "do[es]n't care who gets in [his] way" in I Think You Should Leave, has some fun as a tough-as-nails warden.

But around the end of the first act the directors lose their confidence in the audience and start catering to the lowest common denominator within the evangelical bubble. James turns from a formidable opponent to the easiest mark in the world, and all Nefarious need do is provoke him in the slightest for him to break down, as the filmmakers assume all atheists would. It's a common fantasy among the truly isolated faithful that nonbelievers need only to be confronted with something they're unfamiliar with in order to be convinced. Lots of their literature revolves around "told you so" rapture porn and "you can't explain that" question-begging: check the Left Behind series or Kirk Cameron's banana video for more examples. 

It's no fun to watch the movie pander for the rest of its running time. It's clear that it speaks a language that only the devout will respond to. If you guessed that the movie wheels in the old favorite enemies by having Nefarious confront James's history of both (1) assisted suicide, and (2) abortion for a one-two punch, a shiny red apple for you. Amid a U.S. political climate where about 70% seem to be in favor of abortion rights in at least some capacity, this movie still speaks of it as if it were a secret shame, with James's cries of "It was her choice" serving only as a weasely shirking of masculine and fatherly responsibility. (The woman in question, of course, never appears and her voice isn't heard but for a too-late outgoing voicemail message. The decision-making, of course, lies entirely with men.) And his assisting of his mother's suicide during a terminal illness is written off as a ploy to quickly gain an inheritance; I certainly pray to my own God that none of the filmmakers are faced with such a situation only to have this assumption made of them.

It at least manages a modicum of consistency by coming out against the death penalty as well, but by the end it's beyond recovery. The ending is a debacle of a literal deus ex machina, the worst "God did it" resolution with no real catharsis or confrontation. And what's more, it subjects us to an unbearably long epilogue in which James explains the aftermath on a talk show hosted by Glenn Beck (!), followed by a final ending that doesn't so much "twist" as it does writhe.

The movie really had me in its first act, and were the filmmakers interested in reeling in nonbelievers, it might have worked. They could conceivably have gotten some non-Christians to watch a good solid horror movie with a Christian message. But no movie that features Glenn Beck as its version of a mainstream talk show host is interested in reaching a mainstream audience at all.

And it's a shame: Flanery is really good in it.

** out of ****

30 NIGHTS OF NIGHT, Night #1: THE BOOGEYMAN (2023)

The Boogeyman is a pretty good movie based on one of the scariest short stories ever written, and the thing that distinguishes the story is sadly largely left out of the movie. What’s left is some tried-and-true monster-in-the-closet madness, which, because the director Rob Savage is very deft at this sort of thing, is very exciting and fun to watch. Those who’ve never read Stephen King’s short story won’t know any better, but probably won’t see it as anything better than the myriad other Boogeyman or Boogeyman-adjacent movies that we admittedly love for what they are.

It’s a spooky fun good time and that’s enough, though I’d still like to see the real heart of King’s story adapted into a movie someday. The trouble is it doesn’t expand well to feature length, mainly because the main character of the story is an unreliable narrator and a selfish, rotten person. Lester Billings, who tells much of the story and is here played with a wan complexion of pure terror by David Dastmalchian, is the father of three children who have all suddenly died, one at a time, all after professing to have seen a “boogeyman” in their closet. The movie features Lester as an ancillary character who walks into the office of therapist Dr. Will Harper (Chris Messina), who’s recently lost his wife. The grief in the Harper household naturally attracts the title monster to Will and his daughters Sadie (Sophie Thatcher) and Sawyer (Vivian Lyra Blair). 

And so The Boogeyman is an allegory for grief and loss, as a violent monster fills the space where Will, Sadie, and Sawyer are reluctant to confront their emotions. Fine—a lot of horror movies mine this ground, and Savage along with screenwriters Scott Beck and Bryan Woods do it well—though King’s story treads an uneasier path that would have been more rewarding to see on screen. 

The arc of King’s story runs more like The Shining. It deals not with grief but with resentment, less with feelings that are uncomfortable to discuss and more with desires that are impossible to discuss. Lester Billings, like Jack Torrance, is a bad person trying minimally to be good, and failing. Just as the Overlook Hotel is a reflection of Jack’s violent tendencies and his alcohol dependency, the Boogeyman is a manifestation of Lester’s reluctant fatherhood and bitterness toward his wife for favoring the children over him. 

That’s hard to expand to a full movie, though Savage, whose first two features Host and Dashcam are both brilliant in their own regard, probably would have been up to the task. Woods and Beck are the proper writing team too: they were done dirty by John Krasinski in his diluting of A Quiet Place, and their debut feature Haunt is delightfully nasty. The movie works best when it’s taunting us with apparitions in corners and hazy figures in the dark. The main image the movie takes from the story—a cracked-open closet door—is used effectively. 

And so even if The Boogeyman ditches the more appealing aspects of the source material, it’s still superficially fun to watch. The performances are all very good, notably Thatcher, who plays the teenage Juliette Lewis on Yellowjackets and anchors the thrills here quite well. I can’t gripe that the movie is merely an effectively presented monster story. We need those too. 

*** out of ****