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CINEMA Film round-up

Reviews of A Common Crime, Rose: A Love Story, Final Days, Wilderness, Songs My Brother Taught Me and Assimilate

A Common Crime (12)
Directed by Francisco Marquez
★★★

A SOCIOLOGY teacher is seemingly haunted by the ghost of her maid’s murdered son in this intelligent political thriller masquerading as a supernatural tale.

Writer-director Francisco Marquez’s slow-burning film provides a subtle critique of Argentina’s social classes and the widening distance between rich and poor, and the way the latter are treated as lazy, ignorant, criminal and disposable by Argentinian society and authorities.

When university academic Cecilia (Elisa Carricajo) refuses to answer the door on a stormy night to a distraught Kevin (Eliot Otazo), her housekeeper Nebe’s (Mecha Martinez) 15-year-old son, his body is found floating down the river the next day.

Believed to have been killed by the police, Cecilia becomes riddled with guilt at Kevin’s death. Seemingly plagued by Kevin’s spirit, Cecilia slowly becomes a ghost of herself.

She tries, but is unable, to carry on her life as normal, haunted by the question: why did she fail to act when a teenage boy she knew asked for her help?

The film shows how, being poor, nothing is done to find his killers and bring them to justice.

It is a fascinating thriller, driven home by a complex and haunting performance by Carricajo.

Available online from April 9.

Maria Duarte

Rose: A Love Story (15)
Directed by Jennifer Sheridan
★★★★

IN A revisionist take not seen since the like of Cronos or The Transfiguration, editor Jennifer Sheridan takes on the vampire subgenre with the compelling feature debut, Rose: A Love Story.

Briefly staged as a mystery-box drama chronicling a couple’s socially distanced life in the woods, Rose works as equal part relationship drama and horror thriller.

Sophie Rundle and Matt Stokoe share a tense but grounded and baked-in chemistry as the pair whose isolation is as much for the outside world’s protection as their own.

A classical slow burner built on palpable tension and atmospheric dread, the success of Rose comes more in its restraint and patience for the development of its core relationship than in its more archetypal and traditionally alluring genre elements.

Some will find it trying — possibly even laboured — but give Sheridan the benefit of her calculated pause as and when, and Rose certainly offers its bloom.

Van Connor

Final Days (15)
Directed by Johnny Martin
★★

JUST imagine being trapped in your own home for weeks as a deadly pandemic rages outside, with dwindling supplies and with no prospect of food deliveries.

I guess we can now all relate to this doomsday scenario, sort of.

Add flesh-eating zombies into the mix and you get this apocalyptic horror, directed by Johnny Martin and penned by Matt Taylor, which stars Tyler Posey (Teen Wolf), Summer Spiro (Swell) and Donald Sutherland (The Undoing and Invasion of the Body Snatchers) as neighbours holed up in a block of flats.

Posey and Sutherland work their socks off to deliver a tense and hair-raising survival-against-all-odds thriller. While they do a sterling job, the film fails to offer a fresh or ingenious insight into the genre.

Available on demand from April 12.

MD

Wilderness (15)
Directed by Justin Doherty
★★★

An intriguing display of fresh British cinematic talent, low-budget drama Wilderness depicts a weekend at the seaside for a newly-acquainted interracial couple.

Though its artisanal and tastefully boho-chic presentation both aesthetically and performatively will prove a barrier to some, there are nonetheless a smattering of dramatic elements throughout Wilderness that serve up quite engaging and suspenseful character drama amidst otherwise decidedly drippy post-Blue Valentine navel-gazing.

In large part this is owed to a balancing act between some very precisely honed performances from James Barnes and Katharine Davenport as our leads and a screenplay by Falmouth lecturer Neil Fox that inarguably prefers the introspective to the propulsive, but at least affords those performances the space to expand whilst unpacking the emotion of inactivity.

Not everyone’s cup of tea, but it’d go nice with an Insta-friendly scone.

VC

Songs My Brothers Taught Me
Directed by Chloe Zhao
★★★★

OSCAR-nominated filmmaker Chloe Zhao’s 2015 debut feature was a wonderfully subtle, slow-burning family drama full of cinematic promise.

Set on a reservation known as Pine Ridge, it follows the life of young Native American man Johnny (a standout John Reddy), torn between staying with his alcoholic single mother, his incarcerated older brother and his younger sister Jashaun (Jashaun St John) and heading to Los Angeles with his high school sweetheart, who is off to college.

It is a rich and complex family story, thrown off kilter with the sudden death of Johnny’s estranged father, a bull rider who fathered 25 kids by nine wives.

Exquisitely shot and with stunning, natural performances from the little known cast, Zhao (Nomadland) delivers a heartfelt snapshot of life on the reservation, where youngsters are forced to act as adults and take care of their parents and siblings — in Johnny’s case his mother as well as his sister — instead of being kids.

If you didn’t get a chance to see this film when it first came out, don’t hesitate to catch it now. You won’t be disappointed.

Available on demand from April 9.

MD

Assimilate (15)
Directed by John Murlowski

THERE’S a Day One mistake every film student makes whereby they pen every single line of a screenplay to serve as a trailer-friendly no-context-needed “cool AF” moment with no regard whatsoever for how that same line would play in the context of, for instance, an actual human conversation.

Assimilate would be this mistake replicated ad nauseam for an entire 93-minute movie made entirely by the second unit crew on a Monster Energy ad.

Hailing from John Murlowski — director of Hulk Hogan’s seminal Christmas romp Santa with Muscles — Assimilate follows two high-school outsiders whose live-streaming antics see them wander into the crosshairs of a full-blown alien invasion.

A D-list affair so dim that the appearance of forgotten OC-alum Cam Gigandet can be considered a genuine high point. The only place this movie’ll Assimilate is in a petrol station DVD bin.

VC

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