One clear loser this week.

All of Us Strangers

One film that needs more awards and audience attention is Andrew Haigh‘s All of Us Strangers, arguably the exceptional British auteur’s best. Perhaps it’s because every Oscar movie this season is big and loud with a capital L – Poor Things, Killers of the Flower Moon, Oppenheimer, etc. Not to mention long with a capital L, those three movies have a combined runtime of close to ten hours. All of Us Strangers is much quieter and low-key, and at only an hour and forty-five minutes, it fades away before you can completely process it all. That’s why I’m afraid to heap loads of praise onto this relatively small film; it’s a very nuanced production that politely asks you to stop trying to figure out what form of reality the movie takes place in and simply focus on the emotional journey of our brilliantly rendered and wholly sympathetic protagonist.

In the year’s finest performance, British actor Andrew Scott, who you may remember as “Hot Priest” in Fleabag, plays Adam, a supremely lonely middle-aged screenwriter living in a gigantic and mostly empty apartment complex. The only other resident in the complex, it turns out, is Harry (Paul Mescal), another lonely soul who happens to be much more outgoing than Adam. One night, after a routine fire drill that illustrates how vacant the complex is, Harry stops by Adam’s door, drunk and lovesick, nursing a bottle of Japanese whiskey. He mumbles his words and propositions Adam, to which Adam, while flattered and certainly interested, decides to turn Harry down. Eventually, the two begin a friendship and a romantic relationship, and around this time, Adam ventures out to his parent’s old house to help with his screenplay. To Adam’s surprise, his parents (Claire Foy and Jamie Bell) are living at their old house, even though they died in a car accident when he was twelve years old. Shocked but ultimately accepting this bizarre reality of dead parents roaming around, Adam comes inside for a drink.

Through multiple visits, sometimes with both of them, sometimes with just his mom or just his dad, Adam is able to get to know them better as fellow adults while allowing them to get to know the adult him. Of course, this includes coming out to his parents, who last lived as alive human beings during the height of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s. While this is the setup for something either horribly cliched, unbearably schmaltzy, or a nauseating combination of the two, the result is neither. Even though the movie is entirely unafraid of wearing its heart on its sleeve the entire runtime, it never dips into melodrama because the writing and acting are so dead-on and believable. Is this chance encounter just a figment of Adam’s imagination? Is he actually dead, and these events are unfolding in the afterlife? Is this merely the screenplay he is writing? Is he actually being visited by ghosts? Andrew Haigh is a smart enough storyteller to know he doesn’t have to answer that because it doesn’t change what the film is ultimately about – what you’d say to a dead parent or relative if you had a chance to see them again. This philosophical question is so universal and inescapable to the human experience that it spans well beyond sexual orientation. And therein lies All of Us Strangers‘ true power.

While Andrew Scott is clearly the standout, his three supporting cast mates, the only other speaking roles in the film, are phenomenal. L.A. Times critic Justin Chang called this the best film ensemble of the year, and I can’t disagree. I don’t think Jamie Bell has ever been better than he is as Adam’s dad, sharing a scene with Scott that I dare you to watch without choking up. The Crown‘s Claire Foy also delivers one of her best performances, a remarkably subtle one that culminates in one of the most deep-cutting lines of dialogue in the entire film. Then there’s Paul Mescal, one of the industry’s hottest new talents and the lead of the last year’s best film, Aftersun. To no surprise, he delivers another subtly gut-wrenching performance as Adam’s best shot at happiness.

I never really watched Haigh‘s HBO show, Looking, deemed by many as a sort of gay male version of Sex and the City. I can neither confirm nor deny this claim cause I only saw the pilot when it originally aired a decade ago. However, I’m a massive fan of two of his films – 2011’s Weekend, a carefully observed and utterly heartbreaking examination of a one-night stand between two 20-something dudes, one of whom is leaving the country the following day, and 2015’s 45 Years, a carefully observed and utterly heartbreaking examination of how a fifty-year-old secret can undo a forty-five-year-old marriage. All of Us Strangers is not only Haigh‘s most optimistic and least bleak film, it’s also his most fully realized and unique. Based on an almost forty-year-old Japanese novel titled Strangers, about a straight couple and what I’m told is a much darker twist, Haigh adapted the novel to fit a much more life-affirming story he wanted to tell. As filmmaker Martin Scorsese once said and Bong Joon-ho quoted in his Best Director Oscar speech, “The most personal is the most creative.” Andrew Haigh has made a profoundly personal film here that feels like nothing I’ve ever experienced. Grade: A (In Theaters)

Night Swim

Wow, there’s a lot to unpack here, folks.

American Horror Maestro James Wan returns in producer-only form to help shepherd us a vision from first-time writer/director Bryce McGuire, someone I assume he met at Circle K one late night, heard a rambling pitch and was like, “Fuck it, could rake us in some bucks in January.” Last year around this time, the silly but clever M3GAN spoiled me. I thought, “Wow. January at the Movies isn’t quite the creative junkyard I once thought it was.” Well, it was and still is, and the inept and exceptionally dispassionate, almost cynical filmmaking at the heart of Night Swim is proof that the old junkyard still exists.

The movie has a promising premise – a haunted swimming pool. Not the house itself, just the pool. Now, we’ve seen swimming pools act as a sort of spiritual gate for entities in such movies as Richard Kelly‘s The Box, House – the one with George Wendt, not the Japanese one, and of course, the classic Twilight Zone episode, The Bewitchin’ Pool, which saw two children using their family swimming pool as a way to escape their parents’ divorce into a magical dimension where divorce didn’t exist. Night Swim is more about the ghosts of people who died in this swimming pool tormenting alive people who swim in it. There’s also an outrageous, non-sensical mythology, but we’ll get to that in the spoiler section of this review, which I recommend you read instead of paying money to watch this piece of shit.

Anyway, I was bored with 85% of Night Swim, so I was mostly just sitting there in the theater thinking of different ways to make a haunted swimming pool movie work. Zak Bagans once taught me that water is an inter-dimensional gateway for the dead, but I think ghosts haunting a pool are less interesting than the actual pool being the monster with a single consciousness. I’d make it ridiculous and dumb, with the skimmer being its eyes and the drain being its mouth. It would vulgarly taunt people in an East Coast accent while making puns about swimming. I’d cast Jack Nicholson to voice it. The pool would also use its water to shapeshift into things like a giant surfboard that would attack people (on-brand for the water theme) or maybe a giant octopus with little shark mouths on the end of its tentacles. Nicholson would say, “Surf’s up, dick farts!” and also, “This Octopussy’s wetter than Maud Adams!” She played “Octopussy” in the James Bond movie. Maybe not that joke, cause even I had to Google it. Also, it’s gross.

So, beyond the magical/evil swimming pool, this movie is about a boring upper middle class or lower upper class white family. The dad is a professional baseball pitcher who was recently diagnosed with MS and could be facing the end of his career and/or life. The mom works for a school or something; he’s on her health insurance, apparently. The teenage daughter is one-dimensional, even for these movies, and exists only to be on the phone with friends while annoyed with her family and to invite swim team hunks over to use her family’s pool. The son is more fleshed than the daughter – he’s an awkward, loner kid who is terrible at sports but obligated to play baseball because that’s his father’s whole life. How awkward is this boy, you ask? The family hosts a huge pool party and invites the entire neighborhood, and the kid stays up in his room with a tripod and video camera, secretly recording people in the pool from his window. Forget the pool; the real horror movie is in five years when this little voyeur perv becomes a serial killer.

Let’s talk about the cast. Somehow, the producers got Wyatt Russell and Academy Award Nominee Kerry Condon (The Banshees of Inisherin, Better Call Saul) in the roles of the parents, and they try their best to make these Middle America cookie-cutter characters enjoyable. Over 98 minutes, which feels like the running time of Killers of the Flower Moon, we see a very good actor and an amazing one drown in Night Swim‘s stupidity, unable to do anything to make the movie not seem like an Amazing Stories episode from the 80s stretched out five times longer than it should be. A bunch of jump scares jolt you initially, but the camera holds too long on the thing that’s popping up and scaring you, which immediately reveals itself to be generic and poorly rendered. One ghost looks like a cross between Uncle Fester and Slimer from Ghostbusters. Every scare is undermined by how mid every aspect of this production is. The way I’m writing about Night Swim makes it seem like it’s a lot of dumb fun, but while this movie is indeed fun to talk and/or write about, sitting in a dark theater and having it reflected onto your face is another story. It’s a strikingly bland form of torture; this really must be what they mean by the banality of evil. Grab me a pillow; I’m ready for a nap. Grade: D (In Theaters)

SPOILER SECTION

Let’s dive into the mythology of this piece of shit. So, the pool functions as a wishing well of sorts. It heals some people and takes others’ lives. It has to take life to give life, which makes sense, I guess. This means it’s healing Baseball Dad’s MS when he does his “water therapy” in there, but it’s harming his family to do so. However, it can only hurt them if they’re in the water, which seems like all they have to do is stay out of the water to be safe, right? Wrong! The pool can possess people while in the pool through black oil mist that comes from the floor drain. It possesses Baseball Dad to basically be Jack Torrance from The Shining and attack his family and try to feed the pool his awkward son cause he’s a loser for not being good at baseball. Once the water oil is in you, you can leave the pool and still be possessed. However, the pool might not want your body to leave the house, so it will essentially drown you from within your own body if you try to leave the house. Still with me?

During the ill-fated neighborhood pool party, where Baseball Dad, now possessed by the pool, tries to drown his son’s classmate after an intense game of Chicken in the Water, the drunken real-estate lady who sold them the house admits to the wife that a little girl drowned in the family swimming twenty years ago or something. Just like it’s something you wouldn’t have to legally disclose when selling the house. The mom decides to visit the Chinese-American family of the little girl who lived there but only finds the mom (Jodi Long), now old and on oxygen. When she asks about the daughter, the Chinese-American mom says she doesn’t remember she had a daughter but then tells the backstory of the pool.

“Before there was a pool, before there was a house, there was a magical lake people used for its healing powers. However, healing comes at a cost, and the magical lake demanded compensation…” So basically, a bunch of folks hundreds of years ago fed the town’s undesirables or whoever into the lake for it to eat like a snack. Also, is the swimming pool using the same water as the lake? Lakes are huge, this swimming pool isn’t as big as the lake. Wouldn’t it affect other houses’ swimming pools nearby? Can you build a swimming pool on top of a lake? Googling now.

Anyway, the Chinese-American Mom explains how her first-born male son was sick and dying, so she lured the younger female daughter into the pool to get eaten to death so the male could live. “He’s in Washington, D.C. now, working for the U.S. government…” she explains, “…and everything worked out best for everyone involved.” Yeah, right, lady. You murdered your eight-year-old daughter, things worked out pretty shitty for her, don’t you think? Kerry Condon rightfully calls her on her B.S., and the Chinese-American Mom starts laughing maniacally while that black pool oil spills out of her eyes and this zen garden water fountain next to her starts overflowing.

So, after all this time, the Chinese-American mom is still possessed by her old house’s swimming pool? Is the haunted swimming pool possessing her from dozens of miles away? Can the evil swimming pool control ANY and EVERY body of water? None of this is explained; it’s just meant to be creepy and fucked up. Also, it seems to be James Wan commenting on an outdated Chinese cultural trope of vastly preferring males to females. I say fuck the patriarchy; start appreciating your daughters today!

The movie ends with Baseball Dad sacrificing himself to the pool so his family can live. He dies, and the family decides to stay at the house to protect others from the haunted pool, draining it and filling it up with cement. I hope the sequel is about them building a tennis court on top of it, and then the tennis court becomes haunted and starts killing people with tennis stuff – rackets, balls, the net, maybe a tennis head band flies into someone’s throat and chokes them to death and then while they lay dead and motionless on the court, the head band slithers out of their mouth like a little worm or something and back onto the head of the now possessed step dad. That’s my idea for a sequel, keep the family, have the mom remarry a dude who then becomes the new patriarch of the family who also gets possessed.

They Cloned Tyrone

Juel Taylor’s debut film They Cloned Tyrone certainly isn’t perfect but it’s fascinating and alive in ways most films made by veteran directors aren’t, let alone other newbies. Completely lost in the shuffle because the geniuses over at Netflix thought it would be smart to release it on the same day as Barbenheimer, more and more people are discovering this odd little gem. Sort of like a fusion between Boots Riley‘s Sorry to Bother You and Jordan Peele‘s Get Out, but better than the former and nowhere near as accomplished as the latter, They Cloned Tyrone is about a drug dealer named Fontaine (John Boyega), a pimp named Slick (Jamie Foxx), and a ho named Yo-Yo (Teyonah Parris), uncovering a vast conspiracy of white people fucking with the time space continuum or cloning or some shit. While They Cloned Tyrone is certainly one of the funniest movies I saw this past year (not much competition tbh), the structure is super disorganized and it just feels like a crock pot full of random ideas, some really good ideas though. What holds this movie together more than anything are the three leads, each phenomenal, hilarious and worthy of Oscar consideration. John Boyega proves once again he’s one of the best actors of his generation who needs to be recognized for something beyond the Star Wars universe. Teyonah Parris delivers her best performance yet, and Jamie Foxx has rarely been funnier. If you’re looking for something different to watch that’s fun without being dumb, check this out. Grade: B (Netflix)