Everything good this week.

Love Lies Bleeding

2020 was a barren wasteland for movies and even some of its best films wouldn’t even rank for me in other years. Obviously this was all because of Covid, so it’s no big mystery why this was arguably the weakest year in cinema history. Still, there was a handful of films that really stood out, not just because they were great but because they had arrived in the context of such a creatively barren year. They were like little godsends among a sea of quarantined misery. One of those films was Saint Maud, a wonderfully odd indie horror film about a power struggle between a dying woman and her deeply religious caretaker who believed she was a saint. First time filmmaker Rose Glass gave Saint Maud a unique and compelling visual style, solidifying it as one of the best horror films of the 21st century. After three years, she’s back with her second feature – Love Lies Bleeding – a dramatic thriller with serious dark comedy swagger that’s maybe even better. She’s two for two, folks.

I don’t want to reveal too much of the plot of Love Lies Bleeding because the movie works best if you go in as cold as possible. For those of you still reading my review, Kristen Stewart, in her very best screen performance to date, plays Lou. Lou is an emotionally bruised and deeply lonely gym manager out in some small town in New Mexico. She deals with gross assholes all day and is condescended to and treated like shit by not only her customers, but by her coworkers. One day, Jackie, an absolutely ripped female body-builder played wonderfully by Katy O’Brian, waltzes into town and into Lou’s gym, and the two hit it off immediately. From there, something happens that sets off a chain of catastrophic events surrounding Lou and Jackie, Lou’s dad played by a scary Ed Harris, Lou’s sister (Jena Malone) and her abusive alcoholic husband (Dave Franco), and a meth addict desperately in love with Lou (a scene-stealing Anna Baryshnikov).

While Love Lies Bleeding is extremely effective as a thriller, it’s even more effective as a drama. It may be full of darkly comic and sometimes even surreal violence, but it’s first and foremost a carefully observed character portrait of two women trying to outrun abuse. Glass deploys so many rich details in both the characters and world they live in, and she’s not afraid to take big swings using absurd visual metaphors. Take the Ed Harris character for example. In another movie he’d be at a Loony Tunes volume of maniacal evil, but here he’s fairly downplayed. A quiet sociopath who shows deep affection for bugs but will murder any human that costs him money. The way Glass writes the part and the way Harris plays him is nuanced in a way that makes him seem uncomfortably real in ways few movie villains, some of the real nasty ones, ever do. He’s like some low-key creep you’d briefly encounter on a cross country road trip, and keep talking about on the ride home. However, the film ultimately rises and falls on the dynamic between Lou and Jackie, and Glass, Stewart and O’Brian reel us in so hard. By the end of this movie, we really care about these people.

Love Lies Bleeding is the work of a very bold and daring filmmaker and at a time when the majority of mainstream movies feel like fucking toothpaste commercials, that’s important. It’s not a perfect movie, the first half is certainly more sure-footed than the second half, and there’s a detour to Vegas that seems not entirely needed, but it does so much right that this genre so often gets wrong. If anything it’s a promise that we’re eventually going to get a truly bonafide masterpiece from Rose Glass, perhaps sooner rather than later. Grade: B+ (In Theaters)

Late Night with the Devil

Cameron and Colin Cairnes‘ Late Night with the Devil takes a fantastic premise and a brilliant character actor and doesn’t quite know what to do with them. The film takes place in the 70s and is presented as this infamous broadcast of a late night talk show that was thoroughly forgettable before this infamous broadcast. The late night talk show, Night Owls, basically plays second fiddle in the ratings game to Johnny Carson. The show is hosted by Jack Delroy (the great and always underrated David Dastmalchian), a charismatic enough dude who isn’t quite as funny as Carson and isn’t really all that serious. It’s easy to see why his show is falling behind in the ratings. In a desperate bid to boost them, Delroy and his producers seek out a guest in the form of a teenage girl (Ingrid Torelli) who supposedly has the devil, that’s Satan himself, living inside of her. What could possibly go wrong????

Late Night with the Devil has an odd structure, it switches back and forth between the taped broadcast presented as found footage, and then to what happening during the commercial breaks, needlessly presented in black and white. I guess the filmmakers thought they needed more of a visual contrast, but I think it’s presented clear enough that they could 86 the black and white, but whatever. Also these commercial breaks only exist so the story can tell you things directly without having to vague about them. Better writing would allow you to be vague about them. Anyway, I need to also note that the film begins with this massive info dump about the background of the show and its host, Jack Delroy. It’s presented like a sort of vintage E! True Hollywood Story. “Wouldn’t these nuggets of info/context be better served sprinkled in throughout the narrative?” I thought to myself. “Shut the hell up, Michael. We’re only five minutes in, I’m sure they have a reason for this.” And they really didn’t. There’s a lot of big swings in Late Night with the Devil, but they don’t all add up to something tight and cohesive.

This could have been solved if the beats, or major events in the story that build upon each other to escalate tension, were tighter. For a movie that only spans 93 minutes, it feels like there’s a good half hour of padding. I generally love slow burns, especially in horror, but this feels a bit aimless. It tries to be funny the way many horror films do, cause every horror filmmaker thinks they’re Don fucking Rickles, but it seriously underwhelms in that department. I think it’s smart for the first half of this film to be funny because it puts the audience at ease and makes the terrifying moments hit that much harder, but the Cairnes Boys are in desperate need of a comedic script doctor, just to give it a little punch up. When shit hits the fan, the film gets more interesting and there’s, I counted three, truly effective sequences in the second and third quarters. Then the swing-for-the-fences ending happens that doesn’t make sense or work in the context in which the Cairnes Boys are presenting this movie to us.

I saw this with my roommate and we both agreed the biggest problem with Late Night with the Devil is that it ultimately doesn’t feel real. The guests don’t speak like human beings or even how human beings would speak on a talk show. It feels very scripted, even on their part, and I think that’s party because besides Dastmalchian and Australian comic Rhys Auteri, who plays his band leader, the acting is not very good and often quite over-the-top. Found footage is only effective if it feels real – The Blair Witch Project and Ghostwatch are the best examples of this I’ve seen – but here its in service of a very self-aware parody of 70s television culture. I don’t think it’s a homogenous mixture, it’s sort of like yoghurt and Modelo. Then we get some really awful CGI at the end, but I won’t go into that.

I didn’t hate this movie though, it does do some stuff very well and the central performance is really good. Dastmalchian is truly great and does so much heavy lifting he should get a stunt credit. It’s so good and the premise is so promising it makes you wish the movie was better. Grade: B- (In Theaters)

Quiet on Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV

Extremely conventional but consistently engaging Investigation Discovery docuseries documenting the verbal, emotional and sexual abuse present at Nickolodeon studios from the mid 90s to the early 2000s. Presented chronologically in four 45-minute episodes, we’re presented with talking head interviews, VH1-style, of former cast and crew members, some stage parents and different journalists. The journalist portions are pretty take it or leave it, but the testimony from former child actors like Bryan Hearne, Giovannie Samuels and especially Drake Bell and his father are really hard hitting stuff. Some of the stuff involving Dan Schneider, Nickolodeon’s “hit-maker”, was already pretty well known but the fact that Nickelodeon unknowingly(?) hired three pedophiles to work for them during this time, including one creep obsessed with John Wayne Gacey, is pretty shocking. I haven’t read Jeannette McCurdy‘s book but something tells me it’s a much more personal and pointed piece than what we get here. More often than not, this seems basically like “Behind the Music: Nickelodeon Edition”, but the third episode, which focuses solely on Drake Bell‘s account of what happened to him, is riveting from start to finish. It’s almost impossible to rate something like this, so I’m giving it a B–. It’s interesting but feels very slapped together. (Max)

Monster

Not to be confused with the Charlize Theron/Aileen Wuornos movie from 2003.

Japanese filmmaker Hirokazu Koreeda (Shoplifters, After Life, Broker) gets a lot of flack for essentially making the same movie over and over again – a heartfelt drama about a makeshift family of individuals, usually poor, who help each other overcome their own personal traumas and enrich each other’s lives in the process. I don’t mind it so much, seeing as though there’s rarely a film of Koreeda‘s that doesn’t touch me on an emotional level. Here, the filmmaker tries something a little different – a loose Rashomon variation about a boy at school who is labeled a bully. Our perception of the young “bully”, played in a fantastic child performance by Sōya Kurokawa, continually changes as the POV of the story switches from his overworked single mother (the great Sakura Andō, the mom from Shoplifters), his potentially abusive homeroom teacher (Eita Nagayama), the flamboyant boy he’s apparently bullying (another great child performance by Hinata Hiiragi), and even the school’s principal played by veteran Japanese actress Yūko Tanaka). Some segments are more successful than others, and the movie is at its best and most poignant when following the perspectives of the two adolescent boys. Monster won the Queer Palm at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, and while I applaud Koreeda switching it up, it didn’t move me like a lot of his recent work has and it didn’t intellectually stimulate me as much as his earlier stuff. Monster is a good movie on the cusp of a great one. Grade: B ($5 rental on VOD)