Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM.

First let me wish you all a Happy New Year! With a new year comes renewal, hope… and potential dread. So this week, I’m looking at three new movies where people face potentially dreadful situations, partly of their own making. There’s an abused architect, a compromised CEO, and a sympathetic assassin. 

Harbin

Co-Wri/Dir: Min-ho Woo

It’s 1909 in Korea. After defeating a European empire in the Russo-Japanese war, Japan is flush with imperial ambition. They want more colonies on the mainland and are looking hungrily at Korea, Manchuria, Mongolia, and China. But some independence-minded Koreans are regrouping to fight Japan. Their leader, Ahn Jung-geun (Hyun Bin), managed to defeat a Japanese battalion in a bloody battle. But when, following international laws, Anh released the disarmed POWs, their leader Mori (Park Hoon) shot a cannon at their base killing everyone except Anh. Now the survivors are meeting in Vladivostok to decide what to do next. This includes Kim (Jo Woo-jin) his closest ally, and Woo, (Park Jeong-min) his biggest rival. And some of them think Anh is a Japanese mole. To atone for his mistakes and to do something big, he vows to assassinate Ito Hirobumi (Lilly Franky: Shoplifters, Like Father, Like Son) one of the top statesmen of Imperial Japan who is calling for the annexation of Korea. 

To do this killing Anh must make his way to Harbin, a rail hub city right on the border of Russia and northeast China where Ito plans to give a public speech. But If he travels by train he will be caught. He must turn to a former comrade turned bandit, Ms Gong (Jeon Yeo-been) to try to secure explosives. But there is a traitor in their midsts, telling the Japanese all their plans. Can they make it to Harbin undetected, find the rat, fool their enemies, and carry out the assassination? Or are they fated to be erased from their country’s history?

Harbin is a vivid and gripping retelling of a famous historical event. It’s a classic cloak & dagger, full of action, thrills, drama, and deception. It’s done in the traditional style, with the name of each character appearing on the screen to help you keep track of which moustachioed fighter is which. But easier said than done, when everyone pulls down the brims of their fedoras to cover their faces. The locations are amazing: Anh crawling across the frozen waters of the Tumen River, horse caravans on the sands of Mongolia, ancient Russian train stations… very impressive! The sets and costumes are great too, with a drunken warlord festooned in animal furs or the ceiling lamps aboard a Russian train, swinging from side to side. If you have any interest in action-thrillers, spy stories or even NE Asian history, Harbin is the film for you.

Babygirl

Co-Wri/Dir: Halina Reijn

Romy (Nicole Kidman) is the CEO of a large, successful corporation that makes automated parcel-sorting equipment — similar to what Amazon has in their warehouses. She lives with her husband Jason a play director (Antonio Banderas) and their two teenage daughters, Isabel and Nora. Her life is almost perfect, but is missing a certain…. je ne said quoi. She is not sexually satisfied. One day she is startled by a vicious dog running rampant outside her office tower. She witnesses a random young man calm the dog down and return it to its owner. Later, inside her office, she is introduced to her latest intern; it’s the same guy she saw outside. Samuel (Harris Dickinson) has an unusually forthright manner, almost rude and overbearing for someone so young. He makes her feel unhinged and yet… intrigued. Who is this twerp, and why is he like that? She finds him overconfident and almost ridiculous. And yet… eventually, to her great surprise, they kiss and sparks fly.

Soon she is secretly meeting him in seedy hotel rooms for furtive sex. But he wants more — total domination over her in an S&M relationship. Romy loves her husband and kids has never done anything like this before. Even though he takes the dominant role, in real life she holds all the cards: she’s older, richer and his boss. She has more to lose, though, and it’s that threat that excites her. And she can’t got enough of him. What will happen if word gets out? Has she bit off more than she can chew?

Babygirl is an erotic drama about an older woman’s fling with a much younger man for the thrill of it all. It’s both highly sexualized and yet uncomfortable to watch in parts. It’s entirely told from Nicole Kidman’s (Before I go to Sleep, Genius, The Beguiled, The Killing of a Sacred Deer,  Boy Erased, The Upside, Destroyer, The Goldfinch,  Bombshell, The Northman) Romy’s point of view; we share her agony, her ecstasy, her cringing embarrassment (he treats her like a domesticated pet). As Samuel, Dickinson is opaque, functioning mainly as her erotic foil. He’s usually an excellent actor (Beach Rats, Triangle of Sadness, Scrapper, The Iron Claw) but in this movie he takes second all the way. Some people love this movie, others despise it. I’m somewhere in between. The plot is just a slight twist to the hoary old cliche of the powerful executive submitting to a dominatrix. I don’t need to watch a grown woman lick milk from a saucer. But other parts are quite exciting and altogether it’s worth it for Nicole Kidman’s performance. 

The Brutalist

Co-Wri/Dir: Brady Corbet

It’s post-WWII. László Tóth (Adrian Brody: Splice, Predators, The French Dispatch, Asteroid City) is a holocaust survivor from Hungary who arrives in America as a displaced person. His wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones) and niece Zsófia are nowhere to be seen. His cousin Attila (Alessandro Nivola) gives him a place to stay in his furniture store and puts him to work designing and building chairs. Things look up when the son of an oligarch offers him a job redesigning his father’s home library. Laszlo takes to it like a fish out of water, building a modernistic room with synchronized wooden panels and shelves beneath an open skylight. But when the industrialist Harrison Lee Van Buren Sr. (Guy Pearce) sees it, he goes ballistic and fires him without pay. Soon after his cousin falsely accuses him of sleeping with his wife Laszlo finds himself unemployed, homeless and addicted to drugs. He gets work doing manual labour at a ship yard with Gordon (Isaach De Bankolé) a man he befriended earlier until the industrialist who fired him seeks him out ago. Turns out Laszlo was a Bauhaus architect before the war, and the library was featured in modern architecture. Lee immediately rehires him, this time to build a monumental memorial on a hilltop in honour of his mother. But conflicts still trouble the two men’s relationship. Will Laszlo ever complete his masterpiece? Or will Lee crush him with his oppressive and egoistical nature? 

The Brutalist is a moving drama about the American Dream and the class struggle between two men. (The title refers to the Brutalist style of architecture Laszlo favours). It’s a full-fledged four hour epic, compete with an overture, intermission and various story lines within the plot. I’m only giving you a taste of it here, a three-minute review of a four hour movie. It is visually and audibly stunning, both in design and execution, from the score to the crisp camera work, even the surprising credit roll.  The acting is superb — I’m referring to Brody, Pierce, Jones and the rest of the large cast. This is a mature film made by a young director and former child actor. I’ve only seen one other movie by him, Vox Luxe, which, while visually interesting, didn’t have much to it. The Brutalist takes a quantum leap beyond that, filling in all the parts left out of his previous work. The movie is exciting, full of both hope and crushing devastation. It’s so well done that I left the theatre assuming it was a biopic, only later realizing it’s entirely fictional. 

The Brutalist is a stupendous movie that must be seen to be appreciated.

The Brutalist and Babygirl are now playing in Toronto, with Harbin opening this weekend; check your local listings.

This is Daniel Garber at the Movies, each Saturday morning, on CIUT 89.5 FM and on my website culturalmining.com.