Cultural Mining

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

This week, I’m looking at three new movies about ordinary people who find themselves in extraordinary situation. There’s a tennis pro facing a murder investigation, a podcaster haunted by demons, and a middle school teacher who finds himself in outer space.

Undertone

Wri/Dir: Ian Tuason

Evy (Nina Kiri) is a young woman with a flourishing career.  She recently moved back home to care for her elderly mother (Michèle Duquet), who is in a semi-comatose state. Evy earns her living working on a popular podcast called Undertone. The weekly show looks at supernatural phenomena. She co-hosts it with Justin (Adam DiMarco) who is a believer in everything weird and unexplained. Evy, in contrast, is the rational skeptic (think Mulder and Scully from X-Files). She works remotely, so it wasn’t a big deal to move her makeshift studio — a chair, a mic, headphones and a computer screen — to her mother’s dining room table. She’s there every night recording (mistakes can always be edited out later)

But this week looks a bit different from usual. Justin says he received ten MP3s from an anonymous user. (Listeners are encouraged to send anything supernatural) These recordings were made by a young married couple who hear strange noises at night.  Noises like kids nursery rhymes sung backwards… and distorted voices repeating sinister phrases. And as she hears successive recordings, Evy starts to feel a supernatural presence in the room. And super-creepy Catholic icons (her mom is deeply religious) — like cannibalistic babies devouring a saint — keep appearing in her mothers bedroom, even when she hides them away. Can digital spirits infest Evy’s house via the internet? Or is it all just her imagination?

Undertone is a genuinely terrifying movie, that scares you using sound rather than images. (I saw it in Ultra AVX, which means the sound system somehow situates the screeches and booms and rumbles you hear so it feels like you’re there with Evy in her house.) 

A simple plot, low budget and basically just one actress throughout the whole movie, but it really is disturbing. It had me tense and jumpy throughout the whole thing. 

Undertone scared my pants off.

Islands 

Co-Wri/Dir: Jan-Ole Gerster

Tom (Sam Riley) is a tennis pro who works at a resort in the Canary Islands. He’s wiry but frazzled-looking, subsisting on beer, vodka and the occasional bump of coke. By day, he instructs vacationers on how to swing their racquets; by night he hangs at Waikiki — the local dance bar — often waking up the next morning in a strange woman’s bed or crumpled up on a sandy beach. He’s a bit of a local celebrity celebrity; they call him Ace for once beating Nadal at an impromptu tennis game on the island. He knows everybody and everybody knows him, but he has few friends, other than a local traffic cop and a man who rents his camels for rides. 

But when Anne and Dave (Stacy Martin, Jack Farthing) a rich, young married couple approach him for special lessons for their son Anton (Dylan Torrell), things start to change. They welcome him into their lives, and share all their personal troubles with him, both the good things and the bad. He takes time off work to drive them on a tour of the island, and gets them an upgrade to their hotel room. He feels almost like part of their family. But when Dave disappears one night after drinking with Tom — his clothes and phone discarded near the ocean — the police begin to suspect Anne and Tom as his killers. Are they having an affair? Is Dave dead or just lost? And is Tom a perpetrator or a  victim of some strange conspiracy?

Islands is a good mystery about intrigue on an isolated island resort. It feels like a Hitchcock movie in its set-up, but not in its finish (no spoilers). Sam Riley is excellent as Tom, and while I don’t recognize any of the other actors, they were quite good, and would have been played by Naomi Watts and Richard Grant a few decades ago. The magnificent scenery — cliff-side roads, vast beaches and craggy rocks — give the film a touch of grandeur in what other might have been a small drama. 

If you’re in the mood for a good mystery with a tropical breeze, check out Islands.

Project Hail Mary

Co-Dir: Phil Lord & Christopher Miller

Dr Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling) wakes up one morning, not knowing where he is or why he’s there. He has a long beard and hair that he doesn’t remember growing — so he must have been asleep for a long time . But that’s only a part of it: he’s on board a spaceship zooming through the far reaches of the universe! And the other two passengers are both dead. But through a series of flashbacks he slowly remembers what’s going on. He’s actually a middle school science teacher, not an astronaut. But the earth’s very existence has been threatened by an Astrophage – literally a single-cell microscopic entity, that’s eating the sun.  Which could mean total destruction of the earth in the not-so-distant future. He is recruited by NASA on the basis of a scientific paper he published years earlier but is suddenly relevant again. And that’s how he finds himself on a spaceship in order to stop the microphages and save the planet. 

But the journey gets more complicated when he sees another ship shaped like nothing on earth. And there’s a sinister alien on-board who looks like a pile of rocks. Should he kill it? Or try to communicate? To his great surprise, the creature — whom he dubs Rocky — seems friendly, and apparently wants to stop the astrophage, too. But can he be trusted? Can they work together? And is Grace destined to die alone in space?

Project Hail Mary is a delightful and engrossing science fiction fantasy about an ordinary man turned astronaut trying to save the universe. It has a lot in common with Ridley Scott’s The Martian, the hit movie from 2015 starring Matt Damon… not the least because, again, it’s based on a novel by Andy Weir. And like The Martian, it’s mainly about one character, a clever guy in outerspace who has to use his brain to survive. It’s also packed with religious references. Grace functions as a humble, Jesus-like character, who offers his life to save humanity. His alien buddy is Rocky (as in Peter) and the spaceship itself, called Hail Mary, is certainly full of Grace.  I guess this is to add more gravity to the plot.  I don’t like the way — especially right now  — the film glorifies war by pointlessly setting early scenes aboard an aircraft carrier, as if to say, hey, look at all our shiny new weapons! Setting that aside, though, the movie depends on Ryan Gosling to make it work. He’s basically the only actor on the screen for most of the movie. Luckily, Gosling is as likeable and watchable as ever.

Project Hail Mary is the kind of movie that can entertain an 8-year-old or an 80-year-old. 

Undertone opens in Toronto this weekend , check your local listings; Project Hail Mary starts in select theatres on Monday, March 16th; and Islands is now available on VOD.

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

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