Cultural Mining

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

Sometimes what you don’t see is scarier than what you do see. This week, I’m talking about two new films that deal with invisible villains. There’s an unknown bogeyman that roams the streets and an unsourced flock of machines that rules the skies. 

Her Private Hell

Co-Wri/Dir: Nicolas Winding Refn 

It’s a futuristic, dystopian Copenhagen full of high-rises stretching beyond the clouds, and above a sinister mist enveloping the city. Elle (Sophie Thatcher) is a beautiful young woman staying in a fancy hotel furnished with gold-flocked wallpaper and shiny satin sheets. She’s there to shoot a movie, along with Hunter (Kristine Froseth) a naive, vapid American influencer, who never feels comfortable when she’s not taking selfies. Elle’s father, an eccentric money mogul known as Johnny Thunders, is producing the movie. The third major cast member is Dominique (Havana Rose Liu), Elle’s former best friend and sometime lover, but who is now married to Johnny, making her Elle’s stepmother. Dominique exalts in her newfound wealth, exuding attitude and haut couture. 

The movie they’re shooting is a kitschy, sci-fi fantasy called Candy Floss Girls. It takes place aboard a 1950s rocket ship, piloted by Elle, along with an all-female crew furnished with torpedo breasts. Like a scene from Tron, the spaceship is caught in a vortex and crash lands on a barren planet covered with giant glowing crystals. 

Meanwhile, in postwar occupied Japan, a handsome G.I. is mourning his lost daughter. She disappeared one day, and no one knows why. He blames the Yakuza, and when he sees them exploiting a young woman in a dark alley, he springs into action, starting a violent fight with everyone nearby, including a rogue Sumo wrestler whose eyeball he pokes out.

This whole world appears to Elle when, like a modern-day little match girl, she lights a cigarette. Suddenly the boundaries between a futuristic Europe and post-war Japan start to blur, and Kay finds himself walking among the crystals of the Candy Floss Girls’ stage set and among Copenhagen’s sex clubs and discotheques.

But more people are disappearing into the mist, and a serial killer / urban legend known as The Leatherman is roaming the streets murdering women and girls. Elle and Hunter witness him attacking someone in another high-rise penthouse suite, but there’s nothing they can do about it. And two mysterious women, known as the foxes, manipulate events behind the scenes.

Will past Kay meet future Elle? And who will stop The Leatherman?

Her Personal Hell is a slow-motion, science fiction explosion of images and sound. The plot and characters are a vehicle for a sex- and drug-filled, time-shifting universe. It’s a gaudy and sumptuous fantasy, laden with bright reds, glowing golds and a deep, impenetrable darkness. 

Most of the dialogue, is over the top kitsch, but don’t be misled. It’s beautiful and sensuous and bloody. It references images by Kenneth Anger to Rainer Werner Fassbinder, but in a unique way. (You can tell you’re watching a Nicolas Winding Refn film in about 5 seconds — it’s that distinct.)

I left the press screening of this movie surrounded by other critics with baffled and disgusted looks on their faces — almost universal loathing in reaction to this movie. And yes, it is kind of ridiculous at the beginning, and intentionally artificial, with everything shot on a stage set. But if you let yourself be taken in, allow yourself to be enveloped in the beauty and sensuousness and senseless violence it’s an incredible experience. 

Just let Her Personal Hell unleash your personal psychedelic experience. You just might like it.

The Outer Threat

Wri/Dir: William Woods

It’s a typical Saturday on a family farm in the Carolinas.  Michelle the nuclear physicist Mom (Constance Lee) is in the woods teaching their daughter Maddie (Callista Crowe) how to shoot pheasants. Their nerdy son François (Isaac Smelcer-Zhang) is fooling around, online. The kids are homeschooled and the rule is no work on weekends — and that goes for Daniel the astronomer Dad (Mark O’Brian), too. But he is nowhere to be seen. He’s hidden away in his usual spot, an underground, cold-war bunker, studying the stars. His job? To spot any anomalies in outer space that might suggest an alien life form of some kind, no matter how far away it might be.

And on this day, he sees it. A faint, pulsing signal, somewhere it couldn’t occur naturally. So he calls his supervisor to a meeting — but he is promptly dismissed as wearing a tinfoil hat. His job is a relic, a joke. His kids roll their eyes and Michelle wants him to spend more time with their kids away from the rusty old bunker.

But when he shows her his data, something clicks. She warns him not to tell anyone about this; if word gets out it could lead to mass panic, worldwide. But when Daniel, just to make sure, sends off a single email about what he discovered, the response is almost immediate. Power is cut off, phones stop working, the internet goes dead, and the skies are suddenly filled with countless drones. They decide to drive upstate to find Michelle’s estranged father (Oscar Hsu), possibly the only person alive who could make sense of all this. But is it too late?

The Outer Threat is a tight, taut, totally-watchable science-fiction thriller and cautionary tale. It presents contemporary America turned upside down when facing a possible alien invasion, and how ordinary people react. It’s a lot like Stephen Spielberg’s recent Disclosure Day, only made on a micro budget, not with hundred of millions. This means no impressive  special effects and CGI aliens with big heads. Instead it makes do with a few drones, and some glowing green radar screens and obsolete cold-war paraphernalia for good effect. It’s a Canadian movie meaning good acting, low budget.

I also like the casual use of a mixed-race family without ever drawing attention to it; it’s a given, not a plot twist or a moral lesson. It just is.

Not everything works, though. The zombie-apocalypse feel of much of the film — the almost instantaneous shift from normal attitudes to a disaster mindset in 24 hours — seems too sudden and all-pervasive to be believable. (Where did all the people go?) And the ending is rather abrupt. But taken with a grain of salt and some suspension of disbelief, the film does make sense. 

The Outer Threat makes use of the best kind of science fiction — a story that is believable. 

Her Personal Hell and The Outer Threat both open this weekend in Toronto; 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