Osgood Perkins’ The Monkey

By Stephen King’s standards, Captain Petey Shelburn was not such a bad father. He just had terrible instincts when buying collectibles. Don’t call this wind-up primate a toy, because it is no fun to play with. It is the reason why Shelburn was never around for his twin sons. Unfortunately, Hal and Bill Shelburn get stuck with their father’s evil legacy in Osgood Perkins’ The Monkey, based on King’s short story, which opens tonight in theaters.

Bill was Hal’s senior by a few minutes—and he never let his “younger” brother forget it. Bill bullied Hal mercilessly, but they were equally fascinated by their absent father. However, the airline captain did not intentional abandon his family, as viewers know from the bloody prologue. Inevitably, they find the drumming monkey tucked away with Capt. Petey’s things and turn the key in his back. Then, people start dying.

The Monkey does not physically stab people like Chucky. Instead, it somehow unleashes Final Destination-style accidents that always result in lethal gore. Unfortunately, you cannot direct the simian assassin towards a specific target. It kills who it wants to kill. The twins figure that one out after the second turn of the key. Tragically for Hal, it kills their mother Lois instead of Bill.

Of course, the Monkey cannot be destroyed, so they chain it up in a box and dump it in a well. Eventually, the twins go their separate ways to live sad, solitary lives. Hal is especially sad, but he still manages to slip up and father a son of his own. For young Petey’s safety, Hal tries to keep his distance. However, during a rare road trip together (which might be his final contact, if Petey’s mom and step-father have their way), Hal receives word that his guardian aunt died in a freak Monkey-like accident. By the time Hal and Petey (the younger) reach unfortunate Aunt Ida’s house, they find the town has been plagued by a series of unlikely but gruesome accidents.

King’s original story predated It, but the parallels that emerge in Perkins’ adaptation make it look like an early study for the mammoth novel. Similarly, children survive an encounter with an uncanny evil force, but must return to complete their unfinished business in adulthood. Both Pennywise the clown and the organ-grinder-like Monkey also represent the corruption of symbols of playfulness. However, the twins’ Cain and Abel dynamic adds a dark element unique to The Monkey.

The Other Laurens

Jade Laurens’ family home in Perpignan looks like the White House (in real life, the Chateau de Rastignac is a considered a source of inspiration for our official presidential residence) and her Uncle Gabriel is the spitting image of his twin brother, her late father Francois. However, both sets of doppelgängers are very different on the inside. Francois always had all the luck, because he was the older brother, by mere minutes. Nevertheless, now that her father is dead, Jade thinks her uncle should investigate, since he is a private detective. Reluctantly, he uncovers a good deal of dirty family laundry in Claude Schmitz’s The Other Laurens, which opens Friday in theaters.

Gabriel Laurens specializes in grubby divorces and background checks. Francois took the woman he loved, but Gabriel outlived them both, leaving him to deal with his mother’s death alone, shortly after his brother’s accidental demise. Of course, his niece does not believe it was an accident and the bikers that constantly tail her understandably pique Laurens’ own suspicion.

The same goes for his brother’s less than bereft American widow, Shelby, who was wife #2. She seems to be tight with the biker posse that claims to be Jade’s guardian [Hell’s] angels. Something is definitely afoot, but the family connections clearly cloud the detective’s judgment. He also tends to freak out the Perpignan locals, considering he is such a dead-ringer for his brother, so to speak.

Twists ensue (some of which viewers might anticipate), but Schmitz’s feverish, neon-lit noir is still a good deal of fun. You have plenty of classic elements, starting with the Cain and Abel twins. Olivier Rabourdin is appropriately rumpled and degenerate as Uncle Gabriel. He also has convincingly dysfunctional but potent familial chemistry Louise Leroy as Jade, which is important, because the film really would not make sense without it.

The Twin, on Shudder

Where better to recover from a profound family tragedy than a remote Finnish country village? If they are fortunate, they will be there in time for this year’s Midsommar ceremony. True to genre expectations, the Doyles somehow managed to move into an area that is a focal point for pagan weirdness in Taneli Mustonen’s The Twin, which premieres Friday on Shudder.

Sadly, Rachel and Anthony Doyle lost their son Nathan in a car wreck, but at least they still have his spare twin, Elliot. For a fresh start, they move to his ancestral Finnish home, but the standoffish locals welcome her like a case of Mad Cow Disease. Only Helen, a mildly eccentric English expat gives her the time of day. Unfortunately, Helen’s crazy talk about sinister pagan powers starts to sound believable when Doyle starts to suspect something is out to get Elliot.

Honestly, Elliot is such a sullen and off-putting kid, spending any length of time with him is hard enough. Enduring two of them is almost unimaginable. That is a major reason why the first half-hour or so hard to slog through. The film starts to click when Helen introduces a lot of creepy pagan lore. There is also a reasonably effective twist laying in wait for the audience, but Mustonen and co-screenwriter Aleksi Hyvarinen can’t quite stick the dismount.

One of the problems with the bulk of The Twin is the cold, detached behavior of Anthony, which makes it feels like yet another horror film trying to earn scares by undermining the institutions of marriage and family. Yet, the Conjuring franchise (for instance) has been so successful precisely because they are all about families coming together to overcome profoundly evil horrors (with the help of the Warrens, of course).

De Palma’s Sisters

This early, career-defining film by Brian De Palma probably features the best use of split screens since The Thomas Crown Affair. It definitely has exploitative elements, but it also boasts a fully orchestrated score composed by the legendary Bernard Hermann. Not surprisingly, “Hitchcockian” is often a word used to describe De Palma’s sinister 1972 homage. Freshly restored in 4K, Sisters (trailer here) opens this Friday at the Quad.

Contemporary viewers will pick up on odd echoes and resonances when watching De Palma’s gritty, ever-so-1970s film, starting with the opening sequences involving a voyeuristic game show called Peeping Toms. Phillip Woode has been set-up by French Canadian model Danielle Breton, but his chivalrous behavior earns him her respect and a date to use his free dinner for two. She won a set of Ginzo-esque knives, which should indeed sound ominous.

Breton gets very drunk during their date, but Woode continues to be gallant, driving her all the way home to remote and exotic Staten Island. He also must contend with her stalker ex-husband, Emil. However, the real surprise comes in the morning, when Breton reveals she lives with her twin, Dominique. Alas, it seems Dominique is even more prone to jealous rages, judging from the slasher murder of Woode. Grace Collier, a professionally stalled local SI journalist, sees it all, or at least a good deal of it from her rear window, but her most recent story was an expose on police brutality, so getting the cops to take her seriously will be a challenge.

Of course, De Palma tightly controls just what exactly the audience does and does not see, rather skillfully pulling off a neat feat of misdirection. He alludes to just about every Hitchcock film except Jamaica Inn, but the parallels with Psycho are especially strong, with a dysfunctional sibling relationship replacing Norman Bates’ special friendship with his mother. There is even a terrific scene in which a Life magazine reporter reveals the Breton sisters’ tragic backstory, much like Simon Oakland’s classic Psycho epilogue, but De Palma puts it at the midway point instead.

Sisters is not a perfect film. Arguably, a pivotal but totally nutty flashback-fantasia looks like it could be the ironic work of Guy Maddin, yet for fans, the rough edges are part of its charm. Regardless, its merits far outweigh its shortcomings, starting with its street-level depiction of 70s New York, which is just as effective as a time capsule of the era as Sidney Lumet’s more “respectable” films.

Margot Kidder is terrific as the Breton Twins, in what might be her best role not involving a man in a cape. She is all kinds of creepy and squirrely, but in a way that is entirely different and distinct from Norman Bates and his imitators. Likewise, William Finley immediately established his cult status with his unsettlingly weird turn as the mysterious Emil (probably half his credits come in films directed by De Palma and Tobe Hooper).

Lisle Wilson is quite charismatic and down-to-earth as Woode, making him quite a worthy Marion Crane analog. Granted, Collier is supposed to represent many of the era’s frustrations, but Jennifer Salt’s confrontational portrayal often leads to face-palms. However, ubiquitous 1980s character actor Bernard Hughes (Tron, The Lost Boys) is quite memorable explaining it all as Life reporter Arthur McLennen.

So, is it horror or is it a thriller? Hermann’s Hitchcockian score says the latter. That will be good enough for anyone who takes their movie soundtracks seriously, but people of good conscience could disagree. De Palma worked in both genres, blurring the lines between them with films like Carrie, The Fury, Body Double, and Dressed to Kill. It is still a tense and grabby film that has also become a fascinating cinematic artifact of its time. Highly recommended for fans of De Palma and psycho-killer movies (across genre), Sisters opens this Friday (10/12) in New York, at the Quad Cinema.

Open Roads ’18: Naples in Veils

This is the other Naples—the city we never see in films like Gomorrah. It is a center of great art and architecture, but death remains a constant presence there. Indeed, those cobblestone alleyways are both romantic and ominous in Ferzan Ozpetek’s Naples in Veils (trailer here), which screens during Open Roads: New Italian Cinema 2018.

After one scorching hot night with Andrea, Adriana is convincing he must be the one. Therefore, she is rather disappointed when he fails to show for their date the next day. The good news is he did not intentionally stand her up. The bad news is he happens to be on her slab at the medical examiner’s office. He wasn’t merely murdered. He was also blinded and disfigured. Looks like a Camorra warning killing to us, but nobody comes to that conclusion in this film.

Already reeling from horror and disappointment, Adriana starts seeing Andrea’s doppelganger throughout the city. That would be Luca, his twin brother, who was separately adopted out while both were still in infancy. Luca’s planned meeting with Andrea never happened, but he needs little encouragement to pick up with Adriana where his brother left off. Of course, they both agree to keep his kept-man presence in her flat secret, for fear his brother’s killers will then come looking for him. This definitely includes the police and even Antonio, the rumpled detective falling for her. Much to her own surprise, Adriana also starts feels a degree of attraction to him as well, further complicating matters.

The Naples of Gomorrah is nowhere to be found in the lush, sophisticated Veils, which should do wonders for the city’s tourist trade. The locales are exquisitely cinematic, while the drama itself is unapologetically steamy. It mostly qualifies as a psychological thriller in the tradition of De Palma’s Obsession, but there are also oblique hints of the supernatural. Yet, the really cool thing about the film is the extent to which its twists and turns are rooted in the city’s macabre lore.

Giovanna Mezzogiorno is absolutely terrific as the haunted (in whichever sense of the word) Adriana, proving you do not need to look like a CGI-enhanced supermodel to heat up the screen. Nobody will nod off during her scenes with Alessandro Borghi (as both brothers), but she is at her best playing with and off Adriana’s extended family and family friends, who constitute Naples old guard. Anna Buonaiuto is wonderfully tart-tongued and regal as Aunt Adele, while Beppe Barra is practically the soul of Naples incarnate as old ribald Pasquale.

Frankly, the merits of the ending are debatable, but it is a pleasure getting there. Watching Veils is like a sipping a series of cappuccinos on the city’s piazzas. Ozpetek masterfully commands the film’s seductive mood and even manages to pull off a surprise or two through misdirection. It may very well be his best film yet. Very highly recommended, Naples in Veils screens this Saturday (6/2) at the Walter Reade as part of this year’s Open Roads (and it can also be seen at the Seattle International Film Festival on 6/2, 6/5, and 6/6).

What Happened to Monday?: Multiple Noomi Rapaces on Netflix

In the medium-future, the Euro-dystopia has adopted China’s family planning policies. One-child allotments are rigorously enforced by the jackbooted Child Allocation Bureau (CAB). Extra siblings are humanely put into cryogenic sleep to await a better, more sustainable world. Yeah, sure there are. In any event, cranky inventor Terrence Settman was not about to let his orphaned septuplet granddaughters get whisked away to a bureaucratic fate worse than death. Instead, he secretly raised them to live as the tag-team Karen Settman persona. However, when the first Karen Settman of the week fails to come home, her grown twins must track her whereabouts without revealing their secret in Tommy Wirkola’s What Happened to Monday? (trailer here), a Netflix original film, which starts streaming this Friday.

Old Man Settman, seen in formative flashbacks, assigned each twin a day of the week to leave the apartment, which became their informal names among themselves. At the end of each day, the siblings would have a group review, so they could fake their way through their respective days. Since they each have their respective talents (Friday is a numbers cruncher, Thursday can drink all night with clients), they have risen up the corporate finance ladder quite quickly. However, on the day Karen Settman receives the big promotion they had been working towards, Monday disappears.

Obviously, if anyone on the outside sees two Karen Settmans, it would be curtains for at least six of them. Nevertheless, Tuesday will have to venture out to determine the fate of Monday. Despite some tiresome smoke-blowing from a work rival, it quickly becomes apparent the dastardly Nicolette Cayman is involved. Not only is she the architect of the draconian One Child policies and the director of the CAB, she is also a candidate for parliament, so she is not eager for news of septuplets surviving undiscovered well into adulthood to leak to the press.

Sometime in the 1970s, the apocalyptic left recognized Marx’s failures and adopted an 18^th Century British country curate as the guiding philosophical star. Thomas Malthus’s dire forecasts of exploding population and dwindling resources could be used to justify no end of governmental controls. Formerly a liberating force, the masses became the rapacious instrument of their own destruction. Happily, Malthusian analysis was thoroughly debunked by Julian Simon, but screenwriters Max Botkin and Kerry Williamson obviously did not get the memo. People are still little more than a drag on resources in Monday’s world. It is just a little tacky to kill them outright, like Cayman does.

Obviously, there are echoes of Orphan Black to be heard in Monday. It also bears some similarities to Ben Bova’s entertaining 1980s novel Multiple Man, in which a series of clones managed to get elected President of the United States and then somehow lose their “Monday.” Bova’s novel would probably require a lot of updating, but its political intrigue would still be more fun than Wirkola’s derivative dystopia.

Most problematically, Noomi Rapace does not distinctly delineate her various Karen Settmans, forcing us to rely on superficials, like wardrobe and hairstyle to tell them apart. Glen Close has chewed plenty of scenery as various villainesses, but she phones it in as Cayman. However, Willem Dafoe’s Grandpa Settman is appropriately intense and (justly) paranoid, while Marwan Kenzari charismatically upstages his love interest[s] as Adrian Knowles, the CAB officer who has been secretly carrying on an affair with Monday.

Dystopia is getting old. It’s time for the pendulum to swing back towards Heinleinesque and Roddenberryesque science fiction optimism. Monday is a case in point. It all just feels like familiar ground. Okay as a time-wasting stream, but instantly forgettable, What Happened to Monday? launches this Friday (8/18) on Netflix.

Contemporary Philippine Cinema at MoMA: Gemini

If Tennessee Williams had the opportunity to write a Philippine horror movie, it might have gone something like this. Julia and Judith were always like the Corsican Brothers. If one suffered from some sort of pain, so did the other. Unfortunately, Judith is bold and curious about the world, whereas Julia is sickly and allergic to nearly everything. Due to her frail health, both sisters must live sequestered lives. As a result, Judith harbors a great deal of resentment for her sister. That bitterness and sexual repression leads to violence in Ato Bautista’s Gemini (trailer here), which screens during MoMA’s new film series, A New Golden Age: Contemporary Philippine Cinema.

As Manuel’s interrogation begins, the detective acknowledges the slippery nature of truth, but we have to start somewhere. Julia finally wants to come clean. Her sister murdered Anton, the brother of their tutor, with whom the more forward Judith was romantically involved. When Anton eventually showed his true colors, it sparked a bloody altercation, after which Julia helped Judith dispose of the body. At least that is Julia’s story and she is sticking to it, for the time being. However, there are plenty of reasons to doubt her veracity, starting with the fact Manuel’s partner is a dead-ringer for Anton.

Gemini is filled with doubling, including the central twins, the odd doppelganger, and the frequent use of reflections. Frankly, the film is weird in just about every way. Somehow, Bautista uses techniques and motifs of experimental cinema to disorient and thoroughly creep out viewers. It is hard to say just what Gemini is, because it is probably too cerebral to be horror and too gory to be a straight psychological thriller. Regardless, it is certainly distinctive.

Sheena and Brigitte McBride are indeed identical twins, who are eerily cold and distant as Julia and Judith (or possibly Judith and Julia). Yet, we can vividly feel the fear of the former (presumably), as her constructed realities begin to collapse. However, it is Mon Confiado who really holds the film together and carries it through its twists and turns as the interrogator.

On top of all the surreal reality-problematizing, there is also a fair spot of body horror in Gemini. Yet, despite the profoundly warped perspective, there is a very human tragedy at the film’s center. Viewers have to be comfortable with all the gamesmanship, but experienced genre fans will find it is worth the effort. Recommended accordingly, Gemini screens this Sunday (6/4) and Saturday the 17^th at MoMA, as part of their upcoming Philippine film series.

Goodnight Mommy: Twins Can be a Handful

By now, when we see twins in cinema, we assume at least one is evil—maybe both (as in The Shining, The Krays, and Full House). Evil is probably too strong a word for Lukas and Elias. It might be fairer to say they are intense. They are also rather confused by their mother’s seemingly arbitrary behavior following her countenance-changing surgery. Their family drama will take a decidedly macabre turn in Veronika Franz & Severin Fiala’s Goodnight Mommy (trailer here), Austria’s recently announced foreign language Oscar submission, which opens tomorrow in New York.

This is the sort of film that is dashed difficult to review because Franz and Fiala build it around some audacious misdirection. They either keep you looking in the wrong direction, or they don’t. Regardless, it is probably safe to say this family is massively dysfunctional. For some reason, the mother seems to prefer Lukas over Elias, whom she is currently giving the silent treatment. Of course, her behavior makes no sense to the brothers. Since they are inseparable, they would both be equally culpable for whatever triggered her annoyance.

Her strange comportment coupled with her unrecognizable new features lead the lads to conclude the bandaged woman in the house is not really there mother. At this point, they commit to an antagonist course of action that will often be difficult to watch. Unfortunately for the woman, their house is quite remote and apparently sound-proof.

Produced by festival favorite Ulrich Seidl, Goodnight Mommy is the sort of horror film that explores corrosive psychological pathologies in the much the same manner as Polanski in his prime. There is also a big third act revelation that changes viewers’ perspective on everything that came before. Whether you see it coming or not, it is impressive how slyly the film is cut together leading up to that point.

Lukas and Elias Schwarz are frighteningly believable as the extreme twins. They are all kinds of twitchy, yet they keep us consistently off-balance and hesitant to pass judgement. If they have seen their own movie, they should probably be in therapy now. Susanne Wuest also maintains the ambiguity, while playing some truly harrowing scenes. (Wuest also made a strong impression in Marco Kalantari’s The Shaman, proving critics ignore short films at their peril.)

Even with Seidl’s imprimatur, it is somewhat surprising Austria has submitted a genre film for Oscar consideration, albeit one that is quite polished and rather challenging. After all, within the last ten years, they have won twice with The Counterfeiters and Amour, garnering a third nomination for Revanche. However, what really baffles is the decision not to release Goodnight Mommy in time for Mother’s Day. Seriously, it’s a natural tie-in. Recommended for fans of horror and dark psychological thrillers revolving around children, Goodnight Mommy opens tomorrow (9/11) in New York, at the East 86^th Street Cinema.

The Double: One Jesse Eisenberg Too Many

It was Nabokov’s favorite Dostoevsky work, but he might not have recognized this vaguely British, boldly dystopian adaptation. Simon James is about to meet a new co-worker with a familiar face, who will turn his drab little life upside down in Richard Ayoade’s The Double (trailer here), which opens this Friday in New York.

James is a mousy Winston Smith toiling away in a soul-deadeningly bureaucratic data processing firm. He works like a mule producing mountains of reports, but the boss, Mr. Papadopoulos constantly belittles him, never even properly remembering his name. Simon James initially befriends James Simon, his relentlessly confident doppelganger, even completing his paper-pushing assignments in exchange for advice on wooing Hannah, a pale young woman in the copy department. Even though she lives across the courtyard from his Soviet-style apartment building, she has only the barest awareness of James’ existence.

Naturally, Simon soon starts pursuing him for his own satisfaction, while insidiously undermining James’ already tenuous position with the company. As the put upon James’ Orwellian world becomes increasingly Kafkaesque, he starts to act out of desperation.

For those who were less than charmed by Submarine, Ayoade’s sad-eyed moppet coming-of-age tale, The Double will come as a pleasant shock. Even though it often feels like the unauthorized sequel to Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, there is a real vision thing going on here. Specifically, the strategy of recasting Dostoevsky in a dystopian setting is a brilliant way to still connect to the original story’s Russian-ness, while striving for universality. After all, novels like 1984 and We were conceived as Stalinist critiques, which suddenly seems highly relevant again given Putin’s re-commencement of Russian May Day parades.

Similarly, it is nice to see Jesse Eisenberg step outside his sheepish hipster comfort zone to create two very distinctively pathological personas as Simon and James (or vice versa). His two-handed scenes played single-handedly crackle with tension and bite. Mia Wasikowska’s Hannah is rather drearily demure, but at least she is a convincing blank slate for James to project his yearnings upon. In contrast, Wallace Shawn and Kobna Holdbrook-Smith ham it up something fierce as the company president and security guard, but the effect is much more unsettling than funny-ha-ha.

Ayoade and co-adapter Avi Korine have created a rigorously consistent, dark, and dank vision of an analog future that almost was and maybe will be again. Production designer David Crank and his team did incredible work making it all feel (uncomfortably) lived in. It is an admirably disciplined film that never trafficks in empty surrealism merely to score points with cult movie fanatics. Recommended for devotees of literate urban fantasy, The Double opens this Friday (5/9) in New York at the Landmark Sunshine.

Scapegoat: Du Maurier’s Dead Ringer

If her uncle had not been such an idiot, Elizabeth II never would have been Queen.  Due to his dubious judgment, his brother’s daughter will soon ascend to the throne.  The caddish Johnny Spence half-jokingly describes the days leading up to her coronation a period of monarch-less anarchy.  It will indeed make a fitting backdrop for Charles Sturridge’s completely Anglicized adaptation of Daphne Du Maurier’s The Scapegoat (trailer here), which airs in syndication on participating PBS stations, including Chicago’s WTTW this coming Saturday night.

John Standing has just been downsized out of job as a boarding school teacher.  With no family to support and lacking any significant ambitions or prospects, he sets out on vaguely defined walking tour.  Stopping at a seedy public house, he is startled to come face to face with his dead ringer, the wastrel Johnny Spence.  After a night of imbibing with the charming but overbearing Spence, Standing is surprised to wake up and find the man has absconded with his anonymity, leaving him to take his position of wealth and privilege.

Unfortunately, Standing soon deduces the Spence family fortunes are sagging.  His doppelganger was hoping to save their glass foundry with a Hail Mary business deal, but he rather doubts the playboy pulled it off.  However, he is quite charmed to meet the man’s spirited young daughter (Mary Lou, a.k.a. Piglet) and his nervous wife Frances.  Conversely, he is quite uncomfortable around Nina, Spence’s sister-in-law with whom he seems to be having an affair with.  Yet, nobody seems to suspect his reluctant impersonation, not even his resentful brother Paul or their morphine addicted mother, Lady Spence.  Frankly, the family might just be better off with the new and improved Johnny Spence, but the old one is still out there, up to no good.

Produced by ITV, Scapegoat is a nifty little thriller that had a spot of film festival play before its American television run. Transferred from the south of France to post-war Britain, Sturridge’s adaptation is tightly paced and uses the impending coronation as a clever metaphor.  As the director of most of the beloved Brideshead Revisited miniseries as well as the masterful A Handful of Dust, Sturridge has a keen feel for Twentieth Century British period pieces.  He displays a nice touch with Scapegoat, combining a Downton-esque vibe with film noir-ish elements.

Logically, Sir Alec Guinness (the master of multiple parts) had first crack at the Standing/Spence role in Robert Hamer’s 1959 feature film.  Yet, Matthew Rhys (now probably best known for FX’s The Americans) steps into his shoes admirably well.  In fact, this might be his strongest small screen work, eclipsing his suitably brooding John Jasper in The Mystery of Edwin Drood.  His Spence is charismatically wicked, but he also makes a convincingly confused and depressed everyman as Standing.  Alice Orr-Ewing is a bit vanilla as poor Frances, but Andrew Scott (Jim Moriarty in Sherlock) adds some edgy energy into the mix as Paul Spence.  Yet, Sturridge’s wife and Brideshead co-star Phoebe Nicholls occasionally upstages everyone as the smart-than-her-employers housekeeper, Charlotte.

Altogether, The Scapegoat is quite cinematic by television standards.  Handsome looking and intelligently written, it is definitely recommended for fans of Brit mysteries and literary dramas when it airs on select PBS stations later in the month.

NYAFF ’12: Secret Love

Jin-ho and Jin-woo are not just brothers.  They are twins with Shakespearean bad luck.  Each has suffered from a coma-inducing accident, but not simultaneously.  In fact, it is when both are finally conscious and ambulatory that things really get complicated for Jin-woo’s wife.  Starring NYAFF special guest Yoon Jin-seo of Oldboy fame, Ryu Hoon-i’s Secret Love (trailer here), screens for free this coming Tuesday as a co-presentation of the 2012 New York Asian Film Festival and the Korean Cultural Service in New York.

Two months after their wedding, an exhausted Yeon-yi dutifully cares for her comatose husband.  She knew he had a brother, but she is not prepared for the sight of Jin-ho.  Much to her consternation, the prodigal twin seems more interested in her emotional condition than his brother’s physical prognosis.  Yet, slowly but surely, she starts to fall for Jin-ho.  Frankly, he might just be the better of the matched set.  Of course, right when she is poised to embrace her new love for Jin-ho, Jin-woo pops up again.

The premise of Secret might sound vaguely like Sandra Bullock’s While You Were Sleeping, but it is anything but.  It starts out as a classier if more or less conventional Korean melodrama, but pivots into a sinister psychological thriller.  Indeed, it does not take Jin-woo long to figure out the reason his wife and brother are acting so awkward around him and he is slightly put out by it.  Before long, she is looking at Jin-woo like he is Charles Boyer in Gaslight—or at least she thinks it is Jin-woo.  When he changes his look to match his brother, it makes it devilishly difficult to tell them apart.

Secret begins with a rather confusing prologue that will eventually be explained during the denouement.  It is worth sticking with it though, thanks to Ryu’s wickedly stylish approach to both the forbidden love story and psychological thriller aspects of the film.  To top it off, his dizzying climax would appeal to the old master himself.

Of course, there is a reason Secret was chosen as part of the Korean Cultural Service’s mini-Yoon Jin-seo tribute series.  Her performance is sensitive, but also brittle and raw, making it far more realistic than anything you will see in a Hollywood tearjerker.  Basically hitting for the cycle, she creates a convincing portrait of a woman struggling with depression, while also appearing in some scorching love scenes.

For a time, it looked like circumstances would force Yoon to cancel her trip to New York, but she subsequently rescinded her cancelation.  If she can make it from Korea, New York cineastes have no excuse for missing Tuesday’s screening.  It’s free after all, so plan to arrive early.  A strange but compelling thriller-tragedy hybrid, Secret Love is definitely recommended for anyone who likes their cinema dark and moody when it screens this Tuesday (7/10) at the Tribeca Cinemas, courtesy of the 2012 New York Asian Film Festival, in conjunction with the Korean Cultural Service.

Eastwood’s Hereafter

That bright light must be significant. Near death researchers argue that since so many accounts agree on the particulars, there must be something to them. Some even hint at a conspiracy of silence in Clint Eastwood’s latest film, but the jazz-supporting actor-director thankfully never veers too far into such X-Filish territory in Hereafter (trailer here), which opens today in New York before expanding nationally next week.

Conversing with the dead made psychic George Lonegan nearly unfit for life among the living. Much to the dismay of his slick operator brother, he chucked it all in, despite the serious money to be made, preferring a quiet blue collar life. Yet, just like Pacino’s Michael Corleone, he keeps getting pulled back into his former life. French television talking head Marie Lelay got a glimpse of what haunts Lonegan. Caught up in a Southeast Asian tsunami, she briefly crossed over and back. Slightly preoccupied with the experience, her career and romantic relationship suffer as a result. While in third story arc, young Marcus, an identical twin grieving his brother Jason, is desperately searching for a legitimate medium like Lonegan amidst all the charlatans of London’s New Age scene.

Eventually, these three twains will meet, but it takes an awfully long time to get there. Despite the supernatural themes, Eastwood strives for an elegiac tone throughout Hereafter, eschewing cheap chills. (However, it is truly horrifying when the action culminates at a publishing trade show.) Though a bit snoozy, the director’s string-heavy score sets the right mood. Indeed, Hereafter has a very Euro-art film sense of time and ambiance.

Arguably, Hereafter is one of those films whose whole is less than the sum of its parts. The opening tsunami sequences are reasonably intense and realistic. However, subsequent scenes of Lelay moping around taking bad career advice are paint-by-numbers stuff. Lonegan’s relationship with his brother is also rather standard issue, but his aborted flirtation with a fellow student in his adult ed cooking class is sharply written and really finely turned, by Matt Damon and Bryce Dallas Howard, respectively. However, the most reliable strand involves the two twins, quite impressively played by Frankie and George McLaren. Completely natural in every scene, they are remarkably assured young actors.

Sensitively lensed by cinematographer Tom Stern, Hereafter is certainly a classy package. The discrete payoff might also grow on mature viewers upon later reflection. However, the overall presentation is a bit too long and much too self-serious. A respectable film but nowhere nearly as engaging as Gran Torino, Hereafter seems unlikely to be a major player come awards season. Earning a modest recommendation, Hereafter opens today (10/15) in New York at the AMC Loews Lincoln Square and Regal Union Square 14, before spreading wider next Friday.

Japanese Cinema: The Burning

The Burning
Directed by Kenta Hayashida
Pathfinder Home Entertainment

Twins tend to be an unsettling presence in dramatic films, such as The Krays, Dead Ringers, and of course Village of the Damned. Evidently, the Gemini effect also holds true in Japanese cinema, but while Minako and Hinako are indeed deeply disturbed twins, they also happen to be the sympathetic protagonists in Kenta Hayashida’s The Burning (a.k.a. Brulee, trailer here), now available on DVD.

Minako and Hinako have been separated for thirteen years, since they set the fire which killed their abusive father. Hinako was taken in by her uncle, a pastry chef in a seaside resort town, where she lives a relatively normal high school life, aside from her escalating fire-starting compulsion. One day, Minako arrives unannounced, carrying an urn she claims holds the ashes of their grandmother. However, it turns out the urn is for her. The shy Minako (usually distinguishable by her long scarf) has a malignant brain tumor and her time is short.

Together again, the twins obviously share an unusually deep bond. Hinako considers her sister a calming influence on her, yet her arsonist instincts remain unabated, resulting in the burning of her uncle’s shop. Suddenly on the run, the twins are determined to stay together, but Minako keeps her secrets, fearing the truth would lead to loss of Hinako in her last remaining days. Real life twins Rika and Mika Nakamura are quite effective as Minako and Hinako respectively. Rika Nakamura is particularly touching as the tragic Minako, conveying all the unfair pathos of her circumstances.

While much of Burning might lend itself to a macabre treatment, Hayashida seems to consciously resist the conventions of horror films. Rather than build suspense around the arson scenes, he always presents them well underway. Although at times the twins do act more than a little creepy, there is never any doubt where viewers’ sympathies should be. They are after all unquestionably victims in the context of the film. Appropriately, Hayashida maintains an elegiac tone throughout, dramatically underscored by Toshihiro Mizuno’s melancholy classical soundtrack.

Unfortunately, the live-in-the-moment theme of Burning would be tragically fitting for Hayashida, who passed away just as the film was released in Japan. While a relatively brief seventy minutes, Hayashida’s haunting film certainly feels like a complete emotional journey. It is definitely well worth checking out on DVD.