Scary Movies XIII: Rabbit Trap

Daphne Davenport was on pace to become another Laurie Anderson or Naim June Paik. She describes her concrete-adjacent electronic-distorted found music as “influential” rather than popular. Unfortunately, true fame will probably elude her, because she is a character in a horror film. She hoped to discover some inspiring natural sounds with her recording engineer husband Darcy, but they also find a sinister wild child in director-screenwriter Bryn Chainey’s Rabbit Trap, produced by SpectreVision, which screens tonight as part of Scary Movies XIII.

Daphne is the “artiste” and Darcy is her enabler. He spends hours doing the legwork, roaming the Welsh moors, making field recordings of squishy-squashy natural noises, which she samples into her industrial soundscapes. It is a reclusive life, but apparently, they needed to get away from the London scene. They are also clearly carrying a lot of baggage that they never discuss, but it comes to a boil when the kid shows up.

Even the Da-Da’s notice how cagily their visitor remains nameless. However, the wild child brims with knowledge regarding the local animals and flora. The strange youngster even seems to have a special connection to the rabbits, especially the dead ones. Indeed, the nature child should remind Nat Kind Cole fans that “Nature Boy” is actually an extremely creepy song. Yet, despite this squirreliness, Daphne forges an unhealthy attachment to “the child,” which encourages not-so-subtle attempts to undermine her marriage.

Soon, Darcy starts freaking out over their little stalker’s behavior. He also passes out and loses time after ill-advisedly walking into a fairy circle. Admittedly, the little weirdo warned him not to do it, but he did so anyway, losing time and consciousness as a result.

In some ways, Rabbit Trap is like an Enys Men, flavored with an extract of Blow Out, which makes it ten times more grounded. The folk horror runs heavy in these parts. The atmosphere is thick and it has amazingly clear audio fidelity. The grungy 1970s period details are also highly evocative. Frankly, this is a world you wouldn’t want to visit, but it definitely sounds massively eerie.

Dev Patel’s Monkey Man

He is an underground fighter, whose masked persona is inspired by Hanuman. He encounters a woman named Sita in his quest for vengeance, but this is not the Ramayana. This is old school retribution at its most brutal. Some of the most powerful men in India are responsible for his mother’s death, so now they are going to pay in Dev Patel’s Monkey Man, which opens tomorrow in theaters.

We never really catch the “Kid’s” name, but he takes the alias of “Bobby” while working in the kitchen of the elite private club affiliated with his enemies. As a boy, he watched helplessly as the future police chief killed his mother, as part of an operation to clear their community off land coveted by a politically connected cult. Their (maybe not so vaguely) Modi-sounding nationalist party is on the verge of winning the election, but “Bobby” might not even be aware of politics. He is hatching a plan to make Chief Rana pay. Still, he cannot help noticed Sita, one of the club’s hostesses, whose soul has not been fully corrupted yet.

Bobby’s plan is not great, but he intends to compensate with the red-hot intensity of his rage. He might need a little more than that, but he might find it during a training montage. Sure, we have seen them before, but not with Zakiir Hussain keeping rhythm as the character appropriately known simply as the “Tabla Maestro,” which indeed he is.

Hussain, a member of John McLaughlin’s Shakti, has appeared in films before, but they have mostly been classy Merchant-Ivory productions, like Heat and Dust. In contrast, Monkey Man is about as bloody and seamy as a movie can possibly get. It is not for the squeamish. This is a straight-up payback thriller, but it is getting marketed for horror audiences, partly because it is produced by Jordan Peele and partly because it is so unapologetically violent.

Directing himself, Patel has sort of made a Mr. Hyde companion to his Dr. Jekyll-ish breakout film, Slumdog Millionaire. Bobby, or whoever he is, is another slum kid, but he has very different goals in life.

Hotel Mumbai: Facing the New Template of Terror

Deadlier and more destructive acts of terrorism have been committed in recent years, but the 2008 Mumbai attacks were probably the most successful at instilling sheer terror. Part of the horror was the vicious simplicity of it all: teams of armed gunmen shooting civilians indiscriminately. The coordinated attacks paralyzed the city, culminating in the siege of the venerable Taj Mahal Palace Hotel. The tragedies and atrocities of those dark days are vividly recreated in Anthony Maras’s Hotel Mumbai, which opens this Friday in New York.

This is not an action movie, but there is a weird parallel with Die Hard when Arjun starts his day having footwear issues. The hard-working Sikh is already expecting his second child, so he could not afford to miss a shift. Initially, the head chef Oberoi dismisses him for the day, but he relents, allowing him to borrow a pair of his ill-fitting shoes instead, thereby establishing him as both a stern taskmaster and a figure of compassion. Together, Arjun, Oberoi, and the rest of the Taj staff will do their best to save their guests when the terrorists start executing everyone, floor by floor.

Of course, there is a rather diverse clientele in the hotel that day. We soon meet the well-heeled Muslim Zahra and her Yankee newlywed David, who have a newborn baby and a British nanny up in their suite. Russian oligarch Vasili has two escorts waiting in his room, but the terrorists will get to them first. When news of the attacks first reaches the Taj they will admit a group of survivors, including Australian tourists Bree and Eddie. Unfortunately, the first pair of backpack-wearing gunmen also gain entrance with the group of refuge-seekers.

Hotel Mumbai is a harrowing film that will make many viewers uncomfortable (in ways that they should be discomfited). It is much like One Less God (a.k.a. House of War), another Australian film dramatizing the attacks in the Taj Mahal, but Maras and co-screenwriter takes it further and deeper. To their credit, they never obscure the Islamist ideology of Lashkar-e-Taiba terrorists committing the mass murders, with logistical support from elements within the Pakistani intelligence service. Chillingly, we hear a steady stream of the brainwashing encouragement from their Svengali, “Brother Bull,” which sounds like hate-speech seasoned with socialist class warfare.

Maras also strikes a good balance in terms of the violence presented on screen. A great many innocent hotel worker are executed at point-blank range, right before our eyes, but probably just as many are shot off-screen. As result, the film should not be accused of white-washing anything, but neither is it an endless cycle of death and sadism.

Dev Patel probably does his best work since Slumdog as Arjun. We can feel in our own guts the profound degree of his fear, which makes it so compelling each time he knuckles down and torques up his courage. Yet, if anyone emerges as an awards contender from Hotel Mumbai (an unlikely prospect, given the subject matter), it would be Anupam Kher, who radiates gravitas and gruff humanism as Oberoi. He practically becomes the personification of the stately hotel’s soul.

As the four primary on-camera terrorists, Amandeep Singh, Suhail Nayyar, Yash Trivedi, and Gaurav Paswala are terrifyingly young-looking and chillingly blood thirsty. Jason Isaacs chews up the scenery and everything else that isn’t nailed down as the lecherous Russian, but he still bears watching. Nazanin Boniadi and Tilda Cobham-Hervey have some quite poignant moments (distressing, even) as Zahra and Sally, the nanny, but Armie Hammer is blandly vanilla playing her blow-dried American husband.

There is no question the Mumbai attacks established a template that has already been applied in an organized manner in Paris and by at least one unsponsored wildcat zealot in New York, but the original 2008 events still remain largely under-reported and under-analyzed in the Western media. That makes Hotel Mumbai rather timely and pressing cinema. It also happens to be an engrossing (and emotionally draining) human drama. Highly recommended for anyone interested in serious movies for grown-ups, Hotel Mumbai opens this Friday (3/22) in New York, at the Lincoln Plaza uptown and the Angelika Film Center downtown.

Tribeca ’16: The Man Who Knew Infinity

In retrospect, it is rather ironic some of Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan best known work involved the area of number theory known as partitions. Of course, during his lifetime, the subcontinent remained whole and largely under British governance. That is why Ramanujan’s supporters eagerly encouraged his study at Cambridge, hoping his prestige would inspire Indians and generate greater national respect from the British. Ramanujan’s Cambridge years and his relationship with mentor G.H. Hardy are chronicled in Matt Brown’s The Man Who Knew Infinity (trailer here), which screens during the 2016 Tribeca Film Festival.

Ramanujan was of Brahmin caste, but he still came from mean circumstances. Despite his mind for figures, the self-taught prodigy remained unemployed, forcing him to live apart from his young arranged bride. While scuffling, Ramanujan filled several notebooks with radical, game-changing equations. However, Ramanujan was not so keen on the plug-and-chug work of proofs. They seemed so unnecessary to him, because it was all so obvious. This inevitably leads to friction with his patron, Hardy.

How can you not appreciate a film in which Ramanujan, Hardy, J.E. Littlewood, and Bertrand Russell are allotted considerable screen time? Brown’s adaptation of Robert Kanigel’s surprise hit biography manages to shoehorn a good deal of real Ramanujanalia, including the “cab number” business. Unfortunately, Brown’s narrative arc touches every predictable base, most definitely including the resistance Ramanujan faces from Hardy’s ridiculously racist colleagues. They might have felt that way, but it is hard to imagine Cambridge mathematicians expressing themselves in such crude terms, even in the 1910’s.

As you would expect from the star of The Last Airbender, Dev Patel is solid enough as the sniffling, consumptive Ramanujan. Not so surprisingly, Jeremy Irons essentially commandeers the film as Hardy. He is one of the best in the business and the prickly but sentimental-on-the-inside Hardy is totally in his wheel house. Toby Jones has some nice scenes humanizing the film as Littlewood (who is the only Cambridge faculty member we see serving during WWI). Devika Bhise is also rather touching as Ramanujan’s long-suffering wife Srimathi Janaki, but Sir Francis Spring is exactly the sort of silly upper-class buffoon cameos that are turning Stephen Fry into a caricature of himself.

Infinity is a sturdy, respectable film, but it never takes chances or ventures outside viewers’ biopic comfort zones. Even if you know nothing about Ramanujan or Hardy, you will predict every step of the film. Still, it should be happily conceded Irons rocks Hardy, especially in the third act. Recommended on balance, The Man Who Knew Infinity screens again tonight (4/17), as part of this year’s Tribeca.