For the week of May 16th, A24 and Lionsgate Home Entertainment are bringing the slow-burn horror fable The Witch to Blu-ray. For his first feature-length film, writer-director Robert Eggers looks to New England circa the 1600s for inspiration; working from actual transcripts and records, he crafts the story of a Puritan family banished outside of the community. Things couldn't be worse for the bunch: the crops are dying, the father (Ralph Ineson) is weaker than he seems, the mother (Kate Dickie) resents the sudden shift in status, and the eldest son (Harvey Scrimshaw) keeps stealing uncomfortable glances at his rapidly maturing older sister (Anya Taylor-Joy, in a revelatory performance). It's almost a relief, then, when the greatest threat emerges from without, as a witch living deep inside the woods starts trying to tear the family further apart. And it is a witch: Eggers explicitly announces her threat as she steals the family's infant son (she streaks through the woods, clutching the child and wearing a Don't Look Now-inspired red cloak), so that even when the family suspects one another of mischief, we know they're under the thrall of dread powers. However, after her introduction, Eggers denies us any visages of the unequivocally malevolent for a long time. He prefers understatement and suggestion to any overt terrors. Since we know about the witch, Eggers can play with our expectations, seeding doubt in all the family's increasingly panicked actions. Does the father chop wood to try and reassert his masculinity, or is he under a control not his own? Does the mother believe that Taylor-Joy's tremulous daughter acts as the vessel for supernatural evils, or is she jealous of the young woman's beauty and youth? Are the youngest children (Ellie Grainger and Lucas Dawson) speaking to the family's goat - named Black Phillip, which isn't foreboding at all - out of boredom or something darker? Even when the film delivers a nerve-racking exorcism sequence (it's a moment far scarier than 90% of the horror films I saw all last year), we can't quite place the source of the hysteria. Eggers is so precise in his manipulation: I thought of Roman Polanski and Rosemary's Baby, and of Stanley Kubrick's The Shining - Eggers' cinematographer Jarin Blaschke delivers the same level of aesthetic mastery, composing The Witch as though it were a series of the most horrifying Vermeer paintings ever. Eggers does such an expert job of building tension and withholding conventional scares that I confess I found the last fifteen minutes a bit of a deflation. Blood is spilled, evil is revealed, and we trade in that chilling ambiguity for something a little more comprehensible, a little more earthbound. I suspect the not knowing will always be scarier than the known, although I do appreciate what the ending's doing conceptually (suffice to say, Eggers has a strong feminist-political message to push). But even considering my problems with the ending, there are things in this film that I can't shake. A wizened hand moving over an infant child in a manner both tender and obscene. Dickie's character finding comfort in the most horrific manner possible. The way blood milked from a goat's udder seeps into cold straw. A silhouette shrouded in moonlight as it inexorably rises off the ground. Mark Korven's relentlessly unsettling score, which plays like terrifying outtakes from Jonny Greenwood's There Will Be Blood soundtrack. And the face of Black Phillip, seeming to contain the answers to everything, and nothing. Ultimately, The Witch gets under your skin like few movies can - I suspect it belongs on the shortlist (with The Babadook, It Follows, and Green Room) of the twenty-first-century's finest horror offerings.
Jeffrey Kauffman wrote that "the film is almost weirdly restrained in its depiction of an all enveloping terror subsuming the family (there are some brief and scattered shots showing things like disemboweled animals, but a surprising overall lack of 'blood and guts' in this film). There's an argument to be made that the film's final 'reveal' hints at something duplicitous in one of the major characters, but, again, The Witch seems to be less concerned with any 'hidden meanings' than in an almost cold and calculating portrayal of some Early Americans who were confronting something more than simply an unknown land. The film benefits from an austere but seemingly historically accurate production design, along with a generally tamped down performance style that creates mood rather than outright shock... This is a film where things don't exactly go 'bump' in the night, tending to whisper menacingly instead. That means those wanting a gorefest with horrifying imagery, jump cuts and shock LFE are going to be mightily disappointed by what is a remarkably 'quiet' feeling horror film. For those attuned to The Witch's almost dreamlike (and/or nightmarish) ambience, though, the film offers a completely unsettling mood, along with fantastic production design and some very naturalistic performances, especially given the built in 'folktale' element of the story."
Also from Lionsgate comes the raunchy comedy Dirty Grandpa, which follows the misadventures of a lonely widower (Robert De Niro) and his more conservative grandson (Zac Efron) as they head to Daytona Beach for Spring Break. Surprising, right? Dirty Grandpa is the McDonald's of R-rated comedies. You know exactly where it's going to go at all times, and people like director Dan Mazer and writer John Phillips are hoping you'll find that familiarity comforting, if you can even call 100 minutes of gross-out humor and sex jokes a comfort. Now, were Dirty Grandpa funnier, the relentless crassness might work; the template for this sort of movie should be Terry Zwigoff's just-as-lewd Bad Santa, which remains one of the aughts' finest comedies. But Bad Santa retains a certain diseased wisdom about human nature, whereas Dirty Grandpa is content to pad its profanity with sitcom-ready setups. De Niro's horndog is only living it up because he's trying to recover from the death of his wife, and Efron is the kind of buttoned-down straight man who needs to ditch his shrew of a fiancée (Julianne Hough) for the love of his artsy former classmate (the very appealing Zoey Deutch). Admittedly, Efron is better at committing to formula than De Niro (and that's not a slight on Efron, who's become a talented farceur in movies like Neighbors; it takes talent to make sitcoms work), but even that discrepancy stings a little: has the once and future Travis Bickle really been reduced to rattling off easy drug and masturbation jokes? Dirty Grandpa's hit-to-miss ratio isn't completely dire. Aubrey Plaza scores some laughs as De Niro's unlikely college-age suitor, as does the great Jason Mantzoukas as the most genially unstable drug dealer you'd ever hope to meet. But on the whole, Dirty Grandpa stands indicative of all the slobby, crass farces released post The Hangover - all shock, very little wit.
Along the same lines, Kino Lorber is offering an HD upgrade of the 1968 cult classic Candy. Full disclosure: Candy is not a good movie. It's based on a novel by Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg, and the book has a certain lunatic appeal - Southern (who co-wrote Stanley Kubrick's masterful Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb) and Hoffenberg were satirizing late-'60s sexual morays, and they chose to do so through the title character (played in the film by Ewa Aulin), an eighteen-year-old girl who unintentionally sends every man she meets into erotic delirium. On the page, these exploits read as broadly comic, but on screen – as adapted by the great Buck Henry - they just seem pervy, since we're just watching a bunch of much older men lose their minds over this teenager. However, Candy the movie maintains our interest because it's so singular in its weirdness. Imagine the Dildano sequence from Barbarella (which Southern helped co-write, naturally) stretched out to feature-length, and you'll get a sense of the manic tone that Marquand wants to cultivate. He absolutely doesn't pull it off - you'd need someone like Howard Hawks or Ernst Lubitsch in their primes to make this salacious content work - but you can't help but respect his instincts, to marry this smutty satire with sleek Hollywood surfaces (ace DP Giuseppe Rotunno - he lensed The Leopard and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, among many others - gives Candy a vibrant tactility). We also get a certain thrill from watching the film's star-studded cast leer at Aulin's nubile innocent: at various points, the likes of John Huston, Ringo Starr, Walter Matthau, John Astin, James Coburn, Charles Aznavour, Richard Burton, and Marlon Brando (in a bad/compelling turn that's right up there with his bad/compelling turn in The Island of Dr. Moreau) all paw at her. You wonder if Marquand was blackmailing this absurdly talented cast into showing up and demeaning themselves. Whatever the case, you've never seen anything quite like Candy, and I guess that's a good thing.
In his Blu-ray review, Brian Orndorf wondered "how much cocaine was snorted and acid was dropped during the production of 1968's Candy, but it wasn't nearly enough. A psychedelic journey into amorous encounters and farcical adventures, Candy is meant to represent the shifting creative interests of the time, taking a freewheeling look at sex and control, with a screenplay by Buck Henry trying to make sense of a novel by Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg. It's loud, wild, and carefree movie, and it's an absolute mess that mistakes length for importance. Candy is difficult to digest, more appealing as a road map of bad ideas than the mind-bomb experience director Christian Marquand intends to create... Marquand has assembled an impressive cast (including Marlon Brando, Richard Burton, James Coburn, and Walter Matthau) to bring the darkly comic story (allegedly a parody of pornography) to life, but as snowballing silliness goes, the feature doesn't have momentum. It's stillborn, relying on overacting and aggressive directorial style to help pose this corpse of a movie. Henry whiffs when it comes to lampooning religion, medicine, and education, and his take on the predatory habits of men registers angrily, keeping Candy at odds from the cheeky sexual romp it aims to be, while Marquand doesn't know when to cut away, filling two hours with shockingly little material."
Speaking of the cinematically unfamiliar, the central conceit of Warner Archive's Dark Passage is now old hat to viewers, but in 1947, director Delmer Daves and his cinematographer Sidney Hickox were breaking fresh ground. Their film - an adaptation of David Goodis' seminal pulp noir - deals with an escaped convict who gets plastic surgery and attempts to clear his name, and considering their star was the incomparable Humphrey Bogart, Daves and Hickox had quite the conundrum: how do you present one of the biggest movie stars in the world if, for like 40% of the movie, he looks like somebody else? Their solution? Shoot the pre-surgery scenes from a first-person perspective. That's right: when Bogart's character sees something, we see it, and when he moves, the camera moves, too. This approach to narrative storytelling wasn't wholly unique - Robert Montgomery used the same approach to put us in Philip Marlowe's shoes for his Lady in the Lake - but it was certainly the most successful, with Hickox employing a remarkably fluid camera (as opposed to Paul Vogel's more stodgy lensing on Lady in the Lake) to convey Bogart's terrified movements through San Francisco (it also helps that Daves and Hickox would cut to a third-person perspective whenever Bogart's character was off-screen). The result has a perverse kick - we know Bogart's in the movie, but we don't see him for long stretches, and that's not even counting the lengthy sequence where he's covered in bandages after his surgery. However, perverse doesn't necessarily equal good, and minus the opening sequences, Dark Passage doesn't have a whole lot to offer. Whereas Goodis' novel adopts a far bleaker view of Bogart's hero as he searches for justice, his screen counterpart is more one-dimensionally heroic even when faced with some terrible moral compromises - this Dark Passage doesn't feel as truly, deeply noir. How else to explain the conclusion, which seems to be steering Bogart towards psychological devastation...and then feints, delivering instead a happy ending that's as if Double Indemnity somehow turned into The Shawshank Redemption's final five minutes. On the subject of Bogart and Bacall, while we're at it: these two formed such a combustible union in To Have and Have Not and The Big Sleep, yet here, they barely smolder. Some of that lack of chemistry stems from the film's technical conceit (it's hard to generate heat with a camera lens), but once Bogart is unmasked, so to speak, the film takes a plodding, routine path through its narrative twists, and the relationship between Bogart and Bacall plays as an afterthought. Noir fans probably need to see this movie, but it's a misfire just the same.
Michael Reuben was more favorable in his assessment of the film, writing that "of all the leading roles played by Humphrey Bogart, none is as vaguely defined as Vincent Parry in Dark Passage...The indistinctness of Vincent's character is matched by the film's radical approach to telling his story. Writer/director Delmer Daves...keeps Vincent off the screen for the film's first act, except for a few shots where he is shrouded in shadow. Vincent spends the second act deprived of speech with his face swathed in bandages. Not until the final thirty-five minutes of Dark Passage does Vincent appear onscreen with Bogart's familiar face, which is a risky narrative gambit for a film promoted as a vehicle starring one of Warner's most popular screen icons. Studio head Jack Warner was appalled when he saw the film, and audiences were disappointed. Of the four projects pairing Bogart with Lauren Bacall, Dark Passage was the least successful at the box office. Today, though, viewers are more accustomed to 'point of view' photography; indeed, the found-footage genre has made it such a gimmick that the restraint of Daves' approach is refreshing. Dark Passage also benefits from an elegant performance by Bacall...Bogart spotted the potential role for his new wife when he first read the novel by David Goodis on which Dark Passage is based, and he was instrumental in persuading Warner to make the film under the direction of Daves...Despite the film's initial poor reception, time has ratified Bogart's instincts, because Bacall's ambiguous heroine, part guardian angel, part femme fatale, gives Dark Passage its emotional core."