For the week of July 8th, A24 and Lionsgate Home Entertainment are bringing Claire Denis' wrenching, uncompromising sci-fi meditation High Life to Blu-ray. Anyone expecting that traveling into genre territory might make for a more accessible Denis venture is in for a rude awakening. As with her postmodern vampire drama Trouble Every Day, Denis seems to delight in using familiar tropes to service the headiest of philosophical and thematic content. And High Life is no exception. From the jump, she's working in an abstract register. We open on an intergalactic journey, already in progress, but the space vessel is no Millennium Falcon or Apple-designed wonder: the ship here looks like a shoe box, hurtling ass over end through the cosmos with no discernable end point. The ship's inhabitants? Sullen Monte (a phenomenal Robert Pattinson), a shaved-head grunt performing the most mundane of onboard services, and his baby daughter Willow (Scarlette Lindsey), who coos at monitors playing fragments of videos from some distant transmission source. The ship's interior has the shabby impersonality of a '80s office park (harsh fluorescents, crumbling corkboard walls), and Denis delights in playing off its banality against ever-more sinister elements. Like how Monte needs to make a daily report in order to maintain life support systems. Or how, every so often, he'll make room on the ship by dumping a dead body into the vacuum of space. Eventually, Denis flashes back to Monte's pre-baby days, and we start to piece together the ship's mission, and just how bad things got. It's here that High Life deepens to an almost inscrutable degree. Like Trouble Every Day or White Material, Denis occupies herself with human extremes. In this case, it's a prison ship, filled with convicts (including Mia Goth, Ewan Mitchell, Agata Buzek, Claire Tran, Lars Eidinger, and a warm, funny Andre Benjamin) who elected to travel into the unknown instead of suffering a death/life sentence back on Earth, and all while Juliette Binoche's clinical "witch" runs all sorts of illegal fertility tests on them. Denis punctuates this horrifying, untenable setup (in a nice touch, even the sex room in the bowels of the ship offers no one any real release) with moments of extreme violence and sexuality. High Life is awash in pretty much every type of fluid you can imagine, and I confess that at the midpoint, I felt somewhat under assault. The film doesn't afford for much in the way of unvarnished tenderness after that two-person opener, and a kind of resigned nihilism creeps into the back end of the film. But while Denis acknowledges our lesser instincts, she affords the slightest chance for transcendence. Over a long enough timeline, evolution tends to work out the kinks, and without going too deeply into spoilers, that's kinda the direction she takes High Life. The whole endeavor culminates in a final shot that strives for the sublime, and finds it. I don't know if I liked High Life (it exists outside traditional metrics of "good" / "bad"), but I can't shake it. It illuminates something dark, and vital, about all of us.
Would that I could say the same about Kevin Kölsch and Dennis Widmyer's dour, unpleasant Pet Sematary adaptation. In fairness, I was never that big a fan of the 1983 Stephen King novel, an unspeakably ghoulish tale about a family (played in the film by Jason Clarke, Amy Seimetz, Hugo & Lucas Lavoie, and a very good Jeté Laurence) torn apart when they discover a cursed pet sematary that brings things back bad. For all its nightmarish invention (you got undead demons and savage violence and dead kids and the friggin' Wendigo, for cryin' out loud), King conducts the mayhem in an almost funereal manner: we know nothing good will come of this, and the march to doom proceeds like a dirge. I guess Kölsch and Widmyer deserve some credit, then, for preserving that grim tone in this new version. Clarke's tortured visage sets the pace for the rest of the cast, who accept their bloody fates grimly (Seimetz almost rises above the tedium - in a better movie, she'd be the main character), with only John Lithgow offering any sort of lightness of spirit as the family's homespun new neighbor. Now, I know I pretty much just said the same thing about High Life, like, one paragraph ago, so maybe it seems a little hypocritical that I'd praise it and condemn Pet Sematary even though both argue that mankind is doomed, that we're bound to our worst instincts, and that the universe doesn't care about us. That's fair. But High Life is a serious art film that's interested in these questions, while Pet Sematary is a grisly monster movie that would be a whole lot more entertaining if it just embraced its gonzo premise to the fullest. If you've read the book or seen the 1989 film version, you might get a kick out of the third act, which swaps some key roles and adds a couple of key twists. Yet even these swerves don't have the requisite pulpy momentum. If this whole "elevated horror" trend means more self-important slogs like Pet Sematary, then I'd like to recommend we return to splatter movies and slashers, and quick, please.
In his Blu-ray review, Martin Liebman wrote that "the movie's problems are not simply its reworking of key plot points, whether they subjectively work or not. The film has a feel of generic construction and at times almost torturous genre contrivance, favoring bland cadence and stale imagery and execution and emotion rather than more profoundly exploring the consequential narrative elements of loss, fear, pain, and the human response to the unthinkable that defined the original, the movie and the novel both. Here, the film plays out with scenes appearing together in quick succession without allowing for much of the critical character breathing room. Church is dead very quickly after only some cursory background and world exploration and, while the film does a good job of recreating the deadfall and the dangerous, diseased land beyond the Pet Sematary, there's very little feel for emotional draw and the terrors that exist there. Characters are reduced to stock figures and there's never any feel for legitimate pull to them and the emotions they experience that drive the story. It's all very makeshift, more concerned with creating scenes than telling a story, more concerned with introducing concepts rather than crafting honest human horror."
From Shout Factory comes a pair of cult genre favorites: the 1955 sci-fi hit This Island Earth and the 2006 video-game adaptation Silent Hill. These days, if anyone's familiar with This Island Earth, it's as a punchline: Universal loaned out the film to Mike Nelson and his robot buddies for the 1996 Mystery Science Theater 3000 movie. And sure, on the surface, This Island Earth is pretty silly, as a lantern-jawed hunk of a scientist (played by the ludicrously named Rex Reason) makes contact with a race of huge-foreheaded aliens (led by Jeff Morrow's Exeter) under siege from mutants and a hostile warring race. But the film has never been that bad - it was a big hit, and it's certainly no worse than, say, the George Pal War of the Worlds - and viewed today, it has this goofy, hellzapoppin' charm that went out of vogue the second B-pictures like these started getting A-picture budgets. Even more arresting is Silent Hill. We follow a young mother (the perpetually underrated Radha Mitchell) searching for her mystery daughter in the titular spooky village, but things spiral out of control so fast, and I'm not just talking about the horde of specters and demons that begin hunting mother and daughter. No, the film is almost willfully incoherent, playing with time and space until both seem fungible, haphazard. At the time, critics took the film to task for its perceived failings in this regard. However, the logic of the script (by Tarantino's old buddy Roger Avary) is almost beside the point, considering how striking the imagery is. Director Christophe Gans made the masterful genre exercise Brotherhood of the Wolf, and with Silent Hill, he gets to indulge his surrealist whims with millions of Sony's dollars. At times, Silent Hill plays like the most expensive David Lynch movie ever made, so committed is Gans to furthering his horrifying dream logic. It's the only video-game adaptation that feels like a full-fledged art film.
In his Blu-ray review, Brian Orndorf wrote that "for most gamers, 2006's Silent Hill stands out as the rare success story, with director Christophe Gans and screenwriter Roger Avary trying to master a specific approach that respects the exploratory origins of the original games, transferring that sense of mystery and approaching malevolence to the big screen. There's undeniable artistry to the movie, with Gans lovingly detailing this world with surreal touches and ultraviolence, trying to craft atmospheric immersion without resorting to cheap scares. However, such attention to the specifics of gaming delights results in a largely inert picture, and one that has major issues with dreadful dialogue, disappointing performances, and stabs at exposition that are not inclusive to those who haven't spent weeks of their lives in front of a television, mastering this macabre maze of blurring realities."
Finally, Universal Studios Home Entertainment is giving 4K remasters to two popular cult titles: Kevin Reynolds' infamous Waterworld and Ang Lee's esoteric Hulk. Nowadays, it's almost a cliché to rep for Waterworld, but I was there opening weekend in 1995, and I found the film just as transporting then. What Reynolds and his screenwriters (Peter Rader and David Twohy) have done fits into comfortable genre territory. Basically, they're making Mad Max except on water, as Costner's mutant marauder makes his way through a post-apocalyptic Earth where rising sea levels prove just as dangerous as scores of violent warrior tribes. We get a histrionic Big Bad (a deranged Dennis Hopper, giving the most enjoyable performance in the film), a predictably boring love interest (Jeanne Tripplehorn), and a little kid (Tina Majorino) who just might hold the key to civilization's future, and a whole lot of other details that play out pretty much exactly as you'd expect. But predictable isn't always a bad thing, especially when it's done so well. I've liked a lot of Reynolds' other movies (his Count of Monte Cristo is one of the all-time great cable-TV movies), but here, he's working on a scope that frequently astounds. This world feels so fully realized, and when Reynolds uses it to stage massive action sequences, Waterworld offers the kind of gonzo blockbuster filmmaking we so often want but rarely get. Hulk, on the other hand, almost eschews the kind of violent spectacle you'd expect from a scientist (here played by Eric Bana) who gets irradiated by gamma rays and turns into a big green rage monster. We get one proper summer setpiece: the Hulk escapes a government facility and leads the military on a merry chase/fight through the desert and into San Francisco. If you've seen Lee's breathtaking Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, you know Lee's facility for fluid and beautiful action choreography, and he doesn't disappoint during this twenty-or-so-minute stretch of Hulk. But the rest of the movie is far more introspective and experimental. At the time, people devoted a lot of ink to Lee's use of editing. Lee dashes the frame up into panels, swiping and transitioning between beats like he was leafing through comic-book pages. But that choice feels less daring than the thematic engine powering Hulk, one wherein Lee and his regular collaborator James Schamus reconfigure the story as one of trauma and abuse. As they see it, gamma rays only actualized what was lying dormant. Bruce Banner's father was an angry, unstable genius (played by the angry, unstable Nick Nolte and looking like any number of Nolte's actual mug shots) who passed his gifts and curses down to his son, who in turn threatens to become just as unhinged as his dad. And so it goes, right down the line (Lee and Schamus mirror this dynamic in Jennifer Connelly and Sam Elliott's estranged daughter-father relationship), until the movie erupts in a Freudian lightshow; Nolte's toxic qualities become a supernatural monstrosity that tries to consume the Hulk. It's a weird, weird movie, but it's also thoughtful and surprising in ways that most superhero movies wouldn't dare approach.