A First-Person Haunting

Director Steven Soderbergh "retired" from movies in 2013, more than a decade ago at this point. Since then, he has continued to make movies in spite of himself. Some of these he has made for streaming (Kimi, High Flying Bird) and some for theatrical release (Logan Lucky, Unsane, Magic Mike's Last Dance). What his post-retirement films have in common is a questing curiosity about the process of filmmaking and a formal daring that wouldn't fly in his more commercial films from the turn of the century. He shot Unsane on an iPhone, for example, while Kimi is an update of sorts of Rear Window for the internet age. I am pretty sure that if Soderbergh wanted to command the kinds of budgets that have funded Martin Scorsese or Steven Spielberg in this era, he could probably do it (particularly if the word "Ocean's" is involved), but he just hasn't wanted the bother. His films have gone back to the basics, back to the kinds of films he made at the outset of his career. No big crews. He shoots and edits them himself. In his current film, Presence (2025), he goes even further than that. The camera's point of view is an actual character in the film. The conceit here is that Presence is a ghost story shot in the first person from the point of view of the ghost. If that sounds like a variant of the so-called "found footage" film, you might be justified in thinking that, but Soderbergh is smarter than that. This is more akin to the puzzle movies that M. Night Shyamalan used to make.

The Grant Mystique: She Done Him Wrong (1933)

Mae West claimed all her life that she had discovered Cary Grant. "He had only done a few screen tests" before she plucked him from obscurity, according to her. This is untrue, of course. She Done Him Wrong (1932, directed by Lowell Sherman) was Grant's eighth feature film. Grant was second billed in She Done Him Wrong after West herself, though even that wasn't his highest billing to that date (Grant had been top billed in Hot Saturday, the film that immediately precedes She Done Him Wrong in Grant's filmography). She may not have discovered him, but West sure knew a star in the making when she saw one. A diamond in the rough, as it were, and if Mae West knew one thing, it was diamonds. She Done Him Wrong was West's own first film, but she was already notorious for her plays in New York, some of which had been shut down by the blue noses for obscenity and race mixing. She Done Him Wrong was based on West's Diamond Lil, a play so infamous that the minders of the production code insisted that the title couldn't be used or even referred to by incorporating the word "diamond." Although She Done Him Wrong is a pre-Code film, it highlights the inaccuracy of that category. There already WAS a production code, signed onto by all of the major studios, enacted in 1930, on top of a list of "dos and don'ts and be carefuls" formulated in 1927. Although the code was widely ignored by the studios from 1930 to 1934, the arbiters of the code could and did occasionally flex enough muscle to get their way. She Done Him Wrong wasn't the only film to change its title and other elements due to the strictures of the Code pre-1934. William Faulkner's novel, Sanctuary, was so notorious that film productions were barred from using that title, too, and discouraged from adapting the book at all. Hence, the 1933 film version became The Story of Temple Drake and many of the details of the story were judiciously changed as a means of filing off the serial numbers. She Done Him Wrong follows a similar strategy. "Diamond Lil" becomes "Lady Lou," but they weren't fooling anyone.

What this film meant for Grant was a high profile role in a film that would be talked about by everyone. Indeed, the film was a gigantic hit and was nominated for the "Best Production" Oscar (aka: Best Picture), which it lost to Cavalcade, a film you've probably never seen if you've heard of it at all. It was Grant's first brush with the kind of success that would become customary for productions in which he starred. Although he would labor in thankless roles for Paramount for another three years, this film undoubtedly gave him a leg up for when he decided to forge his own path to stardom. It was a hint that he might be bankable, though no one should mistake this movie as a "Cary Grant" movie. West brooked no rivals for the spotlight.

The Tameness of a Wolf

"He's mad that trusts in the tameness of a wolf,
a horse's health, a boy's love, or a whore's oath."
--William Shakespeare, King Lear, Act III, Scene VI,

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Leigh Whannell's new re-imagining of The Wolf Man loses the definite article at the start and a lot more besides as Wolf Man (2025), a film that has good ideas that it fails to execute to the best of its ability. It's a film that looks at the elements of the werewolf myth and ditches most of the mythology. It drops the silver bullet and the moon and the invulnerability. It keeps the transformation and the contagion at its core, though, things that could be explained away as disease.  In doing so, it discovers the kernel of a body horror movie on the Cronenberg model. It bears more than a passing resemblance to The Fly, with a salting of the generational trauma of The Brood, but with neither of those films' instinct for violating taboos. The most galling thing about it is that Whannell is certainly capable of rising to the challenge. His version of The Invisible Man can stand in the company of Cronenberg's best horror movies unashamed. But this? This is the kind of film that Blumhouse releases in January (Blumhouse is this film's production company). It's not as bad as something like Night Swim, but it's nothing you'll remember once it's out of theaters.

Said the Spider to the Fly...

The prologue of Sting (2024, directed by Kiah Roche-Turner) is a concise and entirely satisfying little short story in which a woman suffering from dementia hears alarming things from her air vents and calls an exterminator. When the exterminator arrives, he's pissed to discover another exterminator's truck parked in front of the woman's building. He reads the woman the riot act when she answers the door. Then he gets to work, only to discover that he's not at all prepared for what he finds in her vents. The end of the story has a wicked whip of the tale. It reminds me a bit of short stories by Robert Bloch or John Collier or Ray Bradbury, or of E. C. Comics (who tended to loot their stories from writers like Bloch or Collier or Bradbury). It's a poisoned bon bon, a cookie full of cyanide. A tasty warm-up act, if you will. The rest of Sting isn't up to the level of its prologue, alas, but the prologue provides enough good will to carry an audience through the film. Or, at least, it carried me through to the end.

Damned If You Do, Damned If You Don't

The Damned (2024, directed by Thordur Palsson) is a film that shows the widening influence of Robert Eggers on cinema. Elements of all of Eggers's films can be spotted in this film, including the visual design of his recent version of Nosferatu. This is a film that dwells in cold and shadow, making extensive use of its bleak Iceland-in-winter location. One could see Anya Taylor-Joy in the lead in this film rather than Odessa Young, but Young is fine in the part of a woman running a remote fishing station in the 19th century. The screenplay is less disciplined than Eggers, though, including an ending that leaves the audience with questions. The rest? Claustrophobic and chilly, a crucible where close company in isolation fails to prevent anyone from going mad. Superstition runs roughshod over otherwise rational people.

Needles and Pins

The Girl with the Needle (2024, directed by Magnus von Horn) is a film so relentlessly grim that a home viewer might opt out of it before it is too far done. Indeed, the crux of its true crime origins doesn't even come into the picture until the film is half over. An interested audience should seek it out in theaters if it opens nearby, if only to concentrate their attention. I had no such luck. Given the state of the world at this moment in time, I considered whether or not I wanted to see things through to the bitter end. I stuck it out. The film has a point. It has several, in fact. It's a meditation on the precarious lot of women in societies past and present. True. And as such it is very much a film for this moment in time. It's also an interrogation into what true monstrosity entails. It could be mistaken for social realism in its early going before it veers into a full blown Gothic. But then an alert viewer may remember that it gives the audience a warning of its true intentions before the credits even appear, when it projects faces on top of faces in shifting distortions that make monsters of ordinary humans.

Revisiting Horror 101: Onibaba and Kwaidan

My friend Aaron Christensen had me on his vid cast again this month to talk about two landmarks of Japanese horror cinema, Onibaba and Kwaidan. I've written about Onibaba before, as Aaron mentions on the show. It's a pretty good episode, if I do say so myself.

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