Lake Mungo: (2008. dir: Joel Anderson) How's this for something new: a subtle and dignified docu-style horror film? Shot well, edited well, and extremely well-acted, it engages fully but only if approached without expectation. It communicates its horror without shocks or gore but through a slow, thickening sense of dread, a sense which appears to be dissipating towards the end into a cleansing redemption only to reverse itself with awful effectiveness.
A teenaged girl has drowned on a family picnic outing; after her burial, strange things begin happening around the house. This is a contemplation of mortality, of grieving, the nature of death, and how ultimately unknowable we all are, one to another, even to our most beloved. I found the ending to be quietly disquieting, and terrible in its implications.
Thirst: (2009. dir: Chan-Wook Park) A priest particularly inclined towards samaritanism is infected with vampire blood while volunteering for an experiment which might cure a deadly disease. It begins as a funny, sexy, visually pleasing and intelligent bloodsucker film. The longer it continues, the more it gets mired down in its own metaphors,-- a little too long and a little too earthbound for my taste,-- although it never loses its optical panache.
Attack the Block: (2011. dir: Joe Cornish) Accustomed to my London-Slum-Stories appearing in various shades of concrete and overcast greys, it took me awhile to get past Attack the Block's music-video palette. I'm glad I put out the effort, since wrapped inside it is a fresh, vivacious, well-written and unpretentious reworking of the old Alien Invasion motif. You know the one, in which an attack from outer space is used to comment on pertinent social issues: in this case, the plight of poor kids in London. (Those riots earlier in the year, they were part of Cornish's PR campaign, yeah? Bold.)
Man, this film was fun. I'm not overfond of over-the-top, self-conscious English humour (Simon Pegg, Steve Coogan, Russell Brand, etc); I prefer mine in the subtle and droll category, thank you. This one was droll and suspenseful, lighthearted and pointed, as summed up in the capstone image of the young hero dangling from an upper storey of his tenement by a tenuous grasp on a Union Jack. John Boyega is perfect (and will be dead sexy when he grows up) as the enigmatic Moses, the leader of a teenaged street gang, a gang fully believable in their decoction of innocence and burgeoning sociopathy. These are the Dead-End Kids of the modern world, and when aliens attack amidst the chaos of Mischief Night, it becomes Moses' night to fight his way into manhood. It is his initial decision to kill the invaders' outrider which brings down the wrath of its followers onto his neighborhood, and it is in his decision to take responsibility for his actions in which we find the meat of the drama.
See it now, before Hollywood resets it in South Central L.A. with its metaphors all overblown and hanging out of its baggy pants.
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