PLEASE BABY PLEASE - IFFR 2022 review

Given a strand entirely focused on her back catalogue (her directorial career may still be in its infancy, but has amassed four features in four years), this year's International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) looked at the films of Amanda Kramer, including her most recent effort, Please Baby Please.

A musical odyssey starring Andrea Riseborough and Harry Melling as a couple questioning their gender roles and theories of traditional masculinity, I've seen Amanda Kramer's latest described as "West Side Story as directed by John Waters", and that about sums it up. Beginning in a quasi 1950's America with Riseborough and Melling's couple, Suze and Arthur, witnessing a savage beating by the Young Gents - a local gang of greasers outside their apartment building - this event sparks discussion about brutality, masculinity and "what is a man, anyway?". From there they both go alone on journeys of self discovery, with Arthur increasingly infatuated with a member of the gang - a rough around the edges type in the body of a Jean Paul Gaultier model - and Suze breaking through the prescribed limitations of her role as wife to find a new side of herself that appeals to her.

If you've seen any of Kramer's work before, you'll know what to expect, with dance-like movements and a hazy, old Hollywood feel mixed with a bold, contrasting blue/orange colour palette. The entire film feels like a queerified, LSD infused Lynchian trip, although - and not just to avoid cliche - not a film David Lynch would make himself, but one a fan of Lynch's work who's devoured his filmography certainly would. In the Bijou 52 cinema Suze visits it even has its own stand in for Mulholland Drive's Club Silencio, complete with a brief appearance from Bobby Briggs himself, Dana Andrews.

Meticulously designed, bombastic and occasionally over the top, it's not subtle about its themes of gender dysphoria and explores them in a manner that may be off-putting for general audiences, but will get lapped up by those with a taste for the surreal. This is the kind of heightened reality, almost stagey film that avant-garde theatre-goers would appreciate, with Ryan Simpkins (who worked with Kramer previously on Ladyworld) dragging it up as junior greaser Dickie, complete with stick on sideburns to fit in with the rest of the unruly gang of youths, who appear to be lead by a man in his 40s. That Simpkins is a non-binary actor adds to the discussion and exploration of the film's gender themes, but this is more fully examined through Riseborough's Suze, whose character is allowed the most growth and potential evolution. The hard to pin down era and setting keep the film at something of a distance, and if you're looking for a more considered take on the dismantling of binary norms, there's other films that better explore this.

With appearances from Demi Moore and Mary Lynn Rajskub in the supporting cast, Please Baby Please is a wild and unpredictable ride that will undoubtedly pull more audiences into the curious world of Amanda Kramer. Despite a great effort from Melling - who's long left Dudley Dursley long behind him with memorable roles in The Queen's Gambit and The Old Guard and has matured into an always welcome screen presence - this is Andrea Riseborough's film. An actor unafraid to take a walk on the wild side - see last year's Possessor for proof - she's having a ball as Suze, with wing tipped eyeliner exploring her masculine side and the opportunity to find her inner Brando. It's a great performance in a film that may not achieve all of its ambitions, but has a lot of fun putting on as grand (and as odd) a show as possible.

Verdict

3/5

Please Baby Please screened as part of the 2022 International Film Festival Rotterdam. More information about the festival can be found here.

POSSESSOR review

Using high tech brain implants that place skilled operatives inside the mind of an unwitting host, a secret agency assassinates high profile targets with no way it can be traced back to them or their clients. Once the job is completed the extraction method is simple; a self-inflicted bullet to the brain to bring the mind of the agent back to their own body. As the process continues to take a toll on the mental well-being of agent Tasya Vos (Andrea Riseborough) she assures her superiors she's ready for her next mission inhabiting the mind of Colin Tate (Christopher Abbott), but quickly loses her foothold on his body as Colin's consciousness starts to fight against her intrusion.

Arriving a whole eight years after his debut feature, Antiviral, Possessor marks a turning point in the career of writer/director Brandon Cronenberg, both artistically and critically. Although Antiviral was well-received by those that saw it, it's fair to say that it didn't reach a huge audience outside genre fans drawn in by the intrigue that his family name brings. It was unavoidable that Cronenberg the younger was always going to have to work hard to spring out from behind the shadow of his father, David, particularly when working within the body horror genre that marked arguably the high point of his father's filmography with films like Scanners, Videodrome and The Fly. But it's also worth noting that those successes occurred twenty years into his career, having spent years directing for television before 1975's Shivers gave him a clear calling card. For Brandon, who has spent the years between features working on short film projects, there's clearly some shared DNA with his father in his approach to horror (and more specifically body horror) but Possessor has quite rightly been heralded as the arrival of a true visionary filmmaker.

Possessor arrives on digital and blu-ray with great word of mouth and some notoriety, thanks in part to its more extreme elements of gore and special effects. The opening scene sees a young woman enter a crowded bar and proceed to stab a man to death (and then some), who then puts a gun in her mouth but finds herself unable to pull the trigger. Shocking and gruesome, it's a bold, blood soaked introduction to what's to come. As the police guns the young woman down, the conscience of Vos (Riseborough), the agency's lead assassin, returns to her own body, mission completed but not faultless. Pale and with bleached blonde hair, Riseborough's Vos looks like a ghost or inverse shadow, maybe of her former self, maybe of someone else. As she debriefs to her superior, Girder (Jennifer Jason Leigh), and tries to re-stabilise her mind to her own reality by describing her connection to various personal items, it becomes clear that due to the lasting after effects of her work, her family life has become strained to breaking point. Returning home to see her son, she has to rehearse what she is going to say to him in order to pass as a normal person, and not the hollow shell she sees herself as.

Assuring her superiors that she's ready, Vos takes on a new mission to assassinate wealthy businessman John Parse (Sean Bean), by inhabiting the body of his daughter's boyfriend, Colin Tate (Abbott), with only a few days to finish the job before the effects could cause lasting damage to Vos's psyche. But as Tate's host starts to fight back against the invading presence of Vos's conscience in his mind and their physical and mental worlds start to intertwine, the fight for control spills out into the real world.

If you're confused, don't worry. Possessor is certainly a film that's full to the brim with outlandish sci-fi concepts, like the dream world of Inception going on in the mind of someone who's just gone through the door behind the filing cabinet in Being John Malkovich (or maybe the other way around?), but it's a thoroughly entertaining experience. For sure, there's moments around the mid point of the film where Christopher Abbott is on screen and it might be difficult to track whether we're looking at Tate or Vos acting as Tate, but that's kind of the point. What's for certain is that as the story progresses and the film reaches its bravura psycho-sexual set-piece that gives it its most indelible image (and its poster and cover image), you'll just be happy to be along for the ride with them, no matter who may be in control.

Indelible it may be, but it's also not the only incredible piece of effects work, courtesy of British special effects master Dan Martin. A frequent collaborator or Ben Wheatley and with other notable recent credits including Richard Stanley's Colour Out of Space and Jonas Akerlund's Lords of Chaos, anyone who's seen the effects work there will be able to attest to their quality and also visceral impact. There's some truly nasty make-up effects in Possessor as Vos gets to work, and it's stomach churning in it's detail as teeth, eyeballs and fingers all find themselves on the wrong side of Vos/Tate. The inclusion of "Uncut" on Possessor's cover may call back to an era of banned films and highly compromised edits and is undoubtedly there as a marketing ploy for gorehounds, but it is a reassurance that the inclusion of these moments has been deemed necessary and not exploitative by the ratings board. And it's not all blood and guts. There's also an incredible effect that marks the start of the mission, visualising the physical melting away of Vos, only to reform as Tate that can only be described as beautiful.

It's a vividly directed film by Cronenberg, utilising bold reds to differentiate between Tate and Vos's POV and contrasting yellow flares, coupled with a blurring lens and quick cuts as things become more detached from reality between the two leads. Abbott and Riseborough are both fully committed to their roles/role, and as the story falls into what can only be described as an extended psychotic episode for the two of them. A success of their performances within what are increasingly blurred lines is that you want to heap praise on both of them, even when only one of them is on screen. There are some ideas that aren't developed or explored to their full potential, leaving some threads hanging. For example, Colin Tate's job sees him spying through people's webcams in order to document their lives and material belongings in as mundane a detail as choice of curtains. It's an intrusion that nicely mirrors Vos's own whilst also providing commentary on our own real world fears of privacy and personal data collection by multi-national conglomerates, but it's put to one side in order to focus on Vos's primary mission.

A mystery/sci-fi/horror that offers plenty of mind melting ideas that will stay with you long after, beyond the comparisons to its sci-fi, horror forebearers and the work of Brandon Cronenberg's father, Possessor is uncompromisingly it's own thing. Gloriously violent, shocking, visceral, tragic - it has to be seen by your own two eyes to truly be believed.

Verdict

4/5

Possessor is on digital HD 1 February and Blu-ray & DVD 8 February from Signature Entertainment

MANDY - London Film Festival review

Arriving in a storm of hype about Nicolas Cage's performance, Panos Cosmatos's Mandy screened as part of the London Film Festival and is now on general release.

The first thing to get out of the way is that 'Mandy' is not a film, but rather two, bisected down the middle and separated by a title card bearing the film's name, bleeding onto the screen an hour in. The first part, shown to be called 'The Shadow Mountains, 1983 A.D' is the starter before the main course of Cage led mayhem, and the set up for what is to come. Cage appears fleetingly and has a passive role, the focus (perhaps confusingly, given the title) is on Andrea Riseborough's Mandy, an illustrator and the wife of Cage's lumberjack, Red.

When a religious cult leader and a gang of demonic bikers arrive at their door, Mandy is subjected to Jeremiah's (Linus Roache) rhetoric, some mind expanding hallucinogens and some Carpenters on vinyl. What is most surprising about this section of the film is how slow and trippy an experience it is. Even before Roache and the Hellraiser-esque bikers turn up, Red and Mandy's home life is shown to be darkly ethereal, their bedroom surrounded by huge windows that connects them (spiritually and literally) to the woods outside.

With its array of kaleidoscopic colours and some truly retina expanding visual trickery (most notably in a cross fading conversation between Riseborough and Roache) you find yourself pulled into its trance like nightmare as all manner of horrors wash over you. It's not an altogether unpleasant experience, but if you aren't fully invested in what's going on, it may have the effect of being read a bed time story by someone on a heavy acid flashback.

The film has a clear change of gears when the Cage door is finally opened, fuelled by rage and a secret bottle of bathroom vodka, it's in this back half where all the crowd pleasing moments lie. At this point in his career, Cage has become known for his on screen madness, and although Mandy does contain some vintage Cage-isms including a neck snapping scene that elicited a spontaneous round of applause in the screening I saw, it's just a drop in the ocean of crazy Cage supercuts and far from the unhinged madness word of mouth would have you believe. It's in this second half where the film leans into its sick sense of bizarre humour, not least the very strange appearance of the 'Cheddar Goblin' that, although funny, doesn't meld well with the psychotropic world we've been invited into. It's as if they have hit upon a 'viral' moment by accident and have opted to include it, even to the potential detriment of the film's established world logic.

As the saying goes, actions speak louder than words, which is helpful as Cage's Red is definitely more of a do-er than a talker. A lumberjack by trade, when he begins his revenge mission with arrows that will "cut through bone like a fat kid and cake" and a huge, self-forged axe, the demonic forces he faces better watch out. The film makes no excuses for its macho-ness and when Cage is at loggerheads (yes, that's a lumberjack pun) with the demonic bikers, Mandy includes a chainsaw ballet complete with the most audience appetite whetting reveal this side of Crocodile Dundee's knife.

It's worth investing in the film's trippier first half to get the pay off when Cage is set loose. A disturbing, psychotropic nightmare of visual mayhem, despite some flaws in its pacing and logic, Mandy is an experience like nothing else.

Verdict

4/5

BRIGHTON ROCK review

Out now in cinemas in this re-adaptation of Graham Greene's novel.

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