Upgrade (Leigh Whannell, 2018)

Body horror comes as no surprise from director Whannell, as he wrote the first three Saw films. But there is more to this than just exploitation, and it's a curious mix of sci-fi, revenge drama and doom-mongering about the perils of AI that just about gels. Basically, a couple's self-driving car crashes, and then men turn up to kill her and leave him quadriplegic. Then, when a reclusive tech company head offers to restore his mobility by implanting a revolutionary chip in his spine, he grabs at the chance and of course uses it to seek out those responsible for his wife's death. This turns very nasty quite soon as the chip dishes out horrendous violence, operating his body with unstoppable killing machine efficiency, while calmly talking to him in his head, offering options for each step like an interactive story.

It wears its numerous influences brazenly on its sleeve (The Terminator, The Matrix, Existenz, Ex Machina etc.) and doesn't really end up saying anything new about the inadvisability of tampering with what the good Lord gave you, but it thunders along enjoyably and hits its finale with an efficiency many of its bigger-budget equivalents singularly fail to do.

6/10

Venom (Ruben Fleischer, 2019)

Marvel seem to have started scrabbling around somewhat for which franchise to invest in next, none more so than here with a alien symbiote taking over and making an anti-hero out of Tom Hardy. The character first appeared in the ill-fated Spider-Man 3 and perhaps that, for all of Hardy's charisma, should have served as a bad omen for this effort. By the time the monster parasitically occuping his body starts talking to him like an American gangster, presumably for comic effect, things have already sailed well up the Swanee, with an off-the-shelf millionaire scientist villain bent on exploiting the alien, and all the subsequent frenzied overspend on FX can't retrieve the situation. Not that the audience paid much heed, since it ended up as the sixth-most profitable film of 2018 worldwide and had a sequel out in 2021.

4/10

The Lighthouse (Robert Eggers, 2019)

Does great cinema have a duty to edify as well as inspire awe? If so, The Lighthouse fails as such, since it is essentially a study in despair and degeneration. However, on all other counts it's a triumph.

It's 1890 and two men arrive at a remote lighthouse on a tiny North Atlantic island to man it for a month. One is a grizzled veteran (Willem Dafoe) and the other (Robert Pattinson) is to serve as his apprentice. This soon proves to mean that the former puts the latter through one arduous chore after another, while denying him access to the light itself. The quality of their relationship takes on the pattern of a degrading sine wave, as spells of warming are followed by ever more aggressive confrontations. At first, it feels at moments like Steptoe and Son seen through an Edgar Allan Poe Gothic horror filter, but the reassurance such a comparison might provide fades away under a bombardment of complex and profoundly disturbing symbols and allusions.

It leaps without resolution from one unsettling scene to another in the manner of The Shining, cuts suddenly into nightmarishly expressionistically-shot close-ups at moments of heightened tension and becomes increasingly hallucinatory, with Pattinson seeing a live mermaid after finding a figurine of one in his bed, masturbating furiously over the image. Semen, the merciless sea, oil, undrinkable drinking water, alcohol and finally blood: liquids dominate the symbolism throughout, akin to the mediaeval humours. Visual symbols, such as the obvious phallicism of the lighthouse, are presented in an insistent, explicit fashion, akin to what you might find in the films of Béla Tarr, through a Hitchcock filter. And as the dynamic between the two characters starts to veer from alcoholic set-tos in the fashion of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf (with accompanying homoerotic undertones) through Godot-esque deconstructed dialogue to something more terminal, Dafoe takes on a persona that is closer and closer to that of Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, with a glint in his eye, first spinning tales of disaster at sea and then prophesying doom. We know doom cannot be averted, as in truth we've known from the start, but when it comes, its manner is still startling, Greek myth merging with 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The actors suffer more for their art before our eyes than can be faked in any way, therefore adding to the impact, and when this is married to artful editing and a true understanding of the purpose of shooting in black and white as opposed to just using it to invoke period, for example, the resulting brew is a heady one. 

Only afterwards did I find out that it did actually take an unfinished Edgar Allan Poe story as its starting point, which makes perfect sense and serves neatly to inform the viewer in advance too of what to expect. Just not the sheer, excoriating impact of what follows.

8/10

A Quiet Place (John Krasinski, 2018)

A Quiet Place is savvy enough to know that exposition is largely no longer demanded or even desired as it plunges straight into a post-apocalyptic survival scenario with a family looting an abandoned supermarket. The premise is also establshed without undue waffle, which is appropriate as it's immediately apparent that waffle is the killer, with the family having to maintain silence at all times lest they be pounced on. Not by the customary zombies, as it turns out, but some kind of extra-terrestrial monsters that instantly zero in on any sound.

Nothing too revelatory so far here, but the ace up the film's sleeve isn't the aliens - of an unlikely origin of which we are asked to ask no questions, and which are wholly generic by visual design - or the set-up as such. No, it's the killer idea that there is and there can be virtually no dialogue, so the cast are forced to use sign language instead, with all the effects that this has on their interaction, and the viewer soon becomes aware of the potential sound made by every single mundane activity, and this idea is pursued with rigour. Noise, rather than the monsters, is itself something to fear and this is a genius conceit. I found myself acutely conscious for minutes after it finished of every sound I made, and any such transformative effect that a film achieves is to be applauded. Naturally enough, a sequel is imminent, albeit unnecessary, since it can't possibly come up with a better premise. 

7/10

Marriage Story (Noah Baumbach, 2019)

It's impossible for any film about the acrimonious divorce of a New York couple and the accompanying custody battle over their young son to escape comparisons with Kramer vs. Kramer, and Marriage Story doesn't try too hard to do so. The differences are superficial: here, they both work together in theatre, and it's her that takes off with the son, to L.A. With the characters firmly entrenched in a middle-class arts world that is so obviously the extent of what the director will be comfortable with depicting and there being no risk of them suffering real penury, navel-gazing would be an easy accusation, but there is a wide range of tonality too from scene to scene, and ultimately the film stands squarely on the excellent performances of Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson, with solid support from Laura Dern and Ray Liotta as their toxic rival lawyers. All in all, it's quite moving, while at the same time highlighting once more what a twisted, parasitic business the American legal system is.

7/10