Humane

Here’s a cheerful premise: Our future will be so grim that people deemed by the government to be a drain on resources will be obliged to step up for euthanasia. That concept powered the 2022 Japanese film Plan 75, and it provides some electricity — some — to the dystopian thriller Humane, directed by Caitlin Cronenberg from a script by Michael Sparaga. In a few years (presumably), the deteriorating climate will result in a serious shortage of water and other natural resources, so the government makes a deal: At least one adult from every family must agree to die. Their survivors will get a decent chunk of change. They will pass into the great unknown mystery knowing they sacrificed (or were sacrificed) for the greater good.

The world-building in Humane doesn’t concern itself very much with some questions we may have (will birth control be mandated?). We see a few snippets of news on TV, some featuring Jared York (Jay Baruchel), an anthropologist working with the government on this morbid endeavor. Jared’s rich, famous father, anchorman Charles York (Peter Gallagher), has called Jared and his three other grown children to his home for dinner. When everyone — including addict Noah (Sebastian Chacon), embattled CEO Rachel (Emily Hampshire) and her teen daughter Mia (Sirena Gulamgaus), and aspiring actress Ashley (Alanna Bale) — has gathered, Charles drops the news: he and his wife Dawn (Uni Park) have decided to volunteer themselves for the cause — to “enlist.”

Charles is out of the picture in half an hour or so. His wife gets cold feet and flees, complicating matters greatly: the people who arrive to administer the enlistment, led by the amiable Bob (Enrico Colantoni), have to take a second body to replace Dawn. So the grown kids fight (often physically) over which of them is going to provide that body. Humane becomes a one-location thriller (it could be adapted to the stage with little trouble) in which four characters with varying degrees of pain in their lives try to defend their continued existence. That could be boring, but Cronenberg keeps things short and briskly paced, with a mitigating sense of humor — bleak humor, to be sure, but enough to humanize the brittle, often objectionable characters. 

Humane doesn’t seem to aspire to more than that; the world is narrowed down to one well-appointed home and one set of siblings squabbling. So it becomes an actors’ showcase, though the drama often devolves into stabbing, strangling, and gunplay. None of these people seem especially capable of fratricide, though I guess part of the satirical point is that these pampered bourgeois kids, who have grown up and into their own self-abusive flaws, turn easily and coldly to violence. I almost would rather have followed Bob and his partner from house to house, seen what they see — kind of the inverse of Asphalt City, in which a couple of guys go door to door saving lives, not taking them. 

But this is the Humane we got, and for what it is it’s crisply rendered. Of the three filmmaking children of Canadian master David Cronenberg (who contributes an aural cameo here), Caitlin seems to have inherited the old man’s dark sense of comedy, while Cassandra (based on her 2013 short Candy) got his erotic aesthetic and Brandon (judging by the two of his films I’ve managed to sit through) got his fixation on body horror. Put them all together and you have David, I suppose, just as combining the Corleone sons gets you Vito. Caitlin Cronenberg has an easy way with actors; her style is smooth, not off-putting or confusing. I’d like to see her write her own script next time, though, follow her own muse.

Late Night with the Devil

For the longest time I kept giving Late Night with the Devil the benefit of the doubt, overlooking things and tones that didn’t square with the film’s presented milieu — it’s supposed to be footage from a late-night TV talk show that aired live on Halloween 1977. It’s got subtly powerhouse work by David Dastmalchian, striding into a rare lead role with confidence and his usual emotional transparency. He’s playing Jack Delroy, the host of the fourth-network show Night Owls with Jack Delroy, and it’s clear he’s watched enough vintage chat and horror-host shows to have internalized how such hosts acted and spoke. Dastmalchian makes the movie fun to watch all by himself. It’s the movie around him that falters.

Obsessed with beating Johnny Carson’s ratings, Jack loads his Halloween show with guests he hopes will lure and hook viewers. There’s “Christou” (Fayssal Bazzi), a psychic who purports to be in touch with audience members’ deceased loved ones. There’s Carmichael Haig (Ian Bliss), a Randi-type debunker of flim-flam. Finally, there’s reputedly possessed girl Lilly (Ingrid Torelli), whose parapsychologist guardian Dr. June Ross-Mitchell (Laura Gordon) saved her from some sort of demonic cult. It’s not long before Jack finds out the real target of satanic energy isn’t any of his guests. 

Gee, could the (real-life) Bohemian Grove and its shadowy meetings of powerful men in the entertainment industry have something to do with it? Grasping at any means to take down Johnny, Jack has joined these weird ritualistic get-togethers in the woods. This isn’t a spoiler, as the too-explicit narration spills the beans right at the start. We then learn Jack’s wife had died of lung cancer despite never smoking (such a thing is rare but not so unheard-of as to suggest demonic cause). So we go into all the supernatural events with the knowledge that it’s all happening due to Jack; he is the nexus of this paranormal activity. 

This is why horror movies get less legitimately frightening the deeper they wander into the weeds of exposition. It becomes Jack’s problem, Jack’s fault, rather than something random and scary that could happen to you. As I said, Late Night with the Devil is a fun tribute; sometimes it looks like genuine 1977 video footage and sometimes not (I assume because if it looked too much like video from 1977 it’d just look terrible, like a smeary, staticky fifth-gen dupe). It’s a decent enough stylistic calling card for the director brothers Colin and Cameron Cairnes, who also wrote and edited the film; perhaps next time they could hire another writer, or resist whatever pressure they may have been under to force the weird events — including levitation, projectile vomiting and someone with worms emerging from his flesh — to make some sort of narrative sense instead of allowing them to be harrowingly unexplained.

What’s worse, rather than letting the whole film just be the show’s footage, the brothers Cairnes often give us black-and-white “behind the scenes” segments that are necessary, I guess, to deliver plot points (as when someone dies offscreen and Jack hears about it during a commercial pause), but that also violate the imaginative contract we’ve bought into that this is actual coverage taped off of late-night TV. Not that we literally believe it’s real, of course, but we want to like what the movie is doing, want to make ourselves vulnerable to whatever scares it packs, and such breaks in the style and narrative shatter what should be unquestioning absorption. Again, it’s a writing issue. 

Dastmalchian is one of the most effortlessly engaging actors we’ve got. In a recent two-parter on The Rookie he played a corrupt ex-soldier who faked his own death; his character showed such strong certainty that he was untouchable by the cops (including the one he once served with) we were left with little reason to doubt him. Late Night with the Devil lets Dastmalchian run the gamut from TV-host smarm to insecurity to grief to terror — it’s a full package. The movie would be considerably easier to dismiss and forget without him as Jack, the ringmaster of his own small circus whose animals get out of his control. For his pains, he’s just surrounded by a bunch of Australian actors who needed work. One of them, Rhys Auteri as Gus, Jack’s Ed McMahon figure, gives an on-target performance without ego. Most of the rest of the cast appear to be too “in character” as guests on a Halloween show — are they on the level or not? These directors seem to know how to leave good actors alone, but the (let’s say) other actors don’t get the guidance they need. By the time the climax fizzles out into a weak post-climax that fills the studio floor with casualties but leaves us unmoved, some of us may already have checked out mentally. Enjoy the movie for Dastmalchian, but don’t expect much more.

Civil War

Like a lot of flashpoints for cultural controversy, Alex Garland’s Civil War isn’t much to get angry or enthused about. It’s not a bad movie; it just isn’t what a lot of viewers will be wanting and expecting. Civil War is about a second such conflict in America, and some of its sounds and visuals have the spooky-surreal punch of the invasion sequences in John Milius’ Red Dawn. Garland, like Milius, wants the American audience to feel what it’s like to live under a hostile military presence. But he also wants to fashion a bouquet to war correspondents — our heroes are a quartet of combat photographers/writers, and they only get in the thick of things every reel or so. Meanwhile, the narrative takes no sides, which seems meant to placate the red and the blue by presenting a purple story that has already annoyed both sides.

Lee (Kirsten Dunst) and Joel (Wagner Moura) are seasoned war journos, joined by aging writer Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson) and neophyte shutterbug Jessie (Cailie Spaeny), who looks about 12. The American president (Nick Offerman) has somehow gotten himself a third term and done other dictatorial things. This has resulted (I guess?) in the country splitting up into factions — loyalist states (Florida, Colorado), neutral spaces, and a secessionist movement called the Western Forces based in a comically unlikely détente between Texas and California (Gavin and Greg, together at last!) 

That last detail is your loudest indication that Civil War isn’t meant to be a statement about our current polarized situation (and a surprising amount of reviewers really, really wanted it to be). It extrapolates a reality that could happen here into a story about the truth-tellers, the press who (theoretically, anyway) seek to capture what’s happening and report on it. Garland’s defense of the media against charges of “fake news” and “enemy of the people” is about the closest he gets to condemning a certain former president who, to these eyes, has very little in common with the president Offerman plays (for one thing, Offerman doesn’t have the material — he’s in it so little one could comfortably hold one’s breath throughout his scenes).

Every so often there’s stuff for Lee and Jessie to photograph, and Garland sticks to the stuttery realism of modern war cinema, the clatter and muffled bass of combat, people abruptly felled as though connected to the sky by an invisible thread that’s been snipped. It was done with more panache and feral virtuosity in Children of Men, but Garland’s attempt to honor the chaos of real warfare is noble. The comparison is apt, because despite what many of its overexcited boosters claimed, Children of Men plopped us in medias res in a grim meathook future and then had nothing much to say about it other than how much it would suck. Civil War is the same. Garland pays a price for his noncommittal approach: his world-building suffers to the point of being nonexistent or at least irrelevant.

If Civil War were a better movie it might spawn a franchise, like the odious The Purge, telling a variety of stories set in the dystopia it creates. Garland’s America has me wanting to know more about it than what we’re given piecemeal. What started the war, what politics were involved, how do some towns apparently choose to opt out of the conflict altogether? Meanwhile, Garland’s narrative is old and full of familiar tropes; the protagonists meet their predicted fates at the predicted times, and Jesse Plemons turns up on the road — this is in essence a glorified road-trip movie, with our heroes beating feet to D.C. to secure an interview with the president — to be creepy and militaristically sadistic in the manner of heavies in a hundred B-movies. Which Civil War basically is, though a well-acted one, and precisely calibrated in the combat sequences. But people need to chill about it. It is what it is, not what we want it to be.

The First Omen

The last time one of these Omen things came around — nearly twenty years ago! — I said we seem to get a lot of demonic cinema when there’s trouble in the Middle East (more so than usual, that is). I don’t know why. But the world situation is what it is, and lately we’ve gotten a slew of brimstone beasties. Last year gave us new installments of Evil Dead and The Exorcist, along with a group of others; this still-young year has brought Late Night with the Devil, Immaculate, and now The First Omen, a prequel set before the infernal events of the 1976 original. (It’s not a prequel to the 2006 remake, since we see a photo of the 1976 film’s star Gregory Peck here.) In such times, people prefer being scared by things that don’t remind them of the world outside the multiplex, I guess.

Visually, this may be the best-directed Omen yet. Cowriter/director Arkasha Stevenson and her cinematographer Aaron Martin offer an early-‘70s Rome done up in dark amber and burgundy, the color of hellfire, as though the world capital of Catholicism were hell on earth. Our heroine is Margaret (Nell Tiger Free), an American novitiate who arrives at an orphanage in Rome to take her vows as a nun. Margaret has been plagued by disturbing visions all her life, and she develops concern for an orphan girl named Carlita, whose drawings indicate similar troubling spectres. As Margaret eventually finds out — with the help of Father Brennan (Ralph Ineson), the priest headed for freak impalement in the ’76 film — she hasn’t been brought to Rome just to become a nun.

The movie is dark and often quiet, and takes its time. Arkasha Stevenson knows her stuff and creates a suffocating mood. It’s the script, whose end is designed to click neatly into the 1976 movie’s beginning, that lost me. Nell Tiger Free plays Margaret honorably, but as written she’s made a bit too perfect, boringly perfect. There’s more going on with Margaret’s roomie Luz (Maria Caballero), who wants to take Margaret out on the town before they both take their vows, and Sister Silvia (Sonia Braga), the chain-smoking, trampoline-hopping Abbess of the orphanage. These two women both imply vivid past lives before their calling, and Sonia Braga cast as a nun will amuse fans of her ‘70s and ‘80s work. Margaret might have been allowed her own secret quirks and foibles. Or perhaps the writers didn’t want to link female individualism with vulnerability to demonic interest. 

In these movies it’s usually a virginal innocent (almost always female) who attracts the notice of Old Splitfoot, the better for her to lure him and risk being defiled by him. Such narratives tend not to be especially feminist. They’re not built to be. Stevenson and her collaborators try, however, to make this a glancingly empowering story by establishing rapport between women (this film, incidentally, would pass the Bechdel Test breezing). The problem is, the script doesn’t create any pockets of warmth between them, no funky humanity whose violation we can mourn. Even in the sober-sided original film there was David Warner as a skeevy tabloid photographer whose manner amusingly rubbed Gregory Peck the wrong way. There’s no David Warner figure in The First Omen, and it could have used one, desperately. 

It does occur to me that these lacks may have more to do with studio meddling than with the creators, who may have initially delivered a movie more in line with what I might’ve liked. As it is, the film — despite freaky bits like a demonic birth that almost got an NC-17 rating — feels, like many prequels, like a bland and unnecessary story. We know, after all, that Damien will be born and taken into the highest halls of power until he grows up to be Sam Neill. Nothing in this film will — or will be allowed to — change that. The only story here is how Margaret, a nun from Pittsfield, Massachusetts, ends up being part of the Damien saga. She has nothing much intriguing about her aside from that, and despite what I’m sure were the writers’ best intentions, she becomes reduced to what these movies always reduce women to: her body.