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Reviews
The Free Fall (2021)
Ashmore is great, and the movie will keep you off balance
I saw this as part of the Toronto After Dark Film Festival this year, and I wasn't sure what to expect. It looked like a fairly modestly budgeted horror movie, but I was interested because I liked the two leads (Shawn Ashmore and Narcos's Andrea Londo) and the director's previous film, The Triangle. Still, my expectations were tempered. The gist: a woman has gone through something truly horrific (quite the opening sequence - yikes!), and after attempting suicide she's struggling to regain her memory. Her husband is by her side as she gets stronger, but is he understandably overprotective... or is there more going on in the house?
Fortunately this movie - which shifts between
psychological thriller and horror - kept me guessing, and it actually did a few things that I (a pretty avid horror watcher) didn't see coming. There were plot elements I suspected by about halfway through, but there's a surrealist quality to the twists that start coming around that midpoint that make that moot, because by then you're so uneasy as the viewer that it doesn't matter if you've guessed a direction. No spoilers: there's a dinner party scene that really starts to make you wonder wtf is going on, in a good way. The writer and director does a very good job at keeping you as off-kilter as the main character is clearly feeling. Who is being gaslighted here, and who's doing the gaslighting? Is it the fragile wife? The controlling husband? Is it the wife's mysteriously absent sister? Or the Danvers-esque housekeeper who seems to have an agenda? And who are the people who keep showing up outside the house...?
Bonus points to Ashmore, who plays into the "is he evil/is he protecting her" qualities of his husband role exceptionally well. He walks a thin line and keeps you vacillating between two extremes throughout the film, and it's quite fun to see. Another bonus point for the ending, which threw another angle at me that I hadn't anticipated at all.
A strong 7/10 rounded up to an 8 for Ashmore and the truly trippy direction it takes halfway through. It may not be groundbreaking but it's certainly entertaining!
The Turning (2020)
A slow burn that unfortunately fizzles out with a weird ending.
I like horror movies and thrillers, I like modern takes on period pieces and classics, and I like the cast and am a fan of the director's music videos and earlier film work (i.e. The Runaways). So I expected to enjoy this update on The Turn of the Screw. I did not enjoy it, I'm sad to report. There was too little story or suspense to hold one's attention throughout, and that's a shame.
The cast certainly did their jobs -- Finn Wolfhard is no longer the nerdy little kid, and Mackenzie Davis was convincing in her role as a driven-to-the-edge tutor -- and it was visually beautiful throughout a lot of the film. But early jump scares suck a lot of the suspense out of it all. And a distinct lack of backstory/characterization leaves way too many questions about what, exactly, there is to be afraid of in the giant, creaky house. The little girl's fears are left unexplained, at least in terms of being satisfactory; the huge personality shift in the boy is sort of waved away; and the many unexplained deaths in the history of the estate are just confusing. I kept wondering if cuts had been made to the script or in the editing room, because things didn't flow at all and it really affected the atmosphere.
The ending will drive a lot of viewers to yell at the screen. Our half-full opening night theatre did a lot of groaning and saying, "You've got to be kidding me!" as the credits suddenly began to roll. Maybe that finale would've worked better had everything leading up to it actually added up to more...but unless we get a Director's Cut we'll never know. I wish I could recommend this movie. I can't. Not scary, nonsensical, and not enough to be worth the price of admission. -HV