Three Films Make A Post: BIG MEETS BIGGER

The Maus (2017): Using genre cinema and elements of the fantastical strictly for parable and allegory is usually the best way for a genre film to get friendly nods from critics who prefer their movies Serious and Meaningful. As Yayo Herrero’s film demonstrates, there is an easy trap to fall in with this approach, asking an audience to somehow connect with a film whose characters aren’t people – aren’t even supposed to be people – but stand-ins for groups of thousands or more individuals and/or mouthpieces for ideas.

Consequently, here, the two Serbian characters are human monsters, the Bosnian woman traumatized into violently striking back, and her German boyfriend just not able to understand because nobody murdered his family. A series of clichés which I believe amply demonstrates how shallowly this film that’s supposed to be about ideas approaches its historical target, turning a complex and horrifying part of recent history into something that’s pat and easily understandable, not reduced to its basics but simplified until the whole noble gesture of this being a Meaningful movie about Serious things seems rather dubious. Why, I can’t help but think if the film had been about specific people instead, it might have been able to actually say more about the world they inhabit and the forces that shaped them.

Habit (2017): Staying in the realm of not terribly convincing genre filmmaking, how about this poverty porn/horror movie by Simeon Halligan? If you went and told me a film concerning a cannibal sex cult running nightclubs and bordellos could be quite as bland and bloodless as this one, I wouldn’t have believed it. Alas, bland and bloodless it is, selling its argument that life as a modern city poor, the inevitable emptiness only lightened by drunken debauchery (don’t tell filmmakers not all of us lower class people are self-destructive alcoholics), can easily push one into enjoying the supposed feeling of life that comes with being a cannibal (the film tells yet doesn’t show that feeling, obviously), with all the energy and depth of an empty battery.

There’s absolutely an exciting, insightful film to be made out of the basic set-up and its basic interests, but that film would have some life to it, and would probably have a point its actually trying to get across beyond: being poor is really bad for your mental health. Who’d have thunk?

Thoroughbreds (2017): Fortunately, I can end this post on a satisfying note, namely with this nasty black comedy about the friendship between two teenage female upperclass sociopaths (Olivia Cooke and Anya Taylor-Joy in performances that are in turn disturbing, sad, and funny). The film recommends itself not only through the performances of its wonderful leads, but also through its sardonic portrayal of the young women’s upperclass world, the kind of privilege that seems bound to create sociopaths while only willing to notice them when they are acting out a little. It’s the old ditty about the terrors lurking beneath the surface of a supposedly normal world given a large twist of class consciousness, and presented with dry wit.


Director Cory Finley’s clinical style of direction will not be to everyone’s taste but to my eyes, it seems the perfect approach to telling the tale of two people who only ever perform emotions.