Three Films Make A Post: A dangerous land breeds a dangerous man.

Siberia (2018): I’m pretty sure Matthew Ross’s Siberia was meant to be some sort of neo noir, using its Keanu Reeves protagonist’s misadventures in shady diamond dealings and cheating in Russia as a means to show his alienation and probably say something about the US’s standing in the world right now too. Alas, what we actually get is a film whose characters are as clichéd as they are uninvolving, and played with little conviction by a cast that seem to have been provided with little usable direction. What little there is of a plot moves with all the verve of a dead snail, lacking any and all interesting detail. Direction-wise, this is a slick, personality-less concoction that looks pretty but doesn’t create a mood, or a world for its characters to inhabit, nor does it create much of a point for anything going on in it, very slowly.

Sequence Break (2017): Equally unsuccessful but at least more ambitious is this Cronenberg without the philosophy but with arcade consoles bit by Graham Skipper (whom I know better as an extremely dependable indie genre movie actor). Stylistically, this really wants to be a Panos Cosmatos movie – or at least loves the same things about Cronenberg movies Cosmatos loves – but it never quite manages to create the proper mood of dream/nightmare/insanity, and is at its heart too friendly and romantic to really hit the philsophical and aesthetical extremes of its models. It is borrowing their surfaces instead of their cores and never quite manages to convince me of its own core.

Blood and Money aka Allagash (2020): Also dwelling completely in very traditional genre structures, character types and ideas, John Barr’s movie concerning an old hunter (Tom Berenger) stumbling into conflict with a brutal gang of robbers in the Allagash is much better at bringing them to life than this week’s other films. In part, that’s thanks to Barr’s slow yet focussed direction style, in part thanks to a performance by a Berenger clearly happy to get a role with a bit of substance his late work isn’t exactly full of, and in part simply because Barr (who also co-wrote this with Alan Petherick) knows how to flesh out tropes and connect them to actual life.


It’s also a film very clear about the utter, existential uselessness of its characters’ struggles, Berenger making one bad decision after the other in a mixture of bad habit, bad luck and an ill-understood idea of redemption that’s going to redeem nobody and improve nothing in the world.