The Secret Garden (2020)

Following the death of her parents around the time of the Partition of India and Pakistan, and a short stint in a pretty Dickensian establishment for orphans, young Mary (Dixie Egerickx, yet another extremely focussed and convincing child actress – I wonder where they breed them) is shipped to the decaying British country estate of her uncle Archibald Craven (Colin Firth).

Craven, driven into a rather serious depression by the death of his wife a couple of years ago, actually has very little time for the girl, leaving her in the hands of his pretty nasty housekeeper Mrs Medlock (Julie Walters) and the rather more pleasant maid Martha (Isis Davis). Mary herself is suffering from PTSD thanks to the circumstances of the late life and death of her parents, finding herself a stranger in that strange England, having to cope not just with loneliness but also the difficulty of trying to understand the new rules governing one’s life when nobody deigns to actually explain them to one.

Mary, it turns out, fortunately is a very resilient – as well as an often pretty arrogant and a bit spoiled - child, finding solace running wild on the moors and in the woods (which must be the height of the exotic to her eyes). Eventually, she discovers a hidden garden on the estate. The garden will turn out to be place of healing not just for her but for all the gothic brokenness she discovers surrounding her; and Mary will turn out to be rather good at sharing that place with others, even if she has to drag them.

How much you enjoy Marc Munden’s very free adaptation of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s beloved children’s book will probably depend on how willing you are to accept the sweeping changes the script by Jack Thorne makes to the source material. I’m rather of two minds about these changes. At least half of them seem to me to be textbook examples of how to properly change elements of a classic to adapt to a new time, new mores and changed audience tastes and ideas, so the film’s treatment of things like class, race and trauma is much more contemporary than in the book, without the film being an ass about it, and certainly a good way to treat the material today.

The other half of the changes, on the other hand, does pull the very genteel source material much deeper into high Gothic melodrama, the sort of thing that can’t not end with a dramatically burning mansion. These are obviously the sort of changes bound to annoy (or violently incense, given the always angry times we live in – the Hulk Age?) the fans of the book looking for an adaptation that may not keep to the details but to the tone of the book. As someone who hasn’t grown up with the Burnett’s writing, it not being the sort of thing read by German children, I find myself raising my eyebrows at some of these decisions a little, but will naturally have an easier time simply accepting them.

Munden does make this acceptance rather easy for me, too, for he is very good at creating a mood of gothic decay surrounding the Craven mansion, suggesting a place rotting away with the sorrows of its dwellers, full of hidden secrets, hidden doors, and even a hidden boy, left by a father whose own mental illness makes it impossible for him to see him clearly or treat him as even a mediocre father should. In this house, all things representing the memory of happier times are hidden away to be found by a courageous little snoop like Mary who hasn’t yet learned the art of repression but faces most of her troubles head-on. The film sells this so well, it even can convince me of that most horrible of things, helpful ghosts; but then, the memories and thoughts of one’s deceased loved ones bringing release and beauty even more than they do pain if you only let them is one of the points of the movie, so helpful ghosts are perfectly fit for the film at hand.

The film does make rather a lot out of the contrasts in light and colour between the mansion - always dark, of course, unless some memory or kindness lets a light in –, the lighter but somewhat bleak and dangerous countryside, and the better than natural brightness and beauty of the Secret Garden. Visually, the house gets all the Gothic colours and shapes of that darker side of Romanticism, whereas the moors are portrayed naturalistic, and the Garden carries the sheen of the brightest Romanticism. As a metaphor, it’s all a bit obvious, of course, but Munden’s visual realisation of the concept is so convincing obviousness doesn’t really feel like a problem.


One might also complain about the film being a bit too nice to its characters, providing them with wounds that heal too clearly and too quickly, but in the decades of the Grimdark Dystopia, I’m pretty fine with a film suggesting that lives can actually change for the better. Curious, I know. Must be my age.

Three Films Make A Post: Evil Lives Just Beneath the Surface

Mary (2019): Michael Goi’s movie about a haunted ship that ruins a family should by all rights be much better than it is: a ghost on a ship is doubly creepy, seeing as it adds isolation to a vengeful supernatural force; terrible things happening to perfectly likeable people are my kind of horror; and lastly, the film has Gary Oldman and Emily Mortimer, and they don’t look bored. Alas, everything that could be wrong with the film is wrong, starting with the needlessly awkward narrative structure of having Mortimer’s character tell the tale to a cop (cue internal groaning about plot twists at once) instead of the film simply telling the damn story, characterisation that does neither know how to do shorthand (don’t even think about actual depth) nor how to properly utilize the abilities of a great cast.
As for the film’s horror business, Goi – despite a perfectly promising background in TV genre work – seems completely incapable to construct even a single creepy scene properly. The framing of scenes is random and uninvolving, and there’s not a moment of the appropriate atmosphere on display.

Kingsman: The Secret Service (2014): I must have mentioned my immense dislike for Mark Millar’s brand of industrialised cynicism here before; curiously enough, I don’t hate all adaptations of his crap body of comics work quite as much. Case in point is Matthew Vaughn’s (co-written by Vaughn with the great Jane Goldman) super spy movie at hand. The movie’s humour is acerbic and generally aims a bit low for my tastes, but at least it does tend to aim for the lower parts of the people on top. Why, there’s even a bit of thinking about class in here that seems…honest. The film also has a lot of fun with the whole super spy business, putting imaginative twists on all kinds of standard tropes. The action is generally loud and abrasive but well-structured, and for most of the time, the film’s on the right side of being cynical. It also features Colin Firth and Samuel L. Jackson in great form.

The final act does become decidedly weaker, though, suffering under the really Millar-ian idea that mass murder is inherently hilarious, at the same time it is trying to milk it for laughs, also trying to use it as the base for suspense. Which, no surprise, doesn’t work out terribly well, but doesn’t end up so bad it ruins what is a surprisingly fun time.

Kingsman: The Golden Circle (2017): Aaaaand, I don’t know what happened here. Same director, same writers, basically the same cast, but the film is a bloated mess, lacking the satiric edge of the first film, landing hardly any joke. It was apparently made under the impression that what this sequel really needed were about a dozen sub-plots, none of which is terribly interesting, and so spends more time tediously juggling all the bits and pieces of what feels like at least half a dozen different scripts in place of having an actual narrative.


It doesn’t help at all that the action sequences follow the way of the plot, becoming more and louder but less interesting, certainly going through the motions of how a contemporary big budget movie action sequence is supposed to look and feel, but never making much of an impact.

Before I Go to Sleep (2014)

Christine (Nicole Kidman) wakes up every morning remembering nothing that has happened to her since her late 20s. The man she wakes up next to, her husband Ben (Colin Firth), explains - with the help of a useful photo wall in the movies more often used by serial killers - to her that some years ago, she had a bad accident that left her with a very particular kind of amnesia, erasing her memory with every night’s sleep.

However, things aren’t quite as simple as they seem to be. Secretly, Christine has been seeing neurologist Dr. Nasch (Mark Strong) for a few weeks now. Nasch has encouraged her to keep a video diary on a camera she keeps hidden, and reminds her of it with a phone call every morning. The therapy seems to be working too, but the bits and pieces Christine remembers lead to doubts concerning Ben.

Turns out Christine’s “accident” was actually a vicious attack on her. This will turn out not to be the only part of her past Ben edits out when he’s doing his daily info dump with her, but is this an attempt to protect her and survive a very difficult situation for himself, or is something sinister going on? And while we’re at it, what about Nasch? Isn’t he acting ethically rather questionable what with him making googly eyes at Christine and treating her in secret?

In general, I’m not terribly fond of thrillers with amnesia plots. It always seems to be a rather too convenient starting point from which to build a plot from, keeping protagonists and audience guessing without a film having to work for it.

However, if an amnesia film uses its easy starting point as well as Rowan Joffe’s Before I Go to Sleep does, I’m totally okay with it. The trick for such a film to make me happy is to create a narrative where the protagonist’s amnesia is more than just a plot tool, so Christine’s memory loss does have quite a few other functions than just enabling the thriller plot – though it does that too. As much as this is a well done “woman in peril – but from whom?” thriller, it is also a film attempting to think thoroughly about the way memory shapes a woman’s identity, and how memory and identity intersect with love and trust.

In putting the thoughtful bits and the thriller plot together, Joffe turns out to be a rather fine director and writer (he wrote the script based on a novel by S.J. Watson I unfortunately haven’t read) for this sort of thing, playing fair with the audience by keeping them clued in about what is going on as much as Christine is without going through awkward contortions to keep things mysterious. Sure, the way the plot relevant bits of memory return to Christine is a bit artificial (surely, she might remember drinking milkshakes or something else irrelevant to matters at hand from time to time instead of exactly those things that’ll make the film most interesting) but what the film does with these memories fits nicely into its thoughts on matters of trust, truth and love. And the suspenseful moments here are indeed exciting without looking as if the film were working too hard for them – which of course means it is working particularly hard for them.

Add to this expectedly fine performances of not particularly simple roles by Kidman and Firth, and you have an exemplary thriller.