Three Films Make A Post: Campfire Stories Can Be Deadly

Downhill (2016): Director Patricio Valladares’s film about bikers (the non-motorized kind) getting into rather big trouble in Chile is a bit of a mixed bag. In fact, it is one in more than one sense. For one, it’s an uneven film: acting, direction, the quality of the dialogue and the effects are all over the place. One minute, it’s a really neat and enthusiastic if crude little bit of indie horror, the next it’s bro horror at its most annoying, only to turn interesting again a scene later – and so on and so forth. The thing is, the good moments are really good, certainly good enough to make the film memorable. Sub-genre wise, one might get whiplash, seeing as this features the already mentioned bro horror, cabin in the woods style shenanigans, a cult, an infection angle played as outright body horror, something like Satanism, some survivalist business, and what can only be described (approvingly) as weird shit. The film never really manages to pull all these different threads together too well, but it is certainly never boring to see where it is going next.

The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999): Anthony Minghella’s version of the Patricia Highsmith novel turns quite a bit of what was still – though clearly identifiable – subtext in the novel’s text into text, producing a psychological thriller about repressed (homo)sexuality and class, and their intersections. It’s very well acted by everyone involved – if we ignore Jude Law’s and Gwyneth Paltrow’s dubious American accents which I just do – with Matt Damon giving one of the best performances of his career until now. Minghella’s direction is typically glossy and pretty, with a penchant for the needlessly sumptuous but here all these characteristics that drag some of his other films in the direction of the vapid yet ponderous type of film beloved by the Academy Awards are actually very much part of the meaning of a film all about the things hidden under these (too) pretty surfaces.


The Hatter’s Ghost aka Les fantômes du chapelier (1982): This sometimes darkly funny thriller by Claude Chabrol is just as interested in the things hidden under orderly surfaces, though he’s obviously not exploring them via excessive gloss and a dozen of stars. Rather, Chabrol’s film feels intimate and personal, never leaving the audience in doubt about what’s going on with its murderous and utterly mad hatter (Michel Serrault in a tour de force performance that finds the horrifying and the pitiable in the histrionic as well as the subtle, usually both in a single scene). This being Chabrol, the film does of course skewer the idea of the so-called “respectable citizen” and his ostentatious “normality”. Something or someone not being, acting, or looking normal – like the film’s poor, sad, grasping for “normality” until he dies of it, immigrant tailor Kachoudas (Charles Aznavour) and his crime of not being born in France – is of course still a major obsession of every stratum of many of the good citizens of many countries.