Three Films Make A Post: For Ruth, the last straw was a spoon.

The Hunter (2011): Daniel Nettheim’s Tasmania set eco thriller is not at all what I’d have expected from a director whose work otherwise is centred on dependable TV jobs (which I’m not going to knock, for there’s nothing at all wrong with craftsmanship under tight restrictions). It’s a slow, thoughtful film whose direction lacks all vanity and pretention in the best way, focusing instead on the landscape and quite wonderful acting by Willem Dafoe and Frances O’Connor, and specifically their interaction (with a bit of Sam Neill and two good child actors thrown in the mix, too). The film turns out to be a rather complicated redemption film that in the end sees our protagonist do something that is at once very, very right and very, very wrong – and unlike quite a lot of films about violent men finding redemption, The Hunter is quite conscious of this ambivalence.

The Sandman (1995): The thing with me and the films of (US indie horror pioneer) J.R. Bookwalter is that I like the man’s films and respect what he’s going for with them, but that I generally wouldn’t recommend them to many people. It’s not just the roughness that comes with making films with little money and not exactly a horde of experienced crew members involved that makes his films difficult to recommend - the ambition that makes Bookwalter’s films so interesting to me is what will kill them for a lot of viewers. If one is willing and able to look past the cheap costumes, the often amateurish acting, and so on and so forth and see the ideas they are supposed to stand in for rather than their inevitably imperfect reality, then one can be charmed and delighted by Bookwalters films; if one can’t, then one will only see something cheap and amateurish - though usually somewhat better shot and edited than one would expect. I’m not saying one of these ways to look at Bookwalter’s work – or that of filmmakers like him - is wrong, or right; I just happen to enjoy them, and this variation on the “dream demon” concept in particular.


Two Lovers and a Bear (2016): Not at all like a J.R. Bookwalter film is Kim Nguyen’s magical realist tale about, well, two lovers and a bear, or rather the imperfect and doomed (or not doomed, depending on one’s perspective) attempt of two lovers to overcome the pasts that defined and broke them. I found the film captivating, interesting, and infuriating to about the same degree. There’s gorgeous (and meaningful) photography of the Great White North (which is the sort of thing that’ll half sell me on any movie), fine performances by Dane DeHaan and Tatiana Maslany, and quite a lot of passion in the way Nguyen treats his characters; but I also found the way the ending seems to treat the characters’ brokenness as something that can’t be mended (or relieved) by anything but death unconvincing – quite literally in the sense that the film didn’t convince me of it, leading to an ending that to me felt as hollow and conventional as a classic Hollywood happy end.