Three Films Make A Post: Lock The Bets.

To Your Last Death aka The Malevolent (2019): There’s hardly any horror animation coming from the USA, but even with that state of affairs, there’s no reason for anyone not into certain forms of sadomasochism to inflict this thing as directed by Jason Axinn on themselves. The best thing there is to say about the movie is that it managed to acquire some name actors, so Ray Wise rants, William Shatner babbles, Bill Moseley does a great Bill Moseley imitation, and so on. One can’t help but think that actual voice actors would have been a better investment as well as cheaper, but even then, there’d still be primitive animation with bland design and the script to cope with. The less said about the animation, the better; the script tries for the en vogue bashing of the rich but does so with no wit, without even the little insight you need for this sort thing, showing neither intelligence nor coming up with even a single interesting idea.

Emma (2020): Fair warning: I’m not an admirer of Jane Austen’s smug and self-satisfied style of irony that only ever snarks at things but does sod all to change them at the best of times – I’m more of a Bronte kind of guy. However, Autumn de Wilde’s adaptation of Austen’s “Emma” has problems all of its own making, namely a love for emotional abstraction and ironic distance that makes Austen’s work feel emotionally involved, and a tendency to aestheticize every single frame so that it basically screams “2020!” without any reason for it apart from the film feeling the need to tell its audience how very clever it is. It’s like The Favourite without the gall, the smarts, the empathy hidden behind cynicism and without the point in this. However, from time to time – I blame the excellent cast as lead by Anya Taylor-Joy – the film suddenly stops posing for a scene or two, threatening to turn its talking clothes horses into actual people for good, only to fall back into smug self-satisfaction and that deathly distance a couple of minutes later.

I honestly have no idea what the filmmakers were thinking.

Yella (2007): But let’s end on a less annoyed note. Nominally, German director Christian Petzold’s Yella reworks the basic set-up of the grand Carnival of Souls here, but in practice he’s using just as much of Ambrose Bierce’s “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”, showing himself in typically German fashion more interested in the psychological than the ghostly and weird. This is still a wonderful film, mind you, just don’t go in expecting a movie that’s in dialogue with Herk Harvey’s film. What we get is a sort-of thriller about love grown bitter, abuse and most of all the horrors of late capitalism and how they twist and shape people, all embodied in a great, nuanced performance by Nina Hoss.


As is necessary for this sort of material, Petzold is great at handling ambiguities, portraying states of mind, personality and world that have drifted into liminal spaces. Small town Germany and the kind of German city Petzold usually treats always have that quality of liminality, an air of irreality one has to have experienced to believe, so they are a perfect fit for a cinematic ghost story. It sometimes still surprises me so few German filmmakers make any ghost stories.