Three Films Make A Post: Descend into Fear

Black Water: Abyss (2020): Two couples plus one go on a caving expedition and find themselves stranded thanks to a shock flood, as well as threatened by a very hungry large crocodile. Survivalist standards and soap operatic character stuff ensue. Andrew Traucki’s belated not-really sequel to his decent 2007 evil crocodile movie Black Water is an okay enough film, if you’re in the market for decently – the film’s no The Descent that’s for sure - realized caving horror with a hungry animal. If the filmmaking were sharper, some of the shots wouldn’t suggest that it’s mostly dark down there because it’s cheaper to shoot, and the character stuff were a bit less annoyingly superficial, this would probably even be worth an actual recommendation. As it stands, you might as well go and watch one of the better survivalist animal horror films out there.

The High Note (2020): On the other hand, when it comes to feel good movies about the music biz with a romance plot and some genuinely thoughtful scenes on how race can play into the question of commercialism versus art, and a ridiculously happy ending, you can do much worse than Nisha Ganatra’s The High Note. Plus, unlike quite a few films about music and musicians I’ve seen in the last year or so, I have the impression that someone involved actually likes and gets music (even in its most commodified forms).

Also recommended for an expectedly nice performance by Dakota Johnson (who apparently can do no wrong for me after her incredible work in Suspiria), Tracee Ellis Ross giving a character that could be a cliché life, Ice Cube doing a really fun cliché manager, and a late and lovely side turn by Bill Pullman.

Keeper of Darkness aka 陀地驅魔人 (2015): Doing a bit of the very Hong Kong genre mixture of horror, ghost romance, melodrama and comedy, Nick Cheung Ka-Fai’s (who is also his own star), film is not always successful in every genre it tackles – especially some of the comedy is pretty risible and badly timed – but has an – I assume purposeful – air of a bit of a dirge for this kind of HK film, films wilder, less slick and more alive than what the rules of mainland China cinema seem to allow right now, interesting even when they are not exactly good.


This melancholic undertone works very well with the human/ghost romance (while not as much with the human/human romance) too, the film’s subtext making the somewhat kitschy text it has little to do with otherwise rather more impactful than it should be.