Three Films Make A Post: Pain Don’t Hurt

Don’t Breathe 2 (2021): I really loved the first Don’t Breathe movie, but this much more violent and body count based sequel directed by the first film’s co-writer Rodo Sayagues (who also co-wrote with the first film’s Fede Alvarez again) is just terrible. Instead of a tight – if not terrible plausible – focussed thriller plot, the only structure here is a series of plot twists that start rather stupid and quickly become so vacuously idiotic, throwing tomatoes at the filmmakers feels like a perfectly civilized reaction to their assumption of a basically braindead audience. Their absurdly misguided decision to turn the first film’s villain into a redemptive anti-hero doesn’t exactly buy them any patience either. On a technical level, many of the scenes here are perfectly capable and competent filmmaking, but that’s really not enough when a script is quite as lazy and stupid as this one.

The Possessed (1977): Though I dislike Jerry Thorpe’s exorcism TV movie quite a bit a well, at least this seems to have been made with the assumption of a non-idiot audience. In fact, the film makes the quite clever choice not to be the TV-lessened version of The Exorcist you’d expect it to be, but clearly aims for more psychological horror. Tonally, it’s often going for psychodrama more than anything else. Alas, the writing’s not really sharp or insightful enough to make this work as a piece of 70s Slow Horror, and as it goes with films which are consciously slow when they don’t succeed, things drag rather painfully. A lack of dramatic flair is a problem, too, leaving this rather too quiet for its own good.

After Pilkington (1987): This product of the BBC’s teleplay culture, written by Simon Gray and directed by Christopher Morahan, starring Bob Peck and Miranda Richardson in two brilliant performances, on the other hand, achieves all of the goals it sets itself remarkably well. It manages to be at once a social satire about midlife crisis and types of educated lonely men and the women they turn real women into in their minds, a comedy that becomes darker in tone and humour the longer things go on, and a thriller with an intense and psychologically fitting climax that is also desperately sad.

It is all these things while also making the feat look easy, direction and script elegantly and precisely shifting modes and tones, leaving the right spaces for the performances.