Three Films Make A Post: You are the experiment

Kain Kafam Hitam (2019): Somehow, it took two directors in form of Yudhistira Bayuadji and Maxime Bouttier to make the most generic, blandest example of the contemporary Indonesian horror wave I have yet seen. As a long-time genre movie fan, I’m perfectly okay with movies that aren’t works of genius and which consist nearly completely of well-worn tropes, but this one really has not a single moment that’s genuinely creepy, instead dragging its audience from one non-set piece, filmed indifferently, to the next. Apparently, the true horror is getting painfully bored by a film not even making the pretence of putting any effort in.

Arctic Void (2022): In comparison, this “stranded on Stavanger after some Fortean stuff happened” film by Darren Mann is a masterpiece. At least, it does start out pretty strong, with an inciting incident that’s cleverly staged and genuinely intriguing.

After the first act, alas, it becomes clear all too quickly that the film doesn’t really have any material for a second or a third one and will mostly drag its feet while nothing happens. At first, the very beautiful shots of an empty arctic township are somewhat interesting, but that attraction does stop eventually too, for one can only watch three mediocre actors doing very little for some time before one expects a theme, a plot, or just a mood to arrive.

The French Dispatch (2021): If you’re Wes Anderson (and the comparison is obviously very unfair to Arctic Void), you can get by with a very personal aesthetic, as this movie of connected shorts set in a France built out of weird ideas dreamt up after a marathon viewing session of pre-80s French cinema demonstrates. The film’s omnibus structure enables Anderson to completely give up on any pretence of interest in a standard narrative. Instead, a bunch of great actors go through a series of Anderson obsessions, tics and concepts, movie and literature quotes as filtered through the director’s by now well-known predilections, until the viewer is either hypnotized by the power of watching the contents of someone’s subconscious turned movie, or annoyed. I’m one of the viewers still very much with Anderson; visiting his mind space as a world put on screen still feels rather singular.