The Last Thing Mary Saw (2021): If you want to know how not to make historical slow horror, this film written and directed by Edoardo Vitaletti should be a great teaching tool. It steps into all of the traps this sort of film can find its way in, starting with the belief that if you want to portray a period and society that’s all drab and dreary, your film needs to be drab and dreary too, and ending on pacing that’s leaden for no good reason whatsoever.
The film also never manages to bring its all too obvious thesis of “historical oppression of women and homosexuality by men was bad and killed the women struggling against it” to actual human life, never letting its concept become an actual story about actual people. It’s too concerned with hokey would-be authentic dialogue, lots of whispering, drab and dreary candle light like Barry Lyndon gone ridiculous to find anything genuinely human. And if all it has to say can be summarized in one easy sentence, what’s the point?
Trojan Eddie (1996): Whereas this Irish crime movie and very dark comedy by Gillies MacKinnon is all about things genuinely human. So it seeks and finds some kind of living spark even in the most oppressive idiots, and can be sympathetic without becoming bathetic. It is often very funny in the bleakly Irish style and very sad at the same time, never shying away from the brutality and pettiness of even its more sympathetic characters; yet it also never treats these as the only things they are. A cast full of people like Stephen Rea and Richard Harris certainly helps there, too.
In direct – and perfectly unfitting – comparison between this and Vitaletti’s movie, I can absolutely believe this film’s Ireland of the mid 90s as a place and time populated by actual human beings, where Mary’s is one in dire need of being fleshed out and taken beyond simplistic ideas about the past and the way people lived in it.
Shiva Baby (2020): Speaking of black comedies that are utterly sympathetic towards their characters even when they are treating them rather rudely and making them the butt of the joke, Emma Seligman’s tale of a shiva going very unpleasantly indeed for young Danielle (Rachel Sennott), what with all the lies she tells others about her life collapsing around her ears in public, is simply a fantastic film.
It is sharp, observant and often cutting without ever becoming cruel, using specificity of time, place and characters in a way that can’t help but produce insight even in viewers not sharing them. Seligman’s a very precise and visually interesting filmmaker, using camerawork and blocking as tellingly and elegantly as a great martial arts film/musical.
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