As regularly as Christmas (or a different festival of your choice) comes around

I'm going to take a bit of a break from the blog for a couple of weeks. I wish all of my readers - imaginary, real, or both - a fine, debaucherous or quiet time, and will be back to my usual shenanigans on January, 6th.

In short: Christmas Bloody Christmas (2022)

Tori Tooms (Riley Dandy) really just wants to drink away small town Christmas Eve, perhaps with some added sexual debauchery with her long time buddie Robbie Reynolds (Sam Delich), at least that’s what everybody they meet believes when witnessing their shouty mating dance of musical allusions and bad sexual innuendo.

Alas, the robot Santa (Abraham Benrubi) from the toy shop of Tori’s best friends malfunctions and begins a killing spree through everyone our somewhat abrasive heroine holds dear (as well as anyone else it encounters). This is the sort of thing that’ll happen when a company’s robot Santas are built on military technology, apparently.

Given the colour schemes of most of his films, it was only ever a question of time until Joe Begos was going to make a film set on Christmas. The resulting movie is pretty much what I expected it to be: very, very red even when no blood is on screen, full of characters unable to communicate in any other way but drunk shouting, editing that tends to the abrasive, often bordering on the physically aggressive. There’s pretty rude, yet damn funny, humour, characters that shouldn’t be likeable but feel both likeable and authentic, and a finely developed sense of general low budget carnage that’s as much reason for Begos’s aesthetic as it is a result of it.

That Begos’s general approach and the punky/grungy air of the film can annoy the hell out of anyone not in the mood for being shouted at for eighty minutes, or ever, is obvious; when you are, there’s really very little like the man’s movies.

Vikrant Rona (2022)

aka VR

Several decades ago (the film officially speaks of “almost half a century”, and I’m not sure if this is supposed to mean the late 70s or the early 80s). A small Indian village somewhere in the middle of a tropical forest is hit by a series of possibly supernatural occurrences and serial killings that suggest a nasty occult ritual is going on. One of the victims is the village’s chief of police. The place is also basically overrun by smugglers, so there is the potential of all of this being a nastier version of the old Dr Syn gambit.

In a curious twist of fate and very suddenly, extremely macho cop Vikrant Rona (Sudeep) appears in the village. He quickly starts taking care of business, swaggering and threatening when he isn’t actually investigating. He’s clearly stirring something up, too, for there is a series of attempts on his life. Though, to be fair, these may very well be caused by all the testosterone the guy is oozing causing allergies.

Freshly returned to the village, young Sanju (Nirup Bhandari) becomes also involved in the investigation, in between bouts of wooing the delightful Panna (Neetha Ashok). These two start on their own parallel investigation that will eventually lead them to a rather horrifying suspicion.

I believe Anup Bhandari’s Vikrant Rona is the first Kannada language movie I’ve seen or written about here. Sensibility-wise, the film is close enough to what I’ve known of contemporary Hindi or Telugu cinema, so it wasn’t much of a problem for me to appreciate its brand of stylized, sometimes wonderfully moody, sometimes loveably silly, slickness. Tonally, I’d actually compare it with Tsui Hark’s Detective Dee movies from Hong Kong, only that Vikrant Rona mixes its twisty mystery with a smidgen of horror not with wuxia but with a bit of melodrama and action in the patented Indian manner.

The action is of the wonderfully overblown and entertainingly overdirected style that’s typically for most of what I’ve seen coming from India right now, in its own way as disinterested in proper fighting techniques as a modern wuxia or a superhero movie, going for maximum loudness, heft, and visual impact. Which can go terribly wrong in the hands of some directors (repeat “Michael Bay” ten times in front of a mirror and he will appear, but only for a tenth of a second, because then the first edit happens) but is just a whole lot of fun here. Particularly enjoyable are an early fight scene on a smuggler boat during a storm that also moonlights as a bit of a musical number, meant to establish Vikrant Rona’s bona fides as an asskicker, and the grand finale that starts as one of the more insane (that’s a compliment) dance numbers I’ve seen and turns into a riot of stunts, peculiar fighting techniques and colours. But whenever else VR punches someone, it is still the beginning of a very good time for the audience.

Speaking of musical numbers, while I’m not the biggest fan of the heavy use of autotune as a vocal effect on generally already very high voices some of the music has going on, as a friend of 70s Hindi cinema, I was rather happy with the pretty traditional way most of them were integrated into the plot, usually to express intensified emotions via choreography that’s just as fun in its own way as the action sequences are.

Speaking of “fun”, given the nature of the killings in the film and certain elements of the plot I’m not going to spoil, I found myself surprised by the general sense of it during the proceedings. It’s not that the film doesn’t have a sense of or respect for its own Indian Gothic (for lack of a better term) elements and the emotional heft of some of the story it is telling, it’s just that these elements so regularly are subsumed under VR’s absurdly overblown machismo (so overblown I couldn’t even get annoyed at it) and the joyful way the film throws out its many, many twists and turns (some of which are pretty damn obvious, some come as really cool surprises I wouldn’t have believed this particular film to get up to), this film of terrible secrets of the past, family suicide and child murder never feels all that emotionally threatening. And because the Vikrant Rona really is that fun, this isn’t an actual weakness but just the basic facts of its nature.

In short: Silent Night, Deadly Night 3: Better Watch Out (1989)

Surprisingly, Silent Night, Deadly Night 2’s killer Ricky (now played by Bill Moseley) survived the fatal shooting at the end of a film that mostly consisted of flashbacks and retcons (and about which I just have nothing to say). He’s now comatose, has his brain encased in a plexiglass dome with a puddle of sloshing fluid inside, and is subject to various experiments conducted by Dr Newbury (Richard Beymer), the guy who reconstructed his brain.

For reasons, Newbury is trying to establish a psychic connection between Ricky and blind Laura (Samantha Scully). This turns out to be a very bad idea – who’d have thunk? – when either a rambunctious Santa Claus or the psychic connection awakens Ricky from his slumber and sends him on a killing spree towards Laura, her brother Chris (Eric DaRe) and his girlfriend Jerri (Laura Harring).

SNDN3: BWO, for reasons that I believe would blow everyone’s minds so badly, it is better not disclose them, directed by the great Monte Hellman, really suffers from a lack of Christmas mood. It’s all well and good having your killer wear a cake topper on his head, but when your film is part of a series that was until now all about the supposed shock value of dressing up your killer as Santa, it does miss the mark just a wee bit. If someone would at least have drawn a reindeer on the thing…

But I digress. On paper, this is actually a rather interesting movie. Hellman – who scrapped the original script for the film and wrote his own – clearly wants to make a slasher with a bit more character depth than is typical of the genre, adding more and deeper character interactions, showing actual interest in this aspect of the film. In this, he is thwarted by two things: first and foremost, the cast is completely unable to provide the nuance you’d need for this to work. Particularly Scully is dreadful, unable to even give the mildest movie interpretation of blindness, not to speak of convincingly suggesting emotional depth beyond a pouty rudeness that is probably supposed to be part of her reaction to trauma, but only comes over as unpleasantness in the performance.

Secondly, all those scenes of actors trying desperately to emote cut down on the slasher business at hand badly, and turn Ricky into the blandest killing machine alive.

That Hellman isn’t exactly the greatest suspense director on the planet is not of great help there, either, and so most of the killings and theoretical murder set pieces feel bland and uninvolving. As does the rest of the film, really.

Music Monday: As Always (Goodbye Mimi)

The Barge People (2018)

Sisters Kat (Kate Davies-Speak) and Sophie (Natalie Martins) are going on a barging holiday on the British canals with their respective boyfriends, the eminently likeable Mark (Mark McKirdy) and the eminently punchable banker Ben (Matt Swales). There are some tensions between the men, what with Ben being a total twat, but things do seem to go well enough. That is, until Ben manages to provoke the – admittedly easily provokable – ire of some people actually living on the canals (among them British low budget horror regular Makenna Guyler).

The English barge-dwelling version of the more common US backwoods murder hick isn’t going to be the quartet’s main problem for long, for there is also a school of human-eating fish-person mutants to cope with.

Director (and often editor, producer and writer) Charlie Steeds has been making a pretty astonishing number of movies in the last half decade or so, wildly varying in tone and horror subgenre. Those I’ve seen by now are all very low budget but a far cry above quite a bit of your typical amateur or semi-professional genre movies. That’s mostly thanks to a mixture of actual filmmaking chops on the side of Steeds and his cohorts behind and before the camera and an impression of drive and energy that suggests these films to be made by people who’d make movies independently of how much money they can scratch together. There’s also an air of this being made by an actual troupe, with actors and off-camera talent recurring again and again in various films in different mixtures, the sort of thing otherwise only Mike Flanagan seem to still get away with on a higher budget level. This approach can – and does certainly do in the case of Steeds’s Dark Temple Motion Pictures – lead to films that feel just that decisive bit more personal, like actual labours of love.

The Barge People with its wild mix of elements of a good handful of exploitation and horror sub-genres certainly feels like such a labour of love, with a director who clearly hasn’t just seen a lot of genre movies but also learned why they use the tricks they use and how to apply these to his own work productively; a script – this time around not by Steeds but by Christopher Lombard – that uses and mixes genre tropes with verve and intelligence, and an acting ensemble that can actually act.

That last point is of course not always a given on this budget level, and also helps The Barge People to avoid my greatest bugbear with contemporary lowest budget/DIY horror – dialogue scenes that are slow like molasses, and start too early to then go on and on and on until they arrive nowhere, too late. Here, acting and dialogue are tight, get to the point the film wants to make with them, and then end when they should. Pacing is one of Steeds’s strengths in any case, so The Barge People not only zips along nicely for most of the time but also knows when it is actually useful for it to slow down. So there’s an actual rhythm to the film that’s not easy to reach on the cheap, when reshoots and unlimited time to get a scene just right are most certainly not on the table.

Also rather nice are the copious scenes of gore. Realized practically, the effects are just the right side of not being realistic, so that the gore elements are eminently fun. Admittedly, the fish mutant masks are less than perfect, but these guys are such natty dressers, I can’t say I find myself caring about this as a weakness one lick.

Finally, as someone who has historically gone on about the importance for low budget cinema of any kind to mix the filmmakers’ favourite genre tropes (let’s call it the genre universal) with elements of local specificity, I can’t help but love a film that does variations on backwoods horror on the English canal system. I’m not sure that Robert Aickman or L.T.C. Rolt would have approved of this particular usage, but I’m all too happy about it.

Three Films Make A Post: Vengeance for the right price

The Duel at Silver Creek (1952): This was the first western Don Siegel directed, and in its first act, it does feel somewhat insecure. How much of this is Siegel or just the curiously structured script by Gerald Drayson Adams and Joseph Hoffman that goes through plot and character set-ups with maximum awkwardness isn’t quite clear. Once the film has set into its groove, and every character is actually where they need to be for the real plot to start, things improve markedly. The tale of men’s friendship (between Stephen McNally and Audie Murphy), an evil brother-sister pair (Gerald Mohr and Faith Domergue) pretending to be extremely upstanding or into marshals, and other complications isn’t terribly original by western standards of the time, but Siegel and the cast provide the whole affair with a lot of energy.

Dead for a Dollar (2022): Energy is rather what this new attempt by the great Walter Hill to get back to his old form lacks; the storytelling meanders enough to rob the film of much of its potential drive, and certainly of any actual tension. There’s still quite a bit to like here, though. The cast, particularly Rachel Brosnahan and Christoph Waltz (as well as Willem Dafoe when he’s actually in the movie), do sink their teeth into characters of a type that doesn’t make one wonder why Hill dedicates this one to the late, great western director Budd Boetticher. And while the action isn’t much to write home about (in a Hill movie!), the final shoot-out sees the man regaining some of his old powers in this area.

Mr. Vampire Part 3 aka 靈幻先生 (1987): If you’re looking for much new in the third entry into the deservedly classic Mister Vampire series from Hong Kong, you might be disappointed. If you come for Lam Ching-Ying’s monobrow, and an incredible amount of stunts, slapstick and slapstick stunts and more throw-away visual gags in any given scene than most movies pack into their full runtimes, director Ricky Lau has you covered again, zipping through jokes and fights with abandon and enthusiasm. And hey, we’re fighting a wildwoman style sorceress this time instead of hopping vampires, so there’s that as well.

Short Film Friday: Into the Night

In short: Silent Night, Deadly Night (1984)

Little Billy (Danny Wagner) is a magnet for Christmas trauma. First his institutionalized grandpa horrifies him with a traditionally dark interpretation of Santa Claus, then his mother and father are murdered – the mother nearly raped as well – by a robber dressed as Santa Claus. The nun-run orphanage he ends up in afterwards offers the kid no peace either, for the Mother Superior (Lilyan Chauvin) has no patience with his not exactly surprising Christmas trauma and abuses him quite efficiently.

Ten years later, when he’s 18 (and now played by Robert Brian Wilson), Billy gets a job in a large toy store, because that’s exactly the place where you want a guy who loses it every December to work at. Not surprisingly, once his boss passes the job of the store Santa onto the kid, it takes only one little additional thing to make him crack completely. And wouldn’t you know it, seeing his secret store crush (Toni Nero) pair up with the work asshole is just the push Billy needed. Thus, he goes on a Santa Claus rampage, finding reasons to put quite a few people on the naughty list with whatever axe he’s got to hand.

If Charles E. Sellier Jr.’s Silent Night, Deadly Night demonstrates one thing, it’s that there’s a reason why most slashers don’t spend their first half on the exact way their killers become psychologically damaged: once you’ve spent so much time with a character – even if he’s as badly acted as Billy – and seen so much of the trauma that destroys him as a person, he simply doesn’t work as the kind of monstrous, inhuman killing machine a killer in a slasher needs to be to function. Sure, there’s the possibility of a really good or intelligent filmmaker to do exactly this and make something very interesting and meta out of it, but that certainly doesn’t apply to Sellier or this film (nor to Rob Zombie).

Instead, we get a film whose two halves have little tonal or emotional connection with one another. The first half is theoretically interesting as the beginning of a psychological thriller, but simply too awkwardly written, directed and acted to work as that; and the second is a pretty bland slasher that never makes as much out of the Christmas gimmick as you’d hope for. There are a couple of scenes where at least the contrast between 70s Christmas mood and slasher sleaze gets somewhat fun, and Linnea Quigley getting killed by antlers is a pretty great gag, but otherwise, there’s very little here to get me in the proper, murderous Christmas spirit.

Significant Other (2022)

Warning: while I’m not going to go into details about the film’s big moment in the middle, I’ll talk around it in a way that might be considered a spoiler to some!

Long-time couple Ruth (Maika Monroe) and Harry (Jake Lacy) are going on a backtracking trip somewhere in the Pacific Northwest.

It’s all Jake’s idea, really, for he has done a lot of this sort of thing before he met Ruth, and genuinely wants her to appreciate this thing he loves. It’s not a good idea, mind you. For while Ruth clearly is as much in love with Harry as he is with her, she is also a tightly packed bundle of anxieties and depression for whom a camping trip in the wilds even with the person she loves most in the world is sheer terror. Given that none of this is news to Harry, it’s a bit of mystery why he believes this situation will be the ideal moment to ask Ruth to marry him, but there you have it.

As if relationship troubles weren’t bad enough, things turn rather horrible when Ruth makes a discovery inside of a cave.

And that’s really where I like to leave the plot of Dan Berk’s and Robert Olsen’s Significant Other, for the big middle plot development is the sort of thing I think a viewer needs to experience all by themselves. Apart from being clever but not annoyingly so, it certainly escalates the situation for and between the characters in a pretty terrible way. It’s also absolutely of a piece with the portrayal of a fraught but loving relationship we’ve seen before, still letting the film speak about its themes while turning things dramatically horrific in a manner that resonates with all that surrounds it.

It’s at this point of the proceedings where it becomes clear how good the performances of Monroe and Lacy actually are, as well as how cleverly the script and the actors work together to make certain things ambiguous without cheating the audience or betraying the characters. Monroe, having been in quite a few classics or semi-classics of fantastic cinema by now, always seems a bit underrated to me, mostly because her acting style on the surface seems to fall into the “pretty face, big eyes, sloping shoulders” kind of cliché. In actuality, she has a lot of nuance, making little shifts in expression, posture and emotional projection that suggest she is putting quite a bit of thought into her characters and position whoever she is playing as a believable human being in often quite strange circumstances. Lacy for his part manages to play through some major shifts in a very organic feeling manner, until he comes to a point where he can really milk certain developments for maximum creepiness (with a good sense of the emotionally grotesque).

Apart from turning into a very clever piece of science fiction horror, Significant Other is also highly effective and thoughtful as the portrayal of a relationship in which one of the partners suffers from mental illness, specifically depression and social anxieties. For once, writer/directors actually seem to understand how frustratingly like self-sabotage these things can feel for the person suffering from them, how dispiriting and undermining of one’s trust in oneself, to the point where one can love somebody with all one’s heart, but can never convince oneself one is actually good enough for them. And because the film really does understand, it doesn’t make Ruth or Harry the asshole in this situation – even though Harry’s attempt at turning Ruth into an outdoors person seems very misguided – and doesn’t question their love or commitment. All of which makes the horror plot hit all the harder, of course.

In short: When the Screaming Starts (2021)

Norman Graysmith (Jared Rogers) is a low-rent documentary filmmaker with delusional hopes for greatness. He believes he has found the perfect subject for becoming a bigshot when he gets wind of a guy who has clearly just as delusional hopes of becoming a serial killer. Aidan Mendle (Ed Hartland) is not much of a creep, clearly lacking in the negative qualities that make a true killer instead of a sad shlub like you or me, and it’s pretty clear that much of his ambition comes from his dead-eyed girlfriend Claire (Kaitlin Reynell). Attempts at actually killing somebody go sideways, so Aidan, always pushed on by creepy Claire and the ever exploitative Norman, decides to become a serial killer cult leader like Charles Manson instead.

He does manage to recruit a group of creeps and weirdos, but once the group is assembled and actually starts to do some killing, it turns out that Aidan might have found an actual monster among the idiots willing to join a cult lead by him. The kind of monster even Norman’s supreme egotism might not be able to exploit.

When the Screaming Starts’s main thematic pull about the exploitative documentary filmmaker/internet personality/whatever who is actually a greater monster than those monsters he tries to exploit is not exactly news in the realm of the fake documentary (I’m not a fan of the word mockumentary for its suggestion of parody of the form), but Conor Boru’s film, as co-written by Boru and Hartland, is making the point well enough that originality isn’t too much of a concern for me.

Particularly since there’s a lot more going on in the film than that: this is also a film about the absurdity of aspirations one doesn’t have the least bit of talent for – obvious with Aidan but also in Norman’s case –, hilariously unhealthy relationships, and also the ridiculousness and unpleasantness of serial killer fan culture. It does talk about all of these things with humour that reaches from the silly, the awkward and the grotesque to moments of surprising subtlety. The humour can, obviously, get rather dark indeed, but the film knows when not to be funny as well, so the murder set pieces could mostly run in a non-comedic film in the same accomplished way they do here, which makes scenes like the party the killer team get up to after their first mass slaughter all the more funny by contrast.

There’s quite a bit of good character work happening here, too. Even though When the Screaming does of course use comedic caricatures, it knows quite well which characters not to overdraw too much to keep character relations as more than elements of comedy bits, thus providing a much more satisfying emotional connection than it would otherwise.

Music Monday: New Christmas Rituals

Horror Hospital (1973)

aka The Computer Killers

After witnessing a cold open in which a gentleman we’ll quickly enough learn is Dr Christian Storm (Michael Gough) and his little person assistant Frederick (Skip Martin) murder two people with the help of a car carrying practical in-built blades for beheading as well as baskets that can magically catch the flying heads, we meet our main protagonist.

Having been punched out of his band, obnoxious Jason Jones (Robin Askwith) decides he needs a bit of a break from life. Signing up with a shady travel agency specialized on his particular demographic called “Hairy Holidays” – run by one Mr Pollack (Dennis Price) – our hero (ahem) books a few days in the health clinic of – wouldn’t you know it – Dr Storm, mostly in the hopes of encountering attractive “birds”. As fate will have  it, Jason has a very special meet-cute with Judy Peters (Vanessa Shaw), which includes very early 70s moments of flirting like our hero explaining that he’s not going to rape Judy. Romance is in the air, clearly, when she offers him cheese anyway.

Judy just happens to be on her way to the very same clinic as Jason to meet her Auntie Harris (Ellen Pollock) for the first time. There’s some bad family blood about the aunt’s earlier career as a brothel owner, apparently.

Once the quick couple arrive at the clinic, the place turns out to be rather strange: auntie really rather wouldn’t have Judy there at all for mysterious reasons; the place’s little person factotum seems just a wee bit eccentric; there are bedrooms that look as bloody as slaughterhouses; and Dr Storm is Michael Gough doing his best Bela Lugosi. And that’s before our heroes meet the other guests - all of them very, very quiet, pasty looking, with nasty scars on their heads, and disturbingly happy to carry out Storm’s every order.

Young people, Storm is sure, need a strong hand to guide them, preferably his own, so Jason and Judy are going to have an interesting, perhaps not as healthy as advertised, time there.

Anthony Balch’s Horror Hospital has for a long time been a rather unseen and definitely undervalued little film. Apart from the vagaries of copyright and licensing deals, this may very well have something to do with the film’s very peculiar style that mixes elements of British exploitative horror (think Pete Walker or Norman J. Warren) with weird, on the cheap imagination and a sense of humour that tends to the weird parodic reversal and to black humour so dry, it will not always be clear to everyone watching if they are supposed to laugh at any given detail.

Though, given the film’s general interest in the specific imaginative detail, I’m rather sure the filmmakers have put a surprising degree of thought into nearly everything we see. Clearly, on this set, doing things on the cheap was no excuse for doing things badly or sloppily, so the resulting film is full of those peculiar little moments and details that at once manage to fulfil the quota of weird awesomeness we wish for from the more exploitative side of the movie business but also makes fun of some of these expectations – often at the same time.

If this is going to charm any given viewer and amuse them as much as Horror Hospital does me will most certainly hang on: a) said viewer’s love for 70s British exploitation horror, b) their love for very, very dry humour and c) if they needed the film’s very special limousine in their lives.

Or, come to think of it, if they believe the romantic lead walking into the mandatory shower sex scene wearing the a knight’s helmet is very funny and strange indeed, or just silly and stupid. If you do find this as funny as I do, you’ll also enjoy watching Skip Martin yet again nearly becoming the hero of a film (and yes, we get a meta joke about that) after stealing at least half of the scenes he is in by perfect delivery of dry jokes and asides, and Michael Gough chewing scenery in a very specific way that is supposedly (okay, I believe it) built on Bela Lugosi’s poverty row performances.

It’s that kind of film, and I love it for it.

Three Films Make A Post: Unlocked. Unleashed.

The Lair (2022): Watching the last three movies of Neil Marshall has been as dispiriting and somewhat confusing experience. It is very much like watching a musician trying to hit all his favourite notes, but missing them, sometimes (Hellboy) barely hitting any note at all, or, like in this case, missing enough to mess up melody and rhythm. Marshall’s weirdly insecure direction also has to cope with a script by Marshall and his apparent creative partner Charlotte Kirk (who also acts and produces, like with his last movie) that has never met a cliché it can’t reproduce in an awkward manner. Mostly pretty terrible acting, perfectly embodied in Jamie Bamber’s accent, does not help either.

Unlike with the last two films of Marshall, there are a couple of moments here that suggest he might slowly be working himself up to better things again, but it’s not a process I enjoy watching.

See How They Run (2022): This period meta whodunnit by Tom George has quite the cast: Saoirse Ronan, Ruth Wilson, Adrien Brody, Sam Rockwell, the inevitable Reece Shearsmith, the list goes on. It doesn’t, however have much substance. Its meta genre exploration tends to be a bit too cutesy for my taste, and never does much with the genre quirks it ever so mildly sends up; this is the kind of movie that thinks having a screenwriter complain about flashbacks on screen after we watched some flashbacks is the epitome of wit, instead of a minor joke. Admittedly, there are a couple of scenes that suggest the film wants to have a bit more going on but forgets about it to make room for having Agatha Christie (Shirley Henderson) poison the wrong guy with rat poison, and other shenanigans of this style.

While there’s little depth here, See How They Run is still a pretty fun watch, slickly directed, if the sort of thing I’ll have forgotten all about in about a week’s time.

The Invisible Man Appears aka Tômei ningen arawaru (1949): Shinsei Adachi’s and Shigehiro Fukushima’s Japanese invisible man movie is not the wonderful box of delights a somewhat later invisible man’s encounter with a human fly would be. It’s a bit too much of a melodramatic crime movie for that, and sometimes, the invisible man is more of a gimmick as a necessary part of the plot. However, even in 1949, Japanese studio cinema was made by technically extremely gifted filmmakers, so there’s a lot to like here too, starting with – for its time – fine invisibility effects, and certainly not ending with the expected mix of slick looking (again, in the style of its time) filmmaking. If not at least every second scene of your movie contains a perfectly framed shot, you’re not a Japanese studio director.

Short Film Friday: Posted No Hunting

In short: A Love Song (2022)

Faye (Dale Dickey) spends a very quiet time – apart from a radio that always seems to play the appropriate song and the birds, of course – at a camping ground by the side of a lake and next to some mountains somewhere in Colorado. She occupies her time fishing, stargazing, and birdwatching, thinking about the husband she lost seven years ago. But mostly, she’s waiting, for she hopes to meet up with Lito (Wes Studi), a friend – a former flame, really – who has also lost his partner some time ago. She’s clearly hoping to rekindle the old crush, the old friendship, or just something inside of herself. While Faye is waiting, she makes the acquaintance of a group of cowhands whose little sister speaks for them, a lesbian couple (Michelle Wilson and Benja K. Thomas) on the cusp of agreeing to get married (or not), and, of course, the postman (John Way).

Eventually, Lito arrives.

Writer/director Max Walker-Silverman’s quiet and thoughtful meditation about aging, love and the way we relate to our pasts and the people in it is an utterly lovely film. I am a bit surprised that a filmmaker on his debut is so well able to get into the mindsets of characters very much his seniors, their concerns and ways to look at life (or to avoid looking at life, as may be the case), but there it is.

Dickey, a supporting actor in so many films, projects an incredible sense of genuine vulnerability, the kind of low key human doubts and feelings that are furthest from melodramatic expression, but are nonetheless just as deep and meaningful. She is the perfect fit for this film’s more laconic and low key approach to life and its turning points, showing emotions in quiet ways that more often than not don’t need dialogue or dramatic invention, indeed become truer without them.

The film is also utterly beautiful to look at, connecting natural beauty to a moment of great change in a person in a way that simply feels right. Again, there’s a lack of external melodrama here, so there’s no new age-y aspect in the way Faye relates to nature; it’s more matter-of-fact, and much closer to the truth of her life thereby.