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.