Three Films Make A Post: If you have to scream, cover your mouth

Sick (2022): I’ve seen this sometimes pretty brutal home invasion movie directed by John Hyams described as some kind of comeback for writer Kevin Williamson – who co-wrote with Katelyn Crabb – but I can only see it as a much weaker follow-up to Hyams’s brilliant Alone that’s failing mostly because of Williamson’s and Crabb’s limp script. As a director, Hyams is still fantastic at directing classical suspense and thriller scenes, but where Alone’s deceptively straightforward script earthed these scenes in great character writing and tense plotting, the film at hand falters at creating characters whose destiny you’d actually be interested in and can only understand suspense scenes as set-pieces instead of intricate parts of a greater whole. That the killer’s motivation come right out of the wet dreams of an anti-vaxxer forum doesn’t make things any better either.

There’s Something Wrong with the Children (2022): To continue grumping about movies, this Evil Children affair by Roxanne Benjamin is just not a terribly interesting film for most of its running time. Benjamin is clearly a competent filmmaker, but not one so good – or simply so experienced, this being her second feature – she can work around the fact the child actors she has to depend on can’t consistently hit the notes of required creepiness, which is pretty much the death knell in a film about kids acting creepy. The script can’t quite seem to decide if it wants to do something clever with shifting the usual role of the “woman who realized early on there’s bad shit going on, but nobody believes her because she’s mentally ill” on a man, or somehow talk about female scepticism of becoming a mother, tries both at once, and manages to do neither in a satisfying way.

It’s not a terrible movie, just one that’s perfectly forgettable.

Baghead (2008): As I have repeated ad nauseam in the past, I am not an admirer of the mumblecore canon as a whole (mostly not even in particular), with an aesthetic that never convinced me this is more than film school grad wank of the highest degree. Having said that, I do have a small place in my heart for this horror/hapless indie filmmaker comedy by the Duplass brothers. Mostly because this, like their other films, doesn’t feel trapped in its aesthetics like too much mumblecore does for me, but actually uses them intelligently. Even the – most probably in large parts improvised – dialogue comes to sensible points and shapes emotional beats instead of simply stumbling around, amounting to nothing.

Quite a bit of this is obviously thanks to the cast – Steve Zissis, Ross Partridge, Greta Gerwig and Elise Muller – as well as what I assume is judicious editing, but there’s also a pleasantly non-wanky sense of self-irony, as well as an abundance of heart (the genuine kind sometimes found on sleeves) on display that makes the film impossible to dislike for me.