December 27, 2018
Charles Bramesco, Jordan Hoffman, Jake Nevins, Pamela Hutchinson, Zach Vasquez, Benjamin Lee, Peter Bradshaw, Catherine Shoard, Steve Rose, Hubert Adjei-Kontoh, Andrew Pulver and Amy Nicholson
From a clammy thriller that’s getting a Hollywood remake to a dark rap battle comedy, Guardian writers pick their favourite underappreciated films of the year
Unsane
It’s been disheartening to see how little of this year-in-summation talk has included Steven Soderbergh’s harrowing psychothriller, especially considering Hollywood’s dogged efforts to mint Claire Foy as a bona fide Movie Star™, and double-especially considering all the “elevated horror” hem-hawing, and triple-especially considering its timely themes of male predation against female self-preservation.
But despite its location at the nexus of cinematic trendiness, Soderbergh’s name has gone largely unmentioned. Attribute it to his bold, risky choice to shoot the picture using an iPhone 7, a gambit many decried as an aesthetic killer. I was not among them; the smallness and flatness of the image visually represents claustrophobia with a terrifying, unprecedented fidelity that traps the viewer along with Foy in the mental hospital of her nightmares. The setting transforms into a crucible for her, confronting her with past traumas she must conquer in a lethal pas de deux of dizzying intensity. The climactic confrontation between our heroine and the creep stalking her is vicious, sickening, cathartic – you know, just like gender relations in 2018. CB
Cielo
Canadian film-maker Alison McAlpine has made a biopic about the sky. More specifically, the sky as seen from the Atacama desert in Chile. Her interview subjects are the people who live beneath it: algae farmers, cowboys, miners, UFO hunters, tellers of mythological tales and the operators of enormous telescopes. The European planet hunters and the old man repeating fables about a “party in the sky” are from two different worlds, but share the same zeal for observation and the recognition of beauty. McAlpine mixes screensaver-ready images of stars and landscapes with home-brewed special effects to imagine planetary formations and the edges of our known universe.
Cielo is more of a head film than a straight documentary. Its interests lie with the scientists’ feelings over a rundown of data. There is an excitement and a generosity of spirit across the whole project. This is the only film I watched three times this year (dragging six friends to one public screening) and as with most things running on galactic time, will probably stay with me long after most everything else has winked out. JH
The Guilty
An American remake of the Danish suspense thriller The Guilty, set to star Jake Gyllenhaal, was announced earlier this month, but it will be hard to supplant Gustav Möller’s original, which won the world cinema audience award at Sundance this year. Coming in at 85 minutes, this taut, altogether absorbing thrill ride, set entirely within the drab interiors of a Copenhagen police call station, so efficiently and economically calibrates tension it seems a kind of miracle.
At its center is Asger Holm (a brilliantly controlled Jakob Cedergren), who we gradually learn has recently been demoted from the field to a cubicle-and-headset at the 911 call center. Möller stays with him for the film’s duration as he tries to rescue an abducted woman over the phone; his decision to remain indoors creates an effectively unnerving sense of claustrophobia that crescendos as we hear, but don’t see, the woman on the other line. All is not as it seems, though, and shocking information is unfurled over the next hour and change, during which we’re in Asger’s sweaty-palmed thrall. JN
Madeline’s Madeline
Josephine Decker’s Madeline’s Madeline was probably the most invigorating and intimate film I saw this year – I hope it reaches a wider audience.
It’s the story of a young woman (Helena Howard), her mother (Miranda July) and her drama coach (Molly Parker). That said, the older women’s roles become increasingly confused as she immerses herself in a semi-improvised theatre project. Howard’s performance, as an anguished teenager with a precocious talent for acting, is extremely arresting, not least during the rehearsal scenes in which she takes on animalistic personas or unleashes dark fantasies about killing her mother. It’s a beautiful and provocative film about boundary-crossing, in which the mesmerizing group dynamic of the drama class is only a backdrop to the spectacle of Madeline pushing back against her mother’s care, while becoming dangerously drawn into her teacher’s own dubious vision. The trio of lead performances and Decker’s woozy, insistent camera make the film all so heady and stimulating that it comes with its own warning at the start. There’s a nurse who reassures Madeline, and the audience: “The emotions you are having are not your own. They are someone else’s.” PH
Let the Corpses Tan
With their modern takes on the Italian giallo genre, 2009’s Amer and 2013’s The Strange Color of Your Body’s Tears, Belgian writer-director duo Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani established themselves as two of the most exciting formalists working in cinema today. Now, with their latest effort, they’ve moved on to other staples of 70s Italian exploitation: the spaghetti western and poliziotteschi action movie.
A near-feature length shootout between cops, robbers and innocent bystanders (who turn out not to be all that innocent) set high above the Mediterranean Sea, Let the Corpses Tan isn’t interested in any coherent plot or high-minded deconstruction. It seeks only to indulge and satisfy its various fetishes – blood, bullets, sex, gold, leather, sweat and art. Its hypnotic power may be entirely transitory, but the film’s innate rewatchability makes up for that.
In a year that’s provided viewers with a handful of bold psychotropic visions – Revenge, Mandy, even sections of Orson Welles’ The Other Side of the Wind – Let the Corpses Tan deserves its share of notoriety. ZV
Calibre
While this deviously calibrated exercise in Hitchcockian suspense might have won a major award at the Edinburgh film festival, it premiered on Netflix just one week later, an oversaturated platform that’s quickly become a dumping ground.
So, despite a collection of strong reviews, Calibre disappeared into the night. But it’s waiting for you right on your phone, laptop or smart TV, bristling with almost unbearable suspense, easy to find yet difficult to endure. It’s a film that’s best viewed with just the slightest awareness of exactly what it’s about so all I’ll say is that it focuses on two friends (pitch perfect performances from Jack Lowden and Martin McCann) heading into the Scottish Highlands for a hunting weekend. First-time director Matt Palmer revels in upending expectations, parading a number of possible genre scenarios in your face before settling on the most devastating one of all. From then on, he pushes us through a nail-biting escalation of events, finding ingenious ways to squeeze yet more unease from a horrifying situation. It’s a ferocious calling card. BL
Every Day
Maybe we don’t expect a YA novel to inspire a genuinely fascinating, high-minded, challenging movie. But that is what has happened here: David Levithan’s Every Day has been turned into a film which might yet be a cult classic. It has a bizarre, supernatural high concept, like Groundhog Day (which it slyly references) or something by Spike Jonze or Michel Gondry. But it is offered completely straight, without any ironic or comic palliative. You just have to grasp the idea – and go with it.
Angourie Rice, looking like a young Cybill Shepherd, plays a high-schooler called Rhiannon whose boyfriend is a self-absorbed and none-too-bright jock. Then one miraculous day, he seems to turn into a completely different person: sensitive, emotionally literate, someone who gets her, totally. But the next morning, he is back to the same old lunk. But from then on, every day, she meets a different total stranger who understands her in the same intimate way. Then this person will disappear to be replaced by another. It is a quietly beguiling film, very well-acted. PB
The Escape
Ebbsfleet international station is a location not much immortalised by cinema – in part because it’s relatively new, in part because there are more glamorous places to shoot, in part – perhaps – because it’s not really on the map for a lot of film industry types.
Yet it gets a pitch-perfect spell in the spotlight in The Escape, a drama from the start of the year curiously overlooked by critics both at the time and in their year-end roundups – more for its parochialism and sobriety than its female-centred narrative, I imagine.
Gemma Arterton (never better, and I say that as a bit of a sceptic) plays a woman living somewhere in the Dartford/Greenhithe/Swanscombe basin. She sort of has it all: nice new house on an estate, couple of children, friendly, fun husband (Dominic Cooper), easy access to Bluewater. But she’s screaming for release. The husband is not on her wavelength, the kids can be quite strikingly hard to care about, she’s completely suffocated by her environment, plus the constant wiping. So, without telling them, or buying a return, she hops on a train from Ebbsfleet to Paris.
What happens next slightly compromises a film previously marked by uncomfortable realism. Yet this is still a haunting and complicated second effort from Dominic Savage, which braves thoughts and impulses few people dare think about, let alone realise. CS
A Prayer Before Dawn
I’m not particularly drawn to prison movies or boxing movies, but this forceful Thai drama is one of those films where you go between watching it and being wrapped up in it within moments. It is based on a true story and we feel it. The setting is Thailand’s notorious Klong Prem prison, where British drug addict Billy (Joe Cole) is swiftly dispatched and left to fend for himself. His fellow inmates are an almost indeterminate mass of hostile, sweaty, muscled, heavily tattooed flesh, amid which Billy’s pale body sticks out like a sore thumb. The dislocation is accentuated by the lack of English-language subtitles.
There are predictably horrific pitfalls: violence, gang rape, suicide, all compounded by Billy’s continuing addiction, but his boxing ability offers a route out, albeit one that’s paved with yet more violence. It’s grim as hell, a treatise on bodily mortification in all its forms, but rendered with lean economy, tactile sensuality and an almost ethnographic curiosity. The deeper we go in, the more this complex culture reveals itself, and amid the cauldron of toxic masculinity there are moments of grace and power. SR
Classical Period
The second full-length film from Ted Fendt contains as many quips as it does quotes – in fact, one single-take nine-minute scene features the protagonist providing a brief history of Jesuit martyr Edmund Campion. It focuses on the members of a Dante study group in Philadelphia, and like Andrew Bujalski’s Computer Chess (a film about chess computer programmers), the film’s intensity and comedy come from a self-selecting group of people who define themselves in opposition to each other. It’s a dynamic that anyone who has ever been in a reading group (or a group chat for that matter) can relate to.
The reluctant star of the film is Calvin Engime or Cal, a real-life scholar who plays a version of himself. His affectations and obsessions guide the film’s structure, and when he is finally challenged, the film itself is questioned. This self-criticism is part of its earnest charm. HAK
Filmworker
Underseen is a relative concept – I am somewhat surprised that The Happy Prince and The Little Stranger, both excellent awards-bait prestige productions, did not make more impact than they did, but neither were exactly invisible. At the other end of the scale, you can’t say the engrossing documentary Tracking Edith – about fervent British-Austrian communist and photographer Edith Tudor Hart – was ever going to break out of its tiny audience niche. The Rider, a beautifully low-key slice of rodeo naturalism, looked to have disappeared without trace until it unexpectedly started to achieve awards traction – so I am going to pass over that and point to Filmworker, the amazing and revelatory documentary about Leon Vitali, Stanley Kubrick’s semi-official sidekick who rather obviously lost out to more powerful vested interests after the great man’s death.
Vitali started out as a TV actor in the UK, before securing the largish role as the (slightly thuggish) Lord Bullingdon in Kubrick’s 1975 masterwork Barry Lyndon. Dazzled by Kubrick, Vitali largely lost interest in acting and instead became Kubrick’s amanuensis, performing unsung tasks on The Shining, Full Metal Jacket and Eyes Wide Shut. Tony Zierra’s film is rich in details of Kubrick’s working methods, but is a nicely judged portrait of Vitali himself, allowing his story to emerge without a great deal of special pleading – though the scene where Vitali has to shuffle through with the paying public in a Kubrick exhibition to examine artefacts he himself wielded on set is bit of a choker. Worth looking out, and not just for Kubrick fans. AP
Bodied
To get “bodied” in an Oakland rap battle means you’ve been murdered by the competition, but in Joseph Kahn’s merciless dark comedy, it’s the audience on the floor gasping for breath.
Bodied stars redheaded former Disney kid Calum Worthy as a Berkeley student named Adam who scraps his thesis on the poetic function on the N-word in battle rap when he’s invited to spar. Let me be clear: this is not an inspirational tale of a geek gone hip. Kahn is out to attack our definition of offensive speech. Here, words are a weapon and the rules of engagement change from scene to scene, as Adam, a lyrical whizkid with a dangerous well of repressed rage, toggles between the anything-goes mayhem of insult artistry, and the finger-pointing sensitivity of his self-righteous classmates and vegan girlfriend. In this movie, everything is a target – moralism, hypocrisy, even a little girl with cystic fibrosis. Survive the film with your brain intact, and afterwards you can put your own words to work debating the conversation-starter of the year. AN
Emma Olive 