Judith Roberts – Podcasting Them Softly

Ventriloquist dummies are creepy no matter what and immediately give horror material an extra boost, however in the case of James Wan’s Dead Silence it’s the ventriloquist herself that ends up being more terrifying, a ghostly presence called Mary Shaw who was once a woman that was barren and instead of having real kids, just made freaky dolls. She’s got a nasty vendetta against the townsfolk of Raven’s Fair, Ontario, relating to an incident from the collective past that has her return time and time again with her dolls to haunt them. Ryan Qwanten is a bit of a soup cracker as the lead, a thirty-something who once escaped the town and is called back by the mysterious forces at Shaw’s command, while the acting slack is picked up by other reliable faces including Bob Gunton, Amber Valletta and Donnie Wahlberg as one sarcastic detective who has no time for this hocus-pocus horseshit until it comes looking for him. Silver screen star Judith Roberts is incredibly effective as Shaw herself, a physically imposing, spectral presence and one hell of a resourceful, spiteful and dangerous otherworldly antagonist. There’s a few scenes where she stalks her prey that verge on that special nirvana of horror territory that actually has your hair standing on end and has you checking the closets later that night. The film is somewhat advertised as an evil doll flick and really that’s just the overall premise, most of the time it’s Shaw herself doing the hauntings, scares and killings and damn does she ever do a great job. Wan directs with sweeping, gothic stylish flair and has a sense of scope and spatial dynamics, Charlie Clouser composes a thunderingly melodic haunted house symphony of a score and the atmosphere hanging over this thing permeates everything. Also, I don’t think any film has ever had the balls to try and pull of a twist ending this… unflinchingly audacious and knowingly hilarious. It’s a bold, bold move but it somehow just works and adds to the charm, eliciting the prestigious slow clap reaction from me. Great film.

-Nate Hill

It’s amazing to think of the impact felt by a film that runs just under ninety minutes, but Lynne Ramsay’s You Were Never Really Here lands with force like that of the hammer that Joaquin Phoenix wields here, the violence mostly implied and hardly seen. Right off the bat though: this is not your average vigilante revenge thriller. It isn’t even your average artsy psychological character study. Ramsay is a careful, precise and challenging filmmaker who doesn’t often take on projects (this is only her fourth feature in two decades) and the story she brings here is full of shadows, provocations, shades of grey, unreliable memories, contains a cubist narrative sensibility and is altogether something of a masterpiece. Phoenix gives a coiled, implosive, miraculous performance as Joe, a veteran and abuse victim suffering intensely from PTSD who works as an off the books contract killer to locate missing girls. Hired by his handler (John Doman) to find the daughter of a senator who has been taken, Joe’s mind-scape and internal climate start to clash with what’s going on around him until memory, reality and action start to blur. This is a complex, difficult film and I’ve read many wild interpretations on what’s actually going on, but Ramsay keeps it refreshingly opaque, leaving our intuitions to decide what happened. Ghosts from the past, violent encounters with disturbing individuals, the eventual rescue and protection of the senator’s daughter (Ekaterina Samsonov), caring for his elderly, unstable mother (Judith Roberts) and uncovering an unsettling conspiracy. It’s all there, but none of it is in plain daylight and the pieces are carefully scrambled to mirror Joe’s disintegrating psyche. We’ll probably never really know what was real and what wasn’t, but that’s not the point anyways, the point is that we feel Joe’s journey deeply, personally, viscerally and that is the genius of both Ramsay’s vision and Phoenix’s performance. The atmosphere is further thickened with a resplendent, layered original score from Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood, who uses a varied kaleidoscope of auditory work to let us see through Joe’s eyes. Not a film to be missed.

-Nate Hill