By Keri O’Shea
My god, this year has flown by, and once again I find myself pondering what I most and least liked in the year which is death-rattling as I type – with the usual proviso that I haven’t even seen all of the films I was most interested to see, for the usual reasons (buy me a beer and let me bore you to death with my tales of a 50 hour working week; ah go on. It’s Christmas.)
Still, I’m not sure how useful a regular Top 10 or even a Top 5 would be, from my point of view, so I’m not going to write one in a conventional sense this year. Truth be told, I only ever cast my eye over other people’s film lists, of which there are always so many by now, so my engagement with them is limited at best; if a writer has named a movie I haven’t yet seen, I feel like I have to skip their rundown because I don’t want to have the entire film summed up beforehand; if they’ve overlapped with a film I also loved, then great, but it smacks of preaching to the choir; if they’ve listed a film I hated, or just merely gone through the rinse, repeat of (as a relevant example this year) ‘Mad Max: Fury Road/feminist statement/high time’ then I’ve already read those articles, and worse still, seen the memes; I quite liked the film, but I don’t need to see any more, thanks.
For all that preamble, you’ve guessed it – I am now going to segue into my, albeit rather arbitrary pick of the bunch. But I’ve gone for noteable features of the films in question, rather than rehashing reviews I or others on the team may have written already (though links to these will be added). I’ve also endeavoured to do this without – and here comes that word – spoilering the films, either, as although the online reactions to seeing plot details revealed can be …excessive, it is also bloody annoying, and is best avoided if possible.
Here goes…
Best performance – Henry Rollins – HE NEVER DIED
I had the real privilege of going into this film knowing nothing whatsoever about it except that Rollins was in it; no clues on the plot, or the genre, or anything. But, as Ben noted at the time in his Celluloid Screams review seeing the name ‘Henry Rollins’ attached to a project doesn’t instantly make you think that you are going to get a sterling performance, as his roles up until this point have been variable to say the least. Still, whilst I don’t always agree with Rollins on a personal level, I am a fan of his music and his stand-up; the perfect role for him could still be out there, I thought. Well, it was, and turns out it’s this one.
Admittedly, one of the reasons could be that – as when Courtney Love played Althea Leasure – the role wasn’t a massive stretch, at least at the outset. Rollins plays Jack, a somewhat grizzled, middle-age man who tends towards the terse; not only does he not suffer fools gladly, but he seems to swat other humans away, barely engaging with them at all beyond what is strictly necessary. He has his life, his apartment, his isolation, his…bingo; nothing else seems to move him. However, as the film progresses, Jack is forced to re-integrate himself into humanity thanks to a drama which has the audacity to begin playing out around him, and for reasons close to home. Jack is one of those great characters in film which simultaneously hold you at arm’s length, yet convince you of a fascinating inner life – and when this is finally revealed, it’s a real tour de force, a credit to director Jason Krawczyk and to the excellent casting choice he made in Rollins. I know, I know I said I wasn’t going to do this, but were I to nominate my film of the year, this’d be it.
Most (Un-)Pleasant Surprise: The Interior
It’s a sad fact that, when you write about film on a regular basis, what starts out as a fun hobby can begin to feel like a chore. I’m sure we’ve all felt it. Whilst it’s decent of filmmakers and distribution companies to keep on proffering new releases to humble websites like ours, it’s still the case that, once you’ve spent several weeks sitting through what essentially feels like the same found footage movie (deja-vu is an occupational hazard), it takes the shine off. So, when I sat down to watch The Interior, to be honest I’d been through a run of screeners which weren’t to my tastes, and my initial impression was that The Interior was going to be a slightly jarring attempt at black comedy, and not to my taste either. True enough, there is some errant humour in the early scenes, but then the film manages so successfully to break away from this, crafting something completely different, that it’s hard to reconcile the two approaches. I say this, I hope, in a complimentary way.
This film manages to take a symbolic approach to its subject matter without carving it in foot-high letters, achieves frankly horrific scares without the obligatory jump-cuts, and weaves a very claustrophobic, uncanny tale out of elements you can be forgiven for supposing would be turned to different, less successful uses. In essence, this turns out to be a truly unsettling, unconventional horror tale; finding films like The Interior is, in a nutshell, exactly why I go on reviewing. You can check out my full review here.
Most Laughs: Deathgasm
The more I reflect on it, the more I think Deathgasm is one of the most successfully funny films I’ve seen since Tucker and Dale vs. Evil. I used to give horror comedies a hard time, and rightfully so in many instances, but it’s often good to be proved wrong and there have been some really good films along in the past few years. Deathgasm is simply glorious: as I commented in my full review, it doesn’t come across as a sneering outsider picking a non-mainstream culture and getting the gags wrong because the basic premise is all off; it’s got a bit of love for metal, rather, and it’s that which makes it funny, as it goes from ‘plausible kids’ through to ‘long-rumoured occult links made flesh’ before threatening the end of mankind via copious blood splatter and dildos as deadly weapons. I mean, do I really need to say anything else here? I laughed out loud throughout this film, and you’ll be hard-pressed not to yourselves. Roll on the sequel.
Best atmosphere: The Witch
Ah, a completely different take on occult horror, then. I will have far more to say on The Witch in the weeks to come; for now, I think it’s a noteworthy film in several of its aspects, not least of which how it boasts of its meticulously-researched basis in the real-life accounts and trials of alleged witches, from the time in which the film is set and earlier. The way it combines this kind of attention to detail with such a slow-burn tale, careful characterisation and a remarkably ambiguous, and thus effective spin on the occultism possibly at play in the New World makes it one of the stand-out films of 2015. These very qualities, sadly, will probably make it a tough sell for the mainstream market, which is exactly where the makers/distributors seem to want it to thrive. For reasons such as this, you get decisions like the disastrous, misleading poster art which Ben discussed earlier in the week – promising titillation, where you’d be hard-pressed to find any. I suppose we should be grateful we don’t see Thomasin re-cast as a thirty year old being dragged backwards down a subway by Black Philip.
Still, let them reap what they sow, if they can grow it at all. The rest of us can appreciate the sheer dread which permeates each frame of this film, that sense of the inescapable, crowding out what is essentially a loving family trying to make their way in a harsh new environment. I think it’s important that the family do care about one another here, and try to resist the series of misfortunes which slowly blight their home and their land; it makes the events which ensue all the more awful, and by degrees strips the potency out of the religion they adhere to. After all, where’s the interest in seeing the already corrupt, corrupted? Ultimately a psychological horror which deserves better than to collapse under the weight of expectations now attached to it, The Witch is absolutely gripping, and you should check out Ben’s words on it before doing your best to see it early, when it gets a full release in February 2016.