This year, I once again had the privilege of access to the London Film Festival, where a number of upcoming films were being shown off. I thought I’d write about some of the most anticipated of them here; I’ve ordered them loosely based on my own thoughts, worst to best. I’ll try and avoid spoilers as much as I can, but those wanting to go into these films blind should avoid reading about them at all, as many are best experienced without much foreknowledge or expectation.
The Whale
Brendan Fraser’s big comeback story has led most of the headlines about The Whale, a new film from indie production juggernaut A24, but for me the most exciting comeback was that of Darren Aronofsky. The director’s last film, 2017’s mother!, was a divisive but visually astounding tour-de-force of pure cinematic impact - a 2 hour fever dream retelling of the Bible through the lens of a home invasion horror/thriller.
This makes it especially disappointing that after 5 years, very little of Aronofsky’s visual inventiveness has made it anywhere near his adaptation of Samuel D. Hunter’s stageplay. Set entirely within the lead character’s small house in rural America, The Whale focuses on Brendan Fraser’s Charlie, a 600 pound obese gay man dealing with a depression that manifests itself in a dangerous eating habit. Charlie is looked after by a nurse, Liz, and visited by Thomas, a religious missionary and Ellie, his estranged daughter. When the film starts, Liz tells Charlie he’s close to death, and so Charlie begins the process of reconnecting with Ellie, through helping her with her high school essays.
The big problem with The Whale almost entirely lies within the script itself, which seems to have been ripped straight from the stage. As I found with 2020’s The Father, straight play adaptations often misunderstand the different relationships audiences have with characters on screen and on stage. The kind of grand dramatic statements and clunky metaphors that might work delivered by an actor in a theatre will struggle to land in the same way when a camera is pressed so close to the actor’s face. Fraser is so good he manages to overcome this problem for most of the film, and his relationship with Liz, played by Hong Chau, is the film’s most intriguing element. But when it comes to Charlie and his daughter, the cracks start to show - this is clunky, unnatural, stilted and often lazy writing.
Much like The Father, I left The Whale in floods of tears, and I’ve seen the film praised often for the emotional reaction it has elicited from so many. But tears can be earned and tears can be stolen from an audience, and for The Whale, only Fraser’s performance can be said to be earning anything. The rest is lazy and forced, relying on audience goodwill to provide a depth of feeling that the film simply can’t be bothered to try and give.
Corsage
There’s not much explicitly wrong with Corsage, a new Austrian film about the life of Empress Elizabeth of Austria, who is played here by Vicky Krieps, an actress who continues to assert herself as one of the great living screen talents. The problem with the film is more of a kind of existential one; there’s nothing here on screen that hasn’t been said before, often better and occasionally in the same way.
The film that has been most brought into the discussion alongside Corsage is Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette, which similarly deals with the tragically constrained life of a female monarch, but maintains a vaguely modern and irreverent tone. Corsage is more bleak than Coppola’s film - the environments are all in various states of dilapidation, reflecting the waning status of the monarchy, as opposed to the gorgeous luxury of Antoinette. But Marie Antoinette had the trick of using the famous story of the French Revolution as a continued source of narrative tension - as we watch the luxury, the audience is constantly aware of what’s to come, granting the film inbuilt dramatic irony.
Corsage doesn’t have this - the whole film is incredibly one note, and while that one note might be accurate (yes, it would be terrible to be a female monarch in the 1800s), the point is already made quite early on. What’s more, without spoiling too much, the one note of inbuilt tension the film might have had if it stayed more true to historical fiction is done away with by the ending, which, while the best part of the film, is its only real note of proper novelty on show here.
White Noise
Nestled in the middle of White Noise, the new film by Noah Baumbach, is an indication that Baumbach can indeed escape the trap of only making New York based family dramas. The section involving a toxic gas cloud (referred to in the film as “the airborne toxic event”) sees Baumbach directing an almost Spielberg-esque traffic jam set-piece that is the highlight of the film, and comes close to the being the highlight of a filmmaker’s career that has, up to this point, focussed mainly around protracted conversations between neurotic rich artists.
The problem with White Noise is that the airborne toxic event is only a small part of the film, surrounded by two other chapters that waste Baumbach’s skill as a writer and director by challenging him to adapt a novel that seems to be struggling against being turned into a film. I haven’t ever read Don DeLillo’s book of the same name, but the problem with Baumbach’s film is that you can tell from the dialogue and structure that he’s trying to ape a style that isn’t his, rather than adapt to one he’s more comfortable in.
This isn’t to say that any auteur who has found their niche should never push themselves out of it, and indeed the aforementioned disaster movie that forms the middle third of White Noise does show that Baumbach should try pushing the boat out more, but during the first, and especially the protracted final third of his new film, he struggles to settle into a rhythm and a space where he seems comfortable. Instead, the dialogue feels ripped from a book where it might be intentionally stilted, and given to actors who are far better working in the realm of naturalism.
This might be a case where the adaptation works better for fans of the book, who are able to pick out its dense thematic preoccupations from what remains in Baumbach’s version, but for fans of the director’s previous works, White Noise feels more like an inconsistent proof of concept. Yes, it seems to indicate - Baumbach can indeed do more, push himself out of his comfort zone (if that wasn’t already clear from his work on Madagascar 3), but the results of that aren’t always successful.
Glass Onion
Rian Johnson is one of the most talented blockbuster directors working today, and as such it’s no surprise that his smash-hit 2019 film Knives Out kick-started a renaissance in the murder-mystery genre. Unfortunately, he’s not really the best at making those. Knives Out disappointed with its actual murder mystery, and it brings me no joy to say that the same is true of the sequel Glass Onion, which I was explicitly asked before the screening to not say too much about.
One thing that might already be clear for anyone that’s read the premise, however, is that this film sees Johnson return to one of the themes that defined Knives Out; class-based satire. While Knives Out went for the neck of old money America, Glass Onion is more preoccupied with skewering new money; from Elon Musk-like tech billionaires to an Alex Jones adjacent Youtuber played by Dave Bautista. This only exacerbates a problem already present in Knives Out - Johnson may be a talented visual storyteller, but subtlety is not in his wheelhouse.
By the time Daniel Craig’s eccentric Southern detective Benoit Blanc is seen playing a game of Among Us in the bath, Johnson’s film has already dated itself heavily. As the film continues, certain moments of comedy seem like they’re ripped straight from this week’s episode of SNL. It’s hard to imagine even watching this film next year and so it’s a further shame when the film’s climax (and the solution to its murder mystery) is itself tied up in what is essentially a big topical joke.
But, for most of its extended runtime, Glass Onion is still a lot of fun, showcasing a lot of Johnson’s talent as a director. When he inevitably makes another one of these, however, I hope he aims for making something slightly more timeless.
I Love My Dad
My surprise hit of the festival was doubtless I Love My Dad, a cringe comedy by first time writer/director James Morosoni, starring Patton Oswalt. Oswalt plays Chuck, the estranged father of Morosoni’s character Franklin. Franklin is a nerdy loser who dreams both of becoming a video game coder and one day maybe even getting a girlfriend. Chuck, meanwhile, distraught at his son blocking him on Facebook, starts a fake profile to catfish his son with.
I Love My Dad is supposedly based on something that actually happened to Morosoni, which might have informed some of the better character details that fuel the plot, such as Chuck’s addiction to a certain form of online chess. But what’s admirable about the film is in how far it pushes its incestuous premise far beyond the line of comfort and into genuine cringe that never stops upping its own stakes. Morosoni isn’t afraid to take potshots at himself as well as his own creepy father, leading to a situation that is believably sad, pathetic and incredibly funny.
Delivering my biggest laughs of the entire festival, I Love My Dad won’t go anywhere beyond a niche group of cult comedy lovers, but it’s easy to see how it might have found DVD success in the days when American indie comedies had their moment. I Love My Dad isn’t quite genius enough to suggest that Morosoni is going to become one of the great new voices in comedy filmmaking, but his ability to mine his own personal tragedy for comedy shows at least a glimmer of talent.
Triangle of Sadness
Winner of the Palme D’Or this year, the second for writer-director Ruben Östlund, Triangle of Sadness arrives with a heavy weight of expectations. Unfortunately, Östlund’s films have had diminishing returns for me since his first smash hit, Force Majeure back in 2014. That film focussed on one family’s reaction to one event and mined it for all the comedy and insight into modern masculinity that it was worth. Östlund’s strength as a writer seemed to clearly be on his perceptiveness with characters - by placing them in awkward and difficult situations, Östlund managed to capture the tricky ways in which modern people try and navigate discomfort.
Indeed, this perceptiveness of people in the face of difficulty is what fuels the best moments of Triangle of Sadness. The opening act, which revolves around Carl and Yaya, both models, feels like it best captures the magic of Force Majeure. Carl, a male model, lives in a situation where he can’t fulfil what he sees as his masculine duty - he doesn’t earn as much as his girlfriend, a point that becomes pronounced when an argument arises over who gets to pay the bill.
But as Triangle of Sadness moves away from Carl and Yaya and onto larger targets, Östlund’s aim becomes more and more haphazard. The couple ends up on a superyacht, filled with the rich and powerful, and with such an abundance of potential topics for satire, Östlund falters. Each one might have made for a powerful film in and of itself - the Marxist captain who forms a friendship with a Russian capitalist; the shy tech mogul who flaunts his wealth to win over women; the continued adventures of Carl and Yaya as he attempts to get her to think of their relationship as more than just a business prospect. But Östlund doesn’t have time for any one thing, and some jokes, such as a British couple who make their money “maintaining democracies” hit far too wide and far too soft.
The film’s third act, which flips a lot of the established character dynamics, is much better for once again narrowing its pool of characters and re-centring the Carl/Yaya relationship (as well as introducing the film’s best character). But by this point, some of the damage has already been done. Östlund doesn’t have that much more to say about the rich and powerful, or the way the world really works, and it keeps showing the longer the film goes on. Even reversing the character dynamics doesn’t actually reveal that much new about our characters, unless you’re surprised by the revelation that those with money aren’t all that powerful without it (so wait, you’re telling me that… money is power!?)
Hints of Östlund’s insightfulness about human character make this still worth watching, as it did for his previous Palme D’Or winner The Square. But hearing that his new project will be about what happens to people on a plane when they can’t use Wifi anymore, a part of me worries that a filmmaker with such a talent for capturing human interactions might be turning into an old man shouting at clouds.
Bones and All
I’ve never been much into Young-Adult novels, having slightly phased over the genre when I was of the right age, so I’d never heard of Bones and All, a novel about a teenage cannibal before. But Luca Guadagnino’s adaptation of it manages to capture the kind of romantic teenage spirit that I can only imagine the novel found success with. Bones and All transforms a relatively standard teenage love story (two outcasts with morally questionable magical powers find solace in each other’s love) into a beautifully crafted road-trip romance.
The premise is something we’ve all heard before: Taylor Russell plays a young teenage cannibal who is abandoned by her father and sets out on the road to find her mother, who might help her come to terms with the whole eating people thing. Along the way she runs into another eater, played by Mark Rylance in a manner that can only be described as “cartoonishly pedophilic”, who teaches her about her newfound powers. She also finds Timothee Chalamet, who is struggling with his own morality as he contends with whether eating another human being is an alright thing to do or not.
Despite the body horror tinge, Bones and All never quite deviates from the standard coming-of-age tale, but Guadagnino has a knack for finding and shooting romance, and he pulls it off with particular aplomb here. Chalamet never quite sells his own moral dilemma about eating people - it’s safe to say that this doesn’t tackle the gory subject of cannibalism nearly as well as Raw, but his chemistry with Russell allows it to sing as a romance.
Really, the whole cannibal aspect seems to mostly be there to enable the ending, which does work beautifully, but before that it’s dragged slightly down by a lack of clarity of purpose, and a strange performance by Rylance, who seems to be under the impression he’s in a different film (and should have really been swapped with a much more fearsome Michael Stuhlbarg.)
Overall though, this works on the strength of great filmmaking - the kind that transcends any problems of plot or logic to become something more than the sum of its parts. Basically - it’s just a great road trip romance.
The Eternal Daughter
Joanna Hogg’s The Souvenir films are probably the finest piece of cinematic autobiography to have ever been made, tracking some of the most tumultuous parts of the director’s life and turning them into emotionally gut-wrenching filmmaking. So, it makes sense that for her next film, Hogg decided to go for something a little less intense.
The Eternal Daughter acts as a strange kind of coda to The Souvenir. It follows the same character, Julie, now played by Tilda Swinton, who played Julie’s mother in The Souvenir (Julie in that film was played by Swinton’s real-life daughter, Honor Swinton-Bryne). To make this all the more confusing, Tilda Swinton plays both Julie and her mother in The Eternal Daughter, meaning this family must have a surprisingly closed bloodline, even for British standards.
While The Souvenir charted Julie’s transformation from film student into filmmaker through an exploration of a particularly difficult relationship, The Eternal Daughter sees her an older, more established director trying to reform a connection with her mother, who she takes on a holiday to the ghostliest mansion this side of Scooby-Doo.
The resulting film plays like a 1970s BBC ghost story, and might have benefitted from being the same length as one, given how Hogg sometimes seems to be stalling for time as Julie wanders through the deserted, foggy gardens of this stately home. But what sets The Eternal Daughter apart from other A24 ghost stories is that it never tries to be remotely scary, instead using the atmosphere of the ghost story in order to tell a quietly beautiful narrative of British emotional repression and difficult mother/daughter relationships.
The only real problem with The Eternal Daughter is the slight sense that this is previously charted ground for Hogg. The Souvenir already painted Julie’s relationship with her mother in detailed brushstrokes and it also dealt with this film’s main theme of the emotional and moral challenge of turning reality into art. This isn’t to say there’s anything wrong with The Eternal Daughter - it’s worth seeking out even just for the thick sense of atmosphere it creates, but stripping that back and the whole thing risks sometimes feeling a bit like deja vû.
The Banshees of Inisherin
After the strange misstep that was Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, In Bruges writer/director Martin McDonagh returns to his roots with The Banshees of Inisherin, which once again teams up Colin Farrell (and his eyebrows) with Brendan Gleeson. The plot is almost comically simple; one day Colm (Gleeson), who lives on the island of Inisherin in Ireland, tells his best friend Pádraic that he doesn’t want to be his friend anymore. And that’s pretty much it for the next two hours.
Colm, an amateur fiddler, has finally realised that his life is getting shorter every day, and that he no longer wants to waste time chatting shit with Pádraic when he could be devoting his time to lasting pursuits, such as music. Pádraic, on the other hand, doesn’t understand why anyone wouldn’t want to be friends with him, when he’s just so damn nice to everyone.
Circling around Colm and Pádraic are a cast of other, slightly less defined characters, from Pádraic’s strong-willed sister Siobhan to the island’s simpleton Dominic, who is played by Barry Keoghan in a performance that can only be described as “Barry Keoghan”. But those characters often feel supplementary at best to the relationship between Colm and Pádriac, who are both perfectly drawn, seemingly ripped from the pages of a classic novel.
Being a McDonagh film, The Banshees of Inisherin has a strong sense of humour, but McDonagh tones it down slightly here - the comedy takes a backseat to an intense emotional realism. Colm’s desire for freedom from the shackles of small-town life is sympathetic, but so is Pádraic’s confusion over having lost the only thing that brings his own life meaning. The age-old battle between personal commitments and the need for something more doesn’t quite translate to the parallel of the Irish Civil War that rages on in the background throughout the film, but it doesn’t really matter when the whole thing is just so watchable.
Decision To Leave
It comes as no surprise to me that my favourite film of the festival, and one of my favourites of the year is the new film by Park Chan-Wook, director of Oldboy and The Handmaiden. Decision to Leave is one of his best films yet, which succeeds despite the fact that Park decides to dial down all his usual proclivities for this new film about the romance between a detective and a suspect.
Hae-joon is a detective who can’t sleep at night, and who lives for the thrill of a murder case. Seo-rae is his new suspect, a Chinese immigrant who he suspects of murdering her abusive husband by pushing him off the top of a mountain. Park’s new film moves at a clip, as the relationship between the two is thrown from different cases to different towns, but Park takes every opportunity to show off his prowess. Every shot, every cut is a new opportunity for Park to visually showcase the state of the relationship. Each zoom and focus pull introduces a new layer of emotional subtext. It’s so dense I could only start really appreciating it on a second watch-through, when the plot was already ingrained in my head and I could let myself be swept away by the detail.
The fact that Park pulls back on the violence and sexuality that defines his work for a lot of people might put some long-time fans off, but anyone who has seen the director’s work on BBC’s The Little Drummer Girl will know that restraints can often breed the best kind of creativity. Indeed, there’s nothing in The Handmaiden that quite matches the sensuality of one scene in Decision to Leave, and while the ending might not have the shock factor of Oldboy’s famous twist, I guarantee you won’t have seen a conclusion to a story this stunning, perhaps ever.