It Ends

Tyler (Mitchell Cole), James (Phinehas Yoon), Day (Akira Jackson), and Fisher (Noah Toth) pile into a car for a late-night drive. All four have just graduated college and have different plans, or lack thereof, and are all gripped in their own way by dreaded post-grad malaise. Writer/director/editor Alexander Ullom brings that malaise to life when it becomes apparent that this quartet is stuck on a supernatural two-lane road to nowhere. It’s a little bit “No Exit,” a little bit “Groundhog Day,” a little bit “Gerry,” but really, what I most kept thinking of was Noah Baumbach’s indie comedy “Kicking and Screaming.” There, facing his own post-grad malaise, the surly quasi-sage Max (Chris Eigeman) wishes he could just skip past all of it and right to the end, observing, “I wish I was just retiring after a lifetime of hard labor.” It’s such a 90s sentiment, thinking of retirement as something plausible. When James makes his own observation about the future in “It Ends” it goes a little different: “I think I’d like to be put into some sort of medically induced coma hooked up to serotonin-oxy cocktails.” It brought to mind Chinese youth opting out of their country’s all-consuming rat race by lying flat.

As the drive begins, James and Fisher are having an argument fueled by a meme, less an old-fashioned brain teaser than a new-fangled conundrum, no right or wrong, which not only encapsulates their place in life but also foreshadows the ensuing journey. That journey begins in earnest when Tyler, who is at the wheel, realizes that they did not miss their turn but that their turn was never there in the first place. Bit by bit, they decipher their predicament, propelled by a bottomless gas tank they are stuck on a never-ending country road that is otherwise empty save for hordes of screaming people that descend on them within 30 seconds if they get out of the car and other vehicles that seem to have been abandoned during the course of their own unceasing journeys. The quartet cycles through all the same questions that the audience, no doubt, is asking, gaming out the possibilities. It sounds meta, and on some level, it is, but unlike, say, the ironic detachment of the Gen X “Scream” series, “It Ends” is infused with a Gen Z earnestness. When James wonders if they are, in fact, dead and if this might be some white-lined purgatory, he is not being flip. Neither, though, does that portend a philosophical talkfest like the situation might suggest. The characters proffer a few confessions, but Ullom prefers to let the circumstances and his characters reactions to them impart deeper meaning.

As they first set out on their unwittingly endless voyage, Ullom does not just keep the camera inside of the car, he eschews showing the world outside of it. This does not induce claustrophobia so much as it imparts the unmistakable sense of the characters’ small, constricted world. It is only once the situation reveals itself to them that the camera in turns reveals the outside the world – nothing more, really, than asphalt, trees, and sky. There is a monotony that sets in and if the horror initially starts out more in a traditional sort of register, that gradually falls away, as the car eventually travels so far that the screaming hordes are no longer heard from, and the monotony turns to enervation and then a struggle for acceptance. No one struggles to accept their new reality more than James, who often feels most illustrative of Ullom’s point-of-view, fueled by a desperation to understand, to have this inexplicable situation pay off. It culminates, in a manner of speaking, with an undermining of narrative expectations that is less shaggy dog Sartre than a transcendental version of Topper Harley reading Dickens in “Hot Shots! Part Deux.”

Friday's Old Fashioned: Stir of Echoes (1999)

Unlike, say, “Dante’s Peak” and “Volcano” in 1997, “The Sixth Sense” and “Stir of Echoes” in 1999 were not twin-type films who knew of each other and raced to be released first. No, they were just eerily similar movies, both with a young boy who could see dead people that happened to be released within six weeks of each other in the summer of 1999. And when M. Night Shyamalan’s psychological thriller became a cultural phenomenon, David Koepp’s supernatural horror movie was destined to get left behind, viewed as a latecomer copycat, as Janet Maslin of The New York Times, who really should have known better, implied in her review, even though the latter was based on a book from 1958. It was unfortunate because despite that crucial similarity, their respective tones were nothing alike. What’s more, whereas “The Sixth Sense” was heavily reliant on its twist, “Stir of Echoes” essentially puts its analogous twist right before the opening credits as five-year-old Jake Witzky (Zachary David Cope) looks into the camera and speaks in such a way that implicitly communicates that he is talking to a ghost. It’s a helluva curtain-raiser.

Jake’s father Tom (Kevin Bacon) is a telephone lineman in Chicago, living in the neighborhood where he grew up, playing part-time in a rock ‘n’ roll band, fumes of an old pipe dream. Indeed, the first time we see him, he is strumming his guitar while keeping an eye on Jake, effectively living the idea of putting away your dream to mind your family even as you can’t help but quietly cling to it. Not long after, in a sequence with his wife Maggie (Kathryn Erbe) that is well acted if a little on the nose, Tom expresses, well, not regret for what his life has become but disappointment that he, himself, did not become something more. Set in fall, “Stir of Echoes” has the feel of A Christmas Carol for the Halloween season in which rather than being granted a supernatural alternate look at life, Tom is infused with a supernatural ability that grants the alternate life he craves, in which be careful what you wish for becomes a silver lining in dark clouds.

Since Tom’s son can see dead people, it would only make sense that his biological makeup might make it so he could too, if that’s how such mystical things work, and his own ability presents itself when he is hypnotized. He is put under hypnosis by his sister-in-law, Lisa, played by Illeana Douglas which goes on the mantle of impeccable 1999 Movie Casting along with Debi Mazar in “The Insider.” She evinces this off kilter but also easygoing air of a character who just sort of excitedly rolls with the discovery that she has unlocked her brother-in-law’s latent psychic ability. Tom’s hypnosis is imagined as him inside an old movie palace, looking up at a glowing white screen, a double-layered idea essentially equating the movie-going experience itself with going under. When he suddenly snaps to, he finds himself not so much with a new outlook on life as having been unveiled as an intermediary between the afterlife and the mortal one.

Almost immediately, he has visions of a young girl inside his home. Gradually, though, Tom is made to realize that she’s not haunting him so much as reaching out to him, seeking help, an idea eventually elucidated by a cop (Eddie Bo Smith Jr.) belonging to a whole community of receivers. This is an interesting idea that Koepp eschews exploring, focusing instead on Tom’s own tightknit community. This is a Chicago movie through and through, filled with all kinds of local flavor, location shots with L trains rumbling in the background and other little flourishes like a neighborhood block party and characters walking and talking on their way to a high school football game. It impresses the idea of this as a place worth preserving, as Tom’s buddy Frank (Kevin Dunn, a Chicago native) keeps saying, and is why even if the denouement can feel a bit perfunctory, there is a believable element of tragedy, nevertheless.

If “Stir of Echoes” goes to some dark places, it does not always suggest that Tom’s gift is a dark one, and neither does Bacon’s performance. He balances both the fear from the unknown of what’s happening to him and an almost kind of giddiness at the same time, the sense that he has some sort of higher calling and must attend to it. The way it fractures his relationship with Maggie is not superficial but baked in and real, the strain evident in their marriage even as she struggles to make sense of it as much as he does. At one point, Frank is compelled to start digging up the backyard, enlisting Jake to help, and when Maggie happens upon this unsettling father and son excursion, it proves to be the movie’s best moment. “Ok,” she says to herself coming out the backdoor and Erbe’s drawn-out delivery of that lone word is brilliant in so much as it registers the terror in her voice but also the need to maintain an even keel to help her husband through whatever this is. At first, we don’t even see the digging, we just see her, and as she walks over to Tom, the camera pans with her, effusing a sense of unsettling discovery in the moment, an image that may as well summarize the idea of being led along by some power you don’t understand.

The Whisper Man

Netflix has been politely asking reviewers to refrain from spoiling a familiar face that shows up in a crucial role in their straight-to-streaming serial killer drama “The Whisper Man.” That’s funny because even if that information was not already all over the interweb, the movie itself spoils it early on. No, from the menacing crane shot kicking things off to the flamboyant red herring, there are no real surprises in store for New Zealand director James Ashcroft’s American feature film debut. I wondered what Tom Kennedy (Adam Scott) would make of that given that he’s a mystery writer himself, though the screenplay adapted from the book barely exploits this fact. Neither does the movie exploit its would-be prevalent theme of fathers and sons, setting it up but never baking it in. Tom’s son Jake (Acston Luca Porto) is abducted, and Tom’s dad Peter (Robert DeNiro) was responsible for locking up a serial killer decades ago who might be connected to this case, and so both Tom and Detective Amanda Beck (Michelle Monaghan, as in “Gone Baby Gone,” constantly on the screen with nothing to do) recruit him into the fold. If there is one thing to write home about it is Robert DeNiro. His performance is so solemn that he might be accused of Phoning it In, to quote the age-old parlance, when really, he is embodying a man who has chosen to recede from the land of the living. It’s just that his finely calibrated dour air cannot help but embody the rest of the movie too.  

Backrooms

I did not see “Backrooms” in the theater, more’s the pity, and when I watched it on my streaming platform of choice, I noticed the run time was an hour and fifty-one minutes. So, I was surprised when a little over ninety minutes in, the end credits rolled. Were the end credits 20 minutes long? They weren’t. There was bonus footage, it turned out, tacked on to the end. None of this altered what I had just seen in any real way, and as writer/director Kane Parsons has explained, it wasn’t meant to, merely intended as an additional layer. “Backrooms,” after all, was not the brainchild of Parsons. It began with a picture of an empty, mucus yellow office space posted in 2019 to a so-called imageboard web site where all manner of anonymous users gradually fleshed it out with a creepy backstory; you entered this space by passing directly through a wall, noclipping a la a video game terminology, and found yourself trapped in “approximately six hundred square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms.” Parsons found the photo and turned it into a short film and then turned the short film into a 25-part web series and now has turned the web series into a movie, layers built upon already existing layers. It’s evocative of how fan theories and online folklore have become as prominent a storytelling method in our time as the traditional analog ones. It’s also what makes “Backrooms” the movie such a bizarre cinematic experience. 

The backrooms of Parsons’s psychological horror movie are located beneath a furniture store in 1990 San Jose, California, the setting and oft-VHS quality aesthetic deliberately evoking an obsession with the past mirrored by the place’s owner, Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor), an antagonistic narcissist harboring a drinking problem and unrealized dreams of being an architect while smarting from a recent divorce. This gets laid out in an early scene of Clark’s therapy session with Dr. Mary Kline (Renate Reinsve) who encourages role-play, a convenient delivery device for extensive exposition. It also hints at the video game-like levels awaiting Clark in the sprawling backrooms once he discovers them, accidentally noclips into them, and then becomes obsessed with them, returning to them again and again, even dragging in a couple of his employees (Lukita Maxwell and Finn Bennett) and eventually tempting Mary to enter them too. Those endless levels, though, also epitomize just how many conceptual bits and bobs Parsons throws at the figurative wall: stasis, trauma, clinical diagnoses of life itself, and some sort of DHARMA Initiative-like entity with Mark Duplass as its face. Rather than creating a concise narrative that lands like a punch to the face by way of an ellipsis, Parsons provides just enough of a little of so many things to allow considerable space for Letterboxd users and the Reddit brigade to spawn fan theories and build upon the existent folklore. It’s akin to “The X-Files” movie from 1998, a waystation on some larger journey more than a journey itself from point A to point B. 

“Backrooms” is also so much better and distinct than “The X-Files.” If his inability to tie meaning to form disappoints, Parsons’s formal command impresses, nevertheless. Inside the backrooms themselves, Parsons creates an aesthetic that is like a dead mall video set in Narnia, or maybe Narnia in a dead mall, either way, and effuses a sensation as mundane as it is otherworldly, as disorienting as it is terrifying as it is weirdly thrilling. The camera often seems to be pulling both us and Clark forward, conjuring that inescapable sensation of wanting to see what might be waiting down the next hall, or around the next corner, even as the whole space as we seem to know it continually changes when looking right, or left, or behind. Ejiofor mirrors these myriad sensations in his jittery performance, embodying someone who seems to be mesmerized even as he unwittingly comes unglued, making it all the more disappointing that “Backrooms” eschews a proper arc. (It feels like there is a whole previous scene, or collection of scenes, missing when he explicates that the backrooms are where he belongs.) When he approaches Dr. Kline to tell her of the backrooms rather than, say, the authorities, or the zoning ordinance administration, what might have been a gap in logic is instead baked into Ejiofor’s turn, a furious anger to prove her wrong after she claims not to believe in him and to show her what he perceives as the light. In one moment when Clark pleads with her, his right hand reaches in desperation toward the camera, almost through the camera, it seems, from the high angle and the high-definition device that Parsons deploys throughout, maybe the single most thrilling shot of the year. For a split-second, the movie itself virtually noclips our own reality.

Friday's Old Fashioned: The Trigger Effect (1996)

In “The Trigger Effect,” the power goes out, the phones go down, and the radio doesn’t work. Why, David Koepp’s thriller never says, proving less interested in explaining the problem than in seeing how the problem causes the world at large to react. Not well, it turns out, yielding fear and paranoia in the vein of the old Twilight Zone episode The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street, not so subtly alluded to in a close-up of a Maple Street sign. Yet society in “The Trigger Effect” already seems to be teetering before the lights go out. This was longtime screenwriter Koepp’s directorial debut, and he was determined to prove himself, beginning the movie by bringing the title to life with an unbroken four-minute Steadicam shot in a mall (holla, 1996!) conveying a chain reaction of minor annoyances fueling anger and resentment and ending in a movie theater where a couple patrons talking over the film on the screen would seem to set up our protagonist, Matthew Kay (Kyle MacLachlan), to go full George Costanza only for him to chicken out. Later that night, the grid fails and all hell breaks loose.

Apart from one wide shot of Los Angeles going dark, Koepp never zooms out for a wider view of what’s happening, sticking close to Matthew, his wife Annie (Elisabeth Shue), their infant child, and eventually, their friend Joe (Dermot Mulroney) who stays over with things getting sticky. We meet some of Matthew and Annie’s neighbors, including their neighbor across the street, Steph (Bill Smitrovich), who briefly becomes embroiled in the plot, but Koepp prefers seeing the action through this makeshift trio as their own foibles bubble to the surface under the extreme circumstances. Indeed, as that opening suggests, “The Trigger Effect” is almost more interested in various crises of masculinity as in the paranoia and panic of the mob.

In this way, MacLachlan and Mulroney are perfectly matched. The former does solid work as someone insecure in his manliness and, by extension, his marriage. Koepp can occasionally lay that on way too thick, like a child’s electronic game beeping the world “yellow” at him as provocation to get him to steal his child’s penicillin when the pharmacist won’t distribute it in lieu of a prescription, but you can also feel him in virtually every moment trying to fill the shoes of what might have been a typical sort of male lead. Joe’s sudden showing up almost feels too convenient, but Mulroney sells it by making the character get a kick out of being a fly in the ointment. As for Annie, an insinuation about her checkered past suggests a femme fatale, though there is no real follow through, and is less interesting than some intriguing notes in Shue’s performance of significant postpartum depression that, alas, has nowhere to go. (Richard Schiff’s one scene appearance as a shady gun shop owner also deserves special mention. Schiff was born to play a shady gun shop owner.)

The gaps in the character of Annie show up in other elements of Koepp’s screenplay. Though we are made to believe that the structure of society is wobbling, the two times when the story requires police, they appear quickly and effortlessly. Everything also fits together neatly in the end, evoked in the recurring appearances of a tertiary character, Raymond (Richard T. Jones). Then again, I wonder if that is merely the ultimate evocation of the title. Raymond is one of the characters in the movie theater in the opening scene that Matthew fails to confront and when that moment comes full circle, the deliberate lack of a physical payoff becomes the emotional release. And tidy though it may be, Koepp does at least make room for one final bit of moral ambiguity, ensuring that even if the power returns, we understand that things cannot quite ever return to normal.

Zero Out of Two Ain’t Bad

If I were to make a movie that revolved around one Nebraska football game, what game would I choose? I might choose the gridiron Gothic novel that was the 2009 Big 12 Championship Game; it has been 17 years and I’m still not sure I’ve fully recovered. Or I might choose the 2015 game at Illinois that I attended in person on a cold, dark, drizzly, dismal afternoon that Friend of the Blog Jaime deemed the worst day of her life and not really even because Nebraska lost in the last second in the most eggheaded fashion possible. (It’s a long story.) Both those games involved a crushing defeat, and that’s because crushing defeat makes for better drama and revelation. It’s why even if I understand the appeal of, say, making a movie about former Nebraska coach Tom Osborne winning his elusive national championship in the 1995 Orange Bowl, that one comes across a little too much like a traditional sports movie. No, I think if you were going to make a movie of one Nebraska football game, and it was a game not based on personal predilections, you would have to choose a different Orange Bowl.

The 50th version of the venerated college football bowl game found 11-0 Nebraska trying to stake its claim as the greatest team of all time only to suffer a breathtaking 31-30 upset to Miami when Osborne famously eschewed settling for a tie that undoubtedly would have assured his team finishing #1 in the polls (this was the pre-overtime era) to go for the win on a two-point conversion that failed. “(T)he simple fact is that the Husker head coach played it the way sports are meant to be played,” Michael Kelley would write for the Omaha World Herald the next day. “And, perhaps, the way life should be played. Go for it.” Bob Smizik of The Pittsburgh Press saw it in more multi-dimensional terms, citing the coach’s decision as “a rare display of courage, arrogance and selfishness.” Aw yeah, that’s the good dramatic stuff. And so, it’s not a surprise that the Nebraska football movie slated to be released this Friday, “Going for Two,” is set against the backdrop of that 1984 Orange Bowl. 

IMDb explains: “Fall. 1983. While their beloved college football team vies for the National Championship, a fatherless 12-year-old boy (Jimmy) and his tomboy neighbor (Frankie) embark on a quest for his ‘manhood.’” Written and directed by Cornhusker state native Kathleen Welch Markel, she originally took the script to Hollywood only to be told by various so and sos that they would rather someone else direct. Instead, she filmed it in Nebraska through Omaha-based production company North Sea Films. She went for it, in other words, just as Osborne did in 1984. Indeed, in explaining all this to Kasey Mintz of Hastings, Nebraska’s KSNB, Markel called the coach a role model, marking “Going for Two” as autobiographical, just with a young boy as her own proxy. I’ll be honest, the trailer emits some serious “Stolen Summer” vibes, the saccharine coming-of-age movie that won the first season of Project Greenlight, but I don’t want to judge the movie by its trailer. I am rooting for this movie like I have rooted for the Cornhuskers every autumn Saturday for the last 40 years of my life.

Aside from conventional sports documentaries, there have not really been any movies that involve Nebraska football. (Unless you count the unexpected Jordan Westerkamp Hail Mary scene in Zoey Deutch’s 2018 romantic comedy “Set It Up.”) The only one I know of is “The Good Life.” Written and directed by Stepehen Berra, a professional skateboarder who partially grew up in Omaha, that 2007 coming-of-age indie drama was about young outsider (Mark Webber) in Lincoln, Nebraska enduring the cult of the state’s collegiate football team and its sainted coach. He takes refuge in an MPDG (Zooey Deschanel) and classic movies (the late Harry Dean Stanton played a theater owner). I do not begrudge Berra’s animosity toward Cornhusker culture. I’ve seen it up close and if it’s not something to which you relate, the ubiquity can be exhausting just as the expectation of conformity can be galling. But then, my own love of Nebraska football stems directly from non-conformity. And if Berra felt slighted by his community, I felt slighted by “The Good Life” given how it equates a love of Nebraska football and of old movies as being incompatible. I’m living, breathing proof that they’re not. If you want to do a double feature of the Judy Garland “A Star Is Born” and the 1985 Sugar Bowl on YouTube, I’m your guy. I don’t mean to demean Berra’s vision, I really don’t, he felt how he felt, that’s fair, but I’d just like to think that perhaps these two films can exist side-by-side in spirit, two sides of the Cornhusker football coin, what it takes and what it provides. Go Big Red.

Obsession

What’s old is always new. That even goes for a Gen Z coded comedy-horror hybrid like “Obsession” that dusts off the old Monkey’s Paw trope. In this case, the dangerous wish is granted to a twentysomething socially anxious nice guy who wants nothing more than the girl of his dreams to love him back. Writer/director Curry Barker emerged from the world of short form Internet comedy and his feature film debut has the feel of someone who watched, say, Richard Curtis’s “About Time,” realized there was something (more than) a little creepy about a man using his ability to time travel to win the girl of his dreams, and decided to make a romantic comedy by twisting the tonal dial one degree to the right. And yet, for all its ingenuity at toying with genre tropes, “Obsession” winds up in a blind alley not unlike the forebearers it would jab so often do. What’s old is always new.

That socially anxious male is Bear (Michael Johnson) and his crush on Nikki (Inde Navarrette) is not so much unrequited as unexpressed by him, evoked in an opening fake out where he practices spilling his guts. When given the chance, though, and even when she asks him point-blank if he likes her, he cannot summon the courage to confess. So, when Bear goes to purchase a replacement necklace for one Nikki has lost, he instead buys a One Wish Willow novelty stick. It is a selfless action manifesting instead as a selfish one, in other words, and with an air of desperation in his voice, he wishes that she would love him more than anyone else in the world. It’s “Big” metamorphosing into “Fatal Attraction” as Nikki becomes clingy, codependent, and crazy in a way that haunts the nightmares of men’s rights activists everywhere. And even as Bear seeks a way to reverse the process, he simultaneously remains reluctant to do so, wavering between each course of action. Indeed, if the ending evokes nothing less than Romeo and Juliet, Bear’s tragic flaw is not impetuousness but cowardice, the nice guy archetype rewired as the worst guy ever.

Horror movies often walk a fine line between macabre and humor, where what you are seeing becomes so horrifying that involuntarily, you almost can’t help but laugh. And maybe owing to his background, Barker demonstrates a penchant for walking that line throughout, like a sequence in which a steering wheel is remade into a battering ram, a gruesome visual reinterpretation of The Laughing Song. The casualty in that sequence is Sarah (Megan Lawless), who harbors her own unrequited crush on Bear, a character that the movie never really sees because Bear never really sees her either. No, Barker would yoke us to Bear’s point-of-view, to suffer along with him as he suffers his own lack of self-awareness and failure to act. The thing is, Barker intermittently violates this idea, such as in a comically frightening shot held of Nikki at home after Bear has departed, or in the camera moving independently of Bear when he and Nikki go out to dinner. It reminded me a little of “J*ker,” honestly, an ostensibly provocative movie that undermined its own provocations with a muddled point-of-view that it did not seem to understand as muddled. 

Nikki is intended to be seen through Bear’s point-of-view too. That’s why she remains something close to a cipher, a projection of his own desires as much a real person, and when she becomes supernaturally possessed on account of his wish, she in turn becomes a terrifying exaggeration of those desires. “Obsession” furthers that idea by rendering Nikki as being aware of her fate, lived in episodes where she snaps back and is present before essentially being reclaimed by the evil spirit inside her, creating a host of conflicting emotions and registers that Navarrette skillfully toggles between and melds together to create a breathless portrait of a person literally possessed. The real Nikki is there, in other words, not just the amplified projection, and asking Bear for help. Yet this imaginative touch effectively opens its own Pandora’s Box of moral complications. If Nikki is sentient, scenes of her and Bear sleeping together become nothing less than sexual assault, which “Obsession” does not gloss over so much as not even recognize in the first place, a revealing omission. What’s more, the headlong rush of a conclusion that brings Bear face to face with the outer limits of his own self-absorption turns the concluding shot into a punchline that simultaneously just writes Nikki off. It’s clear that she’s a victim, but of whom? Bear? Barker? Or both?