'The Balloon Thief' by Aneesa Marufu (2022) - small review

 I loved this.  It was written very calmly, and very visually.  I loved the blend of Islamic folklore – djinn and djinn possession/exorcism, with a tale of female empowerment.  Issues of transgender politics and repression were also woven in.  

I felt engaged and sympathetic to the heroine, Khadija, and her friend, the fair skinned Jacob of the hari, the slave labour of her people, the dark skinned Ghadeans – known as ‘darkers’ in anger by the oppressed hari people.  

There was much about perception and prejudice here, about the need to feel self-agency and have control over your own life – and the image for it all was floating free and high in a hot air balloon.  The protagonist steals several balloons over the course of the book, but by the end, has her own, symbolising her newfound freedom. It felt incomplete in that the hari people and their treatment wasn't extensively addressed or solved at the end; but then again, that made it very true to our lives: racism isn't ever resolved here either, it takes education, activism and a lot of time.  I think Khadija's story showed the beginning of a civil rights movement going into its next phase, becoming more powerful, reaching more people. And yet it didn't read as a political book at all - it read as a story of one girl doing her best to navigate life and her need to choose for herself.

It was a good story and I’d read anything else the author writes next.  

Photo by Noah hill on Unsplash

Destroyer (2019) - layered heist film with noir elements

 

SPOILERS!!! Only read after watching.

Nicole Kidman is brilliant.  Again.  And does that thing people always wow about, where a beautiful actress allows herself to do a part where she’s very real, old and haggard looking.  I thought the most amazing bit of the transformation was still the acting: her walk – it was as though everything hurt, all the time.  This pained arthritic walk.  She's Erin Bell, aging detective, haunted by a case involving a heist long past that she would give anything to redo and fix her part in.

Everyone was good in this  - Sebastian Stan as the other undercover cop, Chris, who loved Erin; Toby Kebbell as Silas, perceptive and ruthless; Zach Villa as Arturo, also haunted by the heist and trying to atone; Bradley Whitford as the horribly supercilious DiFranco; and Jade Pettyjohn as Shelby, Erin's daughter, in particular.  

It was a very sad story of a heist that goes wrong with an undercover pair of cops.  Due to Kidman’s character’s understandable greed.  Two people die.  She could have stopped the heist from happening by reporting it, but she doesn't, as she wants in. She is haunted by it, and the film cleverly does a loop where you think the beginning was the beginning and the events spin from there; but actually the beginning was the end – she kills Silas and then dies alone in her car, having sort of apologised to her daughter and in her mind having squared the circle a little, for what happened in bungled heist and for wrecking her own daughter’s childhood by being unable to be a reliable mother - she hadn't had one herself either. 

She’s a brilliant example of the fucked up detective trope, done really well.  This was a character led film - more of a psychological portrait than a heist film or simple thriller, and SO sad at the end.  Sitting dying in her car, she sees a memory: her walking off, with her daughter as a child on her back, through the snow, walking determinedly…for no reason they were there in this messed up lost situation out in the freezing winter, but what she remembers is being there, walking forward – protecting her child.  It was like she tried to go back and walk out of her life and take daughter Shelby with her. But of course, there is no squaring the circle, she did bad things that can't be undone.  

Its all very dark, and just gets darker as you go along, a feeling of inevitability about her actions.  The whole thing is scripted beautifully by Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi (they've paired on several other films as writers, preferring to always write together; but I didn't like any of them as well as I liked this; this was understated loveliness, in scriptwriting terms).

I think the film is called Destroyer because that’s what she thinks she is.  She thinks it’s all her fault.  There are hints of a neglected and deprived childhood, explaining her ‘hungriness’, but they are explanation, not reason.  She doesn’t forgive herself for any of it - witness her never using the money.  She also doesn't forgive Silas, for accurately seeing that part of her, back in the past, as well as shooting Chris - who belatedly tried to stop the heist, as Erin and he had agreed...While Erin, when it came to it, sat by and did nothing, resulting in his death.  It’s not just about what Silas did at the heist; it’s about what he saw of herself that she can’t bear: "I know what you are". She kills Silas, then dies herself.  It’s all a bit Shakespearean tragedy. 

Great to see it directed by a woman, Karyn Kusama (known mostly for Jennifer's Body [2009]) - incidentally married to one of the scriptwriters, Phil Hay. Well made and very watchable - a different take on the heist genre. Almost noir, in the sense that when you think about it, Erin Bell is a femme fatale - just no longer a beautiful one.

Strongly recommended if you have a spare two hours and like character portraits with depth.

 

 The memory of when younger, walking with Shelby through the snow storm (image copyright - Ascot Elite)                                                                     

Review of The Girls Are All So Nice Here, by Laurie Elizabeth Flynn (2021)

 

SLIGHT SPOILERS!

Total page turner.  Explicit and spot on about what can happen in a female friendship where one upmanship and insecurity are the drivers.  When you look for approval in the wrong places, place blame in the wrong places. 

It talkes place at Wesleyan College (USA), and I do love the sub genre of horrible things happening at colleges, as it encompasses thrillers, horror and fantasy, its a great niche - so much can be played with in it.  This is firmly a psychological thriller with a hugely strong female lead voice. She's a very honest narrator, and the ups and downs of her emotional state and her reasonings for how and why she behaves as she does are crystal clear, we are there every step of the way.

For the protagonist you find out why she is vulnerable to this behaviour, being sucked into a need to impress a cruel other girl; for the other girl, you don't find out why she is as she is. You do see what happens and why to their victim/s. Their own innocence gone, they take it from others as revenge and cynical protection of themselves. This is what happens when two damaged and very angry young women get together, and decide other women need to pay a price for their own feelings. It felt very real: the jealousy, the doubting of another's motives and emotions, assuming people are like you or assuming they have perfection when you don't...deciding what others do and don't deserve. The cruelty you are capable of.

It's all very well handled, a back and forth from then to now, and then an ice cold ending.  I really enjoyed this. The protagonist is NOT nice, but so understandable.  And it's really well written, there's some great lines in here.

The making of predators from ordinary women, laid out. Moving through the generations.

Totally recommended!

*

(A smaller version of this review is up on my Goodreads feed.)

A Smidge of a Poem for the Day, most days really...

 

I wish I had something to say

I wish I had words for this day

But my voice is raw

And yours matters more

So I’ll sit here quiet, out of the way.

 

©Wendy Harding, March 2022

Psychological and other Horrors I Watched Last Year, Part 2

                           

A clue to one of the films...But this pic is Richmond Park, Photo by Tom Shakir on Unsplash

Welcome  to Part 2 of the weird horror/psychological dramas I watched last year.  

**

Feeling sad today.  Watching and tracking the course of the Ukraine invasion, for days now.  So angry, so sad.  And Twitter, in particular, can’t help but give you a massive sense of how many Europeans hate all of England now, and will never have us back.  I miss Europe so. Ukraine fights so hard to save itself, and to get into the EU; which is righteous.  And then there’s England – now thought of everywhere as small minded, a joke, a dangerous unsettlement – and I meet enough of us that are. It’s enough to make you lose hope.  Ukraine is this shiny example of caring to fight for your people and your freedom, and we just suckered ours away. Look at the laws the Tories push through Parliament, just yesterday for example… 

I hope the Ukranians win, somehow. They have more spirit than we do. here in this whiny country. Ashamed to be English, so much of the time.

**

To the unreal horrors. As usual, there may well be massive spoilers.

The Assistant (Julie Garner - 2019)
About Harvey Weinstein and men like him without saying so.  ‘Him’.  A horror film about the normalisation and everydayness of dehumanisation, in circumstances where we cease to see certain people as people.  The heroine loses her soul.  Also, offices helped take it; as they do. Hardly any soundtrack, just the drone of office equipment; enough to steal your mind on a good day, let alone a morally ambiguous one.

Saint Maud (2019)
Hmmmm.  Seriously weird, and very watchable.  Adore that God spoke in Welsh.  As of course, God should.  Soundtrack reminiscent of Hereditary, in that it was disturbing and I loved it. Very very strange film about religious nutteriness, and how you shouldn’t believe omens and portentous sexually repressed feelings that start off as sightings of hallucinatory big beetles. It’s only a horror film because of the last 7 minutes. Really it’s a psychological drama, a beetle on the wall about a psychotic break.

Innocence (2013)
Another random rather excellent film watch.  I liked the picture on Prime. The minute it started, with a girl going to an elite boarding school, and it having a sort of overly atmospheric air to it, I was thinking – Suspiria, they’re all witches – I wasn’t far wrong: lamias, stealing youth from virgins with their blood.  With a premise like that, you just have to go a bit gothic, and very floaty and Story of O pastels all at the same time.  And Tomandandy did the music – you can’t really go wrong.  This was both shallow and extremely silly and totally and utterly beautifully filmed and a bit wonderful.  Based on a book.  I wonder if the book is as good.  [No, I didn’t find it so – later that year.]

Emma Wants to Live (documentary - real, 2016)
Interesting and so sad look at a Dutch girl dying of anorexia.  There’s no happy ending, there’s just her thin bone body and what ends up as the shape of her face: these huge eyes and skull with flesh only really in any muchness around the side of her eyes.  She had no muscle, no tissue. The disease that made her not eat, ate her. Those taking care of her, survivors themselves – and how strong and solid of them to be able to do it, they commented on the power of the disease, controlling her till the last.  And, tellingly, how merciful it was she left home to die, so her family could live, as her disease ran them as well as her, as diseases do.  I knew anorexia was powerful, but just this very unmedical look at it, and I feel I understand more. I wonder if this film will save any lives?  If it maybe has?  Or if for everyone who watches it it’s already too late? Like Thinner?

In the Earth (Ben Wheatley - 2021)
(Bat shit.  I wonder if it will offend other pagans or witches? It was good, but not as good as it could have been.  Pacing problem after the very funny Reece Shearsmith segment.  Music not as immersive as it could have been.  Me worrying if they actually played all that loud noise to the woods, and did it piss off or upset the woods? Everyone was a great actor in this, and loved that the main 2 characters weren’t white.  Nice change. Was Alma possessed by the woods at the end or was she simply doing her job in a traumatised situation when they were still having mushroom flashbacks, offering to lead him out of the forest? Weird and not quite as wonderful as I had hoped considering how much I love A Field in England.  Midsommer was better.

Censor (2021)
(Really mad.  Used the same Chernobyl theme as A Field in England; and had Michael Smiley [amazingly creepy cameo], which In the Earth also didn’t, but A Field in England did, so it was a good pairing of films, they felt related.  Niamh Algar was amazing, her thinking acting was …strong! I enjoyed this a lot, very atmospheric. A film about video nasties and a woman disintegrating from guilt at the incident of her sister disappearing when they were children, and she thought it was her fault.

Dark Eyes AKA Satan’s Mistress AKA Demon Rage AKA Demon Seed (but not that one)

Saw this back in 1982 when it was released, though it was made ‘78 or ‘79. I remember loving it hugely, though watching it now I’m not totally sure why.  Much chestiness from Lana Ward, and how could I forget Britt Ekland and John Carradine were also in this? Kabir Bedi almost does the best acting just looking pent up and longing/cross. I like the totally overdone music and the endless sea shots?  Maybe it’s overdoneness was why I liked it? I think I was mentally a very melodramatic teen.  Mentally mental.

Carmilla (2020, Hannah Rae)
(Amazing!  Really dreamy and strange, 70s-ish. Really felt like it was one of those BBC2 Christmas horrors from the early 70s, except it wasn’t and had many sensibilities of now. Why the lonely girl wasn’t just allowed to get on kissing the other girl and being actually happy, and was instead punished so permanently by the sex starved governess companion….grrrrr, in WendyWorld that woman …well, I would have had a really long conversation with her about why she’s so nasty and judgemental. It was all so needless.  And beautifully filmed – full of countryside and ideas of England from my childhood: lanes with overhanging trees, dreams of the south, warm sunshine, leaves in the wind.  It was its own little world, that went wrong for all the characters.  English people: never satisfied!

The Thing (1982)
AGAIN! Icky perfection.  I am Clarke, in it, I realised.  I would be consistently more concerned about harm to the dogs. Stanley  pointed out how large Mac’s hat is – I had never noticed how huge it is, now I can’t unnotice. It’s going to pull my attention every single time I subsequently watch this.  Tsk.

The Nanny (1965)
Quite sad.  The boy was wrong, but then right about the nanny being a killer; it was more a psychological horror about consequences.  Pamela Franklin is always good to see, and was very perky and unflappable here. Had never seen Wendy Craig do serious; felt sorry for her character – I identified with her givey-uppy floppiness.

The Omen (1976)
AGAIN! Still excellent.  Though can’t help thinking of the child abuse angle watching it now, and that maybe Damien wasn’t the Antichrist, and maybe Billie Whitelaw was the sanest person in the whole film, ferociously protecting her charge from the insane nutters that his parents and other adults became…! Though have to note this interpretation doesn’t explain her turning up unannounced; or the telepathic dogs…

Itsy Bitsy (2019)
A film only incidentally about a really big spider.  (But Fry still wouldn’t watch it with me; he really hates the Large Spiders.)  Mostly it was actually about PTSD and grief and pill addiction.  And it made me cry near the end, very sad.

Nocturne (2018 – not the one about the school)
This was really a good surprise – it was excellent!  Echoes of The Evil Dead, of Triangle and the Buffy Halloween episode where they got stuck in the horror house; and the episode in the basement of the school where Spike could see Buffy but the others couldn’t, so that he was having 2 conversations.  Also, the possession wasn’t about effects but manner, behaviour and creepy Bible quoting. Really impressed, everyone was excellent.  And it didn’t explain what was going on at all, you just had to work it out.  What was Hank to Jo?  Boyfriend, step dad? How long does Jo get stuck in the loop – does she remember it after she goes in the house the second time?  And Liam and Jo weren’t together at any point, they were friends only, yes? Still wondering – may watch again.

*

And that’s it for the horror/psychological stuff I saw last year – there was more, but I didn’t note enough to remember them by. Hope you enjoyed and were made curious by what you read.  Despite my shameless spoilering, they are all worth watching – go see for yourself…

 

Next up, some art I think - but not this one.  This one is here simply for beauty, and topicality...  See you next time.

 Van Gogh's 'Sunflowers', attrib: Bibi Saint-Pol, 

Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Psychological and Regular Horrors I watched last year, Part 1

 

                                    © Raimond Spekking - on Wikimedia Commons

                                    Wheatfields in Ukraine

I wondered if today was a shite day to post about horror films.  You know what, it really isn't.  It's a mirror, its an appropriate day.  The real world is full of obvious horrors today, and I can totally tell the difference between what I watch and the real life tragedies and suffering out there.  At least what I watch isn't real.

I haven’t been watching so many old classics lately, from the 70s or 80s.  I’ve been watching lots of newer things, and films/series that are sort of horror, psychologically speaking, but maybe not entirely. So it’s a strange list – I just went where the fancy took me. If horror films seem too trivial or upbeat (mad, eh?) for the real world as it is today, feel free to tut at me and click away. I'm doing my best to carry on as normal (ish), and this is what I had planned today. Come back later for unreal horror if the real world's horror has made you feel too ill.  I get it.  Or just don't read this.  More book reviews and some articles about art coming soon (after Part 2).  If its not about art and beauty and the peace and passion they give you, what the fuck is all this about anyway?  Life?  Fighting for independence, against invasion? Fighting for life, to just be here?

Sometimes horror films are the truest things I can find in a mad world.  And some of them are downright beautiful art.  Maybe none of these, but some.

**

Let’s go.  As usual I’ll be RANDONLY SPOILERING LIKE CRAZY, and also in some cases barely describing the plot at all.  I comment on what I thought, if I liked characters or what the films made me think of or about.  I should probably mention the sexual assault in real life that one of the series’ made me think of, in case you’re not wanting to read about such a real thing.  But here you are on a post about horror and psychological strife, posted on the day Europe did not much to contain the start of a continent wide war, so –  well, some things are real in my life too.

I’ll list them in the order I watched them…

Deadline (Brittany Murphy – the 2009 one; not the much weirder Italian influenced 1980 one)
I don’t think I’ve seen this before . Found it in a tatty old charity shop I’d not seen before years ago, and it only just called me to watch it, finally. I thought it was a horror film, but it’s a psychological ghost story with a little bit of a confusing end. Did she become David?  And why did they let her look so heroin chic through the whole film, was she ill while making it, why didn’t they take better care of her? I really wanted to feed her some toast and jam, on a regular basis.  Marc Blucas was good, but no one has got him repeating the intensity he brought to the role of Riley in Buffy, since.  I cheer him on though.

Haven, Season 1 (2010)
Excellent, kooky and strange.  I want to live where it was filmed in Canada.

Haven, Season 2 (2011)
Getting darker and sadder. Audrey Parker’s Day Off was the saddest day repeating episode I’ve ever seen. The Wendigo episode was also sad, but because everyone seemed cross with her for killing the Rev, who was a total shithead we can all do without.

Haven Season 3 (2012)
After Audrey finds out she is going to disappear in 2 months; manipulates Duke to kill a troubled man, and refuses Nathan’s love…it goes all dark and relationship-py.  He meets Jordan of The Guard who he can touch because he feels nothing so she can’t hurt him, Clare the psychiatrist starts popping up in every episode but I don’t know whether to trust her, and the Black police guy…who’s side is he on? He turns out to be the Bolt Gun Killer – I did not see that coming at all.  (I’m stalled in season 4 now, in 2022.  I’ll come back to it.  I was annoyed Audrey isn’t being Audrey at the beginning.  Much the same as they do with the new Twin Peaks – when Agent Cooper isn’t himself for far too long; and when you add that up with what they did to his character at the end of the original…well, I walked off.  Stanley finished the new one, but I wanted Cooper as Cooper, I really missed him – so I left. They should be careful with beloved characters.)

The Serpent – 2021 series
The genius that is Tahir Rahim, and how much hair can change your head.  Amazing performance.  And helped me understand my exhub better. Possibly exhub too was a narcissist.  Though it seems Charles Sobrahj was maybe a sociopath, and maybe a narcissist too.  A lot of ego and a LOT of anger – I don’t think sociopaths have anger, as it’s an emotion, so…maybe …I would like to know what made him tick – it seemed to me to be all about racial anger and society owes me and my mum didn’t love me and I’m sneaky and sly and a liar but she should love me anyway…

Jenna Coleman – also incredible.  She just fell in love with someone who made her insides glow with belonging and dreams and the present moment. Mmm. 

And Amesh Edireweera who played Ajay – should have had an episode of his own about how he was found, and also why he was abandoned and not killed by Sobrajh.  He was an important and oddly overlooked character in terms of development. What happened to him after?

And the Billy Howle playing the Dutch man….all those disparate European actors speaking languages not their own beautifully, such dedication.  Such a multinational performance in these tiny days of little England bullshit.  I loved it.  And the music was so good I’ve bought it.  100/10.

Dietland (2018 series)
This was really original, very varied in tone – funny, sad, moving over a whole mass of issues that face women every day, some we are so used to that we barely think about them – they’re just things we have to do before going out. 

I know, that one of the reasons I overate to begin with, was that I’m not comfortable with my body when it’s properly slim because of the way men look at it.  As if it’s theirs and as if my body’s slimness means something, a message, to them, of availability, of willingness, of a loss of my space.  By looking a way that pleases them I invite them in, they think; I feel.  I remember thinking these things very clearly.  And it’s not a big part of why I got fat, but hiding inside this fatter body is definitely part of how I got this way.  Feeling that my body wasn’t mine, that its boundaries became less as I became slimmer.  The trouble is, you take it too far the other way and again, you’re property of anyone: they see your fatness as a message too. A call to attention in a different way. 

It was coincidental but interesting, that I was watching this while the Sarah Everard case was all over the UK news, and women were wanting to do vigils and being denied by the police because of Covid regulations – but it sparked a whole ‘Reclaim The Night’ thing.  Women speaking up about how unsafe it is, just to walk about after dark.  And it is, just is. And Sarah Everard was dressed anything but provocatively.  Totally warm, ordinary clothing.

Street harassment has become an issue – as it is in Plum’s life. It’s odd, while this was on the news, I was agreeing this was true – I remembered the boy who just came up to me and groped my boobs in the street when I was with a friend as a teen, outside Edgware Road Station, on a sunny day in May; the way I carried a little old man’s shopping home for him when I was 14 as he seemed in difficulty getting off a bus, then he got a lot taller – unwound somehow – when we got inside his house, and then groped my breasts and more of me, and I almost felt like I should let him, as what did it cost me, and he was so alone and thought them ‘so soft’. I felt dead and sideways to myself while he did it, like my body was not mine at all. Not my property. I was lucky to get out of there. After I recorded my creepy arse message on his tape recorder that he directed me to do.  ‘My name is Wendy, and I’m Gilbert’s friend’. Things you say to get out of places and situations. No good deed…I never went back, of course.

But many issues raised in Dietland.  A terrorism group called Jennifer. What a  great name, would never have thought of it.

Friday the 13^th (2009 remake)
Actually very good – there was a whole mini plot in the teaser at the beginning.  Jared Padalecki acted better than usual – I’m pretty sure he can act really well, he just keeps getting parts that constrain him massively…brilliant to see Amanda Ringhetti, loved her in The Mentalist. The whole underground area – what was that supposed to be – why would it be there under Camp Crystal Lake?

Honourable mention to the 2 awful guys – the ‘your tits are stupendous – perfect nipple placement’ guy, and the miming behind you sex guy…it just makes Jason’s work so much easier and more fun for the rest of us!

The Void (2016)
Rather insane Canadian horror film with Kathleen Munroe and – yay – Art Hindle, that was a bit The Thing, a bit Hellraiser, a bit bodyhorror/The Brood, a bit a double episode from Supernatural and several other things with nods at Lovecraft all over the place.  Very absorbing and imaginative.  I did feel the end was too talky; despite having a deep gravelly voice, you really have to be something special to pull off the word ‘apotheosis’ seriously.  Totally happy to have spent time making faces of WTF at this J

Devil’s Diary (2007)
Excellent piece of trashy horror – brilliant music, excellent acting and Brian Krause [Charmed] was in it as a priest.  It was oddly well made for schlock.  Totally enjoyed.  Wish this combination of people had made more films. Ah, quiet little Canadian horror films: they so totally rock.

The Seasoning House (2012)
Feels familiar – maybe I saw it before?  Hard hitting. Like 28 Days Later but with militia trained rapists and one deaf mute girl in the walls of a house.  Excellent acting, excellent atmosphere, heartwrenching, and horribly plausible set up situation.  It’s a year later and it’s still in my head, this film - and its horribly relevant re Eastern Europe, today.

Wrong Turn 2: Dead End (2007)
Well, the first one was classy and good; the second was insane and enjoyed itself.  Erica Leerhsen seems to turn up in my favourite sequels to things – even better in this than Blair Witch 2.  This film led even more to my recent, sudden and should have had much earlier in life realisation that Backwoods Horrors/Inbred Cannibal genres are deeply political – all about haves and have nots and left behind communities in rural areas.  This one had chemical waste from a closed paper mill in a now dead town, causing birth defects as explanation for the whole family of odd looking, nimbly dislocating enemies.  It’s actually a fascinating genre if done well.  I think I missed its obvious messageyness before as I was just so creeped out by the faces of people.  Flashbacks to original watching of the Hills Have Eyes and its brutality. And that insane X Files episode where they kept the mother under the bed on a trolley…

Girlhouse (2014)
Disturbingly well made – and stuck in my mind because it was slick enough to feel plausible.  You understood why the killer did it; you weren’t on his side, but you weren’t hating him either.  I felt odd for several days after watching this and The Seasoning House – and I think they both gave rise to the first fully formed character pair and plot that has shot into my head for years. 

I honoured it by writing it down; but I don’t actually want that story to be what I write. Horror is one thing, sleazeporn another.  I blur the lines a lot and often with horror, specially 70s horror, Eurohorror…but those characters and plot that appeared in my head made me wonder what chemicals I percolate without realising it.  Which demons do you feed? I might let these characters turn up in another story, but I don’t want them to have their own one.  I don’t want to feed them too much.

 

And that’s it for Part 1.  Part 2 in a day or so...what other horrors will have hit the real world by then?

#StandWithUkraine