François Ozon's adaptation of The Stranger, while visually stunning, reveals the limitations of cinema in depicting the complex inner states of consciousness that Camus masterfully crafted in his text.
Based on the bestselling book of the same name by Dan Simmons, it chronicles a doomed Royal Navy expedition dispatched to the Arctic in search of the fabled Northwest Passage. Under the leadership of Captains Sir John Franklin and Francis Crozier, the HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, manned with 129 crew, set sail from England in 1845. They became locked in pack ice off King William Island in the winter of 1846.
Dead Lover's heroine is odorous by trade, a lovelorn gravedigger of indeterminate age and origin. Glowicki's accent, roaming between Canada, Canvey Island and Canberra, becomes part of the fun—she's driven to extremes after her verse-spouting poet sweetheart perishes in a shipwreck. Part-Burke and Hare, part-Victor Frankenstein, she salvages what she can of the corpse.
The timing could not be better: We have much to learn in this moment from a movement that was both explicitly antifascist and radically hopeful - and from how the not-so-antifascist Dalí broke from it. But Dreamworlds presents precious little of the historical and political context - for example, the birth of the movement out of the grotesque terrors of World War I - that would help viewers grasp the relevance of what's in front of them.
The first thing you notice about undertone is how quiet it is; not just in its audio mix, but in how it's shot - primarily steady wide shots that slowly pan across empty rooms, allowing your eyes to frantically scan for something amiss. It's an understated form of filmmaking that allows for the movie's scares to hit all that much harder.
It was the first time I felt genuinely unsafe here, she says. Alongside a growing fear, childhood memories resurfaced—the internal and external racism and the exhaustion of never quite fitting in. I moved to Australia when I was seven and didn't speak English—it was a tough time for me, she admits. And then there was one particular recurring thought. There were many times when I'd wake up as a teenager and think to myself: Wouldn't life be easier if I were white?
Until recently, "liminal spaces" were only known to architects. But on the Internet, storytellers and amateur filmmakers have morphed these ubiquitous places you pass by on errand runs into caverns of cosmic terror. Now, a new A24 film from 20-year-old filmmaker Kane Parsons is set to kick off the summer and christen it the season of liminal horror.