Hello folks, and welcome to another Week in Review. The film pickings were particularly generous this week, as I ended up watching two of the better films I’ve seen in months – and hey, one of them was even an anime! I finally checked out In This Corner of the World, and it turned out to be one of the best anime I’ve seen in years, reminding me once again of this art form’s boundless artistic potential, as well as its ability to make me sob like a baby. This post is already behind schedule and I’ve got plenty to talk about, so let’s not waste any more time, as we jump into one more Week in Review!
The highlight of this week’s live-action selections was undoubtedly The Wicker Man, the classic ‘70s horror film featuring Christopher Lee as the imposing Lord Summerisle. The film centers on Sergeant Howie, a police officer who takes a plane to a remote Scottish island, having received a tip that a local girl has gone missing. The devoutly Christian Howie has great difficulty coming to terms with the island’s pagan rituals, while at the same time, the islanders’ evasive attitudes regarding the missing girl point to something far more sinister.
The Wicker Man is a film overflowing with dynamic strengths, beginning with its pointed clashes of culture and religion. Though Summerisle’s rituals are unusual, they possess a clear internal logic, and as their master of ceremonies, Lee carries a profound presence and thoughtful worldliness that vastly outstrips the film’s ostensible protagonist. Howie is in fact a mess of contradictory desires strapped to rigid, desperate Christian theology; you can feel the confidence that his position of authority and adherence to the “official” religion affords disintegrating throughout, as the veneer of what he defines as virtue and modernity is stripped through his isolation in a world beyond his understanding. By the end of the film, I felt far more aligned with the pagans than the police, and the final images of their gods offering equal answer to both sides’ prayers served as a chilling exclamation mark on the film’s exploration of spiritual value.
At the same time, The Wicker Man is really fucking scary. It’s not “there is a monster out there” scary, and it’s not “they’re going to kill us” scary – it’s the precise scary Howie feels, stranded in a world he cannot recognize, seeing the apostles of gods he has made no compact with. The hints of ritual offered throughout are tantalizingly ominous, and the film regularly breaks into song sequences that emphasize the alien nature of Summerisle’s fertility worship. And the final act, a May Day celebration complete with a terrifying array of masks and costumes, counts among the most distinctive horror sequences I’ve seen, embodying the greatest strengths of ritual horror, and coming across a bit like Clive Barker’s masterpiece In the Hills, The Cities. Lee himself considers The Wicker Man his best film, and I don’t see any reason to disagree with him.
Meanwhile, among anime, I also watched 2016’s stunning In This Corner of the World. In This Corner of the World charts the life of Suzu, a girl growing up in Japan in the 1930s, and who ends up being married off just as World War II begins to threaten the home front. The film is technically a “war film,” but we rarely see the actual battles; just air raid signals overhead, increasingly brutal rationing of basic goods, and sudden, occasional sparks of terrifying violence. Through all of this, the absent-minded, often directionless, and fundamentally decent Suzu does her best to integrate into a family of strangers, take over house responsibilities from her husband’s ailing parents, and cling to something resembling a happy life.
In This Corner of the World is, without question, the best anime I’ve seen since 2018’s Liz and the Blue Bird. The film’s script is operating seven or eight levels above what you can generally expect from anime’s adolescence-drenched purview; both Suzu’s childhood and adulthood are presented with a subtle and inquisitive eye, as her quietly expressed emotions are captured with incredible grace. Mundane scenes of daily living echo the poignant naturalism of a film like Miss Hokusai, but wedded to a structure that builds gradually but inevitably towards universal reflections on the inhumanity of war, the strangeness of the passage of time, and the ways we find happiness in this world. Transitions are understated, time flows like an unruly river, and lives pass us by, their intersections with our own marked by the fireworks of one happy moment, or the lingering regret of an unanswered question.
In This Corner of the World felt real, unimaginably real, rising up to the emotional peaks of novel-length character dramas, while simultaneously embodying the ability to capture single tonal moments that might be anime’s greatest strength. Films like this are why anime still seems so special to me – farcical expression work can coexist with grand emotional theater, a painter’s view of the world can be shared directly with the audience, and small, personal moments are rightly understood as a microcosm of all that makes us human. I can only hope this film is a sign of things to come, as the medium continues to use feature films to push outside the demographic limitations of television.
Moving outside of the outright classics, my house also watched Southbound this week, another anthology horror collection from many of the creators of V/H/S. Like V/HS/, Southbound’s fragmented structure is one of its strongest qualities – the stories here are given just enough time to intrigue and develop, but are cut short at critical moments, leaving you without the security of knowing any answers. Deeply cursed stretches of southwestern highways have been a rich vein of horror for decades, and this film offers some fine variations on the theme, though I’d have preferred it lean more into its implied cosmic horror connections, rather than playing through largely disconnected conceits like “the cult one” and “home invasion.” Still, it’s shot and acted well enough, and embodies a style of classic American horror that I’d happily see more of. Far from essential, but a fine horror ride.
Finally, with the winter theater doldrums at last subsiding, I checked out Pixar’s new film Onward. It was… well, pretty much exactly Fine. The greatest Pixar films tend to have a sense of thematic grandeur about them, and tackle topics that seem absolutely universal (aging and finding joy in life, how we treat the world around us, coming to a positive relationship with your internal self, etc). In contrast, Onward is a much more personal story, and I actually liked that – but the film’s smallness of thematic ambition also seemed echoed by its overt narrative, which stuck to an incredibly rigid narrative template, and took place in a world that seemed too half-baked in its construction to really extend beyond the limits of the screen. Additionally burdened by weak art design and generally listless direction, Onward felt functional, but rarely inspired; unless you’re a huge Pixar fan, this one’s probably a skip.
