Hello everyone, and welcome back to the site. With summer in full swing, I actually took a trip with my family from Monday through, uh, literally today, so you’ll have to excuse me if today’s post is on the lighter side. Fortunately, I still did manage to cram in some essential film viewings, including one of the most acclaimed horror movies still on my list. I’m frankly not sure how many other acclaimed horror movies I’ve got left, at least without dipping deeply into franchise sequels. I’m thinking I’ve got a big Italian wave coming – Argento has dazzled me basically every time, so it’s past time I moved beyond him in my gallio research, and munched through the films of Lucio Fulci and so on. As for One Piece, I’m trying to actually savor Wano, rather than gorge myself on it until there’s no Wano left, so it’ll be a little time yet until I have further thoughts there. But for now, let’s burn through some film reviews!

First up this week was a light and breezy watch, the found footage horror film JeruZalem. That quirky title stylization should cue you in to basically everything this movie has to offer: we’re in Jerusalem, there are zombies, shit is hitting the fan.

JeruZalem hits all the expected beats of a found footage adventure, tracking two girls (one of whom is helpfully wearing a Google Glass, our camera for the journey) as their vacation in Jerusalem turns apocalyptically sour. Jerusalem itself is undoubtedly this film’s greatest asset, with the old city providing an alternately beautiful and harrowing backdrop for the action. I also appreciated that, in spite of the title, the film’s monsters are closer to Abrahamic devils than shuffling undead. With a variety of monster types and a city under siege, JeruZalem frequently evokes the best moments of Cloverfield’s “found footage kaiju movie” conceit, and also offers a satisfying array of distinct locational horror setpieces. Nothing about the film is truly exceptional, but it’s a successful and altogether satisfying found-footage ride.

After that, we turned back to check out an actual horror classic, Rosemary’s Baby. Rosemary’s Baby centers on a young couple who’ve just moved into a Manhattan apartment, Rosemary (Mia Farrow) and Guy (John Cassavetes). The two are eager to start a family, but after the mysterious suicide of another tenent, Rosemary begins to suspect their elderly neighbors are concocting something sinister. As her pregnancy progresses and tension with her husband grows, Rosemary becomes certain there is a plot to harm her child.

Rosemary’s Baby is pretty much your quintessential feminist horror film, with any supernatural elements echoing the intense paranoia brought on by every goddamn person gaslighting Rosemary to hell and back. Though her husband makes grand gestures to win her trust, he never offers any trust of his own, while his relationship with their suspicious neighbors quickly grows to eclipse his bond with his own wife. The film is essentially a two hour version of The Yellow Wallpaper, sprinkled with a dash of catholic guilt, and elevated by both the camera’s alienating portrayal of their apartment, as well as Farrow’s gripping lead performance.

I’m not sure I’ve seen another film which so successfully captured how social niceties can form their own form of horror and oppression. Rosemary’s neighbor Minnie (played to perfection by Ruth Gordon) is a terror of cheerful, “mother-knows-best” imposition, swiftly making Rosemary feel like a stranger in her own home. And the film’s interior cinematography and dream sequences feel like a blueprint for the decade to come, evoking the sense of surreal geographic alienation that would define the gallio era. A very generous watch on the whole!

Next up was a recent release, the difficult-to-define Pig. Going by the trailers, you’d be forgiven for expecting this to be Nicholas Cage’s turn at a John Wick vehicle: an aging star is living a quiet life until something essential is stolen (in this case, his truffle-hunting pig), prompting a calamitous journey of revenge. But Nicholas Cage’s Robin Feld is no John Wick, and this is no revenge story – it is a story about family and grief, about what is left of us when love is gone.

The first fifteen minutes of Pig proceed almost without words, as Robin enjoys a quiet life in the deep woods, content with his pig and his solitude. The camera luxuriates in the scenery of this world, and Cage himself is in top form, conveying gradations of joy and grief purely through the crinkled lines of his cheeks. When his pig is stolen, Robin teams up with his truffle-selling partner Amir, a young man played with brittle pride and plentiful humanity by Alex Wolff (an actor who also impressed as the son in Hereditary, and clearly has great things ahead of him). Over time, Amir learns his grumpy truffle farmer was once respected as one of the world’s great chefs, while Robin is forced to negotiate with a society he abandoned, too broken by the death of his wife to face the world.

Robin and Amir’s journey is winding and sorrowful, as each of them reflect on their familial regrets, growing closer by sharing both food and trauma. The film is full of satisfying little gifts, like the sequence where Robin utterly dismantles a former student’s ego, and Cage’s nuanced expression work demands full attention at absolutely all times. Michael Sarnoski demonstrates both vision and confidence in his directorial debut; in spite of the film’s quirky premise and structure, the camerawork is steady and reserved, setting up intimate layouts and then letting the actors do their work. There are no didactic lessons to be imparted here; Pig reflects on the painful consequences of love and the compromises inherent in pursuing your dream without offering any simplistic answers, only the hope that bringing these feelings to the light might help us share our pain with others. 

With a unique premise, thoughtful script, and beautifully reserved execution, Pig is a stellar film by basically any metric. And with Cage turning in one of his best performances in years, hopefully a few more people are cluing in to the fact that the man famous for over-acting is also one of the best actors of his generation. Another triumph for Cage, and I can’t wait to see what both Sarnoski and Wolff do next.

Lastly, we screened The Dead Zone, a Cronenberg-directed adaptation of a Stephen King novel. Christopher Walken stars as a man who emerges from a coma after five years, finding that not only has his fiancé remarried, but he now also has psychic powers. What a hassle!

In spite of a generally convincing performance by Walken, The Dead Zone’s plot was so unfocused that I had a hard time taking it seriously. King doesn’t really seem to know what he wants to do with his psychic protagonist, and so Walken does a little bit of everything. He uses premonitions to save a girl from a burning building, he helps policemen track down a serial killer, he squares off with a dangerous politician – in short, he does basically all of the psychic hero narratives, one after the other, with no real sense of continuity between them. Meanwhile, his fiancé’s narrative feels like a thread that should either have been made more prominent or cut entirely during a rewrite, as her every appearance in this film’s second half prompts a sense of “oh right, she’s also in this film.” And Walken’s “affliction” is so loosely defined that it’s near impossible to care about – he seesaws between near-death exhaustion and furious energy, with his gift seemingly only harming him when the screenwriter remembers it does.

As for the direction, I’m beginning to think I’m just not a Cronenberg fan. His movies are too cold and clinical for me – between this, The Fly, and Videodrome, I feel like he’s never offered a character to believe in, just a target to be dissected. For me, initially believing in a character’s humanity is what makes their eventual trials feel meaningful; I’ve never felt that with a Cronenberg film, and so I think he and I just disagree on what we want out of stories.