Hey folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. The fall season has officially begun, and we’re already being treated to a deluge of genuinely intriguing seasonal contenders. The Witch from Mercury was already on my radar, but hearing that Hiroshi Kobayashi is going full Kiznaiver and Ichiro Okouchi is going full Utena has me even more excited to check it out. Without a feature film draining resources, My Hero Academia is looking more visually impressive than it has in quite some time, while I can’t even guess just how impressive Mob and One Punch Man’s debuts will be. It’s an exciting time in seasonal anime, and I’m frankly tempted to emerge from my slumber and embrace the weekly grind once more. Not right now, of course; I still haven’t seen anything at the moment, but I imagine I’ll have some debut thoughts ready for next week. For now, let’s explore a fresh set of feature films, as we burn down the latest Week in Review!

My first viewing this week was a classic I’ve been meaning to see for years, Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock. The film concerns a group of students at Appleyard College, a private school for girls in the rural town of Woodend, Victoria. On Valentine’s Day, 1900, the students and their governess set off for a picnic at a local rock formation, whereupon several of the girls seem to mysteriously vanish among the cliffs. Subsequent search parties only reveal further mysteries, steadily carving a rift in both the local community and the culture at Appleyard.

Picnic at Hanging Rock is undoubtedly one of the most pure and successful executors of weird fiction in film. The subgenre tends to require too subtle and tonal of a touch to really succeed as film drama; and indeed, Hanging Rock is probably a bit too slow of a drama for impatient viewers. But for those who appreciate stories of mankind’s insubstantiality, and our inability to ever fully reckon with the forces that underlie our universe, the film is an absolute feast of suspense, longing, and dread.

Hanging Rock establishes a dreamlike atmosphere from its first moments, reveling in the liminal uncertainty of its teenage heroines. At their age, every second friend possesses a charged secret, and the mysteries of the wider world seem close enough to grasp, if only your hand could just pierce this veil of adolescence. Hanging Rock threads that electric sense of personal awakening with something old and implacable, the forces that drove volcanic rock from the earth some millions of years ago, rock that had “been waiting all this time, just for us.” Hanging Rock wisely avoids naming whatever force winds through those rocks, resisting the temptation to pin it down as pagan or demonic or anything else we might recognize and understand. The disappearance of these girls thus feels both preordained and random; the order of the universe winds as it will, and we ants can only carve out our paths in reaction.

Hanging Rock’s abominable power is conveyed through light and music, cloth and gauze. Scenes set at the rock are frequently obscured by thin filters, creating a sense of dreamlike disorientation, as if us in the audience are succumbing to heat stroke or something worse. Coupled with the white dresses of the students, the whole scene takes on the tenor of a demented wedding ceremony, as if we are perpetually lifting a veil to see our future’s unknowable face. Pan flutes lend an anachronistic sense of movement across time; all the party’s watches stop at twelve, and you get the sense that this place has been arrested at a single moment for far longer than just this warm afternoon. Half-glimpsed shots of the girls moving steadily upwards imply inevitability, but also immediacy; you get the sense you could just barely catch the hem of their gowns, saving them from whatever awaits, if only your feet would carry you faster.

Along with its stunning articulation of forces beyond our understanding, Hanging Rock is further buttressed with drama we can well understand: the steady dissolution of Appleyard College, as the headmistress cycles from pragmatism to paranoia to despair in the face of a horror she cannot out-reason. Rachel Roberts’ performance lends a human vulnerability to a role that could easily parse as villainous, serving as the human embodiment of her college’s battle with this tragedy. Through the film’s second half, we see just how fragile our ambitions of order can be, how easily our lives can be spun in errant directions by the passing rush of a larger organism. Was it fate that drew those girls up that rock, or simply bad luck? Was the timeless effervescence of their youth answered by something equally divorced from time? Like life itself, Hanging Rock offers no answers to these questions; only the certainty that the world is larger than our capacity to chart it, and casts shadows in which mankind will always fear to tread.

We then checked out Rasputin the Mad Monk, a ‘66 Hammer horror film starring Christopher Lee as the dreaded Rasputin. The film offers a pretty loose take on Rasputin’s life and times, in large part owing to the fact that it was filmed back-to-back with Hammer’s prior feature Dracula: Prince of Darkness. Using the same sets and seemingly many of the same plot beats, Rasputin postulates a suspiciously vampiric take on its titular menace, with our nefarious holy man using much the same powers of seduction and mind control as the prince of darkness.

That’s not really a significant demerit, though; the main appeal of this film is watching Christopher Lee storm menacingly around a variety of lushly appointed sets, and he tends to that business that with gusto. You can construct a reasonable enough horror film just by imagining a scene and then adding “what if Christopher Lee was there,” and Rasputin more than proves it. Like Vincent Price, Boris Karloff, and the other greats of the pre-slasher era, Lee’s ominous aura fills every nook and cranny of the screen; a film like Rasputin may not exactly be an essential watch, but Lee guarantees a fine time at the movies.

Having watched Rasputin, it seemed only proper to check out Lee’s more storied Hammer horror film, so we skipped back to their original 1958 production of Dracula. Lee’s turn as Dracula is one of those performances that’s so iconic it’s actually tougher now to fully appreciate it; his mix of austere menace and tempting sensuality would essentially define Dracula in the popular consciousness from here on out, meaning you’ve likely already seen many, many replications of Lee’s performance. He nonetheless maintains a singular presence in this film, and would likely dominate it entirely if not for Peter Cushing’s equally compelling performance as Van Helsing.

Cushing’s performance lends a nuance to Helsing’s story that tends to be abandoned in more recent versions of the story. It’s not surprising; the concept of Van Helsing, Professional Vampire Hunter is a thrilling one, and thus costumes and performances tend to frame him more as a grizzled bounty hunter than a professional doctor. But here, it is his gradually building obsession with Dracula that makes him so compelling, as the civilizing influences of his professional education must eventually give way to something more violent and primal, imbuing him with the savage instincts necessary to undo a creature who’s also draping a curtain of civility over a chasm of violence. The film wisely chops up the book’s narrative in order to give Cushing a bigger role, facilitating a series of thrilling confrontations between its larger-than-life stars. It’s a privilege to see these two at the height of their powers.

We then watched a recent Netflix release, the animated feature The Sea Beast. Though the film appeared to be a fairly routine children’s feature, I was lured into watching it by the presence of Karl Urban (The Boys’ Butcher, among other roles), who I’ve been delighted to see developing a larger film profile. Urban is indeed pretty excellent as the film’s expert beast hunter, but The Sea Beast is otherwise just a total retread of How To Train Your Dragon, only with less wit and visual splendor, as well as a significantly less adorable version of Toothless. “But Nick,” you might ask, “aren’t those How to Train Your Dragon’s biggest strengths? What do you have left if you remove those?” “Yes,” I would reply, “that is indeed the problem.”

Last up for the week was Ronin, an action-thriller starring Robert De Niro and Jean Reno as two members of a team assigned to steal a mysterious briefcase. There’s a lot more to it than that, but Ronin’s plot is frankly pretty insubstantial on the whole – the film mostly seems like an excuse to cast De Niro and Reno as buddy cops doing car chases, and boy howdy does it succeed at that. Ronin offers some of the best car chases you’ll find in any feature, and I’m not just saying that at this point – I’ve seen Bullitt, I’ve seen The French Connection, I’ve seen To Live and Die in L.A., and I’m happy to attest that Ronin stands comfortably alongside them.

The film wastes no time getting to the action, opening right at the moment when De Niro, Reno, and their compatriots are gathering to plot out the big heist. This truncated introduction serves as a quiet statement of purpose; there’s no real political, thematic, or even emotional underpinning to the action to come, it’s just Guys Being Dudes from here on out. This unfortunately means the film can get a little slow whenever the action stops, as there’s nothing to really tether us emotionally to the heroes’ quest, but De Niro and Reno are both such good actors that they essentially buy audience sympathy by sheer force of talent, fostering between themselves the sense of emotional connection that the film otherwise lacks. And indifferent writing aside, Ronin’s car chases are diverse, frequent, and extended enough to merit a watch by any fans of action cinema. A light but quite diverting spectacle.