Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Things are still pretty hectic on my end, as my housemates and I are still cooped up in temporary lodgings in the wake of the house fire two weeks ago. Not only has this made sneaking in film viewings more difficult, but it has also, unforgivably, delayed our progress in running my D&D campaign. As such, my Bridge Over The River Kwai-themed quest has been delayed until god knows when, but I can at least say I’ve been keeping up to date with my weekly articles, with my buffer now actually containing more big sturdy essays than episodic notes. I’m eager to share all my findings with you, but for now, let’s sift through the films I did manage to watch in the Week in Review!
First up this week was Werewolves Within, a horror-comedy based on a mafia-style game designed for VR headsets. Abandoning the game’s medieval setting, Werewolves Within sets us down in the sleepy New England town of Beaverfield, where new forest ranger Finn Wheeler (Sam Richardson) has scant time to become acquainted with the town’s quirky inhabitants before a blizzard strikes, the power fails, and the town’s personal generators are all mysteriously sabotaged. What follows is essentially a werewolf-themed spin on Clue, as a variety of larger-than-life characters throw accusations (and occasionally axes) back and forth while an unknown monster stalks them.
In spite of its dubious origins, Werewolves Within is actually a delightful time, banking heavily and successfully on the distinctive personalities and performances of its ensemble cast. Richardson rides a careful line between charming and pathetic that provides comfort but not security, while Michaela Watson and Harvey Guillén (What We Do In The Shadows’ Guillermo) compete to steal scenes as the town’s tchotchke-hawking crank and tech expat millionaire. And with the further irritant of a potential pipeline development drawing battle lines between the town’s residents, there’s ample fuel to stoke resentments and potential motives all across the cast.
The film proceeds cheerfully from introductions to accusations and onward to murders, maintaining a light tone and energetic disposition all the while. It’s definitely more comedy than horror, but that’s no fault here; director Josh Ruben understands this film is driven by its script and cast, and thus mostly ensures the two are provisioned with lush, quirky backdrops of small town paraphernalia and sight gags. A breezy and altogether delightful time.
Invigorated by this whole werewolf scenario, we then checked out Burial, a film whose teaser promised Nazi werewolves in abundant supply. I’ve seen plenty of Nazi zombies, but not so many Nazi werewolves, and so we were all quite intrigued to see what Hitler’s furriest soldiers had to offer. Well, it turns out we were gravely misled; the “werewolves” in question are actually just ordinary German soldiers in wolf pelts, who harass a convoy of Russian soldiers as they attempt to move Hitler’s body from Berlin to Moscow.
That mixup would prove only the first of Burial’s countless disappointments. First off, in a base visual sense, the film’s lighting and color correction are simply amateurish. Characters pop too much against their environment, the sky always looks like it was added in post, and the whole film possesses roughly the same visual polish as a home video of a birthday party. But beyond that, the film constantly aspires to a significance and gravitas it in no way earns, treating its soldiers’ mission to move Hitler as self-evidently sacred with no attempts to convince us why.
As an alternate history film, you’d think Burial would be at least slightly concerned with developing an invented scenario that possesses stakes and drama of some kind. There is none of that here; simply particularly stupid soldiers who get themselves offed in obvious traps, alongside a heroine who sees their mission of showing Hitler’s body to Stalin as a task of biblical significance. Even the characters themselves can’t really explain why this mission is important, while the Nazis hunting them are driven by motives just as obscure. Overlong and underwritten, Burial never rises above the status of idle thought experiment, and counts among my weakest viewings in recent memory.
We then finally got around to seeing Fast X, the latest in the venerable Fast and Furious franchise. As I mentioned in my previous series overview, it is fairly easy to chart the rise and fall of the Fast franchise through the years. After some early experimentation, the films lock into their modern, confident mode with Fast 5, ride that high through Furious 7, and immediately begin to lose steam following the death of series lynchpin Paul Walker. The ensuing Fast films are buddy dramas with only one buddy, and no amount of improbable, retroactively relevant family members can replace the clarity and chemistry of Brian and Dom out on the track.
Fast X certainly tries, though. Jason Momoa injects a desperately needed dose of levity and uncertainty into the franchise, dominating the screen as the vengeful son of Fast 5’s late villain. Returning the franchise to its street racing origins is also a good call, as there was really nowhere left to go escalation-wise after the last film shot a Fiero into space. With such a broad cast of returning characters and a three-film stretch of highway ahead of them, Fast X luxuriates in reunions and side adventures, answering a variety of unasked questions as Dom, Letty, Roman, and Jakob all chart their own wildly divergent paths.
The result is as unfocused as you’d expect, with unclear stakes somewhat dampening the excitement of the requisite death-defying stunts. The unwieldy cast muddies the line between performances and cameos; many characters feel like they’re here simply to wave and walk off the screen, while John Cena’s upgraded profile mostly seems like a result of Dwayne Johnson refusing to share a room with Vin Diesel. Messy as it is, it’s still fun spending time with the Fast Family – but for their sakes, I’m happy that we’re at last steering towards a presumptive finish line. And hey, I’m pretty sure Statham will get to do something in the next one!
Last up for the week was Vivarium, a film starring Imogen Poots and Jesse Eisenberg as a young couple looking to purchase a house. An oddly robotic real estate agent leads them to a development known as “Yonder,” where rows after rows of identical houses stand silent and unoccupied. Their agent swiftly disappears, and when the couple attempt to leave, they discover that Yonder seems to extend infinitely in all directions, all roads inevitably leading them back to their starting point of Number 9. Soon, a baby arrives without warning, its box instructing them to raise the child if they want to leave. And so their new life begins, playing out a new form of brood parasitism with a creature not entirely unlike a human child.
Vivarium’s unsettling suburban labyrinth is the first of its many pleasures. Yonder’s identical houses and cheerfully anonymous interiors feel as barren of life as any desert, a feeling buoyed by our leads’ heartbreaking reflections on missing things like smells or wind. Their “son” is equally unnerving; with a voice alternating between disconcerting mimicry and a deep, echoey tone entirely at odds with his body, it is always abundantly clear there is something alien beneath his skin, something that can mimic but never genuinely experience human emotion. The creature has curiosity but no imagination, fear but no empathy; every time Poots begins to see it as human, its unfamiliar bones press through the skin, reminding us it is more jailer than dependent.
Vivarium also has aspirations of commentary on suburban drudgery and the private prison of the nuclear family, though this theme feels a touch underdeveloped relative to its purely high concept pleasures. Incapable of dealing with the hated creature, Eisenberg’s character soon dedicates himself to digging a giant hole in the yard, telling Poots to “let me have this. This is something I can do.” The ensuing scenes offer familiar flashes of resentful cohabitation; Eisenberg pulls away into his self-destructive labor, Poots is left to raise the homunculus alone, and eventually both begin to unravel. The metaphor is the text itself, but it’s hard to see what insight is being gleaned; fortunately, Poots’ standout performance maintains the film’s emotional sincerity even through its weakest stretches.
The enduring humanity of Poots’ and Eisenberg’s characters ensures the film feels claustrophobic and malevolent all through its conclusion, which offers us only a hint of explanation regarding our heroes’ terrible circumstances. That’s ultimately to the good; with no grand mastermind to rally against, we are left with only the grim certainty of this enemy’s further propagation, as a creature which has learned just enough about humanity to present a sick mockery of the suburban idyll. There is no malice in Vivarium, and that only makes it all the more unsettling. We are all just animals trying to survive.
