Hello friends, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. I am sorry to report that this has been another tough week on the home front, as our core “family” of four onetime tenants has been reduced to two, with our other companions choosing new horizons over continuing the apartment hunt. What this means for our D&D campaign I shudder to imagine, but I’m doing my best to take the changing tides with grace. Life continues, you know? It can’t all be good times, and a shakeup like this is also an opportunity to unshackle myself from routine, and see what else is out there for me. Though I enjoy my comfortable, predictable days, it’d also be nice to travel more and meet new people, and so I’m channeling my Rilakkuma & Kaoru zen as fiercely as possible through these turbulent times. In the meantime, a little constancy is always appreciated, so let’s run through some of our regularly scheduled movie reviews. Onward!
First up this week was The Lair, a 2022 action-horror film centered on a Royal Air Force pilot named Sinclair, who gets shot down in a remote region of Afghanistan. After being pursued into an abandoned Russian facility, she discovers a lab filled with bloodthirsty humanoid monsters, and barely escapes with her life. However, the creatures pursue her back to a nearby American outpost, prompting a desperate fight for survival against creatures of seemingly otherworldly power.
The Lair is the latest film by Neil Marshall, who began his directorial career with the outstanding one-two punch of Dog Soldiers and The Descent. In spite of directing two of the best horror films of the ‘00s, his career since has been conspicuously lacking in hits – though he did direct two of Game of Thrones’ most spectacular episodes, which each essentially serve as top notch action films in their own right. The man has a terrific eye for shooting action, but significantly more trouble with scripts and editing; he makes B-movies with A-list finesse, guided by his keen understanding of what makes for exciting visual drama.
Knowing all this before going in, I was thus entirely whelmed by The Lair, which fully demonstrates all of Marshall’s strengths and weaknesses. The film’s lack of production polish can occasionally stray towards made-for-TV territory, and the script could have been written by algorithm, but The Lair is nonetheless stocked with a satisfying array of engagingly designed and energetically filmed action setpieces, ranging from tense shootouts to gruesome grapple matches with superhuman beasties. Though Marshall can make some genuinely bulletproof cinema when he’s provisioned with top notch scripts and actors, left to his own devices he tends to make films much like Paul W. S. Anderson, and that’s not necessarily a bad place to be. If you’re in the mood for a pulpy action film that will engage but not surprise you, The Lair is a fine choice.
We next checked out a Norwegian disaster film called The Burning Sea. As is typical of disaster movies, the “star” of this film is not any actor, but the disaster itself – in this case, a fault line shift that threatens to destroy hundreds of working oil rigs. Working desperately to minimize the scale of this disaster, Norwegian officials elect to set the spilling oil alight, and thereby prevent it from spreading across the entire European seaboard. Of course, that’s bad news for the last remaining rig evacuees, who will have to race against time as a literal wall of fire blots out the horizon.
The Burning Sea is a handsome and propulsive disaster film from start to finish, choosing polished genre craft over innovation to excellent effect. There’s lots of tense boardroom negotiations, tearful stretching of hands, near-drownings, and races against time between helicopters and collapsing helipads. The one thing about this film that surprised me was how competent everyone was – in American disaster movies, you tend to run into corporate or governmental obstruction that threatens millions of lives for the sake of a few more dollars. Not so in Norway, apparently, where things like “the right to life and to a clean environment” seem to be more than just election slogans. This general competency across the cast prevents the film from ever spinning its wheels with arbitrary drama, letting the more-than-sufficient threat of that burning sea maintain center stage. An inessential but altogether well-crafted watch.
Next up was Offseason, a recent Shudder addition centered on a woman (Jocelin Donahue) returning to the island where her mother was buried, having received a message that the grave has been disturbed. Upon arriving, she discovers all the locals are creepy as fuck, and wisely decides to cut her losses. Unfortunately, by the time she reaches the bridge home, the road is closed, leaving her stuck with the (drum roll please) Offseason crowd.
Offseason isn’t shy about embracing its clear Lovecraftian influences. The film is perhaps an eighty-twenty split of Lovecraft’s “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” and Shirley Jackson’s “The Summer People,” and I don’t mean that as an insult – those are two of the greatest horror stories of all time, so fundamental and influential that they feel more like subgenres than single narratives. The Shadow Over Innsmouth has been adapted into films, games, and even a goddamn Magic: The Gathering set; the concept of a fading village fallen under the sway of a deep and unknowable intelligence is just riveting stuff, perfect for any number of distinct adaptations. Offseason’s particular riff on the premise is its series of flashback dialogues between Jocelin and her deteriorating mother, which offer a mix of genuinely pointed familial drama and foreboding proclamations about the nature of the island. It’s a lesser adaptation of its influences (The Block Island Sound provides a better recent take on the same story), but an altogether effective horror film.
Last up for the week was Ladybug & Cat Noir: The Movie, the film adaptation of a French television series that’s been ongoing for most of a decade, a series I personally know mostly from the grumbling that accompanied its ultimate selection of CG over traditional animation. The film centers on two Parisian teens named Marinette Dupain-Cheng and Adrien Agreste, who each find themselves adopting a secret identity in order to do battle with evildoers. As costumed vigilantes, they make an excellent team, with Cat Noir clearly suffering from a serious crush on his spot-speckled partner; in their daytime life, the infatuation flows in the precise opposite direction.
Ladybug & Cat Noir’s concept and structure are obviously inspired by magical girl narratives, complete with familiars, transformation scenes, and a balance of mundane teen drama versus supernatural action. The structure is familiar enough that any genre fan could probably call out the film’s narrative beat for beat, but that would be a disservice to its distinctive texture. Marinette, Adrien, and Paris itself are all given ample opportunities to express their unique characters, with Adrien in particular shining as a sort of riff on Tuxedo Mask where the film is in on the joke, and happy to string him up for his pompous preening. What’s more, our two leads are actually allowed to develop their romance in a way that feels more substantive and true-to-life than either Disney films or anime tend to allow; the two are genuine co-leads, giving the film an emotional depth beyond what you’d see if either were defined simply as “the love interest.”
With charming leads, a lovingly realized setting, and smartly boarded action scenes, Ladybug & Cat Noir offers an engaging spin on a familiar template. The story is predictable and animation unexceptional, but neither of those faults undercut the core appeal of the film’s central relationship. A breezy and altogether agreeable riff on the magical girl genre.
