Hello folks, and welcome the heck back to Wrong Every Time. With my viewing party’s ambitious project to watch our adolescent Big Three now successfully topped off with a viewing of the OG Dragon Ball saga, our schedules have been dramatically freed up, leaving me inclined to finally catch up on all of the year’s outstanding key anime. I’m already watching MyGO and Skip and Loafer with you folks, so our next group projects will likely be Vinland Saga and Witch from Mercury, and perhaps finally getting around to Cyberpunk. After burning down a series of three hundred plus-episode series in eight to twelve episode chunks, screening a one or two-season show just doesn’t seem quite so imposing as it once did. Plus the movies are flowing freely! We watched quite the varied assembly this week, so let’s not waste more time nattering about future plans, and break down the films of the week.

First up this week was Rituals, a ‘77 Canadian horror film about five doctors who embark on a six-day fishing trip deep in the woods of Northern Ontario. When their boots are stolen after the first night, the group suspect some sort of prank, but the increasingly malicious acts that follow prove some creature in the woodlands genuinely wants them dead. As tensions mount and injuries accumulate, the five will be stripped down to whatever core of humanity they cannot surrender, as they are forced to repay a blood debt decades in the making.

In terms of setting and structure, Rituals closely resembles the ‘72 classic Deliverance, though without that film’s most iconic and infamous sequences. However, while Deliverance was thematically centered on how modern society divorces us from some theoretical ideal of masculine cohabitation with the wild, Rituals has no such flattering pretensions regarding mankind’s true nature, and no smirking Burt Reynolds figure to extoll them. These men are not getting closer to the truth, only closer to death – and as the specter of darkness approaches, they are each winnowed down to their most fundamental beliefs and regrets, learning more about each other than they perhaps wish to know.

A film that dances between folk horror tropes while ultimately proving itself more character study than exploitation flick is obviously catnip to me, and I indeed found Rituals both harrowing and delightful. Actual attacks from their mysterious oppressor are infrequent: a bee hive here, a bear trap there, and a general sense of being hunted at every vulnerable moment. Instead, it is the imposing woods and bleak flats of Ontario that serve as the film’s principal antagonist, offering a sense of insurmountable challenge even as they dazzle in their beauty and desolation. Layer by layer, professional ambitions and questions of doctoral ethics are stripped from our proud protagonists, replaced by ruminations on how their relationships fell out just so, how they might measure the sum of their accomplishments, and what dignity they refuse to surrender even when facing the end. A gripping and refreshingly thoughtful watch, and an easy recommendation to any fans of backwoods horror.

We then checked out Nimona, a recent animated feature that was miraculously rescued from the unfortunate demise of Blue Sky Studios. The film follows Ballister Boldheart, a would-be knight from unusually humble origins in a distinctive quasi-futuristic world where crossbows fire laser beams and knights joust atop hover-horses. Though Ballister has dedicated his life to upholding the values of this society, he is framed for the queen’s murder in his moment of ascension, and is thus forced to flee as a wanted man. Soon, he attracts the company of Nimona, a shapeshifter with a profound violent streak who is determined to become his villainous sidekick. With the two soon aligned in their opposition to the kingdom’s injustices, a chaotic insurrection swiftly ensues.

Nimona’s passionate fan community and troubled production history had me quite curious as to how it all shook out, and I’m pleased to report that the film is for the most part a charming, persistently inventive fantasy caper. Though the film’s art design lacks the detail and composition-unifying texture of contemporaries like Spiderverse or The Mitchells versus The Machines, it nonetheless follows effectively in their aesthetic footsteps, embracing a somewhat cel-shaded look to evoke the textural appeal of traditional animation. And the clear chemistry shared by Ballister and Nimona sells their wandering capers with ease; Chloë Grace Moretz and Riz Ahmed both turn in terrific vocal performances, ensuring the film always has an engaging emotional core.

The pair’s quest to reveal their country’s dark secrets feels a touch underwritten, as does Nimona’s predictable backstory; you can basically call every beat of this story from the first moment you see any of its characters, which somewhat undercuts the sense of novelty and possibility offered by the film’s intriguingly unique world. Additionally, its sense of humor is both inconsistent and achingly of the moment; there’s a dabbing joke, a pineapple on pizza joke, and a significant plot beat that hinges on Youtube’s ability to reveal injustice and spark revolution. I suppose I’m just an old man yelling at clouds at this point, but I feel there must be ways to attract a Gen Z audience without so aggressively dating your film; that said, the film is also centered around a biracial gay couple and a clear metaphor for LGBT persecution, so if dabbing characters is the price to pay for such unabashedly progressive drama, I’ll pay it gladly.

Next up was Devil’s Due, a found footage horror film that falls roughly between Rosemary’s Baby and Paranormal Activity. Allison Miller and Zach Gilford star as Sam and Zach, a pair of newlyweds who return from their honeymoon in the Dominican Republic to discover Sam is unexpectedly pregnant. As her pregnancy develops, increasingly abnormal and ominous happenings indicate something is seriously wrong with her baby, all captured through Zach’s preposterously diligent array of home videos.

There are scattered effective scenes in Devil’s Due, but the film absolutely cannot escape the shadow of Rosemary’s Baby, and moreover will simply fail to surprise or impress anyone who’s watched the barest sampling of either evil baby or found footage features. The best found footage films evoke through their framing choices a sense of unmediated vulnerability, or use the specific constraints of their technological conceit to facilitate unique structural or visual effects. Devil’s Due does neither; you get the sense it’s found footage simply because found footage doesn’t require laborious camera setups or intelligent lighting choices, never mind how preposterous it might be that an in-universe character would have a camera present at any particular moment.

Additionally, while the film runs through the expected spookums of a mother carrying an evil fetus (“she’s a vegetarian… but she’s hungry for meat!?”), it simply has nothing to say about anything, either regarding the expectations placed on new mothers or the tensions this situation might foster between its just-married leads. Sam and Zach barely have personalities outside of their need to immediately react to one scene or another’s emergent problems, which makes the slow, obvious burn towards actual supernatural phenomena simply tedious. Comparing any film to Rosemary’s Baby’s taut paranoia and rich reflections on gender and community is probably unfair, but Devil’s Due clearly invites such a contrast, and is all the more underwhelming for it. An easy skip.

Last up for the week was Supercell, a recent disaster drama about a young man named William (Daniel Diemer), whose father was killed while investigating massive tornado-spawning superstorms. Years later, William lives quietly with his mother (Anne Heche), until the unexpected arrival of his father’s old notebook sends him on a storm-chasing quest of his own.

Supercell rides a dangerous line on the border of cliché and iconic, trusting in its talented cast to sell familiar characters and a fairly obvious script. Fortunately, it has a secret weapon: Andrew Jeric’s appropriately operatic, frequently stunning photography, which captures both the stark grandeur of the midwest and the overwhelming majesty of superstorms with a palpable sense of adoration and awe. In Jeric’s hands, the characters’ paeans to the ineffable glory of their pursuit are largely unnecessary; you can see why they chase tornadoes in every sprawling vista and towering stormfront. Eschewing humor or over-the-top action theatrics, Supercell rides entirely on the glory of nature’s fury; scenes with its human characters can occasionally drag, but there’s always another beautiful storm on the horizon. A visually engaging, narratively modest film that understands its own strengths precisely.