Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. With the summer season coming to a close, I’ve at last begun catching up on its glut of prestige productions, beginning with the much-anticipated A Witch in Mongolia. The show has proven an absolute delight so far, continuing the thread of sharp, intimate historical drama begun by Yamada’s Heike Monogatari, and complementing her mastery of melancholy with a great deal of wit and courtly subterfuge. It’s an absolute delight seeing my favorite director expand her tonal and narrative palette while still embodying all the compositional delicacy and attentiveness to character that first dazzled me in her work. It’s been an incredible evolution from K-On! to here, and I’m exceedingly thankful that Science Saru has proven such a reliable partner for her talents. I’ll likely have more to say on that shortly (even if it’s just “season two when”), but for now, let’s run down the Week in Review!

First up this week was The Vourdalak, a recent French production directed by Adrien Beau, based on the novella by A.K. Tolstoy. The film centers on a marquis who finds himself lost in the demon-haunted woods of Eastern Europe, eventually taking refuge in the home of a man named Gorcha. Gorcha’s children offer a chilly and superstitious welcome, but the man himself is far worse; returning home after taking revenge on the Turks who torched their village, he appears transformed into a living corpse, an insidious, life-draining vourdalak.

I quite enjoyed this story’s previous adaptation as a segment of Mario Bava’s Black Sabbath, but that in no way prepared me for the delirious pleasures of this film. Even before Gorcha shows up, Beau presents a simultaneously claustrophobic and overwhelming portrait of gothic superstition, setting up the marquis as a clownish, preposterously mannered counterpoint to the bluntness of Gorcha’s children, and painting each member of the family in rich, distinctive colors. They possess all the mutual fondness and trust of Hereditary’s lovely home, dabbling in occult rituals and gesturing towards forces far beyond the prim marquis’ comprehension.

And when Gorcha arrives, good lord. The family patriarch is realized as a loving detailed marionette, a pale skeleton with piercing, bulbous eyes who his first son somehow cannot recognize as a monster. It’s genuinely upsetting watching this creature insinuate itself back into the family, as if we’re trapped at the dinner table with our lips stitched shut, unable to voice the danger that is even now scraping its bony hands across their cheeks. Beau himself does a fantastic job voicing the terrible creature, leading us towards an inevitable violence that affixes the somber grandeur of Bram Stoker’s Dracula with bloody punctuation and a sordid simplicity of lustful passion. You could make a feast of this film approaching it from the lens of class or gender, languish happily in its dreamlike digressions, or just enjoy the playful contrast of the outgunned marquis and his gracious, terrible host. However you stake it, it’s a brilliant debut that leaves me clamoring for whatever Beau conjures next.

We then checked out Watership Down, the animated adaptation of the novel by Richard Adams. The film centers on a group of rabbits led by the courageous Hazel, who leave their warren after Hazel’s brother Fiver witnesses a vision of encroaching apocalypse. Their exodus leads them over hill and under dale, until they ultimately must face off with the maniacal leader of a distant warren in order to secure a future for their fluffy companions.

Watership Down is a bracingly close adaptation of one of the most brutal rabbit-focused adventures I’ve come across, capturing all the terror and violence of the original story, and bringing it to life with grounded, realistic character animation and lush portraits of England’s ecologically dead countryside. The film really brings the intimidating scale of this adventure to life; with our perspective tucked low among the rabbits, it becomes instantly clear how every open field is an Odyssey-scale expedition, and every uncovered stretch of land an invitation for hostile predators.

Violence comes swift and without warning; an unwary trek beyond the cover of corn stalks might signal a hungry hawk, and any safety that seems too good to be true almost certainly is. As in the book, the film presents a diverse array of challenges that keeps the journey from ever feeling either monotonous or dispiritingly bleak, and though some members of the team fade into the background, you still get a fair impression of the key personalities defining their little fellowship. The story is one of the great nightmare-inducing introductions to consequence in any medium, and this film is a fine vehicle for teaching children that vital sense of the world’s indifference to our suffering.

My housemate’s reckless Tubi-trawling next led us to Surf Ninjas, a ‘93 artifact that looks and feels much like a made-for-TV Disney movie. The plot involves two surfing teens living in Los Angeles, who after being suddenly attacked by ninjas are soon informed they are actually the lost princes of the remote island kingdom of Partusan. Alongside their new guardian and old friend Rob Schneider, the brothers will be forced to square off and surf up in order to claim their inheritance.

The film’s plot is virtually non-existent, and Rob Schneider’s presence frequently make scenes close to unbearable, but Surf Ninjas is unexpectedly blessed with a pair of redeeming virtues: the talented father-son martial arts pair of Ernie Reyes Jr. and Sr. in lead roles, and Leslie Nielson doing his best to serve up some genuine physical comedy as the pair’s improbable nemesis. An inoffensive but entirely skippable time capsule from the moment when Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was at its peak cultural penetration, and also we let Rob Schneider appear in movies for some fucking reason.

Last up for the week was Invention for Destruction, a loose ‘58 adaptation of Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Lubor Tokoš stars as Simon Hart, the assistant to a renowned scientist who is captured alongside him by pirates working for the nefarious Count Artigas. Upon returning to Artigas’ secret island lair, the two are tasked with mastering the professor’s theorized new form of energy, which Artigas intends to use as a superweapon. Determined to foil Artigas’ ambitions, Hart embarks on a brave attempt to warn the world of his menace, and escape his malevolent clutches.

Invention for Destruction is a breathtakingly inventive reimagining of Verne’s tale, presenting the exotic scenery and fanciful inventions of Verne’s world as diligently drafted illustrations existing in concord with the film’s human actors. Utilizing a combination of such backgrounds, stop-motion animation, and projections of light upon an animated seafloor, Invention for Destruction brings Verne’s ideas to life like I’ve never seen before, calling to mind the rare, impressive flourishes of the German expressionists, as well as the mixed-media undersea world of Wes Anderson’s The Life Aquatic.

The effect is transportative and enthralling, presenting an aesthetic feast whose adventurous ambitions are unbound by any concern for setting or scale; united by the mediating influence of black-and-white photography, the visual discordance of the effect swiftly diminishes into memory, until you are left wondering why so many other films didn’t employ such brilliant innovations. And alongside its aesthetic marvels, the film also does the finest job I’ve seen of contorting 20,000 Leagues into a propulsive, audience-friendly adventure shell, adjusting what was originally an episodic, Nemo-led travelogue into a fierce conflict between a professor’s assistant and the nefarious pirates who’ve captured and exploited his mentor. Stunning in its visual versatility and confident in its narrative restructuring, Invention for Destruction is a film I’d recommend to anyone interested in the visual range of cinema at large.