The latest film releases include Presence, Rose, Inheritance, and Myth of Man. Weighing in are Alonso Duralde and Dave white, film critics and co-hosts of the movie podcast Linoleum Knife.
Presence
In this Steven Soderbergh-directed horror-thriller starring Lucy Liu, viewers get a first-person perspective of a ghost that haunts a dysfunctional family.
Duralde: “The entire film is seen from the POV of the ‘presence’ that is haunting this beautiful home that a family has moved into. Yeah, the family has issues of their own that the ghost is observing this from a distance. And so the film is set up as a series of discrete scenes. The ghost sees what's happening. The scene comes to an end. We cut to black, and then we pick up later on. It's a very effective premise. … It helps to build the sense of dread. [Soderbergh] is, once again, his own cinematographer and his own editor. The performances from Lucy Liu and Chris Sullivan and Callina Liang as the daughter are really effective. And this is a beautiful example of how you can learn about characters without people stopping to dump exposition on you.”
White: “It's also a really effective film about familial estrangement and conflict. … It also does something I really love: Films about hauntings that can communicate spookiness. … This one gets it right, while also managing to find occasional humor in the ways that films about hauntings traditionally don't allow.”
Rose
This French film explores a widowed Jewish woman reeling from her loss, while looking ahead to the rest of her life.
White: “It's from French actress Aurélie Saada, this is her first directorial effort, starring the legendary Françoise Fabian. … She's 91. … And in this film, she plays Rose, who is in her late 70s. Now, she shot this movie when she was about 87-88. … Rose's husband has just died, her three adult children hover around her to keep her going until she decides to keep going herself. She puts on her good outfit. She leaves the house, she drives for the first time in decades. She flirts with a man for the first time since her husband came along. … She drinks, and things that she has not allowed herself to do all of these years. Her kids react to this in various negative ways, until Rose has to get them all in line too. It's a gentle movie. It's also not as sentimental as you would expect from this kind of material about grief and moving on in old age.”
Duralde: “There's a Jewish identity that runs throughout. … Rose is from Tunisia, and that comes up as well. And so there's a lot of cultural specificity to the character. But ultimately, it's about a woman rediscovering herself, and I think we get in our minds what the American version of that would look like. … But this movie is a lot smarter than that, and a lot more subtle than that. It's a smart movie about families and about aging and about discovering that life can always hold new possibilities.”
Inheritance
Phoebe Dynevor (Bridgerton) plays a young woman from New York who gets roped into an international espionage conundrum. The film was shot entirely on an iPhone.
Duralde: “It stars Phoebe Dynevor, she's a young woman who has spent the last several months taking care of her dying mother. And at the funeral, her long-absent father, played by Rhys Ifans, shows up, and he claims to have a job for her in real estate. But it quickly is determined that he is, in fact, a spy. And she gets enmeshed in his world of subterfuge. What I found distracting about the film is that it starts out with the idea of: What if we made a thriller where the lead character is really dealing with grief? But they chuck that pretty quickly, and it just becomes her on the run and ducking from people and hiding out. And they had potential to go somewhere different, but this feels like a routine spy movie, but shot on an iPhone.”
White: “There's a mildly interesting twist in the third act, but otherwise, honestly, this movie is a waste of time. It has that stale feeling of something shot during the pandemic. And the reason you see that and know that is because everyone except the main character is wearing a mask. … It's the kind of movie that someone waited around to finally release it.”
Myth of Man
From indie filmmaker Jamin Winans, this follows a deaf-mute protagonist. The trailer shows a fantasy, steampunk, almost video game-like world that’s under siege. The film has no dialogue.
White: “This is about a young woman, played by Austrian actress Laura Rauch. She cannot hear or speak, and she lives in a fantastical reality. The people here, they live in a world that feels like the end of personal agency. It's an authoritarian dystopia. She has some homemade devices that have, she believes, allowed her to receive messages from a universal force, some sort of creator. And she manages to convince a handful of other people to join her in finding the answer, the quest for freedom, salvation. … The story is told … entirely without dialogue. And the visuals are an overload of digital work animation, live action. … I'm immune to the sensibility of the awe and the wonder of the human spirit, which is what's happening here. But I do appreciate the ‘we're all in this together’ mentality that pervades the story, and that binds the characters together to fight and strive for whatever it is they're fighting and striving for.”
Duralde: “On the one hand, it is quite earnest, but at the same time, it is exceedingly trippy. This is the hallucinogenic overload that would become a midnight movie in earlier eras. And maybe in this one too, if they play their cards right. It's an ambitious film. They use the phrase ‘economy of means’ every year at the Spirit Awards. And this movie has all of those things going for it.”