Growing up the oldest kid in a family leaves you without much of a barometer as to what’s cool. A big sibling can be The Silent Protector between you and the DC Talk CD you’d planned to bring to a sleepover, a voice of reason to stop you from wearing an Invader Zim shirt to talk to girls in a food court. In the absence of that precious compass, whenever I looked for new media as a kid, I would shoot for “adult” and hope for the best.
Thrillers were the grown-up movies du jour in my teen years, a genre most fertile in a hard–PG-13/soft-R rating zone that kept most of its library just out of reach in my conservative household. I begged my parents for weeks to let me see Jonathan Demme’s remake of The Manchurian Candidate; I kept a DVD of The Constant Gardener hidden under my bed like a dirty magazine (again, not even an inkling as to what was cool). It was a genre that balanced itself well between the familiar and the electric, safe enough to reach toward but exciting enough to make it feel like I was getting away with something.
There’s a unique vitality to a good thriller, especially one from the aughts. The 2000s thriller is something of a compromise between the trash that finds itself in Scorsese’s crosshairs and Scorsese’s World Cinema Project: a good time that can still carry big ideas, a showcase for serious performances that won’t leave you wondering if you missed a prereq. In a period that saw horror, its sister genre, fall victim to sexist gore and digital sepia, thrillers remained potent and often provocative vehicles for dense character studies, challenging sexual politics, and existential head-scratching.
In this week’s Blood Jump, we pay tribute to the most five-star four-star genre there is: the 2000s thriller, from the multiplex to the art house. The Others. The Box. Trouble Every Day. Let’s begin.
The Whitest Kids U’ Know
Movies so often ask the impossible of mothers. They are demanded to keep their children well but thrust to the borders of negligence and hysteria should they misstep; care too little and risk abuse, care too much and render yourself a basket case. These stakes were particularly heightened around the turn of the century, an era delighted to bind women to violent punchlines—especially in the defense of children, however brittle that defense may be. Alejandro Amenábar’s The Others has likely endured over the past 20 years because of its insistence to keep its mother (Nicole Kidman) safe from either pitfall without sacrificing its potency as collateral. It sees a mother driven past the edge of delirium and does not ask its audience to suspend a drop of empathy.
The Others is a historical haunted-house movie but is mercifully withholding of allegory. Nicole Kidman is Grace, a mother in an isolated manor on the fog-choked Jersey Channel Island in 1945. Her husband has not returned from war, so the responsibility to raise her two children is hers alone. It’s a big undertaking: the kids, Nicholas and Anne (James Bentley and Alakina Mann), suffer from photosensitivity and can’t tolerate light brighter than a lantern. The family’s house is without electricity, and they keep the curtains perpetually drawn. Spooky stuff to be sure, made all the more so when a trio of servants appear—they say they’ve worked at the manor before and showed up before Kidman had posted an advertisement for help. There’s also Victor, a ghostly child Anne claims to speak with, whose presence gets harder and harder to ignore. The whole thing is solid ground for an examination of the ghosts of war, of a generation of fathers plucked from their families to die overseas. But The Others keeps its horrors close to the chest, focusing not on the fathers who left but on those who lived their lives through their absence. Single moms just can’t catch a break.
When sunlight is the enemy, it’s only natural to carry through your days with a bit of an edge. Grace suffers from night terrors, she is strict and sometimes unforgiving with her new staff, there is talk of “an incident” that likely involved a lapse in her sanity. If she is severe, though, she is not a shrew. In a telling scene, Grace, a staunch Catholic, lectures Nicholas and Anne on Justus and Pastor, two child martyrs who died at the hands of the Romans in third-century Spain for refusing to deny Christ. It’s a harsh parable, but the children find it funny: Anne laughs, calling the children stupid for losing their lives where a white lie would have done. Grace admonishes her kids, but there’s a glint of pride about her. Perhaps she recognizes their steadfast survivalism, or maybe she just thinks they’re funny or clever. The scene makes for a fine case study of The Other’s grit: it is not content to surrender to death, though it recognizes death’s severity; it will not cast a mother to the infirmary, nor will it deny the massive weight on her shoulders.
The Others finds its strength in execution, if not innovation. There’s nothing particularly inventive about this movie. It’s in conversation with its contemporaries, meeting the premiums set by its peers for twists (The Sixth Sense) and gothic creepiness (The Haunting). But The Others finds a more comfortable home in the horrors of New Hollywood than the exploitative gore of new-Millennium heavyweights like Saw and Hostel. Kidman is the preeminent torchbearer of Roman Polanski’s apartment trilogy, and her performance here fills every square inch of the manor’s fine molding with precise freneticism. The rest of the cast follows the power of her lead: the children are particularly impressive players and buoy the movie’s Hitchcockian tension and twists without ever feeling irksome. The chief servant, Mrs. Mills (Fionnula Flanagan), likely serves as soil for Ann Dowd’s brilliant turn in Hereditary, carving a hearth so inviting as to encourage a willful disregard of the red flags that stamp its edges. It all amounts to a product content to look back—aside from a bit of computer-generated fog, there is no CGI to be found—coiling its tensions in the same shape as the masters before it.
Alejandro Amenábar’s career is one of fits and starts. After drumming up attention from his 1996 debut Thesis, Amenábar scored a modest hit with Open Your Eyes (1997), a Penélope Cruz vehicle that would later be adapted by Cameron Crowe into Vanilla Sky. The Others marked his first English-language film and remains his biggest hit—it was a smash at the Goya awards and the first to win best picture at the festival without featuring a word of Spanish. Amenábar would go on to make other pictures of note; The Sea Inside won the 2004 Oscar for best foreign feature, and 2006’s Agora was the highest-grossing Spanish film of the year. But in a career that leaned heavily on innovation, it’s curious that Amenábar’s most successful movie remains his most traditional. Sometimes, you just gotta play the hits.
What’s in the Box?!
The Box (2009) is a producer’s high-concept wet dream. A decent American family struggles to make ends meet. A strange man shows up at their door with a stranger proposition: he carries a box that features a single red button. Should the family decide to press the button, they will receive one million dollars—but someone, whom they’ve never met, will die. Forget that this well-known story first appeared in an issue of Playboy, forget that it had already been adapted into an episode of The Twilight Zone. This concept is so strong it will practically print money with the push of a button.
Or, at least, it might have. 2009 saw a changing of the guard in popular cinema. Avatar* blew the doors off the hinges in multiplexes across the country, raking record profits and signaling a lucrative turn toward franchises to studios—and eventually, the erasure of standalone movies geared toward adult audiences. Avatar also coincided with the widespread adoption of digital projectors, a transition that would send traditional film projection into fringe discount and boutique theaters. The Box is very much a product of these shifting tides: it was shot digitally but rests its sensibilities in the thrillers of the 70s (The Conversation comes to mind, though it’s nowhere as strange). It cast its net into a drying pond, barely clearing its $30 million budget from a global gross. It’s tempting to wonder whether the movie might have found better financial and cultural solvency had it been released five years earlier.
Though it’s not quite fair to blame The Box’s failures on circumstance. Its titanium concept also lends easily to parody—I had first heard of the movie through a Funny or Die sketch—and a shoddily edited trailer made it easy to dismiss The Box as a last gasp of a dying genre. As many did: The Box is one of just 22 movies to have received an F from CinemaScore. But where that F often signals something unwatchable, it just as frequently points to movies so absurd they neighbor the sublime. The Box enjoys good company in its F-rating with filmmakers like Robert Altman (Dr. T and the Women), Jane Campion (In the Cut), and William Friedkin (Bug), all who offered movies audacious, bizarre, and undeniably compelling.
It’s difficult to describe The Box as anything but absolutely nuts. After the couple (James Marsden and Cameron Diaz) inevitably press the button, they are indeed presented with a suitcase filled with a million dollars in one-hundred-dollar bills, and they catch wind that a woman was shot and killed in her home. Director Richard Kelly pulls the remainder of the runtime through a masterclass of heightening, executing a series of choices so exponentially strange and alluring that the movie’s initial proposition feels quaint by the time the credits roll. Watching The Box is a bit like investigating a smell that dangles between rancid and intoxicating, something so intriguing you need to see it to its end—regardless of whether it’s good or bad.
Part of what makes The Box so invigorating is its insistence to ask big, simple questions and its refusal to land on any one answer. The movie’s central premise—would you sacrifice the wellbeing of a stranger for the wellbeing of your family—is the stuff of philosophy 101 and could find a good home between the trolley problem and the Milgram experiment. It’s enough to get your gears turning, but The Box endures (at least with a cult audience) through its insistence to elevate its us-vs.-them pitch to the literal heavens. It crests Sartre, creationism, capitalism, the dawn of conspiracy theory, the death of WWII patriotism. It sends James Marsden through the gates of eternity, it pins Cameron Diaz with an inexplicable southern accent. There are notes of Coppola, there are notes of Roeg, though it is a movie entirely of its own. The Box will reward its viewers with something as entertaining as it is beguiling, a ride so dizzying you won’t remember where it started. Ask the questions, but do not expect to understand the answers.
*Despite what Avatar may have wrought, Blood Jump remains a pro-Cameron publication. More on that in a future issue. Maybe.
For the Hungry Boy
Vampire movies have a storied, if not weary, tether to metaphor. Vampiric hunger is employed as symbol for contagion and capitalism, for addiction and desire. It’s an efficient vessel for allegory, though like most metaphor, the symbolic vampire is never quite sufficient an answer for the allure of the vampire itself. And that metaphor crumbles further when hunger is pushed past its limits, when the rules of vampirism break open toward something more feral.
Trouble Every Day (2001) is not a vampire movie—nor does it concern itself much symbolism—though it does see hunger to its consumptive extreme. Its director, Claire Denis, built her filmography around the human body: its form and function, its capability and limits, what it needs and what it desires. Trouble Every Day’s predecessor, 1999’s Beau Travail, is patient even in its excess as it traces the bodies of a group of men in the French Foreign Legion. These bodies quiver with thirst, flex and bulge with anger; they writhe and glide to music in clubs and wither and die in the heat of salt flats. Beau Travail’s reverence of the body likely accounts for its acclaim—the movie remains Claire Denis’ most successful, often lauded as one of the best films of the past 50 years. Trouble Every Day, largely panned on its release, maintains Beau Travail’s attention to the body but unravels its reverence like an inch of skin caught on a nail.
Coré (Béatrice Dalle) has a hunger for human flesh, one that she cannot—or does not care to—contain. She lives in Paris with her husband, Léo (Denis regular Alex Descas), a doctor who serves as Coré’s de facto caretaker; Coré can’t be trusted around other people, so Léo keeps her boarded up in their flat. Shane and his wife June (Vincent Gallo and Tricia Vessey) are young Americans in love and have flown to Paris to celebrate their new marriage. But Shane has ulterior motives—he suffers from the same hunger that afflicts Coré, and he believes Léo might be capable of a cure.
Though none of this matters much, really. Plot hums under the heat of Trouble Every Day like a tangle of thrilled veins, a loose network of causality to scaffold Denis’ fascination with the body. The movie dissolves the line between hunger and desire; where vampirism concerns our relationship with our wants and needs, Trouble Every Day operates wholly from the stomach. Denis’ stock cinematographer Agnés Godard shoots bodies with an attention that falls somewhere between the erotic and a hungry agnosticism. Bodies dance between sexy and a cut of meat within the same shot, kisses turn to bites, skin turns to flesh.
Thrillers—especially those of the early aughts—aren’t typically categorized by slow-cinema mood pieces. Trouble Every Day is frequently cited as a landmark of the New French Extremity, and it’s easy to draw a line between Denis’ work here and the recent works of provocateurs like Julia Ducournau (Raw, Titane) and Pascal Laugier (Martyrs). But a more apt comparison might be Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin. Shane and Coré share the same hunger, and Trouble Every Day maximizes its potency as it watches that hunger splinter across gender lines. Where Shane’s predation feels sickeningly traditional, Coré’s extremism still has to contend with the very real power dynamics that shape our concept of gender. Like Scarlett Johansson’s alien, each move Coré makes toward satisfying her hunger comes at the sacrifice of her own safety; she must contend with the inherent vulnerability that colors the proximity of men. Both movies are quiet, careful, and dreadful works, showcases of a hunger so deep it will make you sick.
Sample Draws
Last week’s Blood Jump featured a column on 1977’s Saturday Night Fever, a brutal and beautiful exercise in picking up a rock and watching the worms writhe underneath. I’ve since watched it’s 1983 sequel, Staying Alive. It is without exaggeration one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen, a craven sellout to Reaganite values and the artlessness of 80s pop. Skip it!
I watched A Matter of Life and Death for the first time with my film club this week. Good Lord. Powell and Pressburger were a blind spot for me, and I’m happy to have a new filmography to dive into. It’s so nice when a classic lives up to the hype.
I’m reading Swann’s Way by Proust for the first time, and it’s (terrified-of-having-the wrong-opinion voice) good! That said, might be a while before I have time to tackle another book for the newsletter, so enjoy the inevitable Oops All Videogames edition of Blood Jump.
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