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Posted on May 14, 2018

Island Zero: Indie Creature Feature

Dawn Keetley

Island Zero is directed by Josh Gerritsen and written by Tess Gerritsen, the best-selling crime author of the Rizzoli and Isles series. While undeniably low-budget, Island Zero has a lot going for it –including excellent writing and direction and some stellar performances—especially by Laila Robins as the local doctor, Maggie. There are also some powerful location shots as the director mines the Maine island of Islesboro for its bleak beauty.

Island Zero quickly puts us into the realm of a quite conceivable dystopian scenario as it follows a marine biologist, Sam (Adam Wade McLaughlin), who is trying to figure out why the local fish population seems to have vanished—“sudden unexplained collapse of the fishery” he calls it. His wife, also a marine biologist who vanished mysteriously at sea four years ago, had been studying fishery collapse—a phenomenon happening all along the eastern seaboard. When she disappeared, she had been working on the theory that the fish were being eaten by an apex predator that hadn’t yet been identified. Sam, still grieving, has picked up her work and has become convinced not only that she was right but that the mysterious predator has moved up to Maine.

Posted on April 26, 2018

10×10 and the Trend of Women Kept Captive

Dawn Keetley

10×10 is the first feature-length film for director Suzi Ewing. Noel Clarke wrote the screenplay and it stars Kelly Reilly (Eden Lake, Britannia) and Luke Evans (mostly recently in TNT’s The Alienist). The film’s plot is simple: Lewis (Evans) stalks Cathy (Reilly), abducts her, and locks her in sound-proofed (10×10) room in his home. At first, all he asks his captive is what her name is, but as she tries to escape, he gets more violent. As 10×10 unfolds, the viewer’s assumptions about what’s going on take some dramatic turns—and one of the most effective things about this film is precisely the way it plays with viewers’ expectations.

These captured-women narratives are undoubtedly saying something about men’s anxiety in an era of diminishing power—and of the rising power of women. The 2010s kicked off with Hanna Rosin’s major article in the The Atlantic: “The End of Men,” with her book of the same title following on its heels. On the other hand, as important as that general anxiety is, the films are all saying something different in their particular kinds of captivity, the different dynamics they imagine between captor and captive. 10×10 is no exception.

Posted on April 20, 2018

Ghost Stories: Best Horror Film of 2018

Dawn Keetley

Ghost Stories, distributed by IFC Midnight, is directed and written by Jeremy Dyson and Andy Nyman and adapted from their stage play which opened in Liverpool in 2010. The play was notable for its warning that no one under 15 should attend and also for its asking the audience to keep its “secrets.” Like the play, the film definitely deserves to have its secrets kept, and this review is without spoilers. I do know, though, that I’ll undoubtedly write about Ghost Stories in the future because it’s a film with an ending that needs to be talked about. And it’s brilliant. It’s the best horror film I’ve watched in 2018. (While Ghost Stories premiered at the London Film Festival in late 2017, so technically it’s a 2017 film, it didn’t arrive in the US until 2018.)

Ghost Stories centers on Professor Phillip Goodman (Andy Nyman), a profound skeptic who devotes his life to debunking what he sees as the superstitious and destructive delusions of believers. A short home video that plays near the opening of the film explains Goodman’s zeal. As he says, “My father’s religious beliefs destroyed our family.” To Goodman, religious faith, or any faith in the supernatural, is a product of humans’ having to confront mortality and death; it’s a way of dealing with “existential terror.” And he believes it’s a self-deceptive way of dealing with that terror. Goodman lives his life believing one must confront the terror of existence and death, not evade it through lies. His entire life is built on the bedrock of “material evidence” –of apprehending the reality in front of your eyes. The film, not surprisingly, challenges that view.

Posted on March 23, 2018

Pyewacket and the Consequences of Rage

Dawn Keetley

With his second feature film, Pyewacket (2017), Adam MacDonald is showing himself to be a distinctive director and writer of horror. His films offer spare plots centered on an intense, complicated relationship—a relationship then tested and torn apart by some kind of horrific force. His films are beautifully shot and make the most of the isolation of his characters.

MacDonald’s first film, Backcountry (2014), which I review here, centers on the strained relationship of Alex (Jeff Roop) and Jenn (Missy Peregrym) as they become lost in the deep woods on a camping trip Jenn never wanted to take. An encounter with a large grizzly bear, however, puts their troubled relationship in a very different perspective.

Posted on March 17, 2018

The Strangers: Prey at Night Is a Travesty

Dawn Keetley

Johannes Roberts’ The Strangers: Prey at Night is a travesty for anyone who watched and loved the outstanding 2008 film, The Strangers, directed by Bryan Bertino. I discuss Bertino’s Strangers here. It’s a brilliant horror film in the pure, enigmatic malevolence of the “strangers,” the simplicity of the plot, and the absolute terror induced by the way the strangers emerge silently into the frame, inside the home they shouldn’t be in. Strangers: Prey at Night is the opposite of all that. Which isn’t to say that, as a film in its own right, it doesn’t have some redeeming qualities.