I’m laid low by a heavy cold at the moment so I don’t have it in me to write these up.

Luckily, thanks to RNZ I already talked about them at length so there are links below. Listen and enjoy.

We Bury the Dead turns out to be the film I liked best of the four — a melancholy …

Read more

Tomorrow is a public holiday here in Aotearoa New Zealand — Waitangi Day — so there won’t be a newsletter sent out.

I thought this weekend would be a good time for people to revisit a Kiwi classic.

Geoff Murphy’s Utu was first released in cinemas in 1984 and it got an excel…

Read more

Yesterday I mentioned all the attention that the Melania documentary got last weekend — media attention that did not result in tickets sold or box office earnt — and I linked to an article by the Southern Punk Project that summarised all of the reviews of the film so that you could feel informed without actually having to watch it yourself.

Read more

The two highest profile releases of the week don’t feature in this newsletter and both are examples of a rapidly changing landscape — one I’m finding it hard to keep up with.

Brett Ratner’s ‘documentary’ Melania sucked up all the column inches but despite its notoriety couldn’t find a screen in Wellington to show it. For once, our cinematic poverty works to our advantage. If you’re at all interested in the actual film, the editor-in-chief pointed me at this excellent summary of global reviews. They all watched it so I didn’t have to1.

In arguably more seismic news, the film with the biggest box office results in Australia and New Zealand last weekend was a self-funded horror called Iron Lung by someone the press release calls a ‘YouTube megastar’, Mark “Markiplier” Fischbach. I saw the phrase “self-funded” in the Flicks summary — and having had something of my fill of horror over the last couple of years — gave it a swerve. Clearly, though, 50 million social media followers ( 38 million on YouTube alone) provided enough weight to make it a cultural phenomenon and it means I have to make some adjustments to my thinking.

Share

I don’t spend much time on YouTube and try to remember to not be logged in to any identifiable account when I do. I’ve seen it mostly as a force for social toxicity despite the fact that I use it to learn how to do weird little things all the time. So, while the algorithm has turned a great many ordinary young folk into tragic incel white supremacists, the platform itself is something I finally have to reckon with. Even the BBC recently announced that they would be making original programming especially for YouTube this year.

This was also the week that The Atlantic published an article about how teachers of film studies are having difficulty getting students to actually sit all the way through the films:

Akira Mizuta Lippit, a cinema and media-studies professor at the University of Southern California—home to perhaps the top film program in the country—said that his students remind him of nicotine addicts going through withdrawal during screenings: The longer they go without checking their phone, the more they fidget. Eventually, they give in. He recently screened the 1974 Francis Ford Coppola classic The Conversation. At the outset, he told students that even if they ignored parts of the film, they needed to watch the famously essential and prophetic final scene. Even that request proved too much for some of the class. When the scene played, Lippit noticed that several students were staring at their phones, he told me. “You do have to just pay attention at the very end, and I just can’t get everybody to do that,” he said.

Having said that, the film that prompted all the queues at my local multiplex this weekend was an anniversary screening of The Lord of the Rings so maybe the classics can endure.

Back to this week’s new releases and I enjoyed Ralph Fiennes in the UK historical drama, The Choral. It was an “O.K. Choral”, if you will2. Fiennes plays a choirmaster asked to steer the choral society of a small Yorkshire town, decimated by the loss of male voices to World War One. Fiennes’ character has to battle class as well as wartime prejudice — he spent most of his professional career in Germany where the good music gets made — and the eventual choice of Elgar’s 1900 epic oratorio, The Dream of Gerontius, is a clever one.

Firstly, from a story point of view, it gives the choir something decidedly English to perform — an affection for England despite its faults being a subtext of The Choral — but it also asks modern cinema audiences to consider something outside of the classical big hits repertoire for a change. When the person sitting next to me asked her companion what she thought of the music, the replay was “Not much.” That new-fangled 125-year-old modern music!

Screenwriter Alan Bennett is a national treasure in England and watching The Choral was like enjoying a fine piece of craftsmanship. Not too inspiring but everything in its place and beautifully turned out.

Sam Raimi is also a craftsman but might not fall into the category of national treasure just yet. Send Help is his first engagement with original (i.e.not franchise or pre-existing) material since Drag Me to Hell in 20093.

At one point in Send Help, Rachel McAdams’ Linda Liddle — an unappreciated strategy executive in a big consultancy firm forced to use the knowledge gained from her Survivor fandom to keep herself and her boss alive after a plane crash strands them on a deserted island — says that "monsters are not born, they’re made”, an observation that will become true of her and Dylan O’Brien’s boorish and entitled executive as the film goes on.

Read more

Long-time readers of this newsletter (and its preceding blog) will know that I have a tendency to go on at length about my trip to the Telluride Film Festival in 2012.

As accredited media, I was entitled to go to the pre-opening night mystery screening at the Chuck Jones — Ben Affleck’s Argo:

Chuck Jones’ Theater is a converted convention centre ballroom …

Read more

The first three films this week are about men for whom rules do not apply and, because things in the outside world are bleak, I’ll start with the most enjoyable of them.

Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague is about the making of Jean-Luc Godard’s groundbreaking Breathless1 (Á bout de souffle) in 1959 and it’s much more fun than its inspiration. Choosing to ape Godard’s low budget, black and white, 1:.37:1 aesthetic, but avoiding mimicking any specific shots (except in reverse, featuring a mostly bemused crew) it’s as if a 25-year-old Godard is shooting his own behind-the-scenes DVD featurette.

Share

Guillaume Marbeck superbly plays Godard as a legend in his own lunchtime, smirking behind sunglasses, refusing to reveal a masterplan that doesn’t exist, trusting his not-quite fully formed instincts but determined to turn the world of cinema on its head regardless. The scene where he’s forced to make a cameo appearance in his own film, revealing his lack of confidence as an actor, is a gem.

I’ve always thought of Godard in this period as being like Dylan — growing his revolutionary reputation by never explaining himself, or deliberately inventing false trails. Linklater’s film centres Godard but acknowledges the huge community of Cahiers-aligned filmmakers who were also smacking hard up against the boundaries but it was Godard that actually broke them down.

The first act of Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent is so virtuosic that I fount hard to believe it could be maintained and it turns out I was right. But it settles down into something deeper, with more melancholy, slowly building to something profound.

The great Wagner Moura is Armando, a former academic trying to stay one step ahead of the Brazilian military dictatorship in the mid-1970s. Waiting on an urgent fake passport that will get him and his son Fernando out of the country, he works in the Recife office producing identity cards while the corrupt local cops are trying to dispose of a severed leg that might tie them to a political killing.

A loving recreation of a specific Brazilian time and place, The Secret Agent is also a meditation on how easily the connections between generations can be broken, how easily our stories can be forgotten no matter how hard we try and keep them alive.

The Secret Agent would make a great double feature with Marty Supreme if that programme wouldn’t end up taking almost a whole day of your life. They are both fine examples of directors exercising the full flourishing of their skillset and they both feature short scenes about the Holocaust, seemingly unrelated to the film as a whole but actually crucial to understanding their themes.

Until recently, Benny and Josh Safdie were a filmmaking team, most notably on Uncut Gems in 2019. This year they split to make competing high anxiety sports-related films featuring characters screaming at each other in confined spaces. Benny’s The Smashing Machine fell flat for this reviewer but Josh’s Marty Supreme impressed me much more, despite not agreeing with some of his choices.

Timothée Chalamet plays Marty Mauser, a talented table tennis player in 1950s New York, a time when being a talented table tennis player was not the path to wealth and fame that it clearly is now. But it was a popular pastime and Mauser makes some scratch hustling rubes like a skinny and bespectacled Paul Newman2 before heading to London to represent the USA at the British Open.

But while Mauser’s ambition is almost matched by his talent it far exceeds his luck as every plan he makes to get to the top actually sinks him even deeper but his indefatigable spirit is why that close-up of a Marty Supreme table tennis ball at the beginning of the film is so important — “Made in America” it says.

Refer a friend

Marty Supreme is a film about desperation. In that brief Holocaust story that we are told, we see how far someone might go to try and keep himself and his fellow concentration camp inmates alive but Marty isn’t fighting for his life, he just thinks he is.

What did I like? The shooting of the table tennis sequences are simply extraordinary. Veteran designer Jack Fisk recreates New York in the early 1950s with a marvellous eye for details of character and class. And Chalamet is terrific, even if his character is borderline intolerable.

Read more

It’s estimated that seven people have died in ICE custody in 2026 alone, with one of those (so far) already ruled a homicide by the coroner. This doesn’t count those, like Renee Good, whose deaths were caused by ICE or Border Patrol action when they weren’t in detention.

Share

Yesterday, it was reported that a man in ICE custody on 8 January is suing ICE for refusing him medical treatment despite receiving “life-threatening” injuries while being detained by them:

The lawsuit says that Castaneda Mondragon, his lawyers and hospital staff don’t currently know how he was injured because “his memory and current ability to communicate are severely impacted by his condition.” But Castaneda Mondragon at one point reported to hospital staff that he was dragged and mistreated by federal agents, the lawsuit says.

According to the lawsuit, agents told hospital staff that Castaneda Mondragon was “laying down in handcuffs when he attempted to flee, and then, for unknown reasons, purposefully ran headfirst into a brick wall.”

When one ICE agent was asked by medical providers for more information on Castaneda Mondragon’s injuries, the agent said that “he got his shit rocked” and did not elaborate further, the lawsuit says.

It’s all awful beyond measure but Rick Rowley’s new documentary, Critical Incident: Death at the Border, makes clear that this behaviour does not start or end with ICE (an agency that has only existed since 2002).

Border Patrol celebrated its centenary in 2024 and is an organisation that is proud of its historical role in American security but it is also a rogue agency that resists oversight and insists on defining its own philosophy, boundaries and methods. The odious Greg Bovino, seen at various recent incendiary incidents wearing either combat fatigues or Gestapo cosplay, works for Border Patrol not ICE.

The incident at the centre of Rowley’s film is the death of Anastasio Hernandez Rojas while being escorted towards his deportation at San Ysidro in San Diego1. Border Patrol agents insisted that he had been resisting deportation and self-harming (bashing his own head against the ground — sound familiar?) requiring that he be restrained. Eye-witnesses — and later, cellphone camera footage — confirmed that he had been tased and beaten by dozens of agents while lying limp on the ground.

An investigation failed to bring any criminal charges and a civil case brought by the victim’s widow was eventually — and tamely — settled several years later.

Only in 2019 was it revealed that Border Patrol had a secret unit, officially unfunded, whose job it was to “investigate” incidents that were likely to cause the agency embarrassment or material loss (in the form of civil judgements), and clean them up so there was no evidence for local law enforcement to build a case on. Add to that, the agency’s ability to close ranks and the ability hold these thugs to account is almost negligible.

Refer a friend

And because we are talking about undocumented migrants, until recently these have been victimless crimes.

A helpful context for what is going on in America now is to learn that Border Patrol proudly and publicly proclaims itself to be a “paramilitary” organisation — a sibling to the Army, Navy, Airforce and Marines, although without the recruitment standards, training or official oversight — and that their own rules of engagement and use of lethal force are much more offensive (in all senses of the word) than a police force.

They do not believe they are a “law enforcement” agency (despite the rhetoric from their current leadership). They think of themselves as warriors defending the United States and that rules do not apply to them.

Like the lawyers and journalists the film relies on, Critical Incident builds its shocking case carefully and methodically. Even though it was conceived in a very different climate than now, it makes clear that the rot set in decades ago. When Anastasio Hernandez Rojas was murdered, Barack Obama was president.

Another group of uniformed monsters who believed that the rules did not apply to them were the U.S. Army soldiers who murdered hundreds of Vietnamese villagers in March 1968 — the massacre at My Lai. That war crime was uncovered largely due to the investigative tenacity of journalist Seymour Hersh and there’s a new documentary about him by Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus called Cover-Up.

Hersh is in his late 80s now, but still writing and still trying to reveal what power would rather keep secret.

The film suffers from a lack of balance — not political balance, but narrative balance. It’s a two-hour feature film and its spends almost half of its time on My Lai — a crucial story but one that has been told plenty of times before. It then has to squeeze the next fifty years of Hersh’s career — a fascinatingly mixed bag it must be said — into the second hour meaning that too many questions go unanswered and too many interesting paths are closed off to us.

There’s also a manufactured conflict about the filmmakers’ potentially revealing some of Hersh’s sources, a diversion that reveals something about a testy old man’s character but is a distraction from the issues he has been banging away at for so long.

Leave a comment

Where to watch Critical Incident: Death at the Border

Read more

Firstly, some of your feedback.

In response to the Housekeeping post last week (the first one back after the holiday and he one where I talked about shifting from Substack and how difficult it is), reader TH said:

I remember that pre-internet world of fanzines on cheap newsprint, newspapers all owned by National Party funders, and lovely glossy magazines …

Read more

Last year’s restart of the 28 Days Later story, 28 Years Later could be read from some angles as an allegory for Brexit — a lonely Britain, forcibly isolated from the rest of the world because of its poor choices. If the moral of 28 Days Later was “Be careful what you wish for” then the new instalment, The Bone Temple, could be saying, “Be careful what you pray for.”

Nia DaCosta (The Marvels, Hedda) takes over the director’s chair from Danny Boyle for this episode but Alex Garland (Civil War, Warfare, The Beach) remains firmly in control of the screenplay.

The film starts immediately after the conclusion of the previous one — and like Avatar: Fire and Ash it offers zero concessions to audience members who didn’t see its predecessor1 — as brave young Spike (Alfie Williams) has been captured by the Jimmies gang and is undergoing an initiation of sorts. Led by Sir Jimmy Crystal (Jack O’Connell), the Jimmies are uninfected by the virus but totally infected by the trauma, modelling themselves on the most evil Englishman of the 20th century, (Sir) Jimmy Savile. There can be only seven Jimmies so Spike can only survive this encounter by ending one of the others, something that as an 11-year-old he is ill-equipped to do.

Share

A stroke of luck intervenes and Spike unwillingly joins the Jimmies on their rampage across Northumberland, eventually coming across the kind and decent Dr. Ian Kelson (Ralph Fiennes, who we met in the previous film) and his remarkable ossuary. With the help of prodigious amounts of opiates, Kelson has managed to befriend one of the infected — a giant ‘alpha’ who he names Samson — and is learning something about the virus that was previously undiscovered2.

To save himself — and his research — from Crystal, Kelson must take on a kind of role play to hoodwink the rest of the Jimmies but Crystal’s position is also at risk without this pact with “the Devil”.

There are sequences in The Bone Temple that are so gruesome that even hardened genre fans have reportedly had to leave the auditorium but I managed to shield my eyes from the worst of it. (I don’t want to speculate on what goes on in Garland’s head but I can say that the most disturbing film I’ve seen in the last ten years is his Men3.)

But The Bone Temple has green shoots of optimism about it, suggesting that while supposedly healthy humans can be capable of as much destruction as the infected, there might be enough of the good ones still left to see us through.

Chloé Zhao’s adaptation of Maggie Farrell’s bestselling novel Hamnet has divided critics and audiences. There’s a ‘love it’ or ‘hate it’ scenario out there so I I’m a bit out of step when I confess to not feeling very much at all.

My biggest problem isn’t with the heavy emotional pull of the grief inflicted on its characters — thanks to leads Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal, I found those depths to be honest and believable. My problems are more to do with not being in much agreement with the intellectual thesis of the film — that the death of William Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway’s son, Hamnet at a young age prompted the playwright to produce the greatest play in the English language (if not the whole world).

And it’s not even that I don’t agree with the thesis necessarily, it's that the film fails to make an adequate case for it, requiring a wilful misreading of Hamlet the play in order to make it a treatise on a specific loss while the play ends with a stage strewn with unmourned corpses4.

There’s something moving about using fiction as a tool to help a loved one move through the bardo to the next place, and to give comfort to those left behind but this is not the play that does that.

Younger readers might know Don McGlashan only as the hero who told Chris Bishop to “Shut up, you dickhead!” at the recent Aotearoa Music Awards, so they might be surprised to know that he’s been an influential music artist in New Zealand for nearly 50 years. His story is told — in pretty straightforward linear fashion — in Shirley Horrocks’ documentary, Anchor Me: The Don McGlashan Story.

Read more

At various social occasions over the summer break I was asked what I’d been watching recently and what I would recommend.

This is a better question to ask me than “What was the best film of the year?” or worse, “What’s your favourite film?” I find most of what I watch only stays in my noggin long enough to write one of these newsletters or talk about the…

Read more

On 30 December the world lost one of the character acting greats. (No, not NZ producer, screenwriter and TV executive Steve Barr who is in the background of the above still from Pete’s Dragon.)

Isiah Whitlock Jr. was almost certainly best known for his recurring role as the corrupt state senator Clay Davis on The Wire but he enriched everything he came i…

Read more

I know, I said I would be back from my unusually long summer break on the 12th of January.

I also said I would be spending some of that time working out how to get this newsletter off Substack and on to something more respectable.

Well, after spending the last few days trying and failing with various options that either don’t work or don’t meet my needs —…

Read more

Back in 2013, when the editor-in-chief and I were first dating, we saw Gravity twice at the Embassy Theatre in Wellington. Both times we gripped each other’s hands throughout, the tension and excitement were so great.

I’ve had the Blu-ray sitting around unwatched for more than a decade as I had been worried that the relatively smaller screen, the lack of…

Read more

In 1982, Michael Mann was a director on the rise. He’d been making stylish episodic television and one very well-regarded feature, Thief with James Caan.

Wanting to capitalise on his heat (so to speak) Mann took on an ambitious adaptation of a bestselling World War II horror novel called The Keep. The supernatural story of a bunch of Nazis stationed in a Romanian village during 1941, occupying a mysterious tower because it looked like the easiest building to defend, then unleashing a terrifying and powerful monster because of their greed, was going to require all of the special effects talent the British film industry could muster and for Mann to be at his most focused. It got neither of those things.

Share

The shoot went relatively well. An abandoned quarry in North Wales stood in for the exteriors of the village and the keep. Shepperton Studios could handle the rest.

Mann got a top cast, many of whom would go on to bigger and better things: Jürgen Prochnow (fresh off Das Boot) played a ‘good German’, Gabriel Byrne played a bad one, Scott Glenn would make The Right Stuff in the same year and Ian McKellen was launching a screen career to parallel his stage one.

Then things started to go wrong. Two weeks after principal photography finished, special effects maestro Wally Veevors passed away leaving 260 shots still to complete and no notes on how he intended to do it. (Mann had to do the work himself.)

Give a gift subscription

Mann’s director’s cut was 210 minutes long. (For reference Avatar: Fire and Ash is 197 minutes.) Paramount baulked at that, understandably, and demanded he get it under two hours. Test screenings of the two-hour version were disastrous so the genius suits demanded further cuts and offered no money for reshoots to cover the holes in the story.

They also decided to cut their losses in the sound department meaning that a final mix couldn’t be completed. The Keep is the worst sounding major studio film of the 80s.

For a long time there were rumours that Mann had used his considerable influence to supress home video releases of the film — it does his reputation no favours — but the truth is that hardly anyone thought there was a quid in it until recently.

The extraordinary collector’s package of the film (from Imprint) is not only a testament to what might have been, it is the only way I think to watch the film and have it be remotely comprehensible. If you were to stumble across The Keep online (usually as a rental but also occasionally on a subscription streamer) and thought to yourself, “Woohoo a Michael Mann film I haven’t seen before” you’ll be totally baffled.

But the extras in the box — especially Buck and Piter’s exhaustive documentary, A World War II Fairy Tale — show us what Mann was aiming for and also what Paramount thought they were selling before the wheels fell off the project. Facsimiles of Mann’s original script and Paramount’s press kit, the five-part graphic novel adaptation of the book, the CD of the Tangerine Dream soundtrack and a (literally) heavyweight metal cross embedded in the box, make it the most stunning collector’s edition of a terrible film in the history of home entertainment.

A testament to director overreach and studio interference, The Keep is a bizarre and tragic chapter in motion picture history.

Where to watch The Keep

Read more

Before I start on Avatar: Fire and Ash, I want to acknowledge a sad milestone.

Today, my RNZ film reviewing colleague Simon Morris records his final ever episode of At the Movies. He took over the slot when Jonathan Dennis passed away in 2002 and he’s produced and presented over 1000 shows since then. (He was meticulously keeping count until a change to …

Read more

So this weekend was taken up by the Australasian premiere of the third Avatar film (Avatar: Fire & Ash) and the attendant media junket.

I was representing RNZ at the press event but declined an invitation to the red carpet screening at the Embassy. I’d seen the film already (we had a preview at the Queensgate IMAX on Thursday night) and I’m not super-com…

Read more

Editor’s Note

I’m delighted to be able to hand today’s recommendation to current subscriber (and temporary flatmate) Doug Dillaman, whose writing about culture you can find at Making Things Better and Letterboxd.

Doug made Gut Instinct which we recommended here in August.

We both watched Reflection in a Dead Diamond the other night and, while I was in the “utterly baffled” camp, Doug made some typically canny observations so I asked him to write them up for us here:

Share

Do you like James Bond title sequences? Would you like an entire film shot like one, with all the cinematic imagination and vertiginous leaps of logic implicit in that description? Reflection in a Dead Diamond offers that - and so much more.

This is the fourth feature-length transmission from the minds of Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani. Their first two films mined the recesses of Italian horror, instantly demonstrating a commitment to restlessly inventive visuals whilst placing narrative and character firmly in the background, possibly in a locked basement in a neighbouring villa. I saw their debut Amer at NZIFF, in 2010 and an angry genre fan declared to me afterwards, “That doesn’t belong in a film festival! That belongs in a gallery!” And I half-agree: every last shot in any Cattet/Forzani, lensed on grainy beautiful super-16mm film, is given as much love as a painter gives a painting.

Refer a friend

Ignoring the haters, NZIFF brought the couple here in 2017 for Let The Corpses Tan, in which they reinvigorated the western and delivered their punchiest narrative and most accessible film yet. (I was lucky enough to host 2 Q&As with them, where they revealed themselves to be a normal happy couple who, like virtually no other happy couple in the world, had their first date at a Gaspar Noé film.) Their announcement that their next film would enter the world of Eurospy thrillers (like Danger: Diabolik, recently screened at Wellington’s Roxy cinema) seemed to promise a further step towards the mainstream.

Nah.

Reflection in a Dead Diamond is told from the point of view of an aged man (84-year old genre icon Fabio Testi) living at a seaside resort, who catches sight of a diamond nipple ring on a bare-chested sunbather. (Far from the last nudity you’ll see.) This promptly produces a kaleidoscopic reverie of what may or may not be his previous adventures as a secret agent. Over the course of the film, these memories ripple into his present life. Is his previous nemesis back on his trail? Is dementia catching up to him? Can he pay his bar tab? Is all of this secondary in a film that is designed to send us dizzily spinning through the world’s most alluring hall of mirrors?

Give a gift subscription

Possibly my favourite film of the year, Reflection in a Dead Diamond cannily critiques genre tropes while taking superlative style to new heights. It left me with a huge smile on my face about 95% of the time. (A fair bit of the remaining 5% was devoted to flinching at some quite impactful moments of violence, the only thing that seems to have earned this film a berth on horror-centric streamer Shudder1. But any Eurospy film - especially one that can be compared to Last Year at Marienbad and Adaptation, further confused by a protagonist in cognitive decline - might intimidate those who aren’t steeped in European genre cinema and don’t know fumetti2 from fusilli.

I say: give it a try. Turn it off after ten minutes if you hate it - it’s just going to keep doing what it’s doing, more or less - but otherwise, enjoy the ride. And if you feel bewildered, just imagine you’re in an art gallery.

Where to watch Reflection in a Dead Diamond

Read more

I don’t often recycle recommendations from the Substack which is strange because there are well over 500 newsletters to choose from.

Two years ago today I’d just seen Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron for the second time. What a marvel!

Here’s what I wrote back in December 2…

Read more

It was only after I had chosen to recommend this that I realised I was thinking of a completely different film1.

Luckily, I had reviewed The Last Full Measure for RNZ At the Movies back in 2020 and liked it so I’m just going to go ahead and pretend that this was the plan all along.

Read more

Films about rules abound this week, or at least films that rely heavily on rules, sometimes to their cost.

The most arbitrary set of rules can be found in David Freyne’s Eternity which sets up a convoluted and illogical collection purely to try and raise the stakes of a classic screwball love triangle to breaking point.

First rule: everyone who dies goes to a holding pen that looks like a cross between a railway station waiting room, hotel lobby and convention centre in trade show mode. This place is called The Hub and everyone gets to spend seven days there adjusting to their new reality and deciding where of the many resorts/lifestyle choices we get to spend forever.

Share

Second rule: Seven days appears to be a minimum. If you can’t decide after a week, you can choose to hang around The Hub but you have to make yourself useful.

Third rule: Everyone gets to choose an eternity experience. Even Hitler can lie one a beach forever if he wants to. This rule is made explicit early on solely to pre-empt any questions about whether this is heaven or not. No judgement, no awkward questions, let’s just quickly move on.

Fourth rule: If you change your mind and leave the experience you have chosen, you will be banished to a void, to nothingness. This seems harsh but, again, the rule is there to artificially increase the stakes for the characters, not to provide any philosophical consistency.

Old man Larry (Barry Primus) chokes on a pretzel at the gender reveal party for his new grandchild. Knowing that his cancer-stricken wife of 65 years, Joan (Betty Buckley), is not long for our world he elects to stay at The Hub until she can join him and they can decide where to go together.

Fifth rule: You will spend eternity in the body you were happiest in. This allows for our central couple to be played by Miles Teller and Elizabeth Olsen.

What Larry doesn’t realise is that Joan’s first husband Luke (Callum Turner) — who was killed in the Korean War — has been waiting 67 years for Joan to arrive and wants to pick up where they left off. The two men have entirely different visions for where they want which Joan away to and — I now realise that this might be a more conscious attempt to reflect their generational attitudes — neither seems terribly bothered about what Joan herself might want.

At no point does anyone consider that someone might want to spend the afterlife alone or with someone other than a spouse. Larry asks how the kids are doing but no one has any interest in, maybe, waiting for them to turn up so the family can be together again.

Eternity is a classic example of a tortuous scenario departing swiftly from logic and never returning, just so two egotistical men can bicker over a woman. There’s decent chemistry among the characters (Olsen is perfect) and the look and feel of the thing works well, but it’s a philosophical question that no one has been crying out to have answered.

The rules of Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 might be more apparent to fans of the video game (or people who paid more attention to the first film) but they felt just as ‘make it up was you go along’ as in Eternity.

Refer a friend

The haunted animatronics of the first film or missing presumed broken and the pizza parlour where they wreaked their havoc is even more abandoned. Luckily, we discover that it was just a franchise of the original Freddy Fazbear’s where there are more of these spooky machines, if only the film could find a way to get there.

Read more