Special 300th edition! Monday new releases: 23 September 2024

Never Let Go and Iris and the Men are in cinemas and The Substance gets a non-review

This is the 300th newsletter since we restarted Funerals & Snakes over here at Substack and to celebrate we are offering a special 50% discount on a one-year paid subscription. That’s only NZ$30 for a full year of recommendations and reviews direct to your inbox. What a bargain! And what a way to support independent screen criticism.

Click here to take advantage of that incredible, limited time, discount. It’s only available until the end of September.

As a gift to non-paying subscribers, I’ve made this edition free to all. The full version of the Monday new releases column is usually only available to paid subscribers.

Let’s start this column with a confession.

Body horror is my least favourite cinematic genre. I am squeamish, I admit it.

So, I woke up yesterday already trepidatious about my impending afternoon screening of Coralie Fargeat’s notorious new movie, The Substance, in which Demi Moore reacts to being fired from her TV exercise show by taking a mysterious potion that results in Margaret Qualley emerging from her back to become a younger, hotter, version of herself.

At least, that’s my understanding of the plot.

Because, dear reader, for some deep psychological reason, I chose not to check the time of my ticket and arrived at Event Cinemas an hour after the film started.

I need to point out that this absolutely not common. Funerals & Snakes is usually a pretty well-oiled machine. But I was clearly resisting this one.

The jury is out on whether I go tomorrow and include The Substance in next week’s new releases newsletter or whether I wait for the home video release and review it then. I’m inclined towards the latter, if only because I feel like I’ll give it a better shot when all of the noise and heat has gone out of it – it will be fairer to watch it without all the hype.

One of the reasons I was feeling so unenthusiastic about The Substance was that all my trips to the pictures recently seem to have been for horror films. On Saturday it was for Never Let Go, in which a mother and her two sons hide out in a remote cabin, hiding from the evil that has laid waste to the rest of civilisation.

The family home is the last good thing in the world so they all have to remain tied to its foundations by very long ropes whenever they go outside to forage for food, lest that evil infect them and gets invited in.

As the film goes on we start to realise that Momma (Halle Berry, also a producer) may not be the most reliable of guides to the horror of the bayou and her twin tween boys (Anthony B. Jenkins and Percy Daggs IV) start to wonder whether outside is all that dangerous after all.

Lionsgate have just signed a deal with an AI company to let them steal mine their catalogue to create one of those large language models to generate “new” ideas. At first Never Let Go feels like it’s an early result of those … we can’t call them efforts because AI is the opposite of effort, developments might be the word … as the central conceit feels so thin and derivative. Like A Quiet Place, the enemy is unspeakably horrible and the rules for staying safe so simple to understand but so hard to stick to.

But then the film – scripted by KC Coughlin and Ryan Grassby with additional “literary contributions” from director Alexandre Aja – heads off in an interesting psychological direction and leans heavily on its biblical references: serpents, Cain and Abel, suffering for our sins, that sort of thing.

Well acted by a small cast – literally in the case of the kids – Never Let Go ended up being quite intriguing with some decent story surprises in the final act.

Watching Iris and the Men – an utterly amiable romantic comedy – in the wake of the horrific Pelicot rape case in France made some of it play a lot darker than anyone would have intended.

Laure Calamy (from Two Tickets to Greece and Call My Agent!) is a successful Parisian dentist, in a happy marriage with two lovely children. Her husband (Vincent Elbaz) is a workaholic and for the last few years the heat, shall we say, has gone out of their relationship.

Complaining about this to one of the other parents at school pickup, she gets the surprising advice to just get on one of those dating apps. Not any dating app, one that specialises in helping people cheat.

This she does and, by golly, she is a smash hit. And this is where things took a turn, for me. There are a couple of fantasy sequences where Iris sees the messages appearing rapidement on her phone and imagines that they are being sent by all the male occupants of the metro carriage. They make all sorts of lascivious and suggestive comments and it doesn’t take much to imagine them all responding to a much less innocent online invitation.

A musical number in which Iris is wooed by dozens of men while lip-synching to the French version of “It’s Raining Men” plays equally icky as you are reminded that this whole scenario has the potential to be very unsafe.

But that’s not the message of the film, and it’s not the film’s fault that it has arrived when it has. It’s a generally sex-positive story of female affirmation and Calamy is often very funny as she realises that, to be frank, she’s still got it.

And the ending is a happy and appropriate – and sexy – one.

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Further reading

Just posted at NZ On Screen is my profile of the great New Zealand production designer Kai Hawkins. He was responsible for some of the most iconic designs in Kiwi cinema including the Battletruck (which he also drove) in 1982. Beyond Reasonable Doubt, Vigil and The Footstep Man are just a few of his many credits in a fascinating 60-year career.