The latest film releases include Night Swim, Occupied City, All of Us Strangers, and Good Grief. Weighing in are Witney Seibold, contributor to SlashFilm and co-host of the podcast Critically Acclaimed, and Amy Nicholson, host of the podcast Unspooled and film reviewer for the New York Times.
Night Swim
From the producers of M3GAN, this horror movie follows a family who just moved into a new house where an evil spirit haunts the backyard swimming pool.
Seibold: “There's a swimming pool in the back. It has a link to an underground aquifer that's loaded with ghosts of some kind. … The pool demands a sacrifice. There's a lot of really ominous shots of creepy things floating through the water toward people as they swim. It's just as stupid as it sounds. Complete brazen idiocy. There are a few lines of dialogue that are so ridiculous, that the theater just erupted in laughter like, ‘Oh, we got a pool. There's something in the water.’ These things that are supposed to be really ominous … come across as completely comedic.”
Nicholson: “I think this might be the most boring idea for a horror film that I have ever seen. It's really just scene after scene after scene of somebody going in the water by themselves, going under, thinking they see somebody on the edge of the pool, and then they're never there when they get up. The lack of thrills are astonishing here. The movie, I think, almost wants to acknowledge that it is very dumb. I wish it was trash that knew it was trashy.”
Occupied City
This documentary examines the Nazi occupation of Amsterdam during World War II, directed by Steve McQueen and based on his wife Bianca Stigter’s book titled Atlas of an Occupied City.
Nicholson: “It really focuses on the people who aren't famous, the people more on the side of being forgotten. And the way that they do it is [through] no archival photos, no photos of the people themselves, no images of what the house or Amsterdam used to look like. It's all present day. So you're hearing these stories layered over images of people running errands, and punks with tattoos listening to music, and kids playing in the snow.
Where there is any sense of an overlapping story at all, in this staggering thing, is that they filmed this during COVID. So you get to see the arc of a different type of occupation takeover — learning that they're being quarantined, seeing anti-mask rallies, as you're hearing about pro-Nazi rallies. It's interesting.”
Seibold: “The most chilling shots come from the police who are watching these protests, how there are a lot of armored-up police officers walking around the streets. There's a few shots of the cameras that are watching people while they're doing these protests. And clearly, there's a little bit of overlap between those kinds of images and the fascism that the city was experiencing in the 1940s.
More than anything, though, I think [Steve McQueen] is really trying to give us a tour. Remind us that the history really did seep into the walls of everything, and how we tend to smash everything to the ground and change the landscape, partly as a means of forgetting. What he's trying to do is make us remember. He’s trying to show us that these cities do have a living history.”
All of Us Strangers
Andrew Scott plays a lonely, grieving London screenwriter named Adam who begins a relationship with his neighbor Harry (Paul Mescal). In addition to the romance, the film also centers on conversations that Adam imagines having with his dead parents (Claire Foy and Jamie Bell).
Seibold: “It's a little unclear as to what is literally happening in this movie. The atmosphere is very ethereal. The Andrew Scott character and the Paul Mescal character live in this gigantic apartment building, and they keep on mentioning how they might be the only two occupants in this gigantic apartment building. It feels weirdly post-apocalyptic. So you'd be forgiven for thinking this is a science fiction picture.
But the Andrew Scott character gets on the train. He goes to his old childhood home and his parents are just there, they're younger, the way they looked when he was 12 years old, right before they died. And he starts having conversations with them. And they understand that this is the adult version of their son, that they're catching up with him from the future. … It's very abstract.
… There's a really heartbreaking scene where he has to come out to his mom because he never got to when he was 12. And it's incredibly painful because she's still living in the 1980s and responding the way a person living in the 1980s might. It really starts to tear open a lot of really horrible wounds about how this grief and this trauma is never really dealt with, in a way that feels satisfactory to us, even as we bring these things into our adult relationships. Healing as possible, but life is a constant state of healing.”
Nicholson: “Part of what I found really interesting about it is you're looking at these different generation gaps in how people feel about their son coming out as gay. … It's a chilly film, but you really do grow to care about all four characters. There's a romance that definitely tugs at your heart, like you want so much here for these characters because they're drowning in this isolation.”
Good Grief
Dan Levy (Schitt’s Creek) directs and stars in this drama about a man who’s mourning the sudden death of his husband.
Nicholson: “[Dan Levy’s] really trying to prove that he can do sad too, that his career can have more range. But the problem with this movie — that's mostly about the year of his life after his husband dies — is that it's aspiring to be sensitive and perceptive and emotionally-moving and to really delve into loss. And I just couldn't buy much of it. There's lots of monologues, but they felt to me like inspirational Instagram captions about becoming a better person. … It's hard to wrestle with how we associate Dan Levy with this character. He's cornered the market on playing [a] shallow, disingenuous elder millennial, and this just doesn't feel like the right role just to show this range. It doesn't really fit him, and he just seems a bit flatlined and mopey.”
Seibold: “Dan Levy as a director, though, does present at least a few strengths. There are a few scenes where he's having conversations, not the monologue scenes with his best friends, who are played by Ruth Negga and Himesh Patel. And they communicate very naturally. They have a very warm, believable relationship. Those kinds of hangout scenes bring out a lot of humanity in the characters and in the movie as well. And I wish there was more of that, more of incidental conversation rather than Dan Levy trying to write his own therapy session.”