Film review

  • Relic

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Natalie Erika James (2020)

    Most of the Australian film Relic takes place in an old dark house.  The camera sneaks curiously around it.  Two of the three main characters, Kay (Emily Mortimer) and her daughter Sam (Bella Heathcote), explore more nervously.  The house is old in the sense of belonging to the same family for several generations; it’s now the home of the third principal, Kay’s mother, Edna (Robyn Nevin), an elderly widow.  The place is dark in a very literal sense.  In the prologue to Natalie Erika James’s debut feature, the murk is punctuated by candle flames and the fairy lights on a Christmas tree.  But lamps and overhead lighting are in short supply – or, at least, infrequent use – throughout the film.  No wonder it’s hard for Kay and Sam to find their way about.  At one point, a power cut prompts an alarmed exclamation from Kay.  In fact, the loss of electricity makes little difference.

    The house has a remote setting, though there’s one other house nearby, and a shabby, almost abandoned look – a slack tennis net slumps in the grounds outside.  Edna lives alone; the three women get together in her home in the aftermath of her temporary absence from it.  Divorcee Kay, who lives and works in Melbourne, receives a phone call from a police officer (Steve Rodgers) that Edna’s neighbour has reported not seeing her for a few days.  When Kay and Sam drive over to the house they find it empty.  Edna’s disappearance is especially worrying because she’s recently shown increasing signs of forgetfulness.  (There are post-its around the house with reminders to turn things on and off, and so on.)   A police search in nearby woods is fruitless but Kay gets up one morning to see her mother in the kitchen making coffee.  Edna behaves as if nothing has happened.  A doctor (Catherine Glavicic) examines her and can find nothing seriously amiss.  Edna is unwilling or unable, however, to explain where she’s been, or the large bruise on her chest.

    Relic is the latest well-received horror movie to lay spooky atmosphere on thick from the start – the tenebrous visuals (the DP is Charlie Sarroff) accompanied by seething ominous music (by Brian Reitzell).  It emerges from conversation about a book of sketches of how the property once looked that there was another dwelling on the site.  Legend has it that the male ancestor who lived there got up to very dodgy things (not further described).  After he died, his place was demolished but coloured glass from one of its windows was preserved and installed in what’s now Edna’s house.  The camera is very taken with this piece of glass.  Is it somehow linked to the things that go bump in the walls, which also are scarred by unexplained dark stains?

    If the coloured glass is one candidate for the titular relic, Edna is certainly another.  The oppressively eerie atmospherics are at first so dominant that you suspect Natalie Erika James (who also shares the screenplay credit, with Christian White) may be exploiting the old woman’s dementia for purposes of audience disorientation – as one of her means to the end of supernatural explanation.  What makes Relic distinctive, a main reason why it’s attracting critical praise, is that almost the reverse turns out to be the case.  James uses the locale and tropes of horror cinema to dramatise the horror of dementia, and of seeing a loved one submerged in it.  Hints of malign mystery like the dubious ancestor and the legacy of his pane of glass are red herrings.  The sinister emblems of decay in the house are expressions of Edna’s deterioration.

    An early hint of this comes when Kay, unbeknown to Edna, visits a Melbourne retirement home with a view to putting her mother in it.  Except for the upbeat spiel of the staff member showing Kay round, the place is silent as the grave.  Its residents, notably an old man (John Browning) whose lost eyes gaze up at Kay, are ghostlike.  (This sequence would stand out even more sharply if James didn’t make everywhere in the film look desolate.)  As the story proceeds, Edna’s amnesiac aggression, verbal and physical, moves increasingly centre stage.  Her post-it messages take an allusive turn:  an anguished scrawl of ‘Keep it out!’ refers to the disease invading her; there’s a final consolatory reminder that ‘I am loved’.  As her mind disintegrates, Edna starts to dismantle her body, scratching her chest bruise until it putrefies, picking at her face with a knife blade.  In Relic’s closing scene, Kay helps her mother remove her withered hair and rotting flesh until Edna is reduced to a corpse that brings to mind Sylvia Plath’s phrase ‘black as burnt turkey’ (in ‘Two Views of a Cadaver Room’).  Kay lies down beside Edna and touches her tenderly.  As Sam joins them on the ground, she notices a tiny black bruise – a telltale doom mark – on the nape of Kay’s neck.

    Enthusiastic reviews have majored on Natalie Erika James’s fusion of grisliness and compassion.  For Stephanie Zacharek, ‘This is a horror movie with a soul’.  Mark Kermode sees ‘plenty to scare but much more to make you care’.  Nicole Davis thinks Relic unprecedented in film drama in that it ‘gets to the heart of what it means to watch a loved one lose their mind to dementia’.  James has relevant personal experience of the disease, through her grandmother, but this kind of connection isn’t enough to absolve a film-maker of questionable taste or judgment (as Craig Roberts recently proved in Eternal Beauty (2019), supposedly an homage to his schizophrenic aunt).

    Nicole Davis’s Guardian review is headlined ‘Facing the fear:  cinema finally confronts the reality of dementia’.  That may be a fair description of Dick Johnson Is Dead, Kirsten Johnson’s documentary about her father’s degenerative illness, which Davis’s piece also covers[1].  It’s not true of Relic.  The realities of Alzheimer’s and the like include incontinence.  In James’s film, Kay is aghast to see her mother discharging black urine on the floor.  Isn’t uncontrolled peeing of the lighter-coloured variety distressing enough?  To depict the dissolution of human personality by means of a human body that literally falls to pieces seems to me the opposite of ‘confronting the reality of dementia’:  deploying the imagery of an essentially non-realistic film genre is, in effect, a distancing mechanism.  Initially monotonous, Relic is eventually offensive in its macabre exaggerations of dementia’s awfulness.

    James’s expressionism finally obliterates the slivers of dramatic realism evident in the early stages of the film.  For a while, the dynamic of the three women is striking.  Practically minded Kay has kept Edna at arm’s length until now, and has a fractious relationship with Sam.  There’s a natural emotional rapport between grandmother and granddaughter absent from the relationship that either has with Kay, who is sadly excluded.  As Edna’s condition worsens, these distinctions simply evaporate.   As the house becomes a fully-fledged metaphor of the rot and chaos of Edna’s mind, Kay and Sam, too, find themselves trapped there.  When Sam manages to shut herself in somewhere within the maze of rooms, she uses the torch on her mobile to find her way around but doesn’t think to try calling Kay elsewhere in the house to explain what’s happened.

    Edna’s neighbour Alex (Jeremy Stanford), who reported her missing, has a young adult son, Jamie (Chris Bunton).  Jamie has Down Syndrome and Alex hasn’t let him visit Edna’s house since a game of hide and seek with her went badly wrong.  She forgot it was going on and locked Jamie in the cupboard where he was hiding, and remained for several hours. Whether alive or (in the case of Edna’s suspicious forebear) dead, male characters in Relic count for little:  the main purpose of Sam’s conversations with Jamie and Alex is to deliver the revelation about the hide and seek incident.  Even so, these brief exchanges, which take place just outside the house, are a breath of air in more ways than one.  The low-key natural playing of them suggests, like nothing else in the film, the operation of a normal world to contrast with the engulfing devastation next door.  The main actresses’ opportunities increase with age, which is tough on the talented Bella Heathcote, but all three are strong.  Among Relic‘s sundry visual effects, Andrew Goldsmith’s patterns of images for the opening and, especially, the closing titles are impressively imaginative.

    5 November 2020

    [1] Afternote:  Having now seen Dick Johnson Is Dead, I can confirm this is much closer to a fair description of Kirsten Johnson’s film.

  • I’m Thinking of Ending Things

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Charlie Kaufman (2020)

    This is the first time since 2002 that Charlie Kaufman has drawn on someone else’s work for a script.  Like his adaptation for Adaptation, however, I’m Thinking of Ending Things, based on the 2016 novel of the same name by the Canadian writer Iain Reid, seems as quintessentially a Kaufman piece as any of his original screenplays.  It’s the latest iteration of his by now familiar themes.  The title has a double meaning.  More obviously, it refers to what’s in the mind of a young woman as she and Jake, her boyfriend of several weeks, set out on a long drive to the remote farmhouse home of his parents, whom she’s to meet for the first time even though she’s already considering breaking up with their son.  A plot synopsis on Wikipedia suggests that the other, deathly meaning of the title of Reid’s novel (which I’ve not read) emerges in the book’s closing stages.  In the film, Kaufman’s depressive tendencies are soon giving the phrase ‘I’m thinking of ending things’ an existential heft.  During their long journey on the road, through increasingly heavy snowfall, the two people in the car engage in discussion of subjects cultural and philosophical, including Wordsworth’s ‘Ode:  Intimations of Immortality…’  But as in Synecdoche, New York (2008), it’s mortality with which Charlie Kaufman is more concerned.

    There’s very little that’s stable in I’m Thinking of Ending Things.  The main female character’s name changes from Lucy to Louisa to Lucia to Ames.  (She’s played by Jessie Buckley so I’ll call her Jessie for simplicity.). Her clothes sometimes change, too, even though the action appears to be happening continuously, in close to real time.  Whenever Jessie or Jake (Jesse Plemons) mentions her college studies, she’s doing a different subject.  Whenever the talk turns to their first meeting, there’s a fresh explanation of how and where it happened.  Jake’s parents (Toni Collette and David Thewlis) undergo dramatic changes in age and state of health during the younger couple’s farmhouse visit, switching from aggressively sociable fifty-somethings to senile dementia and back again.  In the last part of the film – after the return car trip has got no further than Jake’s old high school, which he, then Jessie, enters – the characters’ metamorphoses are more fantastic and alarming.  The only thing that stays pretty well the same across the 134 minutes of I’m Thinking of Ending Things is an atmosphere of impending doom and disintegration, expressed through Łukasz Żal’s ingenious lighting as well as Kaufman’s abundant wordage.

    Early on, Jake shows an occasional, disconcerting ability to read Jessie’s thoughts.  Wordsworth enters the conversation when Jake ‘hears’ her say to herself, ‘The child is father of the man’.  Jessie’s a poet, too.  En route to his parents’, Jake persuades her to recite one of her latest compositions, called ‘Bonedog’.  In what used to be Jake’s room at the farmhouse, Jessie finds a book containing the poem, which is actually taken from a collection, Rotten Perfect Mouth, by the Toronto writer Eva HD.  Jessie also paints landscapes:  she’s encouraged to show images of her work, on her phone, to Jake’s parents.  She later finds larger images of ‘her’ paintings elsewhere in the house.  Not knowing of Eva HD, I didn’t recognise ‘Bonedog’ (and, for all I know, Jessie’s paintings may be those of a famous artist).  I did recognise the words spoken by Jessie as she and Jake start their journey back, and discuss John Cassavetes’s A Woman Under the Influence:  she’s quoting Pauline Kael’s review of the film verbatim.  (In Jake’s room, a copy of Kael’s For Keeps is fatly conspicuous on the bookshelves – not that the Woman Under the Influence piece was included in that anthology.)

    Kaufman repeatedly punctuates the couple’s drive out to the wilds with short sequences inside what’s later confirmed as Jake’s alma mater.  In the car, he tells Jessie of his enthusiasm for musical theatre and reels off the names of numerous shows.  He makes special reference to Oklahoma!, which he says his high school puts on every few years.   We see the cast rehearsing ‘Many a New Day’ on stage, watched by an elderly janitor (Guy Boyd) who’s also shown at work around the school.  In spite of the terrible weather, Jake insists, on arrival at the farm, on giving Jessie a tour of the outbuildings.  This supplies an opportunity for a lament on the pointlessness of ovine existence, for a shot of pigs that have frozen to death, and for Jake to tell Jessie about another pig whose corpse was eaten away by maggots.  Oklahoma!, the janitor and the dead pig story all return to dominate the final act of I’m Thinking of Ending Things.

    Jessie and Jake’s conversation on the way back to the city is more and more fractious, thanks to her growing anxiety that they’ll be snowbound and his disruptive whims of iron.  They also disagree as to whether the lyrics of ‘Baby, It’s Cold Outside’ make it an ode to rape.  Despite blizzard conditions and a huge helping of his mother’s chocolate dessert inside him, Jake is determined to stop for more sugar at a ‘Tulsey Town’ ice cream parlour.  This is one of the film’s most striking sequences.  Images of the parlour from outside, with a trio of girl employees seen through its windows, give the place the lonesome look and allure of an Edward Hopper picture.  Two of the three girls are familiar from the high-school Oklahoma! rehearsals, where they played Laurey (Hadley Robinson) and Aunt Eller (Gus Birney).  In the ice cream parlour, they’re unhelpful, giggling scornfully at their gauchely obliging co-worker (Abby Quinn).   The sympathetic exchange between Jessie and this last girl is a rare engaging moment, and not just because, while it lasts, the sinister pall is briefly lifted.  The encounter starts to hint, too, at the mystery of a human being’s ability to imagine the unknown life of another human being, fleetingly met.

    Charlie Kaufman is as keen as ever to confirm how well read he is, combining with this an oddly naïve conviction that his insights must be original.  (Synecdoche, New York sometimes gave the impression that he thought he’d discovered paralysing fear of time and death.)  In an interview with Jonathan Romney for Sight & Sound (October 2020), Kaufman says of Oklahoma!:

    ‘The character of Judd [sic], who also appears in my movie, is a really damaged, dark, scary, tragic person.  You think of Oklahoma! and people singing and dancing dressed as cowboys, but there’s a lot of other stuff going on there.’

    Perhaps Kaufman had never seen Fred Zinnemann’s film version of Oklahoma!  Many people who have will already have been struck by the incongruous but unignorable weight in the story of malign, disturbed Jud Fry (memorably played by Rod Steiger).  Needless to say, ‘Many a New Day’’s perky resilience isn’t typical of the selection of Oklahoma! elements in I’m Thinking of Ending Things.  (You wouldn’t expect Kaufman to reiterate Aunt Eller’s injunction that ‘You gotta be hearty’.)  In the high-school climax, once Jessie finds Jake, they become spectators of a reworking of the Oklahoma! dream ballet.  Figures dressed exactly like themselves play Laurey (Unity Phelan) and Curly (Ryan Laughtner Steele).  The knife-wielding Jud is now a version of the school janitor (Frederick E Wodin), who kills the Jake figure.

    This is the last seen of Jake and Jessie until the closing sequence, in which they’re both old people in deliberately unconvincing ageing make-up.  On the stage of the school auditorium, Jake receives a Nobel Prize and delivers the acceptance speech that John Nash gives at the end of A Beautiful Mind.  The significance of this isn’t clear, beyond the fact that Charlie Kaufman probably doesn’t think much of Ron Howard’s film.  Jake then sings a song, ‘Lonesome Room’, a solo for Jud in the stage show of Oklahoma! (omitted from the Zinnemann film).  In the audience, Jessie leads the standing ovation.  In the meantime, the elderly janitor has had the film nearly to himself.  At the end of his shift, he sits in his car outside the school and begins to hallucinate (Jake’s parents, a cartoon Tulsey Town jingle).  He undresses and goes back into the school, led by another hallucination – a speaking pig.  The animal’s and the overweight janitor’s naked flesh looks consubstantial.  The difference between them, a small mercy, is that only the animated pig’s body is maggot-infested.

    In Synecdoche, New York, the protagonist, Caden Cotard, attempts to recreate as a piece of theatre the entirety of his life, a project ever-expanding and increasingly uncontrollable.  As you watched the film, you sometimes wondered if Charlie Kaufman was painting himself into a similar corner but Synecdoche, for all its digressions, was held together by Caden’s persisting hang-ups about illness and annihilation.  The differently ambitious Anomalisa (2015) was coherent, too – ditto the plot of Iain Reid’s I’m Thinking of Ending Things, according to the Wikipedia synopsis.  The same can’t be said for this film of the book, which Kaufman struggles to shape and resolve.  (Most of his divergences from Reid’s plot seem to be in the closing stages.)  Besides, the abandon-all-hope-of-human-happiness theme doesn’t work as effectively here.  Since it doesn’t obviously express the state of mind of either leading character it’s more obviously imposed by Kaufman.  The connection between the futurelessness of Jake and Jessie’s relationship and the futility of existence generally feels forced.  Although there’s strong acting all round, the main pleasure comes less from any of the performances than from seeing Jesse Plemons get an overdue leading role.

    It’s clear from what he says in the Sight & Sound interview that Kaufman makes films to explore ideas that interest him more than engaging with his audience does.  When (‘laughing’) he tells Jonathan Romney, ‘That’s always my goal, to put people off’, he can only be half-joking.  Charlie Kaufman is well aware not only of what he’s doing but also of the viewer reactions it’s liable to trigger.  So you disparage a film of his feeling he probably knew that’s what you were going to say.  My increasing problem with his work is that I think I know what Kaufman’s going to say, too – the same things he said last time.

    3 November 2020

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