Review: The Odyssey and Mr. Nelson, Did You Kill People?

Posted on September 11, 2026 by philipbrasor

At this point, it seems impossible to talk about Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey without addressing his faithfulness—or lack of it—to the original text, which is more than 3,000 years old. It’s an issue I can’t rightly address since I don’t remember the poem that well, though I did read it in junior high school, or, at least, some version of it. But it’s obvious that Nolan’s own version is a revision if only because it feels very much like a Hollywood movie, a definite throwback to the kind of big budget storytelling attached to Biblical epics in the 50s and early 60s, except that the sensibility is more enlightened (or “woke,” depending on how you feel about such things) and the technical aspects much more accomplished, even cockily assured. But it’s with regard to the former aspect that I found the movie most intriguing. However dodgy my memory of reading The Odyssey as an adolescent is, I do remember it as being hung up on violent purpose. It is, after all, a tale told in the wake of a horrible war that the hero not only supported but led. In Nolan’s retelling, the hero has serious misgivings.

Being a Hollywood production, the love story takes precedent. After defeating the Trojans through subterfuge and murderous abandon, Odysseus (Matt Damon) spends the entire movie trying to get back to his wife, Penelope (Anne Hathaway), whom he hasn’t seen since he left for the campaign many years ago. In the meantime, Penelope has carried the torch for her husband, so to speak, fending off a mob of suitors who covet Odysseus’s property and title and assume he isn’t coming back. Her steely resolve transcends love to embody a kind of noble suffering, as if sacrifice was a prerequisite for privilege. The suitors plunder her store of wine and food while she sits in her room weaving a tapestry. For his part, Odysseus undergoes sacrifice in more physical terms, braving actual fire and ice, monsters and supernatural forces, in order to return to his family, to home and hearth, as it were. The nobility inherent in such an endeavor is sort of ridiculous, and he seems to require the counsel of at least one god, Athena (Zendaya), in order to decide if the grinding trip is really worth it. For several years he seems to abandon the journey, shacking up with the wraith Calypso (Charlize Theron) in what looks like a Greek island travel advertisement, all sandy beaches and bonfire cookouts. Nolan emphasizes the temptations that pull at Odysseus’s resolve as much as he does the guilt that haunts his memories of war. Our hero is a mess, but a mess with a conscience. 

Much has been made of the IMAX experience, and it is impressive in how it conveys the scale of Nolan’s ambitions in the most vivid way possible. However, it also reduces most of the plot and characterizations to their bare essence, and since the poem is an epic much of it is sketchy. Too many of the episodes are strung together. The ellipses are obvious. The story progresses by fits and starts, and there’s no indication of time passing. Except for Penelope and Odysseus, every character feels like a walk-on, meaning you probably will only appreciate Nolan’s accomplishment if you’ve actually read the poem and remembered it, which I’m sure wasn’t the aim. 

Soldier’s guilt is addressed head-on in Shinya Tsukamoto’s latest antiwar movie, Mr. Nelson, Did You Kill People? The title character, an African-American named Allen Nelson (played by Mark Merphy as a young man, by Rodney Hicks as an older man) who fought in the Vietnam War as a Marine, is shown at different periods in his life after returning from Southeast Asia with a severe case of PTSD. The episodes that show his time in Vietnam make it look as if his batallion carried out daily My Lai-level massacres, enough nightmare fodder for a hundred lifetimes, and Tsukamoto stages these atrocities in his patented visceral style, stressing the savagery of the American troops, most of whom are Black in this telling, thus suggesting that they are taking out their own frustrations with being subjugated in America on the Vietnamese. Nelson becomes a killing machine as if through hypnosis and his eventual owning up to the horrors he committed is presented as someone waking up from a bad dream. Much of the story development is presented through his sessions with a soft-spoken therapist (Geoffrey Rush), who keeps asking him “why” he killed people in Vietnam, a question that, understandably, perplexes Nelson—until it doesn’t.

Nelson is a real person who died about twenty years ago. He is famous in Japan for giving more than a thousand lectures about his experiences in Vietnam, and Tsukamoto wants to connect that experience and Nelson’s everlasting guilt to the experiences of Japanese soldiers in Southeast Asia in World War II, which he believes were never aired in an appropriately candid manner because of the shame involved. But that aspect isn’t clear until the end, when we see Nelson traveling to Vietnam to talk about his experiences in the company of a Japanese man named Kuroi (Lily Franky), who has sponsored his lectures in Japan and whose own father died without ever talking about what he did during the war. 

Mr. Nelson is effective in what it sets out to do, even if Tsukamoto’s direction relies more on production design than on narrative elements. Nelson is portrayed as a man constantly on the verge of total mental disintegration—there is not a scene in the movie when he isn’t sweating profusely—and so he comes across more as a symbol than as a complete person. A more literal approach would have been that much more powerful.

The Odyssey now playing in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Hibiya (IMAX; 050-6868-5068), Marunouchi Piccadilly (050-6875-0075), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (IMAX; 050-6868-5063), Shinjuku Wald 9 (03-5369-4955), Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3011), 109 Cinemas Premium Shinjuku (03-6709-6410), Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024), Toho Cinemas Shibuya (050-6868-5002).

Mr. Nelson, Did You Kill People?, in English and Vietnamese, now playing in Tokyo at Kino Cinema Shinjuku (03-5315-0978).

The Odyssey home page in Japanese

Mr. Nelson, Did You Kill People? home page in Japanese

The Odyssey photo (c) 2026 Universal Studios/Melinda Sue Gordon

Mr. Nelson, Did You Kill People? photo (c) Mr. Nelson, Did You Kill People? Film Partners

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Review: Bob Trevino Likes It and Linka Linka

Posted on September 10, 2026 by philipbrasor

One of the nicer touches in Tracie Laymon’s reportedly semi-autobiographical movie, Bob Trevino Likes It, is the perpetually cracked screen on the cell phone used by the protagonist, Lily Trevino (Barbara Ferreira). As the title suggests, Lily spends an awful lot of time checking her social media feeds and messages, and the condition of the screen, which is never explained nor repaired, becomes a constant reminder of how damaged Lily’s life is. A private care worker living in a nameless American Midwest suburb, the twenty-something Lily walks around with a huge chip on her shoulder thanks to her emotionally abusive father, Bob (French Stewart), who still hasn’t gotten over Lily’s drug-addicted mother walking out on them many years ago and takes his frustrations with the world out on his daughter. Lily internalizes his insults and complaints, seething at his selfishness but afraid that any pushback on her part will just drive him further away, but with each passing encounter her self-hatred and fear of abandonment only increases, to the point that when she finally seeks help from a therapist (Ashlyn Moore), the therapist breaks down in tears after Lily tells her story. Did I say that Bob Trevino Likes It is a comedy?

Well, it is for most of its first half, during which we get the lay of the land of Lily’s psyche, her tendency to seek help by any means necessary on the internet, and the relationships that keep her going—or not. Following a particularly disastrous dinner outing with her father and a middle aged woman he hopes to get jiggy with (“You gotta make me look good,” is her father’s demand), Lily is banished from his life (it’s implied this isn’t the first time he’s done so) and she goes into a depressive tailspin, desperately trying to figure out how to get back into his relatively good graces. While searching Facebook she comes across what she believes is her father’s page, which is doubly perplexing because she didn’t know he had one, but when she tries to friend him she discovers the page belongs to a different Bob Trevino. He accepts her request, thus opening a door to a new relationship. As it turns out, this other Bob (John Leguizamo) is not only her father’s age, but also someone going through his own family-oriented turmoil: He lost a child, a tragedy his wife, like Lily’s father, can’t get past. They eventually meet, and while acquaintances and strangers find their budding friendship unsavory, they turn out to be exactly what each other needs. 

Though at first Lily seems desperate for a father figure who acts the way she believes a father should act, eventually she sees how Bob needs her not as a substitute offspring but as someone who proves to him just by listening that he has value as a human being. It goes without saying that Lily really only wants the same thing, and their give-and-take is heartfelt and grounded in the redemptive power of unselfish love. However, all the other characters are written as stereotypes: the haplessly cruel parent, the ineffective social worker, the deluded spouse, the fair weather friend, and countless minor players who might as well have no faces to go with their respective single defining traits that merely add ballast to the plot. Warning: You will cry your eyes out in the end, but you may wonder if the movie deserves your tears.

A difficult father-daughter relationship also centers the drama in Linka Linka, the debut feature of Tibetan writer-director Kangdrun, whose take on the Tibet Autonomous Region of China eschews most of the cultural peculiarites and sweeping mountain vistas and steppes characteristic of films from the area, instead concentrating on the social milieu of the capital city of Lhasa, which is much more cosmopolitan than you might expect, especially for young people, who are shown dancing in nightclubs and engaging with one another mostly online. Like Kangdrun, the protagonist of the film, Samgyi (Tsering Yangkyi), is sent to Shanghai at an early age to receive her education, and when she returns years later she is a budding filmmaker who intends to make her first fiction feature about a formative event in her girlhood that, at the time, traumatized her and her best friend. However, more than dredging up some bitter feelings in the process, Samgyi’s return also preciptates a reckoning with her musician father, who disapproves of her choice of profession, an attitude that renders what was once a loving relationship into a prickly one. 

Linka Linka (the title refers to a kind of traditional picnic) has a dual structure, alternating between Samgyi struggling to make her movie on location in Lhasa and flashbacks to her adolescence when the formative incident the movie is about took place. Kangdrun often complicates this structure by further bifurcating the flashback tale between what supposedly happened in her mind and how she describes it in the movie-within-the-movie. At issue is a lost wallet whose provenance figures prominently in the fates of Samgyi and her best friend, Lhamo. Each friend remembered the incident differently, which is why they never spoke afterwards. This disconnect carries over to the viewer, who automatically wonders how reliable a narrator Samgyi is.

The resolution of the central mystery turns out to be less consequential than the idea that you can go home again and take up where you left off, at least emotionally. Due to Kangdrun’s ambitious approach to storytelling, the movie sometimes gets away from its premise, and the sideshows are so enchanting that the viewer can be forgiven for losing the thread of the plot. I wanted to know a lot more about Suoso (Ze Ren Dun Zhu), Samgyi’s fashion-conscious influencer pen pal, who essentially represents contemporary Tibetan youth in their desire to embrace the wider world. His presence is conceived as comic relief, but he’s got more soul than anyone else in the movie. 

Bob Trevino Likes It opens Sept. 11 in Tokyo at Human Trust Cinema Yurakucho (03-6259-8608), Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551), Shinjuku Musahinokan (03-3354-5670).

Linka Linka, in Tibetan and Mandarin, opens Sept. 11 in Tokyo at Human Trust Cinema Yurakucho (03-6259-8608).

Bob Trevino Likes It home page in Japanese

Linka Linka home page in Japanese

Bob Trevino Likes It photo (c) 2024 Chosen Family, LLC

Linka Linka photo (c) Tibetan Antelope Films Co., Ltd.

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Review: Starve Acre

Posted on September 9, 2026 by philipbrasor

Folk horror meets generational family trauma in this confusingly intense exercise in sophisticated campfire ghost storytelling. It’s the bleak 1970s in Yorkshire, England, where academically embattled archaeologist Richard (Matt Smith) has moved his wife, Juliette (Morfydd Clark), and possibly schizophrenic young son, Owen (Arthur Shaw), to his own childhood home, partly because it has some sort of anthropological significance and partly because he believes Owen’s perilous mental state (he hears voices) might be relieved with a change of scenery, though a house where he himself was subjected to parental abuse hardly sounds like an improvement over anywhere. Owen’s situation worsens, exacerbated by the mutterings of a local named Gordon (Sean Gilder), Richard’s father’s best friend, who believes the estate, called Starve Acre, is the realm of some kind of pagan demon. 

Suffice to say that things go from creepy to tragic before you can say Jack Grey, which is the nickname of this evil entity. Grief, of course, drives Richard and Juliette farther apart, with Richard applying himself to his work as a kind of distraction—or is it actually to confront the trauma at the base of his own obvious psychosis? Eventually, digging on the site of a vanished supposedly possessed oak tree on the property, he uncovers something sinister that leads him to a box of his father’s possessions containing the skeleton of a hare that starts to come to life in front of his eyes. Could this be Jack Grey in the (putrefied) flesh? 

Such questions never stop presenting themselves because, while the screenplay is based on a novel, director Daniel Kokotajlo seems more interested in summoning delectably gruesome set pieces than making those set pieces serve an organic story. Owen’s sad situation is never satisfyingly connected to the hare’s terrorizing impulses or his father’s deteriorating mental state, which actually seems detached from any concern for his immediate family. Moreover, the dialogue feels purposely muffled, making it difficult to tell what people are saying half the time—call it mumblecore horror. Starve Acre is a handsomely mounted production with a classic gothic atmosphere, but it doesn’t really take you anywhere. It sort of does the rounds and then just leaves on the side of a dark road in the middle of the night. What exactly are you scared of?

Opens Sept. 11 in Tokyo at Cinemart Shinjuku (03-5369-2831), Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551).

Starve Acre home page in Japanese

photo (c) House Starve Acre Limited, Acre Film LLC, British Broadcasting Corporation and The British Film Institute 2023

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Review: Numakage Public Pool

Posted on September 5, 2026 by philipbrasor

Frederick Wiseman, who died in February, was not only America’s greatest documentary filmmaker, but an anthropologist of rare insight. Though he is mainly famous for perfecting the so-called fly-on-the-wall observational doc, it was his wide-ranging approach to his institutional subjects that will be studied centuries from now, from public libraries to ballet companies, from local politics to government functions. Shingo Ota, whose previous film was about the day worker enclave of Nishinari in Osaka, brings the same kind of enveloping curiosity to his study of the last days of a public pool in the city of Saitama, but circumscribes it with thematic structure. The opening scenes of the film show the Numakage Public Pool being demolished, so we already know its fate. Over the next 90 minutes Ota frames its demise through Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s five stages of grief, which are usually experienced by a person who is told they are dying. In Ota’s case, the people suffering are the regular users of the pool, which has been a beloved fixture of the neighborhood for many decades and whose removal, we soon infer, is the result of a lack of imagination on the part of city officials. In documenting what is essentially an act of bureaucratic arrogance, Ota tries to make it into a kind of Greek tragedy. 

But along the way he gets some stunning footage, and conveys a clear sense of how a viable community can emerge from a common, casual interest. As he goes through the five steps—denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance—mostly by forcing the matter, he goes both behind the scenes to show us how a successful public pool is managed and operated, and head-on with users who have a deep emotional stake in the facility. Among the former are the lifeguards, who start and end the day with typical Japanese-style workplace rituals, and the meticulous custodial crew who maintain the impressively diverse attractions (three separate pools, a water slide, concessions, and a massive locker room) in tip-top shape. Two local businesses that cater to pool patrons are also covered in detail, a bento takeout/delivery service and a family-run dagashiya (snacks and cheap novelties for children). Among the users are a cohort of elderly women who look to be in great shape thanks to their daily pool exercise regimen and who badger Ota into joining them in the water; the usual gangs of mischievous kids and adolescents; and a subset of men who come to cruise other men under the radar, though signs in the locker room prohibiting more than one person in a stall at a time would seem to indicate that the operators know what’s going on. In addition, Ota shows a group of local activists lobbying city hall to keep the pool open, though anyone with any knowledge of Japanese government protocols will know that once such a decision is made—in this case, without much effort being made to solicit public input—it’s already a done deal, regardless of all the bowing and “kento shimasu (we’ll look into it)” assurances on the part of white-shirted office factotums. 

The five-step gambit ends up providing little in the way of meaning. Ota gets more substance out of careful camera placements that manage to catch evocative encounters and incidents—though a sequence at the end where one of the male regulars brings home another male regular unannounced for dinner with his elderly, seemingly annoyed mother is obviously staged (a title card during the introduction implies as much) and thus feels joltingly out-of-place. One of Wiseman’s skills was developing narratives out of completely disparate elements. Ota is not at that level. He still needs gimmicks.

In Japanese. Now playing in Tokyo at Theater Image Forum Aoyama (03-5766-0114).

Numakage Public Pool home page in Japanese

photo (c) hydroblast

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Review: The Voice of Hind Rajab and 2000 Meters to Andriivka

Posted on September 4, 2026 by philipbrasor

Tunisian director Kaouther Ben Hania has already proven herself to be an imaginative creator of documentaries with Four Daughters, a film in which she showed the real-life subjects of her story coaching actors who would play them in recreations of their experiences. The Voice of Hind Rajab takes this conceit to its next natural level. It is a wrenching dramatization of the events of January 29, 2024, as they unfolded in the offices of the Palestinian Red Crescent Society (PRCS) where workers tried to help the titular six-year-old girl via cellphone survive an Israeli attack in Gaza. Though what we see on screen is a minute-by-minute acting out of the story, much of the dialogue is the actual recording of the cellphone conversations.

The PRCS’s job in this case is “coordination,” meaning they receive calls for help from people inside the occupied territory and then assist them, but they are required to do this by working with the Israeli authorities, and through the Red Cross, no less, thus adding several layers of bureaucracy. Consequently, much of their mission is tangled up in red tape, which in this case proves deadly because the girl is the only survivor in a car full of relatives that has been hit by Israeli fire. The aid workers on duty must contend with a little girl using a phone with dodgy reception and surrounded by the corpses of her loved ones. Then they have to direct an ambulance to the site of the carnage to save the girl, but not before gaining permission from the Israeli Defense Forces to let the ambulance through. These various challenges cause extreme friction among the aid workers, including the front line operatives Rana (Saja Kilani) and Omar (Motaz Malhees), who talk directly to the little girl and pressure their harried supervisor, Mahdi (Amer Hlehel), to work around the IDF to get help to the girl as soon as possible. Ironically—or not, depending on your perspective—their task is complicated by the IDF’s tendency to jam signals from within Gaza. 

Predictably, the film is unbearably tense, and not just because the voice we hear is that of a real, frightened child. Ben Hania keeps the action tightly focused on her main core of aid workers, so viewers have no chance to catch their breath; and her actors treat the whole endeavor accordingly, as a chamber piece where every character’s attention is fixed on one thing and one thing only. In addition, Ben Hania has to master her own tricky coordination, making sure the various non-recreated elements, like the real-time audio and video of the incident, are incorporated into the dramatization in a way that doesn’t make them a distraction. She does this mainly by occasionally cutting away from the artifice and giving us the actual footage of aid workers doing their job. It is aggressively present-in-the-moment, demanding you not forget what happened on that day.

Presence in the moment is also the leitmotif of 2000 Meters to Andriivka, the latest documentary about the Russian invasion of Ukraine by AP reporter Mstyslav Chernov, which chronicles up close and personally a grueling inch-by-inch retaking of the titular village by a Ukrainian battalion in 2023. Chernov is embedded in the batallion and speaks to the audience in post-dubbed English voiceover, explaining much of what’s going on and even providing context about individual soldiers and the general tenor of the Ukrainian “counteroffensive” that the Andriivka mission is a part of. He has also fitted some of the soldiers with GoPro cameras to capture the action from their point-of-view. Unlike his narration of the Oscar-winning 20 Days of Mariupol, his tone here is distinctively muted, less optimistic about Ukraine’s chances as he watches the destruction firsthand from within the chaos of battle.

And “chaos” is the operative word. The terrain is unusually limited: a thin stretch of forest about 40 meters wide set between two huge mine fields that leads directly to the village. The forest already looks like the moon, with burnt trees and crater-like foxholes sometimes occupied by Russians who have to be removed one-by-one. The Ukrainian soldiers are uniformly profane and understandably terrified of their mission, and while they often talk about what they will do after Andriivka is secured (“I will sleep for two days”; “I am going to take the longest shower in history”) there’s that unmistakable quality in their voice that no actor could possibly mimic of talking through their terror. 

2000 Meters to Andriivka is essentially the opposite of The Voice of Rind Hajab in that not only is nothing recreated, but the realness of the images and the sound become overwhelming. Bullets whizz by, clumps of dirt fly up into the camera lens, grenades go off a short distance away, and men scream. They scream a lot. More significantly, the exhaustion of being always afraid, contained rather obviously in Chernov’s voiceover, is a constant that can’t be erased by anything. Is it all worth it? Chernov implies that these soldiers are here because they feel they have no choice (“I came to fight, not to serve,” says one), because whatever their leaders in Kyiv and their enemy in Moscow decide, they will not rest until all Russians are out of Ukraine. The movie thus adds another layer of exhaustion to an inexhaustible war. 

The Voice of Rind Hajab, in Arabic and English, now playing in Tokyo at Shinjuku Musashinokan (03-3354-5670), Bunkamura Le Cinema Shibuya Miyashita (050-6875-5280), Cine Switch Ginza (03-3561-0707).

2000 Meters to Andriivka, in English, Ukrainian and Russian, now playing in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Chanter Hibiya (050-6868-5001), Shinjuku Musashinokan (03-3354-5670).

The Voice of Hind Rajab home page in Japanese

2000 Meters to Andriivka home page in Japanese

The Voice of Hind Rajab photo (c) Mime Films-Tanit Films

2000 Meters to Andriivka photo (c) 2024 Dogwoof

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Review: Backrooms

Posted on September 3, 2026 by philipbrasor

Horror movies work best when their scares are rooted in identifiable psychological unease. Kane Parsons’ Backrooms, one of the most discussed American horror movies of the year, based on Parsons’ own internet photo postings and YouTube series, has a brilliant setup: The proprietor of a sad, under-patronized furniture store in a colorless California suburb in the 1990s is, as the movie gets underway, cycling through various low-level crises. In addition to being a frustrated, unsuccessful architect, Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor) drinks too much, has recently separated from a wife who continues to badger him for money, and is seeing a therapist, Dr. Kline (Renate Reinsve), whose bedside manner seems to be making his depression worse. The breakdown in Clark’s psychic equilibrium is best exemplified by the hapless TV commercials he makes for his business, where he dresses up as a pirate and looks like a fool, thus fortifying the ridiculousness of Clark’s very existence, which already feels like a horror movie in that the viewer automatically wants to turn away from it.

Parsons then injects a supernatural element that at first feels gratuitous. Having decided to sleep in the store as a way to save money, Clark discovers some electrical problems and while checking the breaker in the basement accidently finds he can pass through a wall into a series of yellow-lit backrooms that seem to lead nowhere. Flummoxed by the discovery, he enlists two student filmmakers (Finn Bennett, Lukita Maxwell) to follow him back through the wall to record the phenomenon, but this time he and his assistants are attacked by an unseen force that traps them in these endless corridors. Since Clark told Dr. Kline about his discovery, she starts to worry when he does not show up for his appointed sessions and goes to the store to investigate. Kline’s experience in the backrooms is sufficiently disorienting to qualify as horror-adjacent, but it isn’t until she encounters Clark in what amounts to an extra-dimensional incarnation of his sublimated anxieties that the movie starts to get under your skin in a very unpleasant way.

Though there’s some violence and blood, the movie’s unsettling power emerges from the way it plays on the audience’s experiences with liminal spaces, which often have a discombobulating effect on the senses, epitomizing the idea of an unnatural environment. Kane intensifies the discomfort by increasing these unnatural qualities with weird angles, impossible perspectives, and attendant sounds that seem to emanate from within rather than without. If, in the end, he bites off more than he can chew by trying to provide some kind of meaningful explanation for what we see on the screen, he leaves you with enough fresh nightmare material for a month’s worth of bad sleep. I don’t think I ever need to visit a furniture store again.

Opens Sept. 4 in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), Marunouchi Piccadilly (050-6875-0075), 109 Cinemas Premium Shinjuku (0570-060-109), Shinjuku Wald 9 (03-5369-4955), Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3011), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063), Toho Cinemas Shibuya (050-6868-5002), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024).

Backrooms home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2026 Backrooms Rights LLC, PC Films, LLC

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Review: The Gullspång Miracle

Posted on September 2, 2026 by philipbrasor

The “truth is stranger than fiction” documentary is almost a movie genre unto itself, though its appeal is mostly ironic: no self-respecting novelist would ever countenance a story this outrageous or unbelievable. This Swedish film, the first feature-length doc by Maria Fredriksson, qualifies for the genre but in a back-assward way. It’s the entire making of the film that buggers belief. In fact, at one point, when the revelations become too much, the director herself can be heard in the background demanding in a conspicuously exasperated tone that her subjects “stop lying” and address her doubts about what they are trying to put across. In that regard, maybe the movie is its own genre: “untruth is stranger than both fiction and real life.”

Fredriksson did not initiate the project. She was asked to record the “miracle” that two sisters in their 60s had recently experienced, thinking that it would make a great movie. It started when one of the sisters, May-Elin Storslettin, who lives in Norway, visits the other, Kari Klo, who lives in the town of Gullspång, Sweden, and is badly injured during a mishap at an amusement park. Told by a physician that she should not travel, May lays up at Kari’s for a few weeks and then impulsively decides to buy an apartment in the town. She chooses a unit because of a still-life on the kitchen wall—a painting that both sisters think is some kind of omen—and when she and Kari meet the owner of the apartment, they are struck by how much she resembles their older sister Lita, who committed suicide 30 years earlier. Initially they wonder if the woman, a retired Swedish army lieutenant named Olaug Bakkevoll, isn’t actually Lita, since they never saw Lita’s body as the funeral was carried out with a closed casket due to religious proscriptions against suicide. Long story short, after some dodgy geneological research carried out by an over-eager cousin and a DNA test showing that Olaug is the sisters’ half-sibling (same father, different mother), they determine that Olaug is Lita’s twin, but because they were born in 1941 during the Nazi occupation, their father decided to give Olaug away to a family “living on the other side of the fjord,” since it was known that the Nazis were carrying out medical experiments on twins. The upshot is that Lita grew up in a strictly religious farm family with lots of siblings while Olaug was raised by a well-to-do couple who gave her a more liberal, worldly education.

At first, these differences feel insignificant in the blinding light of the movie’s incredible revelations, but once Olaug gets to know her newfound relations better, including the family members who still live on the farm in Norway, the relationship quickly curdles. Some of the simmering enmity has to do with class and some has to do with pedigree (Norwegians and Swedes have always harbored national resentments toward each other), but mainly what we see is these individuals’ true selves, as it were, coming to the surface. When Olaug grows suspicious of the police’s initial finding that Lita’s death was a suicide, she demands they reopen the case and then learns that an undisclosed autopsy determined she had no drugs in her system. The family is relieved because they now think she died of natural causes, but Olaug believes it was murder, an insistence that sends Fredriksson further down a rabbit hole and sorely offends the sisters. Fredriksson tries to keep up with the changing situation, but eventually lets it go where it will, and in the end it’s difficult to trust anyone, including Olaug, whose eccentricities now come across as stark bigotry and self-delusion. The “miracle” may be nothing more than wish fulfillment run amok, and while the story gets away from Fredriksson the movie itself never fails to fascinate. That it was even made is the actual miracle.

In Norwegian and Swedish. Opens Sept. 4 in Tokyo at Cinemart Shinjuku (03-5369-2831).

The Gullspång Miracle home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2023, Ballad Film, SVT, Film i Vast, Film Stockholm, Mer Film, Good Company Pictures

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Review: Nightborn

Posted on August 28, 2026 by philipbrasor

Though I’m sure there were cinematic treatments of the horrors of new motherhood before Rosemary’s Baby, it was Roman Polanski’s adaptation of Ira Levin’s bestseller that first interpreted the phenomenon as a literal horror story, and we’ve have many variations on the theme since then. Nightborn takes a folk horror approach to the subject of post partum depression, a theme that’s been ripe for the picking lately by woman directors like Lynne Ramsay and Mary Bronstein. The movie’s director, Hanna Bergholm, is Finnish, and sets her story in a creepy, dark Finnish forest that the protagonist, a newlywed named Saga (Seiki Haarla), knew as a child because her grandmother lived in a big old house there surrounded by junk that, she was told, kept the forest’s malevolence at bay. So when Saga’s new British husband, Jon (Rupert Grint), endeavors to remove the junk from the property so they can fix up the delapidated house as their own home, you already know they’re in for it.

It’s clear that whatever subtexts Bergholm wants to impart about the psychological pitfalls of giving birth, she’s more intent on telling a straightforward Tale from the Crypt, and Nightborn essentially takes Rosemary’s Baby to its natural end. Nine months after Saga and Jon make love in the squishy moss under a forbidding looking tree in the forest, Saga goes through a very difficult labor and immediately feels that there’s something wrong with her new son, whom she impulsively names Kuura. What’s weird is that no one else seems to think Kuura is strange, despite that fact that the child has a distressingly shrill crying voice and draws blood when he suckles. Bergholm emphasizes this disconnect by never showing Kuura’s face, always having it turned away from the camera or hidden in shadow. As the baby starts to grow it develops a taste not only for blood but meat that Saga has no choice but to satisfy, a decision that Jon finds repugnant without even trying to understand, even as the forest itself starts encroaching more aggressively on the house. Family from both sides of the marriage come and go and tend to take Jon’s incurious side, thus driving Saga deeper into depression and frustration. Though she hates the baby, she also feels protective of it.

As a horror film, Nightborn is long on gore and short on scares, which may be the point. Even if Bergholm is avoiding metaphors, it’s obvious that her sympathies for Saga’s situation are at the expense of everyone else, especially Jon who, despite his genuine fear for Saga’s wellbeing, refuses to admit to what’s happening right before his eyes. In the end, Saga is forced to face her demon baby by herself, meaning she’s alone in her despair, and that’s a pretty chilling take on the so-called maternal instinct. 

In English and Finnish. Now playing in Tokyo at Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551), Toho Cinemas Changer Hibiya (050-6868-5001), Kino Cinema Shinjuku (03-5315-0978).

Nightborn home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2025 Elokuvayh/o Komee4a Oy, Filmai LT, Bluelight, Getaway

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Review: Shelter

Posted on August 27, 2026 by philipbrasor

One of the problems that critics of AI encounter when they complain about its effect on movie-making is that a lot of green-lit content in Hollywood already feels as if it’s been produced by a computer program. I have little doubt that had this latest Jason Statham vehicle been written by ChatGPT it wouldn’t have been any worse than it is in its actual state. Statham’s action-hero parameters are unique, which also makes them easy to reproduce because they’ve become so familar, and there’s not an original idea or turn-of-phrase in Shelter. Statham has already played the former super-effective undercover operative hiding out from his checkered past more than a few times, and his characters tend to reenter the fray in order to save an innocent—in this case a young girl—from the evil intentions of powerful entities. The details may differ slightly, but who remembers details?

In this case, Michael Mason (Statham) manages a lighthouse on a deserted Scottish island. The man who delivers his supplies, usually on choppy seas, is often accompanied by his niece, Jessie (Bodhi Rae Breathnach), who tries to make a human connection with Mason but always fails because he’s such a reticent grump. When her uncle dies, Jessie takes over the route and Mason, who we learn worked with her uncle sometime in the past, decides to mentor the girl, teaching her how to use guns and such. Then suddenly bad men invade the island and Mason is forced to flee with Jessie to the mainland in order to confront the mastermind behind the invasion, an MI6 higher-up named Manafort (Bill Nighy) who used to work with Mason and wants to eliminate him because he knows something he shouldn’t, thus Mason’s reason for living the hermit’s life on an uninhabited island.

The usual mayhem ensues, which should be enough for most action fans, but except for one well-staged car chase, the only really interesting aspect of the movie is Naomi Ackie’s MI6 factotum Frost, who is charged with finding out why their agents are being disposed of so handily. She eventually comes around to the realization that her boss, Manafort, is up to no good. Ackie at least pretends that her character possesses a distinctive personality. Usually, Statham also transcends the mechanics of his characters as they’re written, but here he has nothing to work with and seems to give up on Mason fairly early on. The character’s actions are spurred by his need to keep Jessie safe, but the girl’s existence barely registers once the fighting and bloodshed begins. I would like to think that any self-respecting LLM would have striven for something better.

Opens Aug. 28 in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063), Kino Cinema Shinjuku (03-5315-0978), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024). 

Shelter home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2026 Fire Hawk Productions Limited

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Review: The Drama and Enzo

Posted on August 21, 2026 by philipbrasor

Since the only film other than The Drama I’ve seen by Norwegian director Kristoffer Borgli is his last one, Dream Scenario, I don’t have much insight into his approach except the feeling that he definitely likes his comedy to be as discomfiting as possible. Dream Scenario, which featured Nicolas Cage as an emotionally stunted college professor who suddenly appears in strangers’ dreams, sent up cancel culture, while The Drama goes for the jugular of a whole cinematic genre, the romantic comedy. Zendaya and Robert Pattinson play Emma and Charlie, two thirty-year-olds with cushy, creative jobs in Boston who, after two years of anodyne dating and vigorous, seemingly satisfying sex, decide to get married. The kicker occurs fairly early in the film during the couple’s pre-wedding tasting party with their best man, Mike (Mamoudou Athie), and maid of honor, Rachel (Alana Haim), who happen to be married to each other. After condemning the behavior of a casual acquaintance who may or may not be using heroin, the four very drunk friends challenge one another to reveal the worst thing they’ve ever done in their lives, and Emma’s turns out to be such a doozy that Rachel immediately banishes her from her life and Charlie begins wondering what he’s gotten into.

For the rest of the film, which mostly takes in the week leading up to the wedding, we see Emma’s and Charlie’s relationship deteriorate, mainly from Charlie’s point of view, though Borgli’s method of exposition makes it difficult to tell. He gives us flashbacks to Emma’s adolescence, when the dastardly deed took place, as well as jump-cut inserts that illustrate various aspects of the seemingly doomed relationship, such as Emma’s short temper and Charlie’s supreme lack of self-confidence. These scenes are clever and well-staged and successfully get the viewer squirming over how close-to-the-bone they cut, but it’s often difficult to tell which are based on things that actually happened and which are imaginative leaps; and if they are imaginative leaps, whose imagination do they spring from, Emma’s or Charlie’s? The upshot is that our two principals are so caught up in their romantic illusions that they can’t call the wedding off and thus head right into it like a runaway train over a cliff. The darkly comic climax doesn’t necessarily write itself, but it’s pretty much what you expect and you may end up watching it through your fingers. 

Pattinson has the meatier role. Zendaya’s Emma is presented as something of a cipher. She comes across as more of a solid character in flashback as a teenager (played by Jordyn Curet, who doesn’t much look like a younger Zendaya) than she does as an adult woman. Part of the problem is Borgli’s presentation of contemporary American life. He’s uninterested in the attendant racial dynamics—both of the main couples are interracial—and plays by the rules of the American rom-com in that the production design is invariably upper middle class without realizing how such class depictions might affect our observation of the interpersonal difficulties on display. We don’t even meet the parents until the wedding scene, and then learn almost nothing about them. The Drama does one thing right: it shows how unreliable romantic comedies are as a genre. But we already knew that. It’s probably why we liked them in the first place.  

Enzo is also cringe-inducing, but in a more traditional European art-house way. Based on a script by the late Laurent Cantet and directed by his associate Robin Campillo, it’s a coming-of-age film where the protagonist goes through more than his fair share of soul-twisting, self-inflicted psychological trauma, though at first blush these interior conflicts seem clear-cut. Sixteen-year-old Enzo (Eloy Pohu) has dropped out of the “traditional school system” and endeavors to become a certified mason through a trade school that finds him employment with a construction crew. We quickly learn that Enzo is not very good at his job, though it seems to have more to do with attitude than ability. When his foreman drives him home one day to talk to his parents about his difficulties, we learn that Enzo lives in a villa in a swanky hill area of southern France overlooking the Mediterranean. Enzo’s family is well off, his father (Pierfrancesco Favino) a tenured math professor and his mother (Elodie Bouchez) an engineer (who, it’s pointed out, makes more money than her husband). Liberal and open-minded, the folks seem fine with their son’s choice of vocation, but we soon come to understand that Dad believes it is just a phase and that he will eventually come to his senses and go back to school. This clash in perspective gets under Enzo’s skin and drives him further into silent rebelliousness, though to what end he never seems certain.

However, the initial plot conceit of a kid bucking his bourgeois pedigree and getting his hands dirty in solidarity with the hoi polloi gives way to something different. Enzo finds himself attracted to a pair of Ukrainian emigrants who are working on the job site, especially the cruder of the two, Vlad (Maksym Slivinskyi). When both men are called back to help their country fight off the Russian invaders, it is Vlad who resists the request, a decision that appeals to Enzo because it seems to indicate an expression of will that transcends Vlad’s sense of responsibility. As friction with his father intensifies, Enzo draws closer to Vlad, developing sexual feelings that only further complicate his nascent selfhood, sending him into a tailspin of emotional and physical self-harm.

Though it’s easy to see what Cantet and Campillo are getting at, I regretted that my original take on the story—Enzo’s rejection of his privilege—turned out to be a misconception of the movie’s overall dramatic thrust. It turns out to be a red herring, something that lured me into a more conventional tale of a teenager confused by hormones facing choices he doesn’t really comprehend. Though Enzo’s destiny is entirely believable and even moving, it’s also disappointing in the larger scheme of things. 

The Drama now playing in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063), Kino Cinema Shinjuku (03-5315-0978), Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024).

Enzo, in French and Ukrainian, now playing in Tokyo at Human Trust Cinema Yurakucho (03-6259-8608), Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551), Shinjuku Musashinokan (03-3354-5670). 

The Drama home page in Japanese

Enzo home page in Japanese

The Drama photo (c) 2026 Dramatic Movie Rights LLC

Enzo photo (c) Les Films de Pierre

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