Shudder Saturday: Attachment (2022)

Some people are fortunate enough to go through their lives in a state of blissful harmony. They have a great relationship with their family members, and there's a smooth transition later in life when they forge a strong connection with someone they fall in love with. Those people are very rare though. You can call me cynical if you like, but I would estimate that those people are actually so rare that you should buy yourself a lottery ticket on the day you meet any one of them. Attachment looks at someone in a more common situation, struggling to maintain a close, sometimes claustrophobic, relation with their mother as they develop a relationship with someone they have quickly developed a strong bond with.

Ellie Kendrick is the woman at the heart of this triangle. She plays Leah, a Jewish academic living in London, her own home situated one floor above the home of her mother (Chana, played by Sofie Gråbøl). Josephine Park is Maja, a Danish woman who inadvertently comes between the two. Having started a relationship with Leah without knowing too much about her, Maja quickly tries to learn more after Leah hurts herself during a seizure. Trying to navigate the mother-daughter relationship she has walked in on, as well as learning enough about Judaism to avoid any embarrassing errors, Maja soon starts to suspect that there's more for her to be worried about than the usual pitfalls of meeting your partner's family.

Writer-director Gabriel Bier Gislason is actually both Danish and Jewish himself (from what I could glean while seeking out some more information about him online anyway), which makes his feature debut a fairly logical move after his work elsewhere, working as either a translator or helming a couple of his own short films. Attachment feels both familiar and a step removed from the everyday, which proves how well Gislason does at conveying that sense of someone wandering into a world they are unfamiliar with, be it another country or the trappings of another religion. It would be easy to assume that Gislason has crafted this from his own experiences, but maybe he just has a good empathy for people who end up trying to understand something nuanced and complex from a position of relative distance and ignorance.

Although Kendrick is very good in her role, she has arguably the lightest workload. It's Park and Gråbøl carrying most of the weight, showing their own struggles and their strain as they try to find a way to get along with one another. Park is easy to root for, and Gråbøl plays her character in a way that allows viewers to know that her cold and harsh behaviour seems to stem from a place of good intentions. David Dencik plays Lev, someone who can both deliver the required exposition and also play a prominent part in the third act, when things start to become clearer for the two women trying to maintain a steady orbit around Leah.

There are some familiar elements used here, and those familiar with any Jewish mythology should know where it's all heading from very early on, but Gislason doesn't bother trying to fool viewers, nor does he add too much to distract from the tension that keeps moving between Maja and Chana like static electricity. You don't get a load of bells and whistles, but you do get a consistently clear and pleasing visual flow from cinematographer Valdemar Winge Leisner, a very good score from Johan Carøe, and the strength of the lead performances from people who know that the layered material will satisfy those who are happy to be patient with something enjoyably different from numerous other riffs on this kind of thing.

7/10

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Dead By Dawn 2016: Men & Chicken (2015)

In some ways, Men & Chicken may seem an odd choice to close a horror festival like Dead By Dawn. But it doesn't take long to deliver the kind of content that you can easily see appealing to organiser Adele Hartley.

Men & Chicken may end up exploring some very interesting ideas about happiness and family, but it begins with scenes of a man visiting his dying father, slightly perturbed when questions are asked about the whereabouts of his brother, while another man attends a date with a wheelchair-bound psychotherapist, most probably because he thinks that a meal and evening out with the lady will be more rewarding, and less expensive, than actually paying for the therapy that he needs. And that's enough to warn viewers about characters they are about to spend the duration of the movie watching.

David Dencik and Mads Mikkelsen play those two men. They are two brothers named, respectively, Gabriel and Elias. Although brothers, their dead father informs them (through the medium of videotape) that they don't have the same mother. And their dead father isn't actually their father. This information sends them on a journey to discover just where they came from, why their father abandoned them, and whether or not they can do better than the miserable existence they seem to be wading through. It turns out that they have a few brothers, all easily identified by the fact that they all have harelips, along with one or two other abnormalities.

Travelling through territory that includes black comedy, seems to reference The Island Of Doctor Moreau, feels at times akin to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and wraps up a surprisingly optimistic core with surrounding layers of cynicism and despair, Men & Chicken is  a slow burn with many small pleasures despite having few surprises. It's certainly an unusual story, don't get me wrong, but most viewers should be able to realise where the third act will end up as soon as the movie starts to properly plot out the slight narrative.

All of the cast do a great job, but most of the laughs come from Mikkelsen, partly because his role here is so removed from other, more suave, characters that he's portrayed in recent years. Dencik also does a great job, despite being almost the straight man of the piece, but singling him out is slightly unfair to the others, who all get at least one memorable moment. Nikolaj Lie Kaas, Soren Malling, and Nicolas Bro may not be recognisable names, at least not to general audiences outwith their home countries, but they easily hold their own.

It's slightly overlong, and strains at times to keep the viewer on board, but writer-director Anders Thomas Jensen manages to take all of the oddness and unpleasantness and turn it into something surprisingly . . . . . . . okay, maybe sweet is the wrong word, but it all feels very human during the final scenes, which is amazing considering the animalistic behaviour of most of the protagonists.

7/10

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Men-And-Chicken-Mads-Mikkelsen/dp/B01DEAIAJU?ie=UTF8&keywords=men%20and%20chicken&qid=1459601262&ref_=sr_1_1_twi_dvd_3&sr=8-1

And that is it for another year at Dead By Dawn. Thanks, as ever, to Adele Hartley, her helpers, The Filmhouse team, and everyone who gets along to make the festival what it is. Even my loony mates.