Breathing Happy (2022)

A film about addiction, a film about loss and regret, a film about that first Christmas you may be nervously spending alone, Breathing Happy is a strange and surreal film that creeps up on you and lands an eye-watering gut-punch on viewers by the time the third act starts to fully unfold.

I have to admit that I was wary when I saw it was written and directed by the lead actor, Shane Brady. That doesn’t always go well. Thankfully, there was no need to worry.

Shane plays Dylan, a man who is spending Christmas Eve trying to stick to his guns and stay one year sober. It’s tough though. That pull of his addiction is given extra strength as he also feels himself being tied up in a burlap sack of grief and thrown into a dark pool of misery. His memories and feverish imagination create what could be viewed as, well, spirits of Christmas past, present, and future. Will Dylan make it to his big sober anniversary date, or will he succumb to temptation? Will viewers care?

The answer to that last question is a resounding yes. Brady has been careful to present a character who isn’t a bitterly unsympathetic, which is no small feat when portraying an addict. Addiction is selfish, it breaks the hearts of loved ones who want you to stick around and be present, and it’s frustrating and infuriating to want to help someone who doesn’t want to help themselves. It’s also a sickness, and showing Dylan attempting to hang on to his sobriety allows Brady to show his Herculean effort, as well as his growing realisation of the pain he has caused others, and the pain he has caused himself while missing out on so many lovely moments with his family.

Although he is front and centre for almost every scene, Brady also helps himself by filling out his cast with great talent. You get great voice work from Sarah Bolger, Justin Benson, and Aaron Moorhead (two of them voicing magic doors . . . yes, magic doors), and there are excellent performances from Katelyn Nacon, Brittney Escalante, Angie Duke, and June Carryl. Each woman has at least one standout moment, and each presents a slightly different level of patience and understanding, with all of their input working together to eventually present Dylan with the full realisation that might lead to him finding the strength to survive this pivotal Christmas Eve. Oh, and I apologise for almost forgetting to praise Brady some more, he’s easily up to the task of carrying the movie with his powerful lead turn.

There are some flaws here, but they’re quite minor. I would have appreciated a slightly better score, and some of the fragmented memories don’t resonate as much as they could. These are quibbles though, and easy to forget about as you start to feel a lump forming in your throat and some dust aggravating your eyes. Which you should do, because Brady is, both behind and in front of the camera, a master manipulator. In the best possible way.

8/10

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The Endless (2017)

Reason to watch a movie #8 - being about to attend a movie festival featuring the work of someone you admire and realising that you STILL haven't caught up on their last feature. That's what led me to finally watching The Endless (after a rewatch of Resolution, a film which has only gone up in my estimation since my first viewing of it). I'd heard this has connections to the earlier film. It has. Strong connections. I am glad I rewatched that one before I put this one on, and advise others to do the same, if enough time has passed for you to forget the details of Resolution.

Once again co-directed by Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead, and once again written by Benson, this also stars the two men in the main roles, playing brothers imaginatively named Aaron and Justin (I think you can guess who plays who). Justin is the older brother, and he's the one who pulled Aaron safely out of what is best described as a strange death cult. After they receive a video about the current state of the cult, Justin thinks it may do them good to return to visit the cult, to show Aaron what he escaped and to draw a line in the sand. But it turns out that returning just allows the men to see with adult eyes things that they found a lot easier to accept as youngsters. It also places them in close proximity to areas where time seems to run very oddly, to put it mildly.

More sci-fi and fantasy than outright horror, The Endless continues the winning streak from Benson and Moorhead that has them delivering quality content for adults without resorting to the usual bag of tricks we see in so many other horror movies. They consistently deliver thoughtful and relatable moments that just happen to take place in an environment that also contains elements of the supernatural and monstrous. Resolution was about friendship, Spring was about love (and grief), and The Endless is about the bond between siblings, the protective role of the older brother, and those timey wimey shenanigans.

I'm not going to say that I was able to keep track of this throughout, it's a slippery bugger, sometimes seeming more interested in providing interesting moments to mess with your mind than giving you a puzzle that fits together smoothly and completely, but enough markers are dotted throughout the script to keep things intriguing as we move through a plot that becomes more and more urgent on the way to a grand finale that you just know could prove heartbreaking and deadly.

When it comes to the acting, the two film-makers don't do a bad job. They have a good chemistry in their lead roles, and the writing helps them to feel realistically like brothers. Tate Ellington is excellent as Hal, the sorta-nominated leader of the cult, Callie Hernandez and Kira Powell are both decent as Anna and Lizzy, with the latter clueing viewers in to the initial links to Resolution, and both Shane Brady and Lew Temple look slightly suspicious for almost every moment they are onscreen, while James Jordan plays someone understandable angry as he remains aware of the strange time trickery going on in the area.

Nicely constructed, both in terms of the main storyline and how things dovetail nicely with the events we already saw in Resolution, The Endless may well be the best yet from Benson and Moorhead. I'll need to give it a rewatch soon, but it's a film I will enjoy revisiting. Much like every other film they've worked on together to give us so far.

8/10

Here ya go.