Mubi Monday: Bring Them Down (2024)

I really wanted to like Bring Them Down, an Irish drama featuring a number of actors that I have liked in many other movies. Sadly, it feels like many other films I've seen over the past few years, although it's not as good as any of them. It's particularly irritating to see such a great cast being slightly wasted in something that could have been much better.

Christopher Abbott plays Michael, a young farmer who is trying his best to keep the family business afloat while being overlooked by his father, Ray (Colm Meaney). Times are tough, so tough that a nearby farming family becomes a bitter enemy when young Jack (Barry Keoghan) steals a couple of animals and claims that they died. That lie is revealed when Michael sees the animals displayed at a market, which leads to a confrontation between himself and Jack's father, Gary (Paul Ready). Things start to get worse from there.

Co-written by Christopher Andrews and Jonathan Hourigan, with Andrews also making his debut as a feature director after getting a few shorts under his belt, it's hard to really pin down how this fails. I think it's just too many moments that we've seen before without enough added to the material to make it seem really fresh or worth our time. This is a patchwork movie, and some of those patches are almost identical to other films that you could either revisit or watch for the first time.

Abbott does okay in the lead role, even if he suffers in comparison to almost everyone else onscreen. This is definitely time for people to try to make him a thing, but I'm not sure he's truly deserving of the push. Keoghan, on the other hand, deserves all of the positive attention and praise he's been getting over the past few years, and he delivers yet another effortlessly mesmerising turn here. Meaney is fantastic, Ready is very good indeed, and a couple of excellent supporting turns come from Aaron Heffernan and Nora-Jane Noone.

There's a lot being mixed in to a big melting pot here (family pressure, problems handed down through generations, the difficulties of making ends meet in a vocation where profit margins can depend on one good animal), but none of it is able to come through clear enough. To overuse the analogy, a lot of the flavours overwhelm one another, and you're just left with a load of bland mush. Even the non-chronological presentation of events, we get shown things and then taken back to see them from another perspective, doesn't really add the impact and tension that it should.

If you want some great Irish-set movies then I can give you a good half dozen or so. If you want films set against the harsh life of farming then I can probably recommend a few of those too. Great Barry Keoghan films? Easily done. Better roles for Colm Meaney? Just as easy. There may not be anything here that's awful, but it's shocking that so much of it feels so disappointingly average.

5/10

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Wolf Man (2025)

Why can the modern movie landscape somehow not give us a great new werewolf movie? We've had some very good ones, but it's an archetypal monster that seems unable to be redefined and refreshed in a way that gives it a place in modern pop culture alongside the many vampires, zombies, and even bandage-swathed mummies. Thankfully, here's Leigh Whannell to put things right. Or not, as the case may be. I don't want to beat around the bush here. Wolf Man is awful.

Christopher Abbott is Blake, a man who ends up heading back to the family homestead with his wife (Charlotte, played by Julia Garner) and young daughter (Ginger, played by Matilda Firth) in tow. The property is in the middle of nowhere, and most of the locals don't venture outside after night has fallen. So the family getting a bit lost and trying to continue driving after sunset isn't a great idea. There's soon some trouble when they encounter a wild humanoid creature that seems intent on putting the bite on them. Eventually trapped in a house, it soon becomes obvious that at least one member of the family has been wounded. And the wound is starting to change them.

While Whannell is the director here, it's maybe telling that this is a screenplay co-written by himself and his wife, Corbett Tuck. The latter is a first-timer in that role, which would explain a lot of the inherent weakness of this. It wouldn't explain it all, and I'm sure both Whannell and Tuck thought they had stumbled upon a great new hook when they decided to let everything basically play out over one long night, but this feels like a sorely under-developed piece of work. There's no solid lore, which means no way to use or break any rules established within the confines of the film, there are too few characters, meaning very few moments have any real sense of danger, and, most damningly, the third act simply serves as a reminder of the last time someone tried to reinvigorate this IP (in a film that was much better than this one, in my opinion).

I don't want to completely dismiss Abbott and Garner, but it's worth noting that Firth, the youngest cast member, seems to do the best work. That may be down to the adults being weighed down by the screenplay, or maybe I was just put in such a sour mood that I was unable to enjoy anyone onscreen, with the exception of the innocent child. Sam Jaeger, Ben Predergast, and Benedict Hardie also have some screentime, and I'm equally loathe to give them any praise (although none of them are bad, they're just trapped in this mass of awfulness like the bug in the amber at the start of Jurassic Park).

The music from Benjamin Wallfisch isn't bad, but the people I really want to praise are those working in the sound department. The one real strength of Wolf Man is the soundscape; all rustling branches, bass-heavy growls, and strange frequencies showing the difference in hearing between some of the main characters. That's offset by the embarrassment of the creature effects and make-up though, which delivers viewers a werewolf that is one of the very worst to be put onscreen. Seriously. Look, I HAVE seen a lot worse than this, of course, but not in a film with some actual money and studio resources behind it.

Inept in almost every way, even (especially?) in the final scenes, this is a huge disappointment for fans of Whannell and/or his cast. It's a huge step down from his work on The Invisible Man, although it's clear that he wanted to emulate that style of blending the archetype with some relevant social commentary. Maybe he should have been clearer on what he wanted to comment on (masculinity, perceived emasculation, family bonds, and communities maintaining dangerous secrets are all in the mix), or maybe he should have just forgotten about that to focus on something that would have been entertaining and satisfying for those wanting loud howls and hairy scares.

3/10

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Kraven The Hunter (2024)

Now that I have FINALLY got into reading some of the many comics that have proven to be such fertile ground for Hollywood, I tend to know a number of the characters I would have never even heard of years ago. Which explains why I ended up looking forward to Kraven The Hunter, another of the Sony movies making use of a Spider-Man character without having Spider-Man actually in the movie. I have read the earliest comics to feature Kraven The Hunter, and I thought that he was an entertaining character who could be placed in a fun movie. Of course, that opinion was affected by knowing that he was to be played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson (I'm not really a fan), but I still decided that I would try to have some fun.

The plot is tosh, a mess of a script written by Richard Wenk, Art Marcum, and Matt Holloway (all the more disappointing because of how much I love some of Richard Wenk's directorial work), but it essentially gives us the origin story of the title character, someone who uses his powerful animalistic skillset to hunt poachers and villains. Once he sets his sights on someone, that person is as good as dead, and the highlight of this film is the determination and savagery with which Kraven despatches those who end up on his bad side.

Director J. C. Chandor isn't used to working with this kind of material, but he does a decent enough job with some of the action moments. Maybe I'm just worn down from the bad stuff that we've seen from Sony over the past few years, but this never seemed as bad as anything else they've given us. The CGI is uneven, but not completely awful, and Kraven feels as if he has proper teeth and claws. There just isn't enough here to distract people from a fairly wea script, and a large part of that is to do with the eminently forgettable villains (there are at least three, but only one works, and that's Russell Crowe, enjoyably hamming things up with another accent in the role of Aleksei Sistevich, the father of our "hero").

Taylor-Johnson is okay in the role, trying to maintain a serious face in the middle of some ridiculous moments, but there's always someone better available for pretty much every role he gets. Someone with a bit more charisma, and maybe someone better able to convey humour, would have been welcome, although I'm not sure I could give any specific examples. As I've just said, Crowe is fun, but that's all the praise I can offer. Poor Ariana DeBose tries hard in a thankless role, as a woman named Calypso who ends up helping Kraven more than once, Fred Hechinger barely registers as Dmitri (Kraven's brother), and both Alessandro Nivola and Christopher Abbott play the other two main villains, forgettable as soon as they're offscreen).

This isn't great, but it's polished and entertaining in a way that the previous film in this flop-tastic movie series wasn't. I didn't have a terrible time, and the fact that this ended up taking even less at the box office than either Morbious or Madame Web feels slightly unfair. It's certainly not anywhere close to being as bad as the latter. I wish some better decisions had been made, but I also know that I could easily sit down and rewatch this without feeling the overwhelming urge to rip off my own head. How's that for a ringing endorsement?

6/10

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Mubi Monday: Black Bear (2020)

Warning - I wouldn't consider the following information spoilers, BUT I would advise that it is best to go into Black Bear completely blind. So please do yourself a favour, avoid any reviews of the film until you've seen it for yourself.

The second full feature from writer-director Lawrence Michael Levine, Black Bear starts off feeling like something very familiar - a filmmaker (Aubrey Plaza) is welcomed as a guest into the home of a couple with a strained relationship (played by Christopher Abbott and Sarah Gadon). Snippy conversation turns increasingly sour as tension rises. You've seen moments onscreen that explore that kind of atmosphere before. But then things change. A second part presents the actors given different roles, and viewers are now looking at the actual act of creating a fictional piece akin to what we've just been watching. And this is where things really start to get interesting.

Although I appreciate that I didn't know what Black Bear was going to be about, I think I would have enjoyed it even more if I'd been aware of the structural upheaval that was coming along after the first main section. The constant sense of discomfort and unease had me feeling that the film would become a tiresome experience. Thankfully, the big shift in focus makes everything so much better, including what you've just been watching.

Although they take on different roles within each main story segment, Plaza, Abbott, and Gadon are consistently excellent. Plaza is especially impressive in a role that feels more removed from the kind of thing she's done before (and the casting initially, and cannily, allows her to first embody exactly the sort of thing we've seen her do so often already), and both Abbott and Gadon are happy to play characters with layers of deviousness and unpleasantness to them.

Apparently based on some of Levine's dreams, what you get here is a thought-provoking look at just how far some people go to produce a performance from actors, and how manipulative that process can be. You can equate that with any of the more innocuous moments you may have heard of - such as Wes Craven helping Drew Barrymore to act upset by reminding her of stories of animal cruelty - or you can easily consider onscreen performances that came from much more difficult, and problematic, circumstances. The most egregious example of this, in my view, would be some of the work of Bernardo Bertolucci and Alejandro Jodorowsky - men who have delivered some amazing art, but at what cost to women being directed by them.

A film that works well for the actors, as well as being ABOUT actors, Black Bear also explores gaslighting, consent, and abuse. There are toxic relationships on display, as well as toxic environments. Perhaps it's all a very clear analogy for sexual abuse, or perhaps, even more disturbingly for us film fans, it's a damning indictment of methods that are used far too often on film sets where the person in creative control gets to do whatever he (and it's invariably a male in such cases) damn well pleases.

8/10

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Possessor (2020)

It must be both a blessing and a curse to be Brandon Cronenberg. On the one hand, your father is the top name in psychologically-intriguing body horror movies. On the other hand, that's a huge shadow to step out from. After making a decent impression with his debut feature, Antiviral (a film many people enjoyed more than I did), Cronenberg looks like he may be about to solidify his reputation among horror fans with Possessor, a dark and bloody movie that is arguably much more horror of the mind than anything to do with the body.

Andrea Riseborough is Vos, an assassin who takes over the bodies of other people, via an implant, in order to get to her victims. When the job is done, Vos gets the unwitting "host" to commit suicide, thus allowing her psyche to return to her body, which is housed in the machinery allowing her connection to the implant. Vos seems to be struggling with her own identity, understandably so, and also has certain attachments to items/people that may be an issue to someone in her line of work. This all comes to a head in her next job, when she's placed inside Colin Tate (Christopher Abbott). Tate isn't as easily controlled as others, but maybe that is partly to do with Vos not necessarily wanting to immediately return to her own body.

The start of Possessor is certainly a sequence that immediately draws in viewers, showing the assassination M.O. of Vos and then adding enough little details for things to be pieced together. And the end of Possessor is quite jaw-dropping. This is a film book-ended by moments that you won't forget, with Cronenberg showing an ability to deliver real shocks that aren't just delivered in a vacuum. The middle section is where things are a bit problematic, with a number of scenes that are surreal and dark, but not as interesting as the more energised moments around them.

Cronenberg has a bit more room to play here, or so it seems, compared to his debut, and he doesn't squander the opportunity. There's a cast that also includes Sean Bean, Tuppence Middleton, and Jennifer Jason Leigh in small roles, and there's a feeling of a more completely-realised movie world here than there was in Antiviral. Dialogue may not always seem to make sense, but a lot of it is loaded with more meaning that becomes obvious on a rewatch.

Riseborough is very good in her role (although I remain convinced that she isn't now able to take on a role without knowing that it satisfies a certain misery quotient). Even while not seen onscreen, her quiet and cold performance, and how the script conveys this, means that you always feel her presence. Abbott is equally good, and in mostly the same way. He may be onscreen a lot more than Riseborough, but he's portraying someone not always in control of his own actions or thoughts. Everyone else already mentioned does good work, but it's Riseborough and Abbot who own the movie.

I rate this very highly, despite my problems with the middle act. That's how effective the rest of the film is, and how unique it feels. I've not seen anything that caused me to react so strongly in a long time, and a film that can manage that deserves a fair amount of credit.

8/10

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Netflix And Chill: Piercing (2018)

Piercing is weird. There's no other way to describe it. It starts weird, gets weirder, and then manages to get even weirder. Whether you like it or not, well, that's not something you will be able to glean from many reviews. I ended up liking it, and liking it a fair bit, but there were many times when it could have easily just completely lost me.

Christopher Abbott plays Reed, a man with some problems, to put it mildly. He wants to get a prostitute and cause her a lot of harm, ending in death. He ends up having Jackie (Mia Wasikowska) sent to his room. Jackie might be a very suitable victim, or she might end up being something more. And, considering how often we see Reed hearing unusual dialogue from other people who encourage him to follow his urge, it's impossible to really figure out just how much of what we're seeing is real and how much is just how Reed views his world.

The second film from writer-director Nicolas Pesce (I have yet to see his debut, The Eyes Of My Mother), Piercing is an impressively unique piece of work. Although influenced by a variety of cources, from what I could tell, the most interesting "lift" here is probably the music from Tenebrae,  a piece both familiar and yet not instantly recognisable, and one that feels initially jarring alongside the visuals as you know it doesn't belong there . . . but then it starts to quickly belong there. This sums up the approach that Pesce has to the material, originally a novel by Ryû Murakami, and highlights how much effort he puts into allowing something to retain its individuality while also folding in a mass of other interesting touches.

He's helped immensely by his two leads. Abbott performs with the appropriate amount of oddness, viewing the world around him with a mix of disgust, confusion, and mistrust, while filtering the fact that he's determined to claim a victim back into his brain, you can almost visualise his thought process throughout as he says or does things that feed into either his growing security or growing nerves. Wasikowska is perfect in her role, flitting between vulnerable and potentially very cunning and dangerous, and the strange chemistry with Abbott works well. There are some other people onscreen, with the main one being played by Laia Costa, and they all give very good performances of characters as interpreted by the leads.

A film that I can imagine few people absolutely loving, there's enough here to mark it out as something unforgettable, and singles out Pesce as an impressive talent. The boldness of the content, and his approach to it, is admirable, even when it doesn't all work as well as it could. I'll be checking out the other films from Pesce, and I can see myself revisiting this one when I want an atmospheric and visually impressive mindfuck.

7/10

You can buy the movie here.