Shudder Saturday: Pelican Blood (2020)

I have a number of actors I will always watch in anything, but sometimes I forget about them until I am scrolling for my next watch and see their name attached to something. It's easier for me to keep up with the films of mainstream stars from the USA and UK, which is obviously just confirming the bias I tend to have, but if a film stars Adèle Exarchopoulos, for example, then I want to get around to it. The same goes for Nina Hoss, so often used brilliantly by the talented writer-director Christian Petzold. I knew nothing about Pelican Blood before I pressed play, aside from the fact that it starred Nina Hoss.

Hoss plays Wiebke, a woman who spends her time training horses for the police and looking after her adopted daughter, Nikolina (Adelia-Constance Ocleppo). She seems quite content, but also wants to help another child. That leads to her adopting a 5-year-old named Raya (Katerina Lipovska). Raya comes with a lot of issues though, none of which are apparent from the first encounter with her. Can Wiebke make things work while maintaining a balance between her family time and work commitments? Is the problem with Raya something more sinister and powerful than the kind a caring parental figure can deal with?

The second feature to be both written and directed by Katrin Gebbe, this proves two things. I am right to keep watching anything that has Nina Hoss in a main role, and I should remember to check out the debut feature from Gebbe. While this is far from perfect, particularly in a second half that seems to lose confidence when a steady hand is required to take it in one direction or another, it's a unique and dark drama that plays around with "The Bad Seed" concept in a manner that is, for the most part, grounded and appropriately perplexing.

Hoss is fantastic in a lead role that gives her a lot of difficult interactions with the people around her, whether they're children or the few adults moving in and out of the main narrative. She may have more patience than many viewers (and certainly has a lot more patience than myself), but her performance has a hint of desperation and strong will running through it that makes it easier to believe how far she will go as she tries to connect with a child who seems destined to be abandoned. Lipovska is scarily intense as that child, although it's hard to see how much she acts out of spite and how much she acts out of lacking the guidance and context others have had in their lives. Ocleppo has a lot less to do, but she does enough to show how much she is impacted by the ongoing situation. There are a few other characters, but the main one to mention is Benedikt, played by Murathan Muslu in a way that positions him as being a really good mix of being both strong and open-hearted for the right person, and Wiebke could be the right person.

Gebbe has a good instinct for what to show and what to leave just out of frame, and she's happy to leave some questions unanswered, but she's helped by cinematographer Moritz Schultheiß, editor Heike Gnida, and everyone else collaborating on the look and feel of something that can then stay completely focused on the strange battle of wills taking place between a parent and child. There's no guarantee that you will come away from Pelican Blood satisfied, but it has enough interesting ideas in the mix to make it worth your time . . . especially if you've ever had experience with a child during some tantrum-filled pre-school years.

7/10

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Shudder Saturday: The Field Guide To Evil (2018)

I have said before, and will undoubtedly say it again, that anthology horror movies are often an easy sell for me. I love short film content, and even an uneven horror anthology should have some thing to entertain you among the various segments. If you don't like one then just wait, a better one should be along soon enough for your viewing pleasure.

The Field Guide To Evil is a film that has come along to be the exception to that rule. I can't remember the last time I had such a miserable experience with a horror anthology movie, and it's quite telling that my memory of many of these shorts has faded so soon after watching the film.

With the emphasis very much on folk horror, as is clear from the title, a variety of writers and directors set out to provide cinematic interpretations of folk tales from their countries of birth. This covers a wide range of potentially interesting tales, from a goblin wanting to join in with some revelry to forbidden love, from  a djinn that is connected to childbirth, to a group of humanoids known as "melonheads".

The big problem here is that almost none of these stories are interesting enough for their limited runtime. Which would be fine if the runtime was a bit more limited. This film clocks in at just under two hours, and not even a quarter of that is as entertaining as it could be.

Although things often look visually impressive, the writing often leaves a lot to be desired, and the cast are left struggling to convey any decent message as the screen is filled with odd, although often pleasingly unsettling, imagery. Text often sets the scene for each tale, but viewers may still feel as if they're dropped in to the middle of something that is a bit too complex for the kind of quick scares and punches that anthology segments usually provide. Although I have said that the film runs too long, many of these short tales could be greatly improved by being further fleshed out and turned into a full feature.

I'm not going to name all of the writers and directors here, sorry, but I will say that names I was looking forward to seeing work from include Peter Strickland, Can Evernol, and Agnieszka Smoczynska. If you also enjoy their work, I recommend you go back to rewatch some of their features. 

In fairness, there's very little here that absolutely stinks, to use a proper cinematic term. It's just that nothing makes enough of an impact, which makes the runtime feel like more of an endurance test than it should be. The tales should feel varied, but they don't. They should feel like a worthwhile point is made, in my opinion anyway, but they don't. This could have been, stripping away some of the narrative story aspects, an interesting collection of visual essays. It isn't. I just didn't like it. And I continued to dislike it for most of the two hours it was on. Which made me feel rather grumpy as the end credits finally came around.

3/10

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