Shudder Saturday: Tigers Are Not Afraid (2017)

Issa López has been working in the film industry for a number of years now, and those years of hard work have well and truly paid off with Tigers Are Not Afraid, a sweet and effective horror movie that, it's very fair to say, has elevated her profile considerably and allowed her to make what may well be a major step up, in terms of her career opportunities and a wider potential audience. That will happen when festival-goers, genre fans, and such luminaries as Stephen King and Guillermo del Toro, all rush to throw praise and superlatives at your latest film.

I had to wait a hell of a long time to see this, which is even annoying when you consider the fact that I was at the Glasgow Frightfest event that first put this film on my radar. A burst water pipe at home meant I had to head back early and deal with arranging emergency repairs, all while we battled "the beast from the East" towards the beginning of 2018. I read enthusiastic social media comments with despair, being convinced by everyone who was in attendance that weekend that I had missed the best film of the festival. Now, having finally seen the film, it's hard to argue with that opinion. I tried to keep my expectations in check, but I needn't have worried. López has crafted something beautiful and mesmerising here, and it's no surprise that Del Toro has been so impressed (considering how much it feels like something he could have made when he was still making smaller, more intimate, chillers).

The basic story focuses on Estrella (Paola Lara), a young girl who returns home one day to find her mother has been killed by local gangsters. This leads to her encountering a group of children who all keep each other company on the streets of Mexico, living by their wits and their ability to support one another through their darkest times. A chain of events, involving a stolen phone, leads to the children making enemies of the gun-toting gangsters. Estrella may be the one person who can save them. She has a limited number of wishes that can come true. Of course, Estrella knows that she is now seeing the corpse of her mother appearing intermittently after wishing she could have her back, so the wishes may not be a blessing.

I hope that those who know me well enough will know that I am not prone to hyperbole. It's why I resigned myself to simply utilising this little corner of the internet to basically talk to myself every time I write a little bit about movies. Nobody really needs to take note. The things that get noticed nowadays are the extremes. You have to LOVE or HATE something, yet the reality is that a lot of things end up somewhere in between. Tigers Are Not Afraid is not one of those things. I LOVE this movie. I simply cannot think of any one thing I would change about it, and I've been thinking hard over the past 24 hours, since the end credits rolled and I wondered whether or not I would be delivering a rare 10/10 rating (heads up . . . that's a yes).

López has written and directed a small masterpiece, and packaged it in a tight 83-minute runtime that perfectly suits the mix of the light, fairytale-esque, narrative and the moments that linger on something eerie or emotionally impactful, or both. I just can't think of any one moment in which she doesn't make the right decision in her approach to the material, making the end result a beautiful collage of commentary, atmosphere, and hugely satisfying cinematic moments. Between the real-world dangers being shown onscreen and the film techniques used throughout, López shows that she can navigate both territories.

She's helped by her cast. There are some adults here, doing good work, but the film really belongs to the children, particularly Lara, Juan Ramón López (playing Shine), Hanssel Casillas, and Rodrigo Cortes. Every single child actor gives a great performance, even if the film understandably gives some of them a lot less to do than others.

I'll either run out of words soon enough or I'll keep throwing out too many platitudes, which I am loathe to do, so I'll just say that I have seen some people refer to this as a supernatural-tinged Calvin And Hobbes, which is true. It's also quite similar to a land-based Life Of Pi (hey, it's my review and I'll throw around any wild ideas I like). Most of all, however, Tigers Are Not Afraid is your new potential genre classic. It doesn't need to be compared to other movies or creative works, even if those comparisons are favourable, because López has crafted familiar elements into something special and unique.

10/10

Tigers Are Not Afraid is still in some cinemas, and it's now on Shudder.

Red Lights (2012)

Written and directed by Rodrigo Cortes (who previously stepped behind the camera to helm the excellent Buried), Red Lights may not be quite as clever as it thinks it is, but that doesn't stop it from being a fine slice of entertainment while it's on.

Cillian Murphy plays Tom Buckley, a loyal assistant to Margaret Matheson (Sigourney Weaver). The two of them work, predominantly, on debunking paranormal activity. They also teach students about the many tricks of the trade, from table lifting to psychic readings and more. The only big name in psychic phenomena who seems to be "the real thing" is Simon Silver (Robert De Niro), a major celebrity who announces his comeback after many years out of the limelight. Buckley starts to get frustrated when Matheson refuses to pursue Silver more aggressively, but the latter warns her assistant that chasing a man who has kept his hands clean for so long could prove to be more dangerous than it's worth. But Buckley can't let it go, he knows that Silver is faking it and just needs to figure out how the scheme works.

Anyone who has read Attack Of The Unsinkable Rubber Ducks, and/or anything by Derren Brown (such as this fine work), should know where Red Lights is going. Thankfully, that doesn't make the journey any less enjoyable.

Cortes does a more than competent job in the scripting and directing department, but he's also helped enormously by the great cast. This isn't a sprawling ensemble picture, but to have Murphy, Weaver and De Niro in lead roles is a major plus, especially when the latter star is coaxed into giving one of his better performances in recent years. Toby Jones and Joely Richardson both do fantastic work in their smaller roles, and Elizabeth Olsen is just fine, although a little bit redundant (she is, essentially, just there to allow the audience to receive information).

Always interesting and entertaining, Red Lights may stumble in the last 10-15 minutes, but it does so with such gusto that it kind of gets away with its trickery. The fact that it maintains its own movie-world logic is also a major factor in sugar-coating the pill that the third act delivers.

I enjoyed this movie, as you can tell, but as I wrote this review I realised that I was growing to like it more and more. It's one that I look forward to purchasing and revisiting in the near future. I recommend giving it a go.

8/10

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Apartment 143 AKA Emergo (2011)

A team of parapsychologists move into an apartment that contains a distraught man and his son and daughter and try to figure out just what's going on. Are supernatural events happening or is there a more logical explanation? And, supernatural or not, just what is the reason for it all?

Apartment 143 (also known as Emergo) is, as you may have guessed, another entry in the "found footage" subgenre and like so many that have come before it things aren't 100% successful although there are one or two excellent, but very easy, scares in the first half. Sadly, everything starts to fray and then come apart in the second half.

Written by Rodrigo Cortes and directed by Carles Torrens, it's clear that this is a movie that wants to be taken seriously. Light on humour, it starts to build up tension from almost the first few scenes. This is great, and I was rubbing my hands with glee as the situation grew more and more intense for our investigative team, but in this attempt to be taken seriously the filmmakers make the mistake of deciding that everything should be explained in due course, which leads to all momentum grinding to a halt about 15-20 minutes before the grand finale as someone relates a complete backstory that really could have been teased out throughout the preceding 60+ minutes.

The acting from all concerned is okay, I guess, with the best turns coming from Kai Lennox as a concerned father, Gia Mantegna as a resentful daughter and Fiona Glascott as Helen, the only female of the investigative team and the person who gets the most shaken up by things.

The execution of the material is fine, it's the script that's the biggest problem here. It's just too clunky and mis-shapen in places when it should be streamlined and lining up scare after scare. It's not the worst ever filmed for the horror genre, of course (there are far too many contenders for that position), but it's bad enough to damage the film and drag it down from a solid outing to something that warrants an average rating.

5/10

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