Under spell of a pagan story
When they’re not casting spells, making deals with a cackling devil or creating magical servants from inanimate objects, the 19th-century villagers of “November” work and thieve — whatever it takes to eke out a living from the muck.
Writer-director Rainer Sarnet’s earthbound fairy tale occupies a dreamscape somewhere between the teeming canvases of Brueghel and the existential agonies of Bela Tarr’s films. And it’s funny, with a sly salaciousness all its own. Based on a 2000 novel by Andrus Kivirähk that draws on the mythology of Estonia (it was that Baltic country’s submission to the Academy Awards), this folk tale braids together the primordial and the divine in endlessly surprising ways.
The shimmering blackand-white cinematography by Mart Taniel tracks the connections among a village’s wolves and witches, landed gentry and scrabbling farmers. And then there are the kratts — creature-contraptions with bargained-for infusions of human soul, usually constructed from cast-off items like tools and animal skulls. One defiant young man builds his from a snowman, who turns out to be a most poetic being.
That young man is Hans (Jörgen Liik), one of the unrequited lovers at the center of the story. While Hans schemes to get near a sleepwalking German baroness (Katariina Unt), fellow villager Liina (Rea Lest), the luminously feral heart of the movie, pines for him.
More than the love story, it’s the potent stew of nature and spirit, pagan and Christian, that gives the film its zing.
— Sheri Linden
“November.” In Estonian and German with English subtitles. Not rated. Running time: 1 hour, 55 minutes. Playing: Arena Cinelounge Sunset, Hollywood.
Darkness runs deep in ‘Lullaby’
Prolific South African filmmaker Darrell James Roodt has directed more than 30 movies in the last 30 years, ranging from Oscarnominated social dramas (“Yesterday”) to tawdry Bhorror. “The Lullaby” — written by frequent Roodt collaborator Tarryn-Tanille Prinsloo — falls into the latter category, though the veteran director has more than enough chops to keep a doggedly generic premise lively.
Reine Swart stars as Chloe, a teenage runaway who returns home — depressed and pregnant — to her disapproving, meddling mom, Ruby (Thandi Puren). Chloe’s funk deepens after she gives birth, when she begins seeing a ghostly crone urging her to slaughter the newborn baby that she’s persistently too blue to care for.
Roodt and Prinsloo borrow heavily from Roman Polanski’s “Rosemary’s Baby” and “Repulsion,” closely examining one woman’s paranoid anxiety. Chloe’s mysterious moods may be tied to one of the men in her life: her therapist, Dr. Reed (Brandon Auret) and/or her suspiciously kindly ex-boyfriend, Adam (Deànré Reiners).
As is often the case with movies like this, the resolution to Chloe’s story is ultimately unsatisfying — despite how vague Roodt and Prinsloo try to keep the details, all the way through to their big question mark of an ending.
But by sticking closely to a heroine who’s skating on the edge of sanity, the film keeps the audience properly disoriented. Darkness runs deep in “The Lullaby,” rooted in the never-ending conflict between mothers and daughters.
— Noel Murray
“The Lullaby.” Not rated. Running time: 1 hour, 27 minutes. Playing: Laemmle Music Hall, Beverly Hills.
Only thing to vanish is interest
The most passable lens through which to watch writer-director Shawn Christensen’s risible indie drama “The Vanishing of Sidney Hall” is by counting the many ways it grates as both an agonized-artist pity party and a male fantasy of envied power.
Sidney (Logan Lerman) is at first the precocious, misunderstood high school writer wannabe whose class readings routinely get him in trouble. But he’s also sought out by the waifish blond admirer (Elle Fanning) across the street and the secretholding jock (Blake Jenner) who used to bully him.
Then Sidney becomes the new J.D. Salinger, bespectacled, dismissive of fame and weird fans, and blasé about bedding the daughter of his editor (Nathan Lane). But when a devotee kills himself, Sidney withdraws, morphing into an outlaw-bearded, trainriding hobo who burns his own books as penance, even as a mysterious searcher (Kyle Chandler) wants to write his biography.
That’s a lot of poor-talented-me “ouch” to cram into one misguided narrative, the three phases in Sidney’s life played out simultaneously (but not seamlessly) through cross-editing. Christensen’s purity of pretentious purpose is remarkably unconcerned with such things as obviousness, superficiality, and retrograde views of women (they’re all portrayed as needy drags).
The many ridiculous tragedies are just there to slather showy woundedness on a weak, annoying character, leaving “The Vanishing of Sidney Hall” a mysteryfree mystery with an inexhaustible supply of eyerolling postures.
— Robert Abele
“The Vanishing of Sidney Hall.” Rated: R, for language and some sexual references. Running time: 1 hour, 57 minutes. Playing: Laemmle Music Hall, Beverly Hills.
Enough creepy chills to satisfy
“Midnighters,” a sinister crime thriller marking the feature debut of siblings Julius (director) and Alston (screenwriter) Ramsay, plays like “Blood Simple’s” impressionable but less proficient kid brother, nevertheless has some devious touches of its own.
Released, appropriately, under the IFC Midnight banner, the film takes place on an ill-fated New Year’s Eve, as young couple Lindsey (Alex Essoe) and Jeff (Dylan McTee), returning home from festivities, accidentally run over a man appearing in the middle of a dark, heavily wooded road.
Realizing that neither of them would pass a Breathalyzer test, they panic, stashing his body in their car until they can come up with a viable Plan B. In the interim, they discover that their encounter with the heavily bleeding victim lying in their backseat wasn’t as random as believed — what with the slip of paper they find in his wallet with their address written on it.
Like Joel and Ethan Coen and Danny and Oxide Pang before them, the Ramsay brothers are attracted to all the grisly stuff found at the junction between noirtinged thrillers and scarlethued horror, although the plotting here isn’t as tightly coiled and the characters aren’t as delineated as obviously intended.
Even so, the amount of creepy atmosphere they’ve resourcefully squeezed from a limited budget — and spine-tingling Rhode Island backdrops — are enough to make you curious about what they’ll do for an encore.
— Michael Rechtshaffen
“Midnighters.” Not rated. Running time: 1 hour, 33 minutes. Playing: Arena Cinelounge Sunset, Hollywood; also on VOD.
Raging against today’s horrors
As gutbucket personalproject indies go, the volatile, graphic and (somehow) corny “Eat Me” couldn’t have arrived at a more propitious time for a story about the nightmare of sexual assault. Except that actresswriter Jacqueline Wright’s adaptation of her controversial, trauma-inspired play (which was staged in L.A. in 2005) doesn’t fit easily into categories like horror or thriller or issue drama and at times even hopes you can choke out an uncomfortable laugh.
A one-set two-hander taking place over a night, it starts with a deliriously despondent, housebound woman (Wright) jolted from her pill-gobbled suicide attempt by a home invasion. After a prolonged sequence of degrading, violent rapetorture, her attacker (a demonic Brad Carter) comes to realize his ready-made prey has an armor of audacious, mood-jarring selfloathing that, once she voices it, opens his own psychic wounds.
The theatrical origins of “Eat Me” are ever-present and not very successfully hidden by director Adrian Cruz. (As for the aforementioned stabs at humor, the less said the better.) But if you can get through the first half ’s repulsiveness in word, deed and exploitation-adjacent rendering, Wright’s and Carter’s committed mosh pit waltz of bloody, angry Act 2 unburdening — simultaneously garish and sensitive — creates its own weirdly galvanizing, human tension.
No easy path to forgiveness and communication, this one, but as a tour-deforce howl of primal, damaged rage, it contributes in its own strange way to the current era of public reckoning and testy healing.
— Robert Abele
“Eat Me.” Not rated. Running time: 1 hour, 35 minutes. Playing: Laemmle Music Hall, Beverly Hills.
Snappy scenes propel action
The Korean thriller “Golden Slumber” is the rare chase picture as invested in its characters and setting as in its twists. Director Noh Dong-seok — working from a Kôtarô Isaka novel — fills the film with rich detail, helping this “innocent man, wrongly accused” story overcome its dogged conventionality.
Gang Dong-won stars as Kim Gun-woo, a delivery man who achieved viral fame across Korea after being caught on a security camera rescuing a pop star. Then a shadowy black ops organization — connected to a member of Kim’s defunct rock band — takes advantage of his popularity and frames him for a political assassination.
Most of “Golden Slumber” apes the likes of “North by Northwest” and “The Fugitive,” following the hero as he narrowly dodges capture, sometimes with the help of a mysterious benefactor (played by Kim Eui-sung). Noh, best known for arty low-key dramas, excels at the movie’s many action sequences.
But he’s much better at character-building. It’s easy to care about Kim’s fate, given how well Gang and Noh define the character as a nice guy who’s abandoned his ambitions and is maybe too naive about how the world actually works.
“Golden Slumber” isn’t as wide-eyed as its protagonist, though. The movie ultimately paints mass media cynicism as its real villain, noting how a sensationalist press and a gullible public allow amoral creeps to spread dangerous lies. And that’s a valuable warning — even when embedded within some snappy entertainment.
— Noel Murray
“Golden Slumber.” In Korean with English subtitles. Not rated. Running time: 1 hour, 48 minutes. Playing: CGV Cinema, Los Angeles; CGV Buena Park, Buena Park.