Movie Reviews – Sylvia Foster

On May 24th, 2022, I sat on my couch in front of my TV and was about to begin my usual evening routine of picking a movie. What was different about this evening, though, was that earlier that day a gunman had entered Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas and massacred 19 children and two teachers, injuring 17 others and emotionally scarring an untold amount of people in the process.

I found out about this massacre by accident. True, I would have heard about it sooner or later (probably scrolling the news while laying in bed the next morning), but I’m not on social media, I hadn’t gotten any breaking news emails about it, so when I saw that the first thing on my Hulu homepage was a live news broadcast I thought, “Sure, let’s watch the news. How bad can it be?” (No, seriously).

It took me a moment to digest what I was seeing. Instead of a reporter stationed at a desk telling me the latest updates on the war in Ukraine, I was assailed with footage of crime scene tape flapping in the breeze, what seemed like acres of empty emergency vehicles with their lights flashing, and a hollow-voiced team of reporters. It was probably about 5 or 6 PM and the description on the bottom of the screen still read “12 children feared dead,” despite the shooting having played out hours earlier. In short, it was a chaotic scene, presented mechanically and repeatedly in a way that only the 24-hour news cycle can provide.

I was struck dumb. This fresh horror combined with the barely scabbed-over tragedy that occurred in a supermarket in Buffalo only 10 days earlier shot through me in a way that I was unaccustomed to. “I feel like I should cry,” I said. And so I did. I coughed up sobs and spiraled until I pulled it together enough to call my mom and ask how are we supposed to live like this, how do you return to your daily existence after something like this ricochets through you. She said, “You don’t move forward, you sit with it. Also, turn off the news.”

I knew I wouldn’t be able to think about anything else that night and I didn’t want to think about anything else. That is my approach to tragedy: get close to it. For whatever reason, I decided a long time ago that knowledge is the antidote to fear and ever since I’ve been staring into the abyss. So, with the massacre on my mind, I went looking for a violent movie to watch.

I’m sure it seems like a counterproductive way to cope with something as horrible as a mass shooting at an elementary school. However, it’s not like I could watch Notting Hill and forget it ever happened. The day was already marked with blood and I wanted to open myself to the horror of what happened. I am not naturally an empath, which is why I have to make myself one.

Let me explain my relationship to war movies. As I’ve become more interested in history, and therefore more acquainted with the particulars of war, I’ve softened from my suburban, pacifistic “everyone in the military is evil” view to one that is far less black and white. There are a few universal truths about humanity, and one of those is that the strong will always manipulate the weak. I realized it wasn’t the rank-and-file foot soldiers who deserved my anti-militaristic wrath, but the men at the top ordering troops around on a map. The more I learned about war, the less naïve I became and the less I villainized the masses tasked with fighting the war. I began to empathize with these people as victims of imperialism, nationalism, and capitalism, same as most everyone else. The more I learned about war, the more I realized how impossible it was to imagine it. So, I started looking to war movies to help me grasp even a fraction of what that chaos and confusion might feel like, instead of just judging the participants without taking their nightmarish experience into account.

That’s how I stumbled across Fury.

I love watching Brad Pitt fight Nazis. Anyone fighting Nazis, really, is just one of the most clearcut good versus evil situations, in my opinion. And sometimes it feels really good to align yourself with the side of good, even if it’s not in a Walt Disney kind of way. That simplicity is one of the things that I find comforting in war movies. The second thing that comforts me about war movies is how basic, universal, and primeval everything boils down to: man fights man, man experiences true fear, man curses God, man confronts death.

Another thing I love about war movies, and Fury in particular, is the dialogue. It’s economical, often darkly funny, and based purely around survival. There’s a resilience that comes across in the dialogue of this film, something indicating the ability to continue living despite coming face to face with all the horror man has to offer. There’s just something about watching these men laugh, quote the Bible, and refuse to give up that resonates with me, especially during a time as violent as this. It would certainly be easy to criticize me for even associating the modern-day United States with the Western Front of WWII, but in the scope of history, all violence boils down to the same thing: “Wait until you see…What a man can do to another man.”

Fury loses its realism in the end, with a last-ditch effort to scrounge up some heroism in a god-forsaken landscape. It’s an unfortunate but expected choice, considering the appetite of the American public. War (and war movies) is supposed to be about success and glory, not confronting the stark realities of man.

You could watch Fury solely for Brad Pitt, solely for Shia LaBeouf, solely for Michael Peña, or solely for Jon Bernthal (Logan Lerman is basically a non-entity), because the performances are amazing. You could watch Fury simply to learn more about tank warfare and the invasion of Germany. You could watch Fury because of the fact that war movies also boast some of the best pyrotechnics, make-up, sound-editing, and special effects in Hollywood. You could watch Fury because war movies are horror movies, in the truest sense of the term.

I don’t watch movies like Fury for heroism or patriotism or even for historical interest. I watch them because they’re often well-researched, focused on accuracy, and are prime landscapes for me to project my imagination onto. I watch them because things like this happened, people suffered this way, and it only feels right to acknowledge their experience the best that I can, especially if I intend to take part in discussions surrounding conflict. I watched Fury because I don’t want to #prayforUvalde or #prayforUkraine or #prayforBuffalo; I don’t want to become numb.

After missing out on seeing The Northman in theatres, I was in need of an A24 fix so I decided to see Men. I’m familiar with much of Garland’s work, with my favorites being Annihilation and the FX series Devs. As someone who veers toward the primitivist, it takes more than a spoonful of sugar for me to embrace high-tech dystopias in my free time, and Garland has always managed to make the uncanny valley approachable and aesthetically appealing to me. I was excited to follow Garland into a more rural and slasher-inspired atmosphere where the director could prove his versatility.

The film follows Harper, a slightly-chic Englishwoman, as she seeks to convalesce from a personal tragedy in the idyllic town of Cotson. Three hours from home (and her closest friend), this retreat can go one of two ways. Going into the film, I didn’t really know what sort of horror to expect, and the film let me steep in this ambiguity for a little while. While I wouldn’t exactly call it a slow build (things unravel fairly quickly), you don’t really find out what kind of horror movie until the end; it plays with horror conventions throughout, before ending with a smirk.

Spoilers Ahead.

I was quickly reminded of what makes Garland’s work so unique: warm, yet extremely modern interiors, soft lighting and symmetry, a preoccupation with choral music. It was actually the haunting sharpness and whimsy of the protagonist-created vocal arrangement that first made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. In this particular scene, Harper is enjoying her first walk through the countryside when she comes across an abandoned tunnel in the forest. The tunnel is huge, both in height and depth, and the shallow water covering the ground reflects its arch, creating a dark ring of black water and empty space. Invigorated from her walk, Harper casts her voice into the tunnel and it echoes back repeatedly, as an almost angelic choir. This goes on for a while, and the longer Harper spends in this one eerie locale, the more a feeling of doom creeps up on the viewer. Harper, obviously, is unaware of the premise of the film, its tagline, or that she’s participating in a horror movie at all. We, on the other hand, know that there has to be someone hiding in the tunnel (ostensibly a man), that danger is lurking, that she probably wouldn’t be singing into a tunnel if she knew someone else was there. The viewer is therefore immersed in one of those classic “the killer is right behind you” moments, with all the foreboding and anticipation that comes with it, without even seeing the lurking figure. This scene’s power lies in its length and its ability to create a powerful fear of the unknown in a limited setting. Even though we knew the man was there all along, simply had to be there, it’s hard not to jump a little when the figure finally reveals itself.

Eventually the naked figure who is magnetically drawn toward Harper and her womb-colored Airbnb is revealed to have some relation to a folkloric deity whose image can be found opposite a symbol of fertility on a creepily explicit baptismal urn in the local church. This sort of ancient European horror echoes the premise of films such as Midsommar and The Ritual, films which appeal to me because of their ability to dig up terror from the past instead of attempting to catapult the viewer into the horror of the future. This fanatical, nude man covered with blood and oak leaves is exactly what you might expect to find in the forests of a town as backwards as Cotson. The fact that this man comes across as menacing and bestial instead of delusional and pitiful is because of a few main factors: his nudity, his status as a man, and his silence.

The man is never armed when he approaches Harper and instead invokes fear through his evidently sexual and predatory approach. Why does a strange man gravitate toward an unsuspecting woman in her home? To do her harm, of course. Why does a strange, naked man attempt to break into the woman’s home? To harm her sexually, of course. This is an ingrained dynamic that we have all interacted with to a varying degree, therefore any further weaponization or characterization of the man is unnecessary; history and television have given us everything we need to know about this situation.

Men was far gorier than I expected, and I give it serious props for making me look away (birth is the most terrifying experience I can imagine). The ruthlessness of the bloodier scenes is something I was impressed by; Garland forces us to look at the last thing we want to see and wields his directorial power over the audience in this way. The image I, and probably most viewers, most struggled to conceptualize was the unnatural series of pregnancies and births which split forth from the male form. I came to interpret these bloated and stumbling figures as fathers giving birth to generations of unchanged men, who come tumbling forth woman-blaming, self-aggrandizing, hostile.

I’ve seen several reviews bashing this movie for a pseudo-feminist approach or for not having any inherent meaning or moral. Apparently, titling something Men warrants a more devout approach in some people’s eyes. I, on the other hand, applaud this film for doing what I think all good works of art do: provide the scaffolding for the viewer’s imagination and personal experience to flesh out and interpret in their own unique way. I don’t need to be told how to feel, or slapped repeatedly with a moral, even on something as personal and loaded as gender relations. And neither should you.

Category: Movie Reviews

‘Fury’

Alex Garland’s ‘Men’