Black Gate

My last film of Fantasia 2018 was a late surprise. The Festival often starts with a screening slot still to be announced, as the Directors negotiate to add one last film to their line-up. This year, just a few days before Fantasia ended, they announced that they’d close this year’s festival with a screening of Lords of Chaos, a film by Jonas Åkerlund based on the true story of the band Mayhem in the early 1990s. It’s a drama, with a lot of very dark comedy, involving murder, suicide, and church burnings. The version of the film that played Fantasia was the same unrated version that premiered at the Sundance festival earlier this year; apparently cuts will have to be made before the movie can be shown again in a North American theatre. (I can’t say with absolute certainty what those cuts will be or what the reason for them is, but the leading theory I heard is that they have to do with the film’s realistic depiction of suicide.)

Lords of Chaos is based on the book of the same name by Michael Moynihan and Didrik Søderlind, with a script by Dennis Magusson in collaboration with Åkerlund. It’s worth noting that in the mid-80s Åkerlund was briefly a member of Bathory, a band that laid the groundwork for the black metal scene that emerged a few years later. Definitions are tricky in metal, and some will argue that Bathory was one of the creators of black metal; the point is that Åkerlund has roots in this world as well as being an experienced director with a long list of credits.

The film he’s made now claims to be “based on truth and lies.” Starting in 1987, we’re introduced at once to young Norwegian metal musician Øystein Aarseth (Rory Culkin), who is our narrator: “this is my story, and it will end badly,” he promises. Aarseth, under the name Euronymous, leads the band Mayhem, which has hit a plateau — but when a new singer sends in an audition tape (along with a dead mouse), Euronmymous sees new hope for the band. Per Yngve Ohlin (Jack Kilmer), who takes the name Dead, is deeply troubled but immensely talented, and Mayhem takes off, helped also by Euronymous’s knack for self-promotion: he positions Mayhem as “true Norwegian black metal,” in contrast to the proliferation of un-true Swedish death metal bands. Mayhem, he implies, is at the vanguard of a movement, harder and more unyielding than anyone else. More evil.

And so we get a moment in which an enthusiastic young fan approaches Euronymous to gush about the band, Euronymous stares at him in a long silence, then points to a patch on the fan’s jacket and reads out “Scorpions” in a flat and chillingly ironic tone. The old-school German hard rock band’s used like a bludgeon, a sign of the un-trueness of the fan, who is crushed; and we realise how Euronymous can and will pick instantly on a small tell to dominate and manipulate people around him. Because the fan, Kristian (Emory Cohen), isn’t driven away but instead becomes even more determined to gain Euronymous’s approval. Dead commits suicide, but if Euronymous is affected, he doesn’t show it much. With his parents’ money he opens a metal record store, and in the basement holds meetings of a “black circle” of favoured musicians. “I was building my own empire,” he reflects. “Everything that had happened had made me immune to reality.” Kristian, still a fan, wants to be a part of this group — for he’s a musician, too, and, it turns out, a talented one. Brought into the circle, he takes new names, Varg Vikernes and Count Grishnackh, and slowly emerges as a rival for Euronymous among the black circle. The two young men compete with each other to say and do ever more extreme things, driving each other further and further, and it is very clear that Euronymous’s early promise is true: this can only end badly.

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The two final movies I’d watch at the 2018 Fantasia International Film Festival were both in the big Hall Theatre. It’s perhaps appropriate that the first of those two aspired to be a crowd-pleasing blockbuster. Detective Dee: The Four Heavenly Kings (Di Renjie zhi Sidatianwang, 狄仁杰之四大天王) was directed by veteran Tsui Hark and written by Chang Chialu. It’s nominally a prequel to two other movies, though no knowledge of those films is required.

(Before the movie played we saw a short film, “No One Will Ever Believe You,” written and directed by Frédéric Chalté. A young girl wants to play a prank on her sister, and hides in her room. But she ends up becoming a witness to a supernatural horror, and by extension so does the audience. It’s a well-crafted 6-minute short shown largely from the perspective of a girl frozen in terror, and the point of view works. Shots from inside a bedroom closet through a blind emphasise the hidden viewer; it’s not surprising, maybe, that Chalté’s other short at this year’s festival, “Le otta dita della morte,” is a tribute to the surreal paranoia of the giallo film.)

For the sake of completeness, a bit of background on Detective Dee: Di Renjie was a magistrate and duke in 7th-century China who became the hero of an 18th-century Chinese detective novel by an anonymous author. (The first part of this novel, Four Great Strange Cases of Empress Wu’s reign, or Wu Zetian si da qi an, would be translated into English as Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee by Dutch diplomat Robert van Gulik in 1949; van Gulik would go on to write a series of his own about Dee’s adventures.) The novel shows Dee solving multiple crimes at once, with the help of dreams, a ghost, and a team of constables who skilled in martial arts; detective novels, as invented in China around 1600 (called gong’an fiction, “case records of a public law court”), often included elements of the supernatural as key aspects of the plot. At any rate, Judge Dee, or Detective Dee, has starred as the hero of numerous TV shows and films over the years in both China and the West.

Most relevant here, in 2010 Tsui Hark made Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame, written by Chen Kuofu with Andy Lau as Dee. In 2013 Hark made a prequel, Young Detective Dee: Rise of the Sea Dragon, with a script he wrote with Chang Chialu. Now comes The Four Heavenly Kings, a second prequel that’s set after the second movie but before the first one. As in the last, Dee’s played by Mark Chao, Shaofeng Feng plays Dee’s foil Yuchi Zhenjin of the Ministry of Justice, and Lin Gengxin is Dee’s friend and ally, doctor Shatuo Zhong. As the movie opens, Dee’s been granted custody of the “Dragon Taming Mace,” a magical item powerful enough to save a country from any threat, or to destroy it. The somewhat sinister Empress Wu (Caria Lau) feels threatened by the mace in Dee’s hands, and plots to regain it, enlisting the aid of Yuchi Zhenjin — and a clan of wizards. But there’s something more going on behind the scenes, involving mind control, secrets of the founding of the Tang dynasty, and the mysterious Faceless Lord.

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For my last movie of 2018 in the Fantasia screening room I selected a Canadian horror movie called Lifechanger. Written and directed by Justin McConnell, it follows an entity named Drew (narrated by Bill Oberst Jr), who, born human, at age 12 developed the ability and need to change bodies with other people (which Drew does repeatedly through the movie, tying the film together with voice-over ruminations; thus the “narrated by” in the previous parenthesis). The process kills the other person, and leaves Drew trapped in a swiftly decaying body. For decades, he’s had to keep changing bodies every few days, the inevitable rot slowed only slightly by doses of cocaine. Lately, though, he’s convinced himself he’s fallen in love with a woman named Julia. Drew wants to be close to her, but how can he do that given what he is?

That the question feels meaningful makes the movie a success. It’s odd as a story, with beats in unusual places. Drew never seems too curious about his own nature. Which makes sense; by the time we meet him, he’s resigned himself to the terms of his existence. Still, the movie occasionally feels convenient; his habit of living a few days as one of his victims, for example, feels as though it’d be unsustainable. The plotting here is not the strongest, I think, and I didn’t feel tension build in a traditional way. But it’s an interesting film nevertheless.

This is a small-scale movie, a kind of neighbourhood supernatural horror story set in a suburb of Toronto. It feels a little like the low-budget horror films that filled video store shelves in the 80s, but viewed from a different and somewhat more sophisticated angle. It’s a kind of revisionist horror movie, taking the genre and taking a new look at its framework and structure, keeping what makes those things work while using a different narrative approach. The aim here is not gore, though there is that, but explication of character through the use of horror. As such it succeeds; Drew feels like somebody who’s responding as a human being in an inhuman situation — and so has become inhuman himself, and now accepts the inhumanity as natural.

Drew’s a monster, then, so it’s not surprising that he doesn’t consider being honest with Julia about his nature. The movie manages a tricky balance here: Oberst’s dry narration and the sharp script keep Drew at least interesting, though he’s fundamentally unsympathetic on a number of levels. Drew’s got a certain amount of self-knowledge but views mass-murder as merely a necessity for his own survival; being that self-obsessed, he stalks Julia, in a number of different bodies, trying to find out where she lives and whatever information he can that will help him get close to her.

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The second film I saw on the last day of Fantasia was a Korean remake of a Spanish original. The Vanished (사라진 밤) was written and directed by Chang-hee Lee, and is based on the 2012 film The Body (El cuerpo), which was written by Oriol Paulo and Lara Sendim and directed by Paulo. Lee’s film begins with a mysterious attack on a morgue security guard who may have seen a supposedly-dead woman (Hie-ae Kim) very much alive. At any rate, the body’s missing now. The police investigate, led by Jung-sik Woo (Sang-kyung Kim), who calls the husband of the deceased Seol-hee, Jin-han Park (Kang-woo Kim), to the morgue and ends up holding him for questioning. Did Jin-han have a hand in Seol-hee’s apparently-natural death? Or is someone seeking vengeance on him? What about his mistress, Hye-jin (Ji-an Han)? Questions and strange incidents multiply, as the police struggle to solve the crime before dawn, when they must let Jin-han go.

This is a movie that challenges the audience to work out what’s happening. Theoretically, even describing what genre it is could be construed as a spoiler; there’s an experimental drug that enters the story, and opens the door to various different possibilities. I can say, though, that there’s a fair-play aspect to the film. It’s quite possible to figure out by at least the half-way mark roughly what’s happening. For better or worse, I can say this because I did figure out what was happening without particularly trying to. I don’t know that it’d be fair to say that the film’s obvious, though; I happened to pick up on a couple of visual clues, and I’m not sure whether that’s chance or whether that’s good directing by Lee. I suspect it’s not intended, as certain scenes played out as though they were still meant to be mysterious. At any rate, I can say that if a certain amount of tension necessarily goes out of the film when you know what’s going on, it continues to be a solid story.

Some of that is just because The Vanished is technically sound. The location where much of it takes place, the morgue that stores Seol-hee’s body, is shot remarkably well. It has a slick, high-tech feel, but also a definite horror sense. There’s something claustrophobic about the building, filled with small rooms and odd nooks. And echoing halls, and an emptiness that can’t be defined. Conversely, the film also uses flashbacks fairly extensively, so the audience doesn’t get bored of the location. The lighting’s moody at every turn, but is on the whole notably brighter in flashback — still cold, still atmospheric, but brighter than the shadow-filled morgue. Tension’s ramped up by the time element: a clock appears every so often on screen, reminding us how little time remains before Jin-han has to be released, and making us question whether we should be rooting for him or against him.

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Many people collect something, whether it’s rocks, stamps, coins, glass animals (especially favored by emotionally fragile Southern girls who find themselves trapped in Tennessee Williams plays), or in this social media era, grievances. A lot of us here at Black Gate collect books. For almost all of my life, this has been my own particular preoccupation, but much as I love my books, I must admit that collecting them has its drawbacks, a fact I’m reminded of every time someone new comes to my house and I again have to answer the question, “How many of these have you read?”

I do have another collection, though, one which costs nothing, never needs to be dusted, doesn’t require a forklift and flatbed truck to transport, and takes up no room. (Except perhaps emotionally.)

Several years ago, I was watching The Vikings, a 1958 bit of pseudo-historical nonsense starring those Nordic icons Ernest Borgnine, Kirk Douglas, and, fresh from the fjords of Brooklyn, Tony Curtis. At one point during the festivities, some horn-hatted character or other turned to one of his fellow Norsemen and declared, “Love and hate are horns on the same goat.” I instantly experienced a celluloid epiphany, and my new collection was born; from that moment on I began to obsessively accumulate Fake Folk Wisdom From the Movies.

You know Fake Folk Wisdom. You’ll find it in any movie set somewhere east of Suez, or in which native Americans appear, or where lederhosen-wearing peasants named Hans and Karl grab pitchforks and head up the hill to storm the castle. You’ll be knee-deep in it in any movie where a Swede portrays a Chinese (Warner Oland as Charlie Chan) or a Hungarian plays a Japanese (Peter Lorre as Mr. Moto). Virtually every line Anthony Quinn ever spoke in his sixty years in Hollywood was Fake Folk Wisdom of one sort or another.

Fake Folk Wisdom didn’t issue from the depths of the Black Forest, nor was it born on the banks of the Nile, the Danube, or the Ganges, but instead flowed freely from the bourbon bottles that graced the desks of writers’ bungalows at Paramount and Warner Brothers, Twentieth Century Fox and RKO.

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I went by the screening room early on August 2, the last day of the 2018 Fantasia International Film Festival. It was my final chance to see some of the things I’d missed at the festival, and if I watched three movies in the screening room before heading off to watch the two films I wanted to see that evening at the Hall Theatre, then I’d total 60 movies on the year. And I knew going in what the first film I wanted to see at the screening room was, a film that had gathered a goodly amount of buzz around the festival. On the first day of the festival I’d begun Fantasia 2018 with the revisionist Western Buffalo Boys; now I’d begin the last day of Fantasia 2018 with a different kind of revisionist western.

Five Fingers for Marseilles was directed by Michael Matthews from a script by Sean Drummond. A South African film, it starts in the days of apartheid, when five boys have formed a pact to protect their town from outsiders: the Five Fingers, they call themselves. Then White soldiers show up, and things go terribly wrong. Tau, the proudest, kills a man. Twenty years pass; Tau (grown into Vuyo Dabula, who has had roles in Invictus and Avengers: Age of Ultron) becomes a thief and hardened killer, has a change of heart, is imprisoned, is released, and finally returns to his home, to the small town named Marseilles in emulation of a distant European centre. The Five Fingers are no more; the leader’s dead, another one’s become mayor, another’s the chief of police, another’s a priest. The girl who once was closest to the Fingers, Lerato, is now a woman (Zethu Diomo, Number One Ladies’ Detective Agency, The Book of Negroes) running a saloon, with a son by a dead man. And a gang’s trying to take over Marseilles, the Night Runners, led by the mysterious and charismatic Sepoko (Hamilton Dhlamini). Tau wants to put violence behind him and try to be a better man. But can the bad men around him be stopped by any other means? And even if he must again take up the way of the gun, will his childhood allies stand with him? Or can he surround himself with a new group of Five Fingers?

The western aspects are strong in this film. It’s a conscious evocation of the genre without being derivative, romantic, or overtly knowing. It never winks to the audience. But it builds a story around a bad man trying to be better, with a mythic past of violence behind him. The heroes and villains both have the fable-like qualities of good western characters. Not just Sepoko but each of his Night Runners have individual looks. The Five Fingers, meanwhile, are shown early in the film riding their bicycles across the land very like young horsemen — a nod, without being a wink, to the iconography of the cowboy.

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I had time for one more movie in the Fantasia screening room before I’d head over to the J.A. De Sève Theatre to watch a film called Madeline’s Madeline, an experimental film about a girl in a theatre group struggling to define herself. It’d be the last movie I’d see in the De Sève at this year’s festival, but before it started I opted to watch a Finnish comedy about death metal. (There’s a reason for that choice, involving the final film of the festival; more on that in a few posts.)

Heavy Trip was directed by Juuso Laatio and Jukka Vidgren, who also wrote the movie with Jari Olavi Rantala and Aleksi Puranen. Turo (Johannes Holopainen) is the singer of a four-man death metal band in a northern town in Finland. They’ve been rehearsing for twelve years under the reindeer slaughterhouse owned by the family of guitarist Lotvonen (Samuli Jaskio) — “your playing makes the reindeer want to kill themselves,” they’re told cheerfully. Early in the movie they finally write their first song, though they still don’t have a name when chance brings the promoter of a Norwegian metal festival to the slaughterhouse. Through a series of lies and misunderstandings, the idea percolates through the town that Turo’s band, now calling themselves Impaled Rektum, will be playing the festival. They won’t; but will the band’s newfound fame lead Turo to finally confess his love for Miia (Minka Kuustonen) before she’s stolen away by the local big man, Jouni (Ville Tiihonen)? And what happens when the truth finally comes out?

There’s a pleasant tone to the movie, which is surprisingly quiet for a film about metal. The band members — which also include hellraiser drummer Jynkky (Antti Heikkinen) and a bassist, Pasi (Max Ovaska) AKA Xytrax, with an encyclopedic knowledge of his chosen music genre — are unexpectedly unaggressive. Sometimes that’s taken too far; the running gag of Turo puking whenever he takes the stage is obvious, for example. Still, the band members are at least established as characters, with their main personality traits defined. Unfortunately, they’re then given very little to do.

It feels as though not much happens through the first two thirds of the movie. That’s illusory, to an extent. Characters are introduced, one dies, Turo’s love for Miia is set up, Jouno does his best to ruin the band’s dreams, and so on and so forth. But it’s sluggishly-paced, and not especially interesting. The movie plays things too straight; it’s aware of the absurd things the characters do, but nobody reacts to any of it (I will concede that this might play better with an audience to do the reacting instead). As a character, Turo’s too passive to hold much interest. And the idea of the Norwegian festival is too prominent; one waits for the band to hit the road to go to play a festival, rather than waste time sitting around their hometown. The name of the movie is Heavy Trip, but the trip you’d expect doesn’t come along until the third act.

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I was at the Fantasia screening room early on August 1 to watch a movie I’d missed when it played in a Fantasia theatre: Tigers Are Not Afraid (Vuelven), written and directed by Issa López. I’d heard a number of people around the festival rave about it, and I was intrigued. 10-year-old Estrella (Paola Lara) is a girl in a Mexican city ravaged by drug violence. When her mother goes missing, she falls in with a gang of four boys who live on the street. But their leader, a scarred child named Shine (Juan Ramón López), has stolen a cell phone containing a video incriminating an aspiring local politician (Tenoch Huerta) in brutal criminal activity. Now his cartel’s after them, and death is all around. So, perhaps, is magic; but magic is not always safe.

The first thing to know about this film is that it’s a powerful story. It’s structured well, paced well, and is tremendously inventive. The characters are alive and well-rounded; the actors are excellent, both Lara and López crafting disturbingly real people. It’s a powerful story, too, dealing with primal emotions about love and abandonment and fear and wonder. Visually, it’s precise, opening up at odd moments in odd places, so that the boys’ rooftop camp feels like a sanctuary, or an old house can feel like an elven palace. Special effects are integrated well and push the reality of the film in exactly the right directions. This is an excellent movie. And it is a profound movie, with a lot to say about storytelling and magic and myth.

The film begins with Estrella in class, taking part in a discussion about fairy tales. From the start, then, the movie does not hide its influences; this is a fairy tale of the modern world. My fellow-critic Giles Edwards observed that there’s a Peter Pan–like sense to the film, with Estrella as Wendy; I note that Lord of the Rings is mentioned explicitly a couple of times in the film, and in fact the agents of evil here chase small people who have an item of potential power that can destroy a kind of dark lord — but which they themselves cannot use. At any rate, beyond any one story there’s a kind of syncretic aspect, pulling together all kinds of childhood fables into the story of these very desperate children; a meta–fairy tale, if you like, a story that uses fairy tale elements deliberately, and as part of its affect establishes up front that this is what it’s doing.

That perhaps sounds over-clever, but although this is a very clever movie it’s never too clever, never too cute. One way or another, there is an elegant interweaving of the fantastic and the grimly real. Much of the film seems to be aiming at an effect of the uncanny, where it’s possible to view the magical as merely the improbably coincidental, but I would argue certain shots in the film that are not from Estrella’s point of view preclude that possibility, and in any event I can’t see how to read the conclusion without accepting the magical as literally true. Does that make the movie fantasy or myth or magical realism? I’m not at all sure it matters. What does matter is the skill with which the story’s unfolded. The fantastic’s used with an understanding of its power. It’s something that transfigures the world — which I think is in part the point of the film.

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On Tuesday, July 31, the first movie I planned to see alongside a general audience was a Hong Kong action movie called The Brink. After that, I’d pass by the screening room before heading home. There’d be only two more days of Fantasia after this one, and I wanted to catch up on things I’d missed in theatres. I was specifically curious about a Korean movie called The Outlaws, about a cop who’s working against the clock to catch a Chinese gang who’re trying to take over territory in a district of Seoul. Two promising action movies; I had reasonable hopes for the afternoon.

The Brink (Kuang shou, 狂獸) was directed by Jonathan Li, his first film, and written by Lee Chun-Fai. On the seas just outside Hong Kong, a gold smuggler named Jiang (Shawn Yue, Wu Kong) kills his superior and sets his sights on the big boss of the smuggling ring, a man named Blackie (Yasuaki Kurata, God of War) who rules a ship-board casino just outside Hong Kong waters. Meanwhile, an intense cop named Cheng (Max Zhang, Pacific Rim: Uprising) has set his sights on Jiang — who captures Cheng’s faithful partner A-de (Yue Wu, God of War) to get him to back off. Instead, the plot thickens, drawing Cheng’s boss (Gordon Lam) into the fray. A showdown at sea looms as a typhoon bears down on Hong Kong.

Depending on your tolerance for genre conventions, the movie’s story will seem either clichéd or an exercise in working with reliable tropes. Cheng’s a lone wolf who does things his way, while his boss yells at him to follow the rules. A-de has just one more day on the force. You can see that the whole story’s going to come down to a fight between Chang and Jiang.

Personally, I don’t mind clichés done well, with energy. I think The Brink’s hit-and-miss as far as that goes. The overall structure, establishing Cheng with a fight that goes wrong, then showing Jiang’s viciousness, and going on from there by moving back and forth between the two men — that works well, in theory. The conception of the characters, though, isn’t deep enough. You can’t have a chess-game of an action movie if the players are stereotypes. More effort was needed in imagining the leads.

On the other hand, the actors do their best to elevate the material, or at least make it new. Yue fares a little better than Zhang, probably because he has more to work with in the script. His Jiang’s a guy who came up from nothing through ruthlessness and a feral intelligence; now he sees his chance at a big score, and goes for it. Zhang, by contrast, is charismatic enough, and finds some interesting moments here and there, particularly with one of the few women in the film. Cheng unintentionally gets his partner killed in the movie’s first scene, then enters a kind of semi-paternal relationship with his dead partner’s daughter (Cecilia So); she’s underwritten, with an interesting subplot left underdeveloped, but she at least gives Cheng some desperately needed depth.

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I was at the J.A. De Sève Theatre early on Tuesday, July 31, for a press screening of Mandy. It’s the second film by Panos Cosmatos (director of Beyond the Black Rainbow), who also wrote the script with Aaron Stewart-Ahn. The movie stars Nicolas Cage as Red Miller, a lumberjack who lives in a cottage in the deep woods of the Shadow Mountains with his wife Mandy (Andrea Riseborough), a metalhead artist, in the long-ago year of 1983. Mandy unwittingly catches the eye of a cult leader (Linus Roache), whose minions, the Children of the New Dawn, abduct her. Bad things happen. Miller is tortured. And, inevitably, he embarks on a quest for bloody revenge.

There are films that experiment with the artform of cinema, using sound and visuals in unconventional ways to inspire in the audience strange emotions or new states of mind. And there are grindhouse movies that use revenge plots, violence, buckets of fake blood, power fantasies, maybe a bit of sex, and whatever else comes to hand to entertain the hindbrain of the audience. And then there’s this movie, which does both at once. Mandy is both for the arthouse and the grindhouse, and the match is perfectly harmonious.

This might make it sound like a Quentin Tarantino project, and I suppose there are some points of resemblance; like a Tarantino film, it starts with an exploitation-movie plot. But rather than play with structure or dialogue it uses things like weird lighting effects, sound design, and hypnotic pacing to almost slip past the conscious mind of the viewer. It’s surreal in a way Tarantino never approaches. It’s much more Lynchian, in the way it’s not afraid to slow down to a doped-up pace and in the way it pays attention to soundscapes and in the way it’s not afraid to show a character reacting to something in an almost uncomfortably long take. (There’s even a backdrop near the end that seems to have been borrowed from a certain eccentric psychiatrist in the town of Twin Peaks.)

The aesthetic here is utterly bizarre, shaped by early heavy metal and 80s horror and fantasy paperbacks (from which Mandy reads aloud). Lurid light fills the sky, even at night. Long synthesizer notes and slow doom metal fill the soundtrack, a perfect match to the madness onscreen. Nature photography turns the forests and mountains into suburbs of hell. Animated sequences provide further sci-fi visions. The movie’s nominally set in the real world, but doesn’t feel like it. And then there’s Nicolas Cage.

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