Alan Scott Neal’s “Last Straw” is a lean and surprising thriller that means it. It doesn’t hide behind a veneer of smug cleverness, such as recent genre movies like “Strange Darling” and “Companion,” and the carnage when it arrives is disturbing and taken seriously by the filmmakers. In the old days, this is the sort of thing that you would roam the aisles in the video store hoping to find.
Nancy (Jessica Belkin) is a waitress in a 1950s-era diner somewhere in rural Nowheresville. The diner seems to sit out in the middle of wilderness, detached from a town—an odd, irrational detail that gives the film’s early scenes a subtle charge. Nancy is 18 years-old and has recently learned that she is pregnant. Dad isn’t going to like that, Nancy tells her friend and co-worker, Tabitha (Tara Raani).
Neal and screenwriter Taylor Sardoni parcel out details carefully. When Nancy arrives at the diner, we learn that dad is also her boss, and is played by Jeremy Sisto. She is a manager at the diner as well, which scans as dad’s way of getting daughter to grow up a little. The unborn child hangs over these scenes like Chekov’s gun.
More promising still is the sketching in of the diner’s supporting staff. It’s embarrassingly obvious that Bobby (Joji Otani-Hansen) is in love with Nancy, while the kitchen staff emits a casual bitterness and hostility that is very familiar of actual restaurants. Jake (Taylor Kowalski) is particularly resentful, and played by Kowalski with a submerged anger that reminded me of Tom Berenger’s early performances.
This is a horror movie, then, that bothers to have a few things going on apart from the horror. We’re not killing time, watching plastic characters trade exposition. These are familiar types that have been accorded volatility. And there is an aura of desperation, explicitly connected to differences of class and finances, which is refreshing in a cinema climate that doesn’t want to touch those issues with a 10-foot knife.
Neal prepares us for another redux of “The Strangers,” with killers with funny masks circling the diner, only to make things more intimate and personal. I don’t want to give away the entire game here, but “Last Straw” is a story of a business, with vulnerabilities in its chain of command, eating itself alive.
Balling on a budget, Neal doesn’t shape smooth and easily differentiated set pieces. Instead, there are explosions of chaotic violence. The killings in this movie are painful and awkward. You’re not invited to sit from a hip perch and scoff. Something in the key of “The Strangers” gradually begins to resemble, say, “River’s Edge.”
“Last Straw” also recalls the recent raw and forceful “Candy Land,” another genre movie which benifitted from fevered class anger. Neither of these movies are classics, but they are memorable, and they are more in touch with the wild west of the vintage grindhouse than the yearly “Scream Whatever” and “Halloween Here We Go.”
Paolo Sorrentino’s “Parthenope” is another of the Italian director’s sagas of the perils of being rich and beautiful and illustrative of a cultural symbol that more or less eludes me. Sorrentino has a gift for gorgeous imagery, and he’s capable of attracting famous and beautiful people. He could probably mount something that’s dirty and fun if he ever stopped chasing “significance.”
Parthenope (Celeste Dalla Porta) is a woman moving through Naples in the 1960s, ‘70s, and beyond who bewitches men with her beauty. That part is persuasive: Dalla Porta is among the most beautiful woman that I’ve encountered in a movie in a very long time—if she was around in Fellini’s time, she would have been an icon. And though the actress is playing less a character than an idea, she’s affecting.
Prior Sorrentino movies, such as “The Great Beauty” and “Youth,” had a nominal sense of narrative. They wander. They are preoccupied with window dressing over plot, but, whatever Sorrentino’s pretensions may be, something was driving things forward. “Parthenope” is nothing but inviting shots of landscapes and Dalla Porta, a series of postcards that fancy themselves parts of a memory play. I’m not the first writer to suggest that the movie is a cologne ad, a work of self-parody.
At least it has those pillow shots, while Mimi Cave’s “Holland” is a much more stupefying series of fake images of unconvincing scenes that are in love with their own nonsense, mistaking it for cleverness. Who is thing supposed to be for? It feels like a director/actor package that was brokered before anyone had landed on a script. Cave directed the promising “Fresh” with Sebastian Stan a few years back, and her star here, Nicole Kidman, appears in seemingly everything with a patina of prestige. If you, like me, are exhausted with watching Kidman in contrived social issues thrillers, “Holland” is going to play like a “South Park” parody of Nicole Kidman hipness bait.
Nancy (Kidman) is married to Fred (Matthew Macfadyen) and the two have a teenage son, Harry (Jude Hill). They live in Holland, Michigan, which is influenced by Dutch aesthetics and graced with a huge windmill. Nancy is a teacher and Fred is an optometrist who is often out of town for conferences. Nancy suspects that he’s cheating on her, and begins to unravel a thread that’s obviously going to lead to a Big Reveal. Rinse and repeat, on and on we go.
Every scene is so busy signifying that it forgets to make even rudimentary sense. Kidman and Macfadyen, seemingly cast together from a game of Mad Libs, have no chemistry, though in fairness Kidman rarely has chemistry with anyone, including Gael Garcia Bernal as a shop teacher who ventures into Fred’s office to investigate his potential affair… am I conveying how thrown together this sounds?
“Holland” has a sense of artifice that brings to mind “The Truman Show” and its many offspring, a mini genre of rug-pulling, quasi-thrillers that is—with “Get Out,” “Don’t Worry Darling,” and “Blink Twice,” among many others—quite fashionable again. A socially resonant thriller needs to do more than decry the world as an illusion. In this day and age, that sentiment can’t provoke much more than a befuddled “no shit.”
Looking for a restorative, yet feeling cranky and indecisive, I perused the Criterion Channel’s “Adventures in Moviegoing” series, in which significant artists discuss films that matter to them, which are, of course, available on the channel. These interviews are edited into tasty 5-minute nuggets that serve as an amuse bouche for the movie in question. If you’re feeling the fatigue of too many options, these vignettes offer clarity.
And I was pulled from my fugue state this week when I was prompted by a Wim Wenders interview to watch Yasujirō Ozu’s classic 1957 “Tokyo Twilight,” a beautiful and extraordinarily tender yet tough-minded family tragedy that simultaneously affirms: Ozu’s mastery, the valuable sense of community that The Criterion Channel promotes, and above all the notion that cinema can still serve as a profound tonic. When in doubt, reach for the top shelf, not the clutter out front.
“Last Straw” is available on VOD and AMX +. “Parthenope” is available on VOD, and “Holland” on Amazon Prime. The Criterion Channel is, well, The Criterion Channel.
