What's the Greater Threat To Hollywood, Prequels or Nepotism?

+ masks, monsters, Mike Faist ... and a June movie diary

I write to you not from Deeper HQ, but from sunny Southern California, where I will be for the next few weeks. I wish I could say I’ve become one of those marvelous people who skips town for the summer, but I am just working in a different place (a convention center).

Before leaving, I managed to catch a bunch of new releases of dubious quality. Now that I’m several weeks removed from the joy of Challengers, I find myself longing for the lofty highs of summer 2023, where we had tentpoles like Mission Impossible and indies like Theater Camp. This month’s franchises are far less satisfying, and the small stuff feels … small.

But the California sun doesn’t quit and neither do I. Here are this month’s releases:

The Strangers: Chapter 1 (Renny Harlan, in theaters)

This remake of the classic horror film, The Strangers (2008), witnesses a couple on vacation terrorized by masked intruders. Proof that Hollywood has stopped pretending they’re not afraid of rural America.

Code for small-town America: lots of American flags on fridge

Worse acting, worse storytelling, worse camerawork than the OG, with all the bite and commentary replaced by rote female suffering. Pointless.

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (George Miller, in theaters)

The latest journey into the Mad Max-iverse explores how Fury Road’s Furiosa came to drive the war rig.

See my review of The Strangers.

The Bikeriders (Jeff Nichols, in theaters)

Inspired by Danny Lyon’s iconic photography of 1960s motorcycle clubs, The Bikeriders charts the rise and fall of a Chicago gang during the golden age of motorcycles.

Mike Faust joins Christian Slater’s character in Interview with the Vampire as journalists getting presumably unusable tape

Not really a crime drama, and only half a “biker movie,” The Bikeriders is an intricate biopic of people who didn’t exist. Borrowing heavily from Goodfellas and Marlon Brando’s vocal affect, and anchored by big set pieces and bigger performances, The Bikeriders feels a bit like sticking a playing card in your spokes. An undeniably good time, even if the roar doesn’t amount to much.

The Watchers (Ishana Night Shyamalan, in theaters)

M. Night Shyamalan's daughter cashes in on the feysploitation craze with this folk horror trifle.

Do rich filmmakers know they can just send their kids to film school? The Watchers is exactly the kind of attempt that should be rotting on a private college’s password-protected Vimeo page, trotted out only for a single workshop critique session. Instead it has a multimillion dollar production budget and a 102 minute runtime.

Real disappointing time to not cast Elle Fanning

The Watchers joins the long, long list of 1) horror films made by people with no apparent interest or taste for horror and 2) films by twenty-year-olds who don’t know there are ages between “waif” and “crone.” Starring Dakota Fanning as a 23-year-old (???), The Watchers’ reference points are painfully obvious. But no influence is more glaring than that of M. Night Sr., who Jr. rips off mercilessly (this time it’s the birds, rather than the fish of Old, who prove key to survival).

But Ishana lacks her father’s sense of amusement — the giddiness visible even in his worst movies that has you trying to guess the twist. She sucks out all the puzzle of what could be a middling mystery, cramming each moment with endless exposition and denying her characters, or her audience, the catharsis of an a-ha! There’s no discovery to be had here, except in learning what a last name can buy you.

Handling the Undead (Thea Hvistendahl, in limited release and available on VOD)

The dead rise again for three families who have recently lost a loved one.

A new entry in the Bergman tradition of depressing Scandinavian movies set by the water

Starring both Renate Reinsve and Anders Danielsen Lie from The Worst Person in the World, Handling the Undead is a sensitive zombie flick that isn’t afraid to get gruesome. Handling the Undead can feel overly restrained — sometimes to the point of treacle — but it’s a chilling and effective portrait of agony, with enough goriness to satisfy the horror freaks.

Okay … I will do it for real

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (bonus track)

I went into Furiosa hoping I’d be pleasantly surprised after a lackluster and frankly unconvincing media campaign; I left feeling like a damned fool. It’s a given that, as a prequel, Furiosa won’t have much in the way of suspense or tension. But rather than deepen the Fury Road character that became a fan favorite, Furiosa turns its titular character into stan culture content. Furiosa does not build on the things we already knew about Furiosa. Instead it just shows them, over and over again.

For the first hour of the movie, the central tension is not who Furiosa will become, but the extent to which she’ll be tortured and raped. In the first chapters of the film, Furiosa, as played by child actress Alyla Browne, appears as a cherub in white carrying a teddy bear, the kind of cloying symbol of innocence I associate with Natalie Portman’s young career. We see her arm get ripped off, we see her shave her head (twice!) but none of these events resonate. It’s all just more trauma to add to her character dossier. Furiosa doesn’t make hard decisions throughout the course of the movie. All she does is react to her victimization.

Oh and they brought this guy back … because you liked him right … right …

The world of Mad Max is undoubtedly patriarchal and traumatic, but that doesn’t mean that the victims of these systems have no function beyond suffering, no personality beyond resisting male dominance. I look at The Nightingale, directed by fellow Aussie Jennifer Kent, a movie so horrifically violent and haunting that I wouldn’t ever recommend it. The central character, Clare, is abused in some of the most terrifying ways a person can be: and yet she still has desires and flaws. Her character is not simply what has happened to her, and her suffering has not rendered her perfect.

But Furiosa doesn’t have a character, it has an emblem. The most interesting part of her character in Mad Max is her central hypocrisy: how has this woman who seems to oppose everything about the Citadel risen through its ranks? It’s a conflict that I think every viewer can understand: the knowledge that we are benefiting and have benefitted from a violent society whose decisions we disagree with. But rather than have Furiosa confront this dichotomy, we see her only as pure, perfect, and hyper-moral.

Her backstory becomes indistinguishable from Max Rockatansky’s: a survivor who has lost their family and home, haunted by images of lost faces. But we’ve seen movies of Max making hard choices. Furiosa doesn’t get offered the masculine freedom of complication. If we had seen even one moment of Furiosa enjoying anything the Citadel has to offer, of any expression of normal doubt or uncertainty in her path, I might be able to see her as a person rather than the top reply to a Manosphere-adjacent bot on Twitter prompting, “Who are the most BADASS female characters in movies?” 

Your goal should be the top reply to Manosphere-adjacent Twitter bots asking “Who are the WORST characters in movies?”

Anya Taylor-Joy does a faltering impression of Theron, playing her with a painful self-awareness of the character’s pop culture significance. Chris Hemsworth re-demonstrates his limits as an actor that I first encountered in Blackhat, offering a performance that feels like a Halloween costume. The final confrontation between the two is like the most painful scene study in your acting 101 class: two people screaming nothingness at each other. I left Furiosa ironically wishing it had copied the original Mad Max movies more: that it might have portrayed a single adventure, rather than the whole of the character’s life. That it wasn’t afraid to create a woman who existed outside of trauma.