Horns (2014)
When Ignatius Perrish (Daniel Radcliffe) proposes to his longtime girlfriend Merrin (Juno Temple), she rejects him, telling him she loves someone else. The next morning, Merrin is found dead and everyone in town, except for his childhood friend Lee (Max Minghella), believes a spurned Ig murdered her.
A pariah, Ig spirals into a pit of depressive rage, eventually drunkenly cursing God for allowing Merrin to die.
The next morning, horns grow out of his forehead. He initially thinks this is a medical problem, but soon learns these horns give him supernatural abilities, everyone who sees them is compelled to unburden their darkest secrets and most depraved desires. Police officers admit secret homosexual fantasies, a bar owner exposes his plan to burn down his bar for the insurance money, and his parents confess their deep disappointment. The only person not affected is Lee.
Ig uses his ability to find Merrin’s true killer and extract his revenge, and, in the process, discovers she was never in love with anyone else, but concocted a cover story to shield him from her terminal cancer diagnosis.
Radcliffe is great as Ig, proving he’s much more than The Boy Who Lived, and Minghella, son of an Academy Award winning director, is wonderful as Lee.
Remember when Heather Graham was a rising star? Here, she continues her slide to irrelevance as a diner waitress piggybacking her way to fame via a tenuous connection to Merrin’s murder.
Because it’s only a two-hour movie, this wonderful adaptation of Joe Hill’s novel can’t provide answers to all of the questions it raises. Where did the horn’s powers come from? Ig never believed in God and frequently chastised Merrin for her faith, did this make him more susceptible to Satan’s influence? Did Merrin’s faith imbue her cross with special powers?
I love this film, especially the well-written and mesmerizing confession scenes, but would have preferred something slower like a TV miniseries to more fully explore the mythology hinted at in the film.
The Wandering Shadow (1920)
Mia May’s long-term boyfriend Georg Vanderheit doesn’t believe in marriage, so she forges documents to legally recognize their union.
After Geor disappears and is presumed dead, a frightened Mia hides in the surrounding mountains. Georg’s surviving relative, and identical twin brother, John Vanderheit looks for her because her needs their wedding invalidated so he can claim his inheritance.
It’s difficult to judge this film because it remains partially lost, but what remains is an ambitious exploration of faith and marriage which provides insight into the continuing cultural battle over marriage and its proper place in Western culture.
In a few short years, Lang would explode as an important auteur with Dr. Mabuse (1922) and Metropolis (1927), but this is one-dimensional and better seen as an artifact in his career.
In the Company of Men (1997)
When coworkers Chad (Aaron Eckhart) and Howard are sent to work out-of-town for six weeks, they bond over their failed relationships with women and hatch an elaborate scheme to take out their frustration by manipulating a random woman into thinking they both love her, only to break up with her at the same time.
Chad, the more aggressive of the two, finds a perfect patsy in Christine, a deaf coworker, but while Howard legitimately falls in love with her, she falls in love with Chad and sleeps with him.
The pressure of his actual feelings and Chad’s cruel mind games cause Howard to tearfully confess their scheme. When Christine confronts Chad, he freely admits his abhorrent behavior and laughs at how upset she is.
Back home, Howard discovers Chad lied about his recent break up. The whole enterprise was a diversion for his sick enjoyment. Shaken by the experience, Howard tries to convince Christine he actually loves her, to no avail.
Neil Labute’s disturbing debut introduces one of the most infuriating characters in the unrepentant and cruel Chad. His despicable jokes about Christine’s disability and his casual sexual harassment of a black subordinate are haunting.
LaBute confronts us with uncomfortable and painful examples of how men perceive women to expose the gap between how people feel and how they act.
Four Around a Woman (1921)
A wealthy businessman believes his wife is having an affair with an old lover. Meanwhile, his unscrupulous identical twin romances and swindles his wife’s best friend. Everyone is working an angle and hiding a secret agenda.
This early film by Fritz Lang which focuses on the artificial constructions of the German wealthy in the Weimar Republic is only a shadow of what Lang would soon unleash.
Life of Riley (2014)
When George Riley’s friends learn he’s dying, they invite him to join their amateur theater troupe to help him feel useful and productive. During rehearsal, long hidden secrets and suppressed desires cause several couples to question the status of their relationships.
Riley is never seen, but he’s a constant presence as every character repeatedly talks about their love and admiration of the man, transforming the film into an updated version Waiting for Godot.
While maintaining the English setting of Alan Ayckbourn’s play, Alain Resnais’s film is in French and uses cartoon drawings as establishing shots before cutting to a studio stage with a painted curtain backdrop.
These devices highlight the film’s artificiality which, in turn highlights the artificiality of its central relationships, forcing us to ask how much of our relationships with others is performance, either for their sake or ours.
Because Resnais died shortly after the film’s completion, it’s easy to see George as a substitute for his role in the production, a slightly obscured off-screen presence.
I like this film, but prefer his penultimate film, You Ain’t See Nothin’ Yet (2012), which also revolves around a dying man and the effect his death has on his friends.