Movie Review: Women Talking (2022)

Genre: Drama  

Director: Sarah Polley  

Starring: Rooney Mara, Claire Foy, Jessie Buckley, Ben Whishaw, Frances McDormand  

Running Time: 104 minutes  

Synopsis: At an isolated religious colony, women are subjugated, deprived of education, and regularly raped. Taking advantage of most of the men being away, a group of women gather to discuss whether they should stay and fight for better conditions or abandon their men and leave the colony. Those offering opinions include the pregnant (by rape) Ona (Rooney Mara), the angry Salome (Claire Foy), whose child has been assaulted, and Mariche (Jessie Buckley), who is married to an abusive husband. Kind school teacher August (Ben Whishaw) is the only man allowed to attend and record the deliberations.

What Works Well: Writer and director Sarah Polley demonstrates no shortage of artistic courage in adapting Miriam Toews' book to the screen. With just a few exterior interludes, this is a one-set drama staged within a barn, consisting exclusively of a should-we-stay-or-should-we-go debate. The option exploration is a gateway to revelations, some horrific, about an oppressive patriarchal community. A blanched blue-green-grey-brown palette reflects women robbed of their agency, the living conditions and hard choices resonating well beyond the barn.

What Does Not Work As Well: The film's intimate focus on a single passionate conversation is also a foundational cinematic weakness. Theatricality dominates, and the uneducated women exhibit remarkable discourse skills but without bothering to consider neither what "stay and fight" entails nor the practicalities of survival outside the colony. 

Conclusion: Rarely has a title so accurately reflected both the bravura and limitations of the content.



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Movie Review: My Son (2021)

Genre: Missing Child Mystery Thriller

Director: Christian Carion

Starring: James McAvoy, Claire Foy, Tom Cullen

Running Time: 95 minutes

Synopsis: Frequent business traveler Edmond Murray (James McAvoy) rushes back to rural Scotland, where his seven year old son Ethan has been abducted from a riverfront campsite. Edmond reconnects with his ex-wife Joan (Claire Foy), who is raising Ethan with her new husband Frank (Tom Cullen). Inspector Roy (Gary Lewis) is in charge of the investigation, and Edmond quickly suspects Frank is hiding something. When Roy is unexpectedly yanked off the case, it's left up to the divorced couple to unravel the mystery behind their son's disappearance.

What Works Well: The fog-shrouded Scottish Highlands locations carry a rustic beauty and amplify the missing child mystery. The opening act sets a compelling context of an absentee father returning home to deal with an unfolding crisis.

What Does Not Work As Well: McAvoy was apparently not provided a script and instead asked to improvise his lines. The resulting dissonance degrades an already ragged narrative where multiple opportunities are nurtured then carelessly scattered in the wind. Frank's erratic behaviour, the investigation taken over by "London", and Edmond's work backstory are all discarded in favour of a third act consumed by a too-dark spook show with undefined villains.

Conclusion: Chilly moodiness is undone by undisciplined plotting.



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Movie Review: The Girl In The Spider's Web (2018)

An action thriller, The Girl In The Spider's Web is overloaded with unlikely narrow escapes, but with enough brooding character angst to maintain interest.

When she was a child, Lisbeth Salander escaped from the estate of her abusive father, a powerful tycoon with connections to Russian mobsters. But her sister Camilla stayed behind and suffered years of exploitation.

Now the adult Lisbeth (Claire Foy) is a hacker based in Stockholm, and a vigilante targeting abusive men. She is contacted by Frans Balder (Stephen Merchant), an ex-National Security Agency (NSA) employee, to steal and prevent the misuse of software he wrote for the NSA enabling anyone to take control of the world's military satellites. Lisbeth is successful, but her hack alerts the NSA's Ed Needham (Lakeith Stanfield), who travels to Stockholm to investigate. Gabriella Grane (Synnøve Macody Lund) of the Swedish Security Service does not welcome Ed's intrusion on her soil.

More dangerous is a violent gang that steals the code from Lisbeth before she can hand it to Frans. The software is protected by a pass code known only to Bader and his young son August, and they are both soon in danger. Lisbeth reaches out to reporter Mikael Blomkvist (Sverrir Gudnason) for help as the ghosts of the past catch up with her.

An adaptation of the book by David Lagercrantz based on Stieg Larsson's characters, The Girl In The Spider's Web takes the series in a new direction. The screenplay by Jay Basu, Steven Knight, and director Fede Álvarez, is packed full of action, and while the dark mood and subtext of abuse remain, here the emphasis is on a Bond-type conspiracy and a cliffhanger (sometimes literally) every 15 minutes.

Some of the thrills are excellent, including a motorcycle escape on an iced river, and a technology-enabled airport breakout. But others become repetitive and quite over-the-top. With Claire Foy wearing a singular expression of epic pissed-offness, Lisbeth escapes a massive gas explosion that destroys a neighbourhood, a hail of bullets, a really high jump, a torture session in a rubber suit, twice being drugged, and several physical scuffles with burly assassin-types. Her frequent near-death moments become numbing and steal away from the more cerebral and emotional parts of the drama.

And The Girl In The Spider's Web does contain enough ingredients for human-level interactions to deserve toned-down theatrics. Once revealed, the mastermind behind the conspiracy to steal the software provides excellent opportunities for the past and the present to collide, and the triple themes of abuse, revenge, and hacking defining Lisbeth's life merge into a compelling narrative. Meanwhile her relationship with young August is also rich with possibilities for personal growth.

In contrast, the bond between Lisbeth and Mikael suffers the most with the reorientation towards action. Here Mikael is very much a secondary character along for the ride, the writer out of place amidst all the stuntwork and flying limbs.

The Girl In The Spider's Web carries intricate threads, but the execution is more expedient than exquisite.



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The Movies Of Claire Foy

All movies starring Claire Foy and reviewed on the Ace Black Movie Blog are linked below:

The Lady In The Van (2015)

Breathe (2017)

Unsane (2018)

First Man (2018)

The Girl In The Spider's Web (2018)

My Son (2021)

Women Talking (2022)

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The Movie Star Index is here.

Movie Review: Breathe (2017)

A biographical drama and romance, Breathe is the remarkable story of Britain's longest surviving polio patient and his wife. The narrative is inspirational but also excessively sentimental.

In England of the late 1950s, jovial, athletic and adventurous Robin Cavendish (Andrew Garfield) meets and marries Diana Blacker (Claire Foy). She joins him on business trips to Kenya, where in 1959 he contracts polio and is paralyzed from the neck down. Kept alive by a mechanical respirator, Robin is given weeks to live. The already pregnant Diana refuses to give up on him, and after their child Jonathan is born, the family relocates back to England.

Confined to a grim hospital ward, Robin just wants to die. But Diana revives his will to live, and after a year they defy medical advice and leave the hospital. In partnership with inventor and Oxford University professor Teddy Hall (Hugh Bonneville), Robin helps design and test groundbreaking devices and equipment to improve his quality of life, including a wheelchair equipped with a battery-operated respirator and a van modified to provide mobility. Intent on living as normally as possible, Robin and Diana travel as he advocates for the rights of people with disabilities.

Written by William Nicholson and produced by Robin Cavendish's son Jonathan, the directorial debut of Andy Serkis is a labour of love honouring a couple who decided to thrive despite unimaginable hardship. From lyrical scenes of an idyllic love expressed in the African sunset to the grim realities of dealing with near-total paralysis, Breathe is two hours long and slow paced, but always energized by a prevailing can-overcome attitude.

Serkis displays a flair for visual beauty and creates many postcard-pretty scenes, whether in Africa or back at the country estate in England. The film finds an unlikely highlight by the side of a dusty road in Spain, where a potentially catastrophic ventilator failure becomes a moment to savour with the locals rallying to provide moral and musical support. Another searing revelation occurs at a medical conference in Germany, demonstrating the stark contrast between modern technology and unfiltered humanity in treating people with disabilities.

But while Breathe satisfies the senses and stirs the soul, it also approaches saccharine levels of melodrama. Once the Cavendish's settle down in their country home after escaping the hospital, the couple are elevated to saintly do-no-wrong status, almost blissfully cruising above any conflicts. This may be an honest account of two wonderful people, but makes for vanilla cinema. The final chapter in Robin's life is excessively drawn out over the final 30 minutes, complete with greatest hits flashbacks to earlier moments in the film.

Andrew Garfield does his best while mostly confined to laying on his back, acting solely through limited facial expressions and difficult speech. Claire Foy is limited to the familiar stoic-and-resourceful stand-by-your-man role. Hugh Bonneville as the amiably eccentric Teddy Hall is the one prominent supporting cast member, while Tom Hollander plays both of Diana's twin brothers.

A bit old fashioned, definitely affectionate but also sincere, Breathe celebrates one couple's resolve, severely tested but most certainly unbowed.



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Movie Review: Unsane (2018)

A suspense drama, Unsane is an intimate psychological thriller with horror elements cleverly exploiting the fatigue of an over-stressed mind.

Sawyer Valentini (Claire Foy) is alone in a new city, holding down a bank data analyst job but still traumatized by her experience of having been stalked for the previous two years. She checks in with a psychiatrist at the Highland Creek mental wellness institution and inadvertently signs papers admitting herself for 24 hours. Unable to leave, Sawyer lashes out, but her acts of rebellion only prolong her stay to seven days.

Things gets much worse when she encounters her stalker David (Joshua Leonard) working at the facility as an attendant under an assumed name, although she cannot be sure what is real. She also meets fellow patients Violet (Juno Temple) and Nate (Jay Pharoah). Occasionally drugged, frequently restrained and feeling threatened by David, Sawyer uses Nate's smuggled cell phone to call her mother Angela (Amy Irving) for help. But freeing herself from the clutches of both David and the profit-driven institution will not be easy.

A study of paranoia either real and perceived, Unsane playfully prolongs the question of whether Sawyer is experiencing actual or brain-manufactured traumas. Director Steven Soderbergh experiments by shooting the film entirely on an iPhone7 Plus and in a blocky 1.56:1 aspect ratio. With a miniscule production budget of $1.5 million, Unsane is a surprisingly potent drama penetrating Sawyer's tormented mind and the business of bogus treatments fueled by insurance money.

The tight focus on Sawyer and her mental condition is effective. Soderbergh literally and physically closes the walls of the world around her and confines the movie to the institute once she is admitted. She is in a surreal world where all the patients are sure they don't belong, and at least some of them are probably right. As for Sawyer's compounded nightmare of finding her stalker operating in her new prison, the story depends either on her delusions, a relatively wild coincidence, or layers of conspiracy too dense to contemplate.

In addition to the struggle of mental patients to find advocates, Soderbergh pursues the evils of a private health system run amok, placing profit ahead of patients while hiding behind oily corporatespeak and well-rehearsed sales pitches. None of which helps Sawyer get better before, during or after her stay at Highland Creek. She needs rescuing, as does the system pretending to treat her.

The entire film rests on Claire Foy's shoulders, and she delivers a delectable performance of knowing vulnerability laced with sarcastic determination. Joshua Leonard is suitably creepy as her stalker.

Unsane's final act rushes towards more stock horror elements as nuance is left behind, violence is unleashed and the blood flows. Whatever Sawyer's specific condition, the world around her is unhinged and likely to remain so.

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Movie Review: First Man (2018)

A biographical drama, First Man recounts the story of Neil Armstrong, the first human to set foot on the moon, in the years leading up to the seminal Apollo 11 mission.

It's 1961, and NASA test pilot Armstrong (Ryan Gosling) experiences a series of in-flight mishaps. At home, tragedy strikes with the death of his young daughter from cancer. A detail-oriented and introverted aeronautical engineer, Armstrong signs up for the Gemini program, the first phase of the US push to land a man on the moon before the end of the decade. Armstrong and his wife Janet (Claire Foy) relocate to Houston, where he strikes up loose friendships with other astronauts-in-training, including Ed White (Jason Clarke).

The Gemini program, guided by Chief Astronaut Deke Slayton (Kyle Chandler) and Director Robert Gilruth (Ciarán Hinds), experiences highs and lows, and the threat of serious mishaps is never far. The Apollo program then launches, and along with the more convivial Buzz Aldrin (Corey Stoll), Armstrong is in prime contention to lead the first mission to the moon. But he remains aloof and unwilling to communicate openly with his family.

Directed by Damien Chazelle and based on the book by James R. Hansen, First Man is, as the title implies, more about the man than the mission. It's an intriguingly personal perspective on what is generally portrayed as a triumphant national endeavour. Rather than the more gung-ho astronaut spirit featured in movies like The Right Stuff and Apollo 13, Chazelle delves into the emotional toll of going to work in a pioneering program where death was a constant companion, every phone call and door knock pregnant with potential for bad news, and colleagues almost routinely did not come home to their families at the end of the day.

With his methodical, detail-oriented and dogged determination to get the job done, Armstrong was perfectly placed for success, but at a price. His coldly analytical approach left no space for emotion, and as much as he was a loving husband and father, expressing feelings, sharing thoughts and conveying risks were simply not in his toolbox. As the space program heats up, his home mannerisms get colder.

With the focus on a single individual, Chazelle runs into problems with pacing and context. The film is stubbornly not interested in any characters other than Neil and Janet. The multitude of other astronauts and space program officials are essentially faceless and colourless, with only Ed White barely making it over the line as a defined person.

Equally, Chazelle largely neglects to explain the overarching space program, the political Cold War space context or the purpose of the individual missions. The enormity of the endeavor and the scientific challenges receive perhaps two scenes lasting less than a minute each. This becomes a significant problem when Chazelle invests inordinate screentime with Armstrong strapped into the shaky and noisy spacecrafts. The overall flight objectives and the astronaut's skills in achieving them are reduced to repetitive scenes of clicking random switches and observing jerky dials.

As a result, First Man is too long at 141 minutes. The story is simply not rich enough to justify the length, and most of the scenes go on for longer than they need to. Gosling and Foy do provide some excellent private moments as a couple linked by a strong but mostly quiet bond, while Chazelle crafts a sumptuous climax with the moon landing and subsequent scenes on the lunar surface. First Man does leave footprints in new areas, but never quite soars.

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