The Ace Black Movie Blog

Showing posts with label Juno Temple. Show all posts

Friday, 8 January 2021

Movie Review: Killer Joe (2011)

A raw crime drama, Killer Joe takes pleasure wallowing in humanity's sewer. The twisted plot offers plenty of perversions before unravelling.

In Dallas, Chris Smith (Emile Hirsch) owes money to drug dealers. He conspires with his dimwitted father Ansel (Thomas Haden Church) to hire police detective "Killer" Joe Cooper (Matthew McConaughey), who moonlights as an assassin-for-hire, to kill Ansel's ex-wife. Her insurance policy pays out $50,000 to her daughter Dottie (Juno Temple), a naive young woman and victim of child abuse. After paying Killer, the plan is for Chris, Ansel and Dottie to share the money, but then Ansel insists his current wife Sharla (Gina Gershon) also gets a cut.

Joe takes a liking to Dottie, and in lieu of receiving his $25,000 fee up-front, he demands Dottie as a "retainer". With his sister now a sex slave and Joe making himself comfortable in the home of Ansel and Sharla, Chris starts to have doubts about the whole plot, but much worse is to come.

Luxuriating in the grime of immoral behaviour, Killer Joe aims for Coen brothers shadings. Tracy Letts wrote the script based on his own play, and William Friedkin directs with one eye towards sly humour and the other firmly fixed on extremes of depravity. With the slime glistening under the Texas skies, Killer Joe promises much and at least for a while delivers fine moments of white trash artistry

The Smith family are mired in poverty, stupidity and the pursuit of lost causes. Ansel at least knows he is dim and is therefore one step ahead of Chris, who is still awakening to his limitations. Sharla is just looking for a meal ticket and a roof over her head, and for now, Ansel will do. Which leaves Dottie as the only character worth caring for, a naive, pitiful young woman, essentially sold into sexual slavery by her brother and father. By the time Chris decides he ought to maybe rescue his sister, the damage is done.

Killer Joe struts into this family sniffing easy opportunities first for money then for free sexual favours. He is much smarter than Chris and Ansel, but also much more nefarious. And when his worst tendencies surface in the third act, Killer Joe unfortunately stumbles and falls. Letts and Friedkin settle for a stagebound single-set climax, then go looking for extremes of behaviour (involving fried chicken) for maximum shock value. The gambit misfires, the search for cheap notoriety sacrificing the drama's sharp edges.

Matthew McConaughey cruises through the film in icy arrogance mode, Emile Hirsch compensating with frantic desperation. Thomas Haden Church finds the necessary open-mouthed imbecility. Gina Gershon and Juno Temple are asked to do most of the heavy lifting, both actresses displaying courage in physically humiliating roles.

Killer Joe earns head-shaking stares, but when the drama is overrun by theatrics, it's time to look away.

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Tuesday, 4 February 2020

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.