learnedfoot

I have been to the theater a bunch since I got back, and am going again tonight to see Weapons, so before I build up even more of a backlog, here are my latest watches.

28 Years Later (2025). 28 years after the original rage virus that turns people into mindless flesh-eating monsters, a twelve year old boy named Spike leaves his safely quarantined island community and ventures to the mainland in hopes of finding medical help for his mother.

I have heard very mixed reviews of this movie, things like "interesting but messy." I honestly find this a little confusing, because on the whole I found this movie beautifully executed (it's Danny Boyle, after), emotionally coherent, very well-acted, and with only as many unlikely bits as one gets in any zombie/post-apocalypse movie. It's very earnest; I saw someone call it "sentimental, in a good way," which feels about right. I liked the island community, I liked the complicated relationship between Spike, his mom, and his dad. The moments the movie wanted me to find beautiful and moving generally worked for me.

I didn't love it the way some of my friends did; I think it just didn't have enough of my own personal id-bait in it. I thought it was a perfectly competent post-apocalyptic coming of age story, though.

The one fly in the ointment is the ending/cliffhanger, which feels like a visit from the schlockiest era of Mad Max. It's easy enough to just ignore that scene, though, at least until the second movie in the trilogy comes out. IMO this movie works fine without it.

Together (2025). Real-life spouses Dave Franco and Alison Brie star as a longtime couple whose stagnated relationship gets more strained when they move to the countryside, and then things get really weird after they go hiking and fall into a weird hole in the ground.

I feel like this movie knows exactly what tone and mixture of horror, humor, metaphor, and relationship drama it wants and mostly succeeds. Unfortunately that tone didn't really work for me, and I found the main couple annoying, especially Franco's character. Meanwhile the movie is NOT interested in the mechanics or backstory of its horror, fair enough, but those are the parts that I would have been most interested in.

The deal with the third significant character is pretty fun, and I appreciate the foreshadowing. I also appreciate that this is yet another horror movie this year with a casual, unmarked queer relationship in it.

Overall, this felt like a perfectly fine movie that was just not for me.

Strange Harvest (2025). A true crime mockumentary about one man's series of ritualistic killings.

If "Lovecraftian serial killer mockumentary" sends tingles down your spine, then this movie is for you. I would not say it does a lot over and above that description, but the slow unspooling of events and the eventual reveals (which mean more to us horror aficionados than to the people being interviewed) are all very solidly written. It also manages to be quite gory, which I feel is impressive given it's literally all shown via photographs and video taken after the fact. There's one particularly grisly kill that is not like anything I've seen before. Plus, you have to be charmed by a movie so indie that the guy playing the serial killer is also the production designer.

Watching this, I wondered why there aren't more horror mockumentaries. They feel like probably just one step up from found footage in terms of budget and complexity (okay, maybe two steps), and they allow for a lot of the same kind of storytelling. I would absolutely watch more of this kind of thing. (Any recommendations? I've seen Lake Mungo, and that's about it.)

Anyway, this movie is a solid example of the kind of thing it is, which happens to be a thing I like. If you watch it, be sure to stick around through the end credits for the little stinger.

AKA Movies I Watched On the Plane to Slovenia. In order of how much I liked them.

The Amateur (2025). After his wife is killed by terrorists and his bosses at the CIA refuse to do anything about it, computer nerd Charlie (Rami Malek) sets out to get revenge on them himself.

This is by far the most movie-like of these movies. It has a solid thriller structure and decent cinematography, and most importantly it has Malek, who is fantastic. Plus, who doesn't want to to root for the underdog? On the other hand, the espionage scene in this movie has a few too many gentlemen in it: gentlemanly CIA ages, gentlemanly terrorists. By the end this tipped over from charmingly quaint to silly. It also has way too few ladies in it, by which I mean there are four total and three of them end up dead. And it was very confused about what it wanted to say with its revenge plot, with an ending I found pretty unsatisfying.

Trap (2024). Cooper (Josh Hartnett) takes his daughter to a pop concert but then realizes the police are using the concert to trap a notorious serial killer, ie him. The first of my accidental Shyamalan double feature! This is directed by M. Night and features his daughter Saleka as the pop diva.

This movie is very silly. The basic premise of a psychopath trying to escape a concert without his daughter realizing anything is wrong was good fun, but most of the plot developments strain disbelief or just make no sense. Then they do actually get out of the concert venue in the third act, which means instead of the gimmicky premise the movie is having to stand entirely on the strengths of its plotting and character work, which are not up to the task. Cooper gets only the laziest of psychological development or motivation, and Hayley Mills (!!) as the FBI profiler leading the efforts to catch him is severely underused.

The worst thing about the third act, though, is that the daughter fades completely out of the picture, and we are supposed to care about first the pop diva (??) and then Cooper's wife (???) and their respective relationships/interactions with him. The wife in particular is a total curveball; she's had like two lines before she suddenly becomes the lynchpin of the final act. The pop diva, meanwhile, just can't act. And also I don't care! I thought this movie was going to be about Cooper and his daughter, what the fuck!

To me the piece of writing that typifies this movie is the FBI profiler saying towards the end that nobody could have noticed Cooper's psychopathy except maybe a parent. Meanwhile, Hartnett has spent the whole movie playing this character as only barely hinged.

The Watchers (2024). A young woman in Ireland named Mina agrees to drive a parrot to a neighboring city, gets lost in a wood of cosmic horrors, and ends up joining a group of other survivors trapped in a structure where creatures come to "watch" them every night. The second in my Shyamalan double feature, this was directed by his daughter Ishana Night.

Where Trap was silly, this movie is nonsense. Yes, these are meaningfully different in my head. 😅 This movie has greater ambitions, but its ideas are so scattered.
• It’s basically a creature feature, but the creatures are faires. Sure, okay.
• The main character Mina has an identical twin named Lucy, but this Dracula reference adds absolutely nothing.
• There are a lot of different instances of the theme of mimicry or likeness, but this doesn’t seem to have anything to do with Mina’s emotional struggles or arc.
• The bird is a plot macguffin that hangs around most of the movie doing nothing and then leaves the narrative in the third act. (It’s alive and fine, though.)
• Like Trap, this movie eventually loses interest in its “trapped in a location” premise and wanders off to finish its story elsewhere, at which point the momentum and tension come to a screeching and permanent halt.

I’m reminded of Cuckoo, another indie horror movie with maybe more ideas than it knew how to execute, but Cuckoo looks like a screenwriting/directing/editing masterclass compared to this. Which is unfortunate, because IMO the cast was pretty good, and the cosmic elements could have been really cool and weird in the right hands.

All that said, I’m interested to see what Ishana Night Shyamalan does next. This was bad, but it wasn't boring, and I definitely did not guess where it was going.