Hassan Sherif reviews Lukas Dhont’s award-winning and intimate debut feature on trans experiences. 

BFI London Film Festival’s Sutherland Trophy for Best First Feature was awarded this year to director Lukas Dhont for Girl, a stunning portrait of a transgender teen bruised by the struggles of her transition. It is steeped in melancholia, but boasts an uplifting message that powers through on account of a well-paced and intelligent script. The film’s intimate narrative style and honest performances ensured its success at Cannes Film Festival, where it received both the Camèra d’Or and the Queer Palm. Its lead, Victor Polster, as mesmerising as he is disquieting, was rightly named winner of the Un Certain Regard Jury Award for Best Performance. The film’s receipt of these successes is testament to the fact that Girl is not only a blistering new take on LGBTQ issues, but also that it masterfully and unforgivingly explores girlhood and maturity.

Polster is Lara, a fifteen-year-old who was born male but is now within the first stages of gender reassignment, preparing for surgery. Lara’s excitement at gaining a trial placement at one of Belgium’s most prestigious dance academies is undercut by the mounting mental pressure she experiences due to both internal and external sources. The factors of this oppressive unease include her frustration at the transition’s slow pace, her uncomfortable socio-sexual interactions, and her unrelenting training schedule. Polster’s physical and facial expressions are pivotal to capturing this frustration, as the script from Dhont and collaborator Angelo Tijssens deliberately limits the amount of verbal expression offered by Lara. She represses her emotions in the company of others, coming across as shy, quiet, and sweet. But Polster’s tortured eyes suggest a severe angst that speaks volumes over Lara’s restrained dialogue, rendered inescapable for both Lara and the viewer as there is a centrality to the protagonist in pretty much every frame. It is this underlying torment that builds up the tension so brilliantly throughout the film. For all the emotion welling up within Lara, she is never afforded a dramatic outburst, and ballet acts as a vent for her innate desperation. Every scene that sees her fight back tears is married to a beautiful sequence in which she explosively practises her routines, occasionally with difficulty. Dhont uses Lara’s training errors to scatter a forceful violence throughout the film; every brutal knock and every bloody strip of skin reminds us of the harsh reality that exists beyond Lara’s brief escapism.

But it is not just Polster’s breakout effort that will move viewers. Arieh Worthalter is phenomenal as Lara’s single father Mathias, a taxi driver on his own turbulent journey of finding new love while settling into a different life with his two children. His prioritisation of Lara and her baby brother Milo’s (Oliver Bodart) happiness is never once questioned, with moments of annoyance solely borne from his desperate hope for Lara to find peace. The mother figure is removed from the narrative entirely. In his post-screening interview at LFF, Dhont explained that this was part of his own mission to reduce the notion of toxic masculinity prevalent within LGBTQ films, in which the main antagonistic force that the queer character must battle is a straight male figure’s rigid intolerance. For Dhont, making the father and brother figures the film’s most accepting characters ensures that viewers do not paint such a topic in black and white. So, too, does Dhont’s conscious decision not to entirely victimize his protagonist; Girl is not a coming-of-age piece that reduces the young central figure to an emotionally immature teenager on a journey to adult liberation. Instead, it explores how Lara’s determination influences those around her for the better. The implied emotional turbulence of her past has elevated her maturity to an inspirational level, as we can see from Milo’s intimate gleams of admiration every time he is entertained by his big sister.

Girl truly is a film of intimacy, with emotional eruption a constant threat. Over five hundred actors auditioned for the role of Lara, and it is no surprise that Dhont’s extensive search for an actor with powerful emotional control and a masterful dancing technique was fruitful in its results. Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui’s emotionally-charged choreography and Valentin Hadjadj’s sweeping orchestral soundtrack intensely accentuate Lara’s exasperation throughout. The film’s success lies in its simplicity and balance, placing side-by-side gripping dance sequences with moments of harsh, gritty realism. Dhont’s stunning directorial debut is an example of how beauty prevails among discomfort and pain.

8/10

Girl won the Sutherland Trophy at the 2018 BFI London Film Festival, and will receive its general release in the UK on March 15th, 2019. In the meantime, check out its trailer below:

Hassan Sherif critiques Carol Morley’s meandering and cosmo-pondering neo-noir.  

Carol Morley’s latest venture, Out of Blue, is grounded within the gritty urbane confines of New Orleans yet deals with a magnitudinous cosmic subtext. It aims to wear a viewer down with its exploration of the pessimistic thoughts that accompany deliberation over humanity’s insignificance. Unluckily for the film, it succeeds, and then some. The potential is endless when toying with astrological references, but this story of an existential crisis during a homicide investigation is often stale and unexciting, meaning that this slow film never really feels like it has begun.

This is most clearly down to the sluggish performances themselves, and not to the art direction: the dark ambience which imbues the film encapsulates well the crushingly world-weary mindsets of our protagonist (Patricia Clarkson) and the cast of characters around her. In Morley’s adaptation of Martin Amis’s 1997 novel Night Train, Clarkson is Mike Hoolihan, a veteran detective and recovering alcoholic. Her latest case concerns the murder of a brilliant young astrophysicist, Jennifer Rockwell (Mamie Gummer), noted for her disconcerting research on black holes and on our place within the universe. It also drowns Hoolihan in a dark wave of transcendental grief. Midway through the film, the identity of the culprit in this mystery is no longer the main focus; as time passes so does the detective’s sensibilities, transforming Out of Blue from a gritty whodunnit into a surreal portrayal of a deathly mid-life crisis.

As Hoolihan grows frustrated with the emotional vacancy of both Rockwell’s boyfriend (Jonathan Majors) and her sinisterly professional family, we’re left wondering just how much more powerful this production could have been with a more energised performance from its cast; Morley’s confident direction and the film-saving score from Clint Mansell are left hanging by imbalanced emotional execution from the primary actors. A poor attempt at realism means that they deliver their lines in a very resigned manner, and they almost seem distracted by how unengaging the script is. Majors tries to maximise his character’s grief, but unfortunately returns a painful few sequences of odd and unconvincing crying. Even Toby Jones looks disinterested as the dodgy Professor Ian Strammi, and these half-hearted performances cannot be resuscitated by a plot that largely goes nowhere. Although Clarkson’s overblown dreariness quickly becomes oppressive, her portrayal of a woman’s descent into broken stupor is bound to stay with the viewer. An hour and a half into the film and we think we know the monotonous rhythm of her speech, but a short, awkward drunk sequence showcases this professional woman embarrassing herself in cringe-worthy fashion. It is the first instance of cringe within the film that seems intentional, and actually adds to the portrait of a lady in distress, rather than displaying signs of weakness in a tired movie. We welcome this sudden change from the safe formula of poorly delivered one-liners and tautologous scenes that scream irrelevance.

On a more positive note, Morley’s recycling of the same locations complements her discussion of humanity’s limited time on Earth by creating a sense of claustrophobia within the large-scale setting of New Orleans. However, this quickly delves into repetitiveness, with the same three or four different environments revisited in every scene. Similarly, a flash back to Rockwell’s short monologue about how “we are all stardust” is churned out every ten or so minutes and eventually loses its impact – while starting to feel slightly self-indulgent. Morley’s script is obsessed with Schrödinger’s cat, and other such philo-psychological concepts, mentioning them so frequently that we soon feel like we are watching a badly taught lecture and as an audience, that we are not being taken seriously. For a script that repeatedly comments on how beautiful the unknown world among the stars may be, it is markedly unmagical. Thankfully, the ominous dénouement of the film is a powerful, hallucinatory, and most importantly satisfying farewell to an unnecessarily drawn out investigation, and to the portrayal of a middle-aged life locked in stasis.

4/10

Out Of Blue will be generally released in the UK on March 22nd, 2019. Check out a clip below:

Hassan Sherif takes on the Conjuring franchise’s newest supernatural horror origin story. 

The Conjuring Universe shows little sign of ending its welcomed expansion, with The Nun becoming the fifth instalment in the horror franchise that, despite fluctuating critical response, has proved to be a six-year box-office big hitter. The series’ non-linear chronology allows for a developing thread of stories, resulting so far in ‘cases’ that range over thirty-ish years, based on the files of Ed and Lorraine Warren.

The newest venture, under the direction of Corin Hardy with a story from Conjuring director James Wan, is the first not to be set in the United States or England, instead sidestepping away to 1952 Romania – specifically the Carta Monastery (which bears no resemblance to the real one). Not a surprise, since this film itself bears little resemblance to the series from which it is born. The rushed production has resulted in a cocktail of frustrating clichés and jump scares, a mile away from the paralysing suspense that elevated the original film above many horrors of recent years. Considering that the real Carta Monastery is located in Transylvania, there’s no doubt the producers took one look at the infamous location and thought they’d steal the name for typical contextual effect. This is indicative of many of The Nun’s unashamed genre clichés that plague what could have been an iconic instalment in an already memorable collection.

For instance, the demon nun herself had slapped so much terror into The Conjuring 2 that when news of her own spin-off was announced, fans braced themselves for what was promised to be an unforgettably nightmarish adventure. Instead, she is reduced to a pantomime villain-slash-showman who is incapable of pulling off anything other than silly, non-fatal pranks on our three protagonists. It feels less like a dangerous investigation ordered by the Vatican itself and more like an angry episode of Scooby-Doo.

Meanwhile, this hapless trio of priest Father Burke (Demián Bichir), young Catholic novitiate Sister Irene (Taissa Farmiga) and workman Maurice ‘Frenchie’ Theriault (Jonas Bloquet) find themselves exploring the dark happenings of the monastery following the apparent suicide of one of its sisters. In fairness to them, and to the ensemble of nuns who feature heavily in the narrative’s relatively redeeming climax, the film’s performances are by far the strongest thing about it. The dark atmosphere is largely maintained due to their visceral portrayals of fear, but it is less helped by Hardy’s exaggerated emphasis on a light versus dark motif. Whilst the opening fifteen or so minutes balance the terror of the monastery with the relief of the outside world, the constant flitting between light and dark provides a clear formula which signals to the audience when they should brace themselves for a scare, eliminating much of the suspense on offer. One in five of these jumps might perhaps result in a slight gasp, but there’s no memorable or grippingly frightening sequences, such as The Conjuring’s hand clap, or Annabelle: Creation’s hand snap.

The actors’ battles with a poor script distracts from the actual battle playing out before us. Awful one-liners reduce the leads to caricatures – particularly Frenchie, who, thanks to Gary Dauberman’s writing, carries out a weird few minutes of predatory flirting literally within two seconds of being introduced to Sister Irene, in one of the most disturbing sequences in the film. Thankfully, the natural likeability of the actors, who each give enough effort to hint at a complexity beneath their half-hearted yet melodramatic dialogue, gifts their characters a certain realism which also blessed the original Conjuring cast. All performances, even the nuns who follow a daily routine of freak out – pray – repeat, are the strong links holding together a plot threatened by an odd rhythm to the sequence of events and by a few dramatic revelations which the audience assumed were obvious from the beginning.

The predictable genre screenplay overshadows a decent atmosphere and set of performances, green-lighting a very tired portrayal of the haunting that started it all (at least so far). It’s below par, but not a disaster, if we accept that Hardy’s very average offering has produced a fun, dumb horror movie, rather than a serious effort to match the standards of the series. In short, it won’t leave you looking over your shoulder, but you won’t be asking for your money back.

The Nun is currently released in UK cinemas. Check out its trailer below: