swamp ophelia

Still catching up with my backlog. Theme is, um. *points upwards*

Midsommar (2019): This is one of the most striking horror movies I've watched to date. Grieving the loss of her parents and sister in a horrific murder-suicide, Dani joins her boyfriend (an anthropology PhD whose plans to break up with her were also interrupted by the deaths) on a boys' trip to rural Sweden, to celebrate the summer solstice with the pagan cult in which one of the friends was raised. Everything is sun-drenched and floral, the cultists all clad in serene white and perpetually smiling; the warm welcome they show Dani contrasts starkly with the barely veiled indifference of her boyfriend and the contempt of his friends. It's all so perfectly idyllic - and yet, they're a cult, and this is a horror movie. So naturally the visit goes GREAT. :)))

Florence Pugh is amazing as Dani. The scene at the beginning, when she first receives the news about her family, was such a gut-wrenchingly real, raw depiction of grief that I only barely managed not to nope out. Her shitty boyfriend was finding her too needy even before she lost her whole family; she's under constant pressure to put on the most coping front she can, painfully aware that her "support network" sees her as a burden. ( Spoilers )

Smile (2022): As far as I can tell, this film got made because someone reached the end credits of It Follows and said "Great, now take it from the top, but a bit less good this time." Dr. Rose Cotter, a psychologist working in an emergency mental health unit, contracts a sort of contagious demon from one of her patients. The entity follows you around for a few days, appearing in the form of different people smiling the same creepy smile at you. Then it takes over your body and forces you to commit gruesome suicide in front of a witness, who then becomes the entity's next victim. The supposed irony of Rose's professional background - she treats crazy people, but now everyone thinks she's crazy! Cue Alanis! - is milked for all the heavy-handed messaging about mental health stigma it can possibly yield. There are a shitton of jumpscares. That's about it.

Here's a screencap of the creepy smile. If that image scares you in a way that you'd like to experience more of, then it's by no means a bad use of ~2hrs of your life! I had a pretty good time, to be honest, but it was all empty calories. It's probably not one I'm going to feel moved to rewatch.

Late Night with the Devil (2023): A 1970s late night talk show host, played by David Dastmalchian, gets more than he bargained for when he invites a possessed girl to appear on his Halloween special in the hopes of boosting his flagging ratings. This was good solid fun with great acting and some great campy scares. I wasn't 100% sold on the surreal twist in the final act, but that's more of a "this wasted its chance to end stronger" complaint rather than actively detracting from the film, if that makes sense. I liked it a lot! And I'd like to see more of Dastmalchian, I think. The only other role of his I've seen is when he played Gurathin in Murderbot, and since I hated the adaptation in general and his character specifically, I don't think that appearance did him justice. He acted the HELL out of this.

I'm also very interested to see more of Ingrid Torelli, who played the possessed girl. She's young and very early in her career so there's not exactly much backlog to delve into, but I found her extremely charismatic. And apparently she's Australian! We're such a horror powerhouse. Go us. :')

We Bury the Dead (2024): Speaking of Australian horror... The US accidentally deploys an experimental weapon off the coast of Tasmania, killing literally every single life form on the whole island. Daisy Ridley plays an American woman, Ava, whose husband was staying south of Hobart on a work retreat when it happened, and who has come to join the body retrieval effort to find him. On arrival Ava quickly learns that rumours of some of the dead coming back to life as zombies are true, and also that Hobart is still on fire and the army won't be letting anyone travel south until the flames are out. Unwilling to wait that long once she sees some of the zombies showing signs of what look like self-awareness, hoping desperately to find her husband resurrected and still himself, she and the wildcard fellow retrievalist she has bonded with give their unit the slip and set off alone for the husband's resort.

I watched this mainly for Daisy Ridley and did NOT expect to love it as much as I did. I spent the first few minutes uncharitably annoyed because Ava showed up in an Australia that has literally just lost, like, a full percentage of our population in a tragedy caused by her shithole fucking country (sorry US friends I love youse really) and immediately started trying to play the sympathy card about her bereavement to the visibly exhausted Australian soldier manning the registration desk, thinking she could get a super special exemption to go look for ONLY her husband and not be bothered to pitch in with the rest of the cleanup effort. (Australia is of course in no way the primary or intended victim of the American cultural tendency to view the whole rest of the world as a painted backdrop on which American stories, the stories that matter, play out - but we have taken enough collateral over the years that I have some bad feelings pent up, okay.) But I got past that quickly because 1) grief can make self-absorbed jerks of everyone, not just Americans and 2) her bullshit did actually get called out later in the film. Meanwhile, the meat of the story turned out to be that ( spoilers ) The zombies aren't really the source of much of the horror at all, and the ending left me so fucking happy, in a way that I would never have expected from a zombie flick.

I think We Bury the Dead and Midsommar are tied for my favourites in this post, and are probably up there with my favourites of this year's whole horror binge so far.