Red Sparrow is a 2018 spy-thriller film directed by Francis Lawrence who worked with Jennifer Lawrence (the star here) on a couple of the Hunger Games movies, but this is a very different beast. Jennifer Lawrence plays Dominika Egorova (in, it has to be said, a not entirely convincing Russian accent), and Joel Edgerton, Matthias Schoenarts and Charlotte Rampling star as the film's secondary characters. This one is a pretty big departure from what Lawrence has done in the past, although it has to be said that she's making some pretty bold career choices. I'm not the first one to say that, and for a good reason: it's true. After last year's Mother! it appeared as if she was trying purposefully trying to appear in more "mature" films, and believe me, it doesn't get much more mature than Red Sparrow. The film plays out like one of those schlocky exploitation from the seventies, in that there's sexual violence, sex, violence, torture, and all manner o
Pulse is a 2001 Japanese horror film directed by Kyoshi Kurosawa. It received pretty good reviews when it came out (74% on rottentomatoes), and has since garnered a cult following. The story starts in a plant shop, with a group of friends talking about someone they know (Taguchi) who has been strangely withdrawn. He claims to have been working on a computer disk in some way, and eventually Michi (Kumiko Aso) decides to go to his apartment and check up on him. He commits suicide, and then, when checking his computer, Michi finds a video of him staring strangely at his own computer. Then the friends try to figure out what exactly spurred Taguchi to commit suicide.
I've been meaning to see this film for a while, and I decided to finally get it on Blu-Ray. In some ways, this one is pretty similar to The Grudge and Ring, but only in terms of its style. I think it'd be slightly inaccurate to say if you like those two films, you'll like this one. It's not that Pulse is less socially aware than those two (I'd argue that it has pretty similar themes), but this film is much slower. With that being said, I enjoyed this film a lot - it's just a complex film that rewards patience.
But what I really love about this film is that it is genuinely scary, and that's strangely rare for modern horror. The most remarkable thing about this film is that it was made on an incredibly low budget, yet does so much purely on the backs of its actors and small amounts of CGI. Some of the scenes in this are the scariest I've seen in years. I don't want to spoil any of them, but there are moments in this which are not for the faint of heart. They're not gory or violent, but they are disturbing and will stick in your mind for a long time.
I also think this is the most nuanced exploration of themes that are explored in a lot of Japanese films too - loneliness, existential despair, what it means to exist in a world where technology and work rule our lives. But the main theme is one of loneliness. It forces us to think about how we can exist happily in a disconnected world in which people exist on the other side of a screen rather in "real life."
The only downside to this film is that some of the effects are incredibly cheap-looking. I don't even think it's because of the low budget, because they're the kind of effects you'd find in something like Birdemic. I have no idea how it happened, but luckily the effects are few and far between and didn't really affect my enjoyment of the film much. This is a slow, scary, and meditative film, and anybody who's a horror fan should definitely check this out.
Comments
Post a Comment