Director: Shiori Itô
Writer: Shiori Itô
Stars: Shiori Itô

Synopsis: Journalist Shiori Ito investigates her own sexual assault, seeking to prosecute the high-profile offender. Her quest becomes a landmark case, exposing Japan’s outdated judicial and societal systems.

“Now let me tell you my story.”

Shiori Ito is speaking to a camera phone. She’s scared but she wants to talk about the truth of her sexual assault, two years previously. She is a journalist and if she comes forward with the facts, she will be the one stigmatized. Her family discourages her. People call in to television and radio stations abusing her. Shiori Ito is making a stance in a country where making a stance is akin to proclaiming oneself a pariah. 

The man who allegedly assaulted her is a senior political journalist and in the inner circle of Prime minister Abe. Ms. Ito is consistently stonewalled by the police when she tries to get proof of what occurred, so it is now up to her to run her own investigation. She begins with the driver who dropped her off at the hotel. Ms. Ito was highly intoxicated but asked the driver several times to drop her off at the station. Mr Yamaguchi, the man who had bundled her into the car, refused to let the driver stop. CCTV shows Ms. Ito and Mr. Yamaguchi get out of the car. She is barely able to stand, and he is pulling her across the hotel foyer. It is 2015. May 29th, 2017, Ms. Ito makes her public and filmed press statement at the National Press Club. From that moment she is repeatedly re-victimized and becomes ‘persona non grata’. However, she feels that if she “shuts up” she feels she will be contributing to the culture of silence for sexual assault victims in Japan.

In investigating her own rape, Ms. Ito learns she has almost no chance of bringing the man to ‘justice’, so her next recourse is to question the misogynist systems that control meting out ‘justice’ in Japan. From the Tokyo and National police to the bureaucratic government offices – including the male staffed Office for the Safety of Women, Ms. Ito finds either a wall of silence or a culture of inaction. She also becomes tangled in her own ethical dilemma when people who do come forward off the record to assist her risk their jobs and livelihoods if she publishes what they have said in her book, “Black Box.” Her family will be put in danger if the book is published. One detective (known as Detective A) who informed her that the police were told not to arrest Yamaguchi on the order of chief Nakamura, the head of the Tokyo police, can never testify or be quoted by name.

Parliamentary records are ignored, or the stenographer told to not record what is being said if it relates to Ms. Ito’s case. The press refuses to cover the story – what would otherwise amount to a major scandal. Mr. Kanehira of the TBS Network newsroom (who refuses to be filmed) apologizes for his junior colleague, Hamaguchi, and notes how quiet the press has been. The corridors of power form a maze Ms. Ito is trapped within and even the truth as a beacon is unable to guide her through.

Her apartment is wiretapped. Her physical safety isn’t guaranteed. Ms. Ito has been a prisoner in her own city, unable to go outside without someone accompanying her. As time passes, she speaks of forgetting what the cherry blossoms look like.

In 2017, she is told that her criminal case will not be re-opened despite the proof gathered by Ms. Ito and her team of fellow journalists. The Prosecution Review Board denies all requests and Ikaru Yamaguchi threatens legal action against anyone reporting or writing on him suggesting he is a criminal. “Bring it on,” says one of Ms. Ito’s colleagues.

“Rape is murder of the soul,” Ms. Ito writes. She is also afraid enough to write in her will that that she is not suicidal and if she dies during her trial and the investigation, she wants people to take note. Later, she does find herself on the edge and destroyed by the constant stonewalling, harassment, and victim blaming she ends up in the hospital. How many other young women have been through the same thing?

“Journalism is about monitoring power,” she pronounces during a conference of women journalists and academics. Many come forward speaking of their experiences. For the first time she is speaking in public to an audience who embrace and uplift her. They wholeheartedly believe her, and because of her feel enabled to add their voices. Ms. Ito’s stance is one they wish they’d taken. She stands as the face of a movement. The relief she feels at being vindicated by other women and having people to share her shame and horror is palpable and she cries.

“Every time I speak, I feel like I am standing naked. But today I feel like I am being covered in blankets.” Ito’s tears are shared, and her burden shouldered by other women making it easier to carry on. Japan is facing its own ‘Me too’ moment. 

Shiori Ito has limited legal recourse against Yamaguchi because there will never be criminal charges filed; however, she takes the case to civil court in 2018. Along with her book and her tireless self-advocacy she has spent most of her twenties reliving the worst night of her life. She tried to deal with her case as a journalist, in the third person, but it is impossible for her to keep the barrier between ‘objectivity’ and the fact she is the human being who was drugged and violated.

Shiori Ito’s documentary is an astounding record of tenacity and bravery in the face of systemic misogyny. One doesn’t have to imagine the professional, personal, and emotional cost of bringing to light the crime she endured. Almost every step she has taken has been filmed. Her personal video diaries, her phone calls, the interviews, the progress of the civil trial, the emails she received – they each form a mountain of evidence not only against Yamaguchi but against Japan. “The black box is a social problem,” Ito says. The black box is where the evidence of sex crimes go when they have been deemed too difficult (read: too challenging) for the authorities to pursue. 

Shiori Ito is emblematic of too many Japanese women. In the film, the audience is shown home videos of Shiori as a child pretending to read the news. All she ever wanted to be was a journalist. In one night, over what she had assumed would be a professional meeting, the bright-eyed child was murdered and was replaced by a woman who, bruised and bleeding, became a statistic in Japan’s shameful neglect of victims of sexual assault. She also became an icon of resistance. A woman whose case was mentioned in parliament. A woman who put herself in the direct firing line of every colluding bureaucracy and spoke not only for herself but for the women who could not. Ito’s work is a national testament opening the doors for other people to stand up and fight.

“I’m still here,” Ito says. After eight years of battling for herself and others she has retained her integrity. Panic, intimidation, dark nights of the soul, public and personal shaming, and countersuits were all weathered, and her civil case was successful. Yamaguchi is proclaimed guilty, but he will never be imprisoned. Shiori Ito, in the end, wasn’t fighting to put Yamaguchi in jail but rather to get herself out of the prison that victims of sexual assault are forced into. 

Presented with veracity and straddling the line between objectivity and intimacy, every fact Shiori Ito brings to light is a wrecking ball pounding at the walls obstructing justice for women in Japan. Vital and remarkable, Black Box Diaries is a towering feat in documentary filmmaking.

Grade: A

Director: Tim Fehlbaum
Writers: Moritz Binder, Alex David, Tim Fehlbaum
Stars: Peter Sarsgaard, John Magaro, Ben Chaplin

Synopsis: During the 1972 Munich Olympics, an American sports broadcasting crew finds itself thrust into covering the hostage crisis involving Israeli athletes.

The events that occurred during the Munich Olympics in 1972 have been told multiple times, most notably in the Oscar-winning documentary One Day In September and in Steven Spielberg’s Munich. Black September, the infamous Palestinian terrorist group that formed in the aftermath of the Six-Day War, broke into the Olympic Village apartments where the Israelis were staying and took 11 hostages. The end result was tragic: the police’s bungled attempt to ambush the terrorists resulted in the deaths of all the hostages. Fifty-two years later and some of the worst moments of the Israel-Palestine conflict currently going on, the events of that day are very relevant and, just like last year’s The Zone of Interest, September 5 is a reminder of what is going on now.

What makes this film distinguishable is that the entire events are told from the perspective of ABC Sports led by executive Roone Arledge (Peter Sarsgaard) who simply completes the schedule for their sporting coverage the day before. What begins with a crew tired after the previous day’s events led by American swimmer Mark Spitz winning 7 gold medals turns quickly on its head when they hear distant gunshots from the Olympic Village not far from where they are. Quickly, Geoff (John Magaro), a producer in to cover other sports happening that morning, scrambles to get everyone up to speed with Marvin (Ben Chaplin), the head of operations, and their translator Marianne (Leonie Benesch), trying to get information first. 

As night turns to day, the studio uses every trick they have such as sneaking one of the assistants into the village by dressing him up as an athlete living there to film as close as he can towards ground zero of the attack. This is decades before the advent of social media. Roone fights for the satellite control with CBS – the rival studios took turns on timeslots covering the Olympics – Marianne runs inside and out and translates every word coming from German police and media while fighting for respect from her colleagues, and Geoff works to fend off ABC news for full control on their side even though they are just for sports. Suddenly, you finally see the camera tighten up on everyone with every second passing as day becomes night and the climax moves away from them to the airport. 

The film edits itself tirelessly between the archival footage, such as the shots of a mask-cladded terrorist on the balcony, and the studio as they work fast to cut between cameras with their footage outside and in-studio where lead anchor Jim McKay (only archive) is giving the up-to-date news. The sound design is also flawless with the overlapping voices, sounds with the controls, and radio announcements, whether it be German radio or Peter Jennings (Benjamin Walker) relaying from outside what is happening. It is terrifying to watch as they see these shocking images from their own well-placed cameras and then to realize that the terrorists are watching their feed since it’s also in the Olympic Village. TV journalistic ethics come into major question with what Roone and Geoff want to broadcast, especially when accosted by Munich police brandishing semi-automatics at the crew. 

Co-writer/director Tim Fehlbaum (Hell) is perfect in telling this very compelling, heart-pounding drama of the first terrorist event happening live worldwide. (The post-script says 900 million people saw it on TV.) The whole ensemble syncs perfectly to every turn in the story with Magaro and Benesch being the standouts. September 5 succeeds beyond expectations as a docudrama that holds on to viewers and will never let go as the hours tick on by to its tragic conclusion. Leaving the theater will have the same realization as with The Zone of Interest: nothing has changed in this conflict many, many decades later on with the Middle East.

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Grade: A

Director: Malcolm Washington
Writers: Virgil Williams, Malcolm Washington, August Wilson
Stars: Samuel L. Jackson, John David Washington, Danielle Deadwyler

Synopsis: Follows the lives of the Charles family as they deal with themes of family legacy and more, in deciding what to do with an heirloom, the family piano.

August Wilson’s second Pulitzer Prize-winning play (after Fences) becomes the latest work from the late playwright to receive the movie treatment, again from Denzel Washington as producer. This time, it is a more family affair as it is his youngest son, Malcolm Washington, adapting (with co-writer Virgil Williams) and directing The Piano Lesson as his debut feature and directing his brother, John David Washington. Their younger sister, Katia, is also a producer on the film. Although it is set in Pittsburgh during the 1930s, it is very much based in the South and it has entered the house where its ghosts begin to haunt everyone, all surrounding the family history carved into a piano. 

The opening scene, set  on July 4, 1911, in Mississippi sets the tone to what is to come after. The Charles family flees the farm to move up to Pittsburgh before a small group of Klansmen burn down the house, thinking they have killed everyone inside and destroyed everything. Cut to 1936 and Boy Willie (John David) with his friend Lymon (Ray Fisher) enter the home of his sister Berniece (Danielle Deadwyler) with a plan to sell the piano, their most valuable asset, to buy land for his own farm back in Mississippi. Once a piano player, Berniece hasn’t played since the death of their mother and lets it sit in the living room. She refuses to sell it or move it, noting the carvings that depict their ancestors going back to when they were slaves. 

Uncle Doaker (Samuel L. Jackson, who played Boy Willie in the play’s first production at the Yale Repertory Theatre) plays mediator between the conflicting siblings with his mellow tone and gives the full story of the piano, its origins, and the events after July 4, 1911. A White man named Sutter, whose family were the slave owners of the Charles’ family descendants, led the charge to take back the piano that was built for his family and killed Boy Willie and Berniece’s father. However, he mysteriously fell to his death sometime later. It is Sutter’s ghost that lurks in the house and makes his presence known at times during the film. 

The strength of the film comes in its acting; Deadwyler is by far the MVP of the film. John David does his best to duplicate his father and glimpses are very much there with Michael Potts as Wining Boy Charles sharing stories with Doaker to give light into a heavily dramatic tale. A preacher (Corey Hawkins) is also around looking to court the single Berniece and, even though she’s in for only a few minutes, the flashback to Lucille Charles (Erykah Badu) as the slave being sold to the Sutters in the beginning is very a firm representation, even in silence, of the family’s – and the piano’s – origins.  

Of all of Wilson’s plays, The Piano Lesson is probably one of the more difficult ones to adapt because of its supernatural tone, but does work well as a movie. It didn’t need to play like it did on stage with the extra exposition in certain scenes and the climax which carries on a bit long, but Malcolm Washington and crew (and family) succeed in giving Wilson’s story a solid screen adaptation about family coming full circle around one singular object and the importance of knowing your ancestry and keeping it all costs, regardless of what comes with it.

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Grade: B-

Director: Adam Elliot
Writers: Adam Elliot
Stars: Kodi Smit-McPhee, Eric Bana, Sarah Snook

Synopsis: A bittersweet memoir of a melancholic woman called Grace Pudel – a hoarder of snails, romance novels, and guinea-pigs.

The story is not about an actual snail, but a snail-loving young woman in Grace Pudel (Sarah Snook) who wears a snail cap all the time. Talking to an actual pet snail, Sylvia, Grace tells the story of her life and her encounter with the free-spirited Pinky (Jacki Weaver), who has just died. It is a sad tale: Grace’s mother dies after giving birth to her and her twin brother Gilbert (Kodi Smit-McPhee). The dad, Percy (Dominique Pinon), is a former street performer who is a paraplegic and alcoholic after getting hit by a car, leaving Grace and Gilbert to their own devices for the most part. They do, however, still have some fun with their dad, but the siblings are mostly preoccupied with themselves and comforting each other.

Gilbert is protective of Grace, willing to give her blood when undergoing surgery for her cleft lip and stopping bullies from mocking her for it. However, Gilbert is a pyromaniac who wants to become a street performer just like his dad while Grace takes on her deceased mother’s love of snails and gets anything snail-related. Sadly, this happiness ends when Percy dies and child services comes in to send the pair to separate foster homes and they can only communicate through letters. Gilbert goes to a deeply religious family who run an apple farm while Grace goes to a childless couple who are nudists and seem to neglect her. 

It is here when Grace meets the elderly Pinky who has had an adventurous life, including making love to John Denver in an airplane. Pinky becomes Grace’s confidant and fills the void left by Gilbert being separated from Grace. Her grandmotherly manners helps Grace gain confidence with herself, especially when she meets a neighbor who becomes smitten and the two move in together. That happiness, not surprisingly, pops with a shocking revelation, returning Grace back to gloom. It is a perfectly paced, scene-by-scene transition with every beat shown clearly and not a single word of dialogue offline. 

This is an R-rated animated film, so don’t bring in the kids to see claymation breasts pop out. However, this tragicomedy is one of more emotional films of the year and writer/director Adam Elliot (Mary And Max) absolutely knows when to pull the strings to set off some tears.  Accompanied by Elena Kats-Chernin’s score, which can go unnoticed sometimes, Elliot is able to construct every detail with pinpoint accuracy in tone shifting between the years. Being a stop-motion feature adds that authentic feel being not made with CGI and perfectly captures that darkness Elliot wants to capture, his “clayographies” as he calls it.

As a totally Australian production, it feels refreshing to hear the actors speak in their normal accents. You probably would not have guessed that Shiv Roy was the voice of Gracie but Snook’s voice performance matches the right tone for Gracie like telling a bedtime story. As someone who never heard of Adam Elliot and the fact it took over a decade to get this made, it is one of the biggest surprises for me this year and will be for others too. The deeply somber tone of Memoir Of A Snail, how dark and real it can be, removes the fact that this is an animated movie and is one of the more human films in recent memory.

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Grade: A+

Director: Marielle Heller
Writers: Marielle Heller, Rachel Yoder
Stars: Amy Adams, Scoot McNairy, Arleigh Snowden

Synopsis: A woman pauses her career to be a stay-at-home mom, but soon her domesticity takes a surreal turn.

“I feel like I’m stuck in a prison of my own creation … I’m deeply afraid I’m going to be smart, or happy, or thin ever again.” Mother (Amy Adams) internally answers the question of what it is like being a stay-at-home mom to a woman who she meets in the supermarket who now has her job in the city art gallery she used to run. Mother’s spoken answer is, “I love being a mom.” 

Marielle Heller’s adaptation of Rachel Yoder’s novel Nightbitch imagines the loss of identity a middle-class woman experiences once she moves to the suburbs and takes on the role of ‘mother’ to her toddler son (Arleigh Patrick Snowden and Emmett James Snowden). Mother’s well-intentioned, but oblivious, husband (Scoot McNairy) is absent four days a week leaving Mother with only son for company. The routine of her life is consuming her; yet apart from Son’s sleep refusal, he’s a pleasant and lively little tyke. Mother understands that she chose her life, she quit her job, and they moved out of the city, but had she realized what having limited adult contact, and the impact of giving up her career as an artist (one she is too exhausted to contemplate) would do to her – she might have done something, she can’t yet define what, differently. She certainly wouldn’t have walked willingly into 1950s style suburban malaise.

Mother’s assumptions about other mommies keep her away from most daytime child friendly activities. Her horror of ‘Book Babies’ at the local library is rooted in her belief that other mommies blissfully love just being mommies. The idea of bonding with another woman simply because they have both given birth is pathetic in her mind. What do these women even talk about? Is it as mind-numbing as the repeated duck song played by the storyteller? If only she could find one sophisticated, beautiful, and interesting woman to talk to who hates it all as much as she does. Instead, she finds Jen (Zoë Chao), Miriam (Mary Holland), and Liz (Archana Rajan) who don’t make her feel like an alien from another planet. The alienation Mother feels comes from herself. The trio just laugh when Son loudly proclaims, “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck,” in front of the group. Liz is fascinated by the fact that Mother is an artist. Jen knows what installation art is. Miriam used to be a stripper. They were all people in the ‘before time’ – before kids.”

“Giving birth changes you on a cellular level,” Mother says to the trio when she has begun to open up about her experiences. Chimerical cells travel from a fetus’ body into the mother. Those cells create a bond between mother and child that changes their very physiology. Mother had become resigned to the changes happening to her body. Playing with Son, he says, “Mamma fuzzy.” Mother goes to the bathroom and sees a patch of coarse hair on her lower back. She examines her face. “What fresh hell am I due today?” she asks. More grey hairs, more wrinkles, her figure no longer svelte. Strange body hair barely raises her eyebrows, but her teeth seem sharper too. Also, why is she suddenly able to smell everything so clearly? “I guess that’s where we’re at,” she says but she does mention feeling different to Husband who jokes with her. The jokes stop when Mother loses her temper with Husband as he snores through Son’s restlessness in their bed. “Can you not hear him? Would you fucking do something?” Husband is blithely ignoring Mother’s dissatisfaction because she has turned so much of it in upon herself. She is not a good mother if she complains. She was the one who decided to quit her job. Husband is surprised when she snaps at him. She acted like a bitch. Maybe that’s what she is, a Nightbitch. As he’s taking an Uber to the airport for another four days away, he tells her she should make a schedule and reminds her “Happiness is a choice” – in her mind she slaps his face. In reality she smiles weakly and nods.

Something is happening to Nightbitch. She’s recalling her childhood in a Quaker community and the deep sadness that surrounded her own mother. And she is changing – at least in her dreams. Dogs come up to her at the playground and she takes Son with her to chase them. She remembers her grandmother cooking or perhaps casting spells in Pennsylvanian Dutch. She goes to the library and asks Norma (Jessica Harper) for a book on women and animals, or women turning into animals. Norma hands her a book of ethnographic mythology titled, ‘A Field Guide to Magical Women’ where she reads about the bird women of Peru and Dog goddesses. Nightbitch imagines herself flying.

Nightbitch finds herself ravenously hungry in the supermarket. She begins playing “doggies” with Son. She wolfs down her food court meal directly from the container – people stare but she doesn’t stop. Norma comes over to her table and says it’s so much fun having a son and playing games. She joins in the barking. Nightbitch is surprised she has children and wants to ask her how she got through it all – did she work when they were young? Nightbitch is desperate for some kind of wisdom, some assurance that she’s not cracked. She can’t ask her mother who is deceased. The dreams she has – if they are dreams – are of a pack of dogs stripping her of her clothing and bringing her tributes. 

Marielle Heller remains coy on whether Nightbitch is turning into a dog or if she’s simply connecting to something ‘primal’ within herself which rejects the sameness of suburban living and allows her to release a long held in howl. Heller’s use of Yoder’s prose as Nightbitch’s internal monologue affords Amy Adams some lyrical and sometimes raw insights into motherhood and the state of being for women. Women who have extinguished their own flames and wildness by sanitising the experience of their bodies. Bodies that can grow human beings. Bodies so powerful they create life. Bodies that give until they are empty. Protect, nurture, attack. Bodies on the edge of exhaustion. Animals run on instinct, but as Nightbitch she can run free – growl, snap, bite, and nuzzle – and decide who is allowed in her territory.

While there are some salient points about the continued struggle women encounter with social expectations of what a ‘mother’ should be in a certain stratum of society, Heller’s film is firmly entrenched in privilege. Nightbitch wants to be an artist and a mother. She wants to find her pack – no longer her inner-city graduate school friends with their conceptual art and expensive lifestyles. Maybe her pack is the other suburban moms who also ache to not let their flames be extinguished by permanent caregiving. Perhaps they too hear the call of the wild and become ‘Baby Yoga Moms Who Run With Labradors.’ Nightbitch and the other mommies in her circle don’t need to worry about how they’re going to pay the bills, or whether they have secure housing, or deal with violence or physical abuse. They’re quite literally wine moms who go hiking and have the money to go to therapy if they choose. 

The penultimate scene of the film where Nightbitch, Husband, and Son play together in a cushion filled outdoor blanket fort/tent in a neatly forested park denotes how sanitised Heller’s film is at its heart. Nightbitch flirts with the animalistic but refrains from sinking its teeth too deeply into female ferity. 

Nightbitch makes observations about, and comments with purpose on, the inherent violence of childbirth and how (in optimum circumstances) despite the pain, the blood, the sweat, piss, and tears involved in bringing a human being into the world the instinct is to immediately love the person who just tore a women’s body open. Nightbitch never regrets being a mother, she adores Son, she simply needs to be more than Mother.

Amy Adams, like Nightbitch, is reclaiming her art. After a string of disappointing performances in disappointing films, Nightbitch is her best role and performance in dog’s years. Scoot McNairy is well cast as Husband – a man who loves his family and wants to support Nightbitch but too often uses the “If you don’t tell me precisely what you want and need, I don’t know how to intuit it” excuse a little too often. Husband is not a bad man, but he is one who says he is babysitting his own son. Nightbitch, because of its tame nature will appeal to a broader audience than if it leaned harder into transgression and the “monster/mother” themes it purports to investigate. ‘Educated white woman gets a bit dirty and has a breakdown in her nice neighborhood, then insists on equitable parenting and finding her joy as a woman/mother/person/artist’ and lets her son eat out of dog bowls and sleep in a dog bed isn’t exactly she-werewolf tears out the throat of the capitalist patriarchy leaving a trail of dead bodies in her wake. Nightbitch may not be excoriating and revolutionary, but it is often funny and mildly cathartic as tame feminist allegory.

Grade: B-

Director: Joshua Oppenheimer
Writers: Joshua Oppenheimer, Rasmus Heisterberg
Stars: Michael Shannon, Tilda Swinton, George MacKay

Synopsis: A Golden Age-style musical about the last human family.

In a future where the world on the surface has ended thanks to global warming, a wealthy family lives in a salt mine well below and survives on their self-reliance to make their own food. The unnamed Father (Michael Shannon), a former energy corporate man, Mother (Tilda Swinton), and Son (George MacKay) have spent the last twenty-five years in their apartment adorned with expensive art, a piano hardly used, and a model of what the world used to look like based on photos; the son was born in the bunker, not in the actual world. With them is a doctor (Lennie James), the butler (Tim McInnery), and a family friend (Bronaugh Gallagher) to complete their life underground as what it was before above it.

Suddenly, an intruder has arrived at their bunker with the unnamed Girl (Moses Ingram) having somehow found her way in. It’s the first time they’ve had someone from the outside come in; the group decides to get rid of her per protocol, but later accept her as part of the family. But the girl’s interest in how they arrived and survived and trying to talk about the emotional feelings of being survivors threatens them, except for the son, who is more interested in her life back on the surface. The family has seemed to build a barrier around those emotions, denying the fact that Father is partially guilty and everyone has avoided the fact they allowed everyone else to die, having no remorse or guilt for choosing that path except for the girl. 

Instead of a traditional dialogue, we get singing when it comes to their thoughts and feelings, almost like a sung-through musical. Some songs hit well, others are a drag; the choreography is very expressive and a bit dumbfounding at times. Singing performance-wise, I don’t think it’s bad as Ingram, MacKay, and Swinton hold their own note, but Shannon and the rest have to not raise their voices and creak a bad note. The score from first-time film composer Joshua Schmidt and veteran Marius de Vries (CODA, Navalny) is a whimsical mix of melancholy and happiness that accompanies the family’s lifestyle, mentality, and conundrum.  

Script-wise, it could have been more tightened, shortened (runtime of 148 minutes), and filled with more conflict with the Girl Vs. Family battle. The scenes between MacKay and Ingram are the most emphatic as it becomes apparent the two develop feelings for each other, something Son has obviously never felt. He starts to learn things once shielded by his parents who have put up a wall to not let their emotions of the past come out. The cracks of this facade and the hypocrisy of a family that is ultra-rich and ignorant of their actions (think of Elon Musk) begin to show but nothing bursts out, keeping constructed what could have been a compelling tale of what the future may be.

Moving from documentaries to feature films, director Joshua Oppenheimer (The Act of Killing) takes a growingly common theme of post eco-disasters and throws an odd mix in the blender. The End is a rocky ride of song, dance, and disconnect with some hits and plenty of misses which shows Oppenheimer’s weakness in moving to narrative features. It’s one for art-house fans rather than traditional musical lovers. While it can be respected for taking a bold style to the ominously realistic subject, it doesn’t quite get the full force it tries to produce from its mix of music and the apocalypse to fully impress.

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Grade: C

Director: Roberto Minervini
Writer: Roberto Minervini
Stars: Jeremiah Knupp, René W. Solomon, Timothy Carlson

Synopsis: In the winter of 1862, during the Civil War, the U.S. Army sends a volunteer company to patrol the uncharted Western territories.

Throughout the decades, war pictures have primarily been constructed as cinematic spectacles rather than portraits of the tragedy and violence of those sacrificing themselves on the battlefield and frontlines. On some occasions, you can appreciate the technical side of war films, specifically the big-budget ones like Sam Mendes’ 1917, Edward Berger’s adaptation of All Quiet on the Western Front, and Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk, in which they recreate warzones to the best of their abilities. However, there is a feeling of responsibility from the directors partaking in such behavior and approach due to their focus on the theatrics rather than the psychological and emotional bouts these soldiers are facing, coming face to face with death itself due to the calamity occurring in every corner. 

In a 2012 Hollywood Reporter roundtable, Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke mentioned a similar thought, using Steven Spielberg’s acclaimed film Schindler’s List as an example. When asked if he would ever make a film about Hitler, to which he immediately replies with a no, Haneke says that it is impossible for him to do that because creating entertainment out of that monstrous historical figure is a reckless and ill-considered maneuver. Haneke later stated the difference between how Alain Resnais handled the time and setting in his gripping masterwork Night and Fog–where the French filmmaker asks, “What is your position?” and “What does this mean to you?”–and Spielberg’s approach. “The mere idea of trying to draw and create suspense out of the question of whether gas or water is going to come out of the shower head is unspeakable to me”, said Haneke. 

His direct and assertive tone left Judd Apatow and John Krasinski speechless. Whether or not you agree with Haneke on Schindler’s List and the responsibility filmmakers must have when making war pictures, you must admit that there is plenty of truth in what he is saying. Hollywood handles these types of pictures and topics with awards in mind, compared to the international voices who do such films with a more pensive and genuine feel, like Haneke himself with The White Ribbon, the aforementioned Resnais with Night and Fog, as well as Elem Klimov with Come and See. There are many more examples you could name. The latest international director to deliver a careful and thought-out way to depict war through cinema is Roberto Minervini, 

His film, The Damned (playing in the Main Slate of this year’s New York Film Festival), is more focused on the silence that plagues a battlefield before the violence occurs–the psyche of these soldiers who must face potential death firsthand and their broken spirits. It demonstrates the psychological heaviness and fracture of beliefs that accompany these places and people disrupted by agony and warfare. Their lives were lost amidst the cataclysm. The Italian filmmaker focuses on the calm before the storm. Minervini does not want to dwell in the physical elements of war but more so on the mental side, seen through the eyes of those on the frontlines as they bask in the weather before the air smells of asphalt and gunpowder. 

The Damned is set in the winter of 1862 amidst the Civil War. We follow a group of volunteer Union soldiers heading to the uncharted territories of the West. They are first seen with their heads high, honoring the tradition of serving your country, as they march into the unknown; an organ-based score by composer Carlos Alfonso Corral accompanies each step they take. But something about these musical pieces feels off and hints at the imaginable. Each note has an ominous feel; Corral lets you know these soldiers’ headspace will switch soon enough. Despondency will lead the way so that later, Corral can take them on the actual journey, an existential one. 

The first chunk of The Damned relies on many scattered moments where we hear them share their beliefs, the reasons they joined, and the meaning of fighting for their country, and, in addition, to seeing them play cards, baseball, or skirmish. They are just passing the time the best they can while worrying about what’s next for them. It isn’t until one of the few action scenes, where we don’t see any explosions (just them running and occasionally shooting a couple of rounds), that the film turns into a darker-minded state. The score resounds more in the atmosphere; the gunshots become part of the ambient score to increase the effect. Their numbers go down; there are far fewer conversations, if any, during the couple of hours after. 

Silence covers their souls as they get their first glimpses of the atrocities of war. Their beliefs shift. The reason why they joined is now in flux due to experiencing these acts of violence. There’s one specific scene after the shoot-out in which the soldiers in the group left talk about God, life and death, and the ideologies of war within the religious beliefs. The two younger soldiers are keen on believing in what is good and evil and the security of an afterlife. However, the older ones, some of whom have spent plenty of time in the field, have grown to put aside those religious thoughts because of what they have seen throughout the Civil War. 

“I hope it stays that simple for you”, one of the older soldiers replies when one of the young ones expresses their thoughts on why he thinks they should believe in God and hold onto their faith. It is a cold answer to such vulnerable openness. Yet, it should set them straight and see all that is happening for what it is. These characters are not fully explored, nor do we get a broad insight into their psyches individually. However, Minervini studies their composure so that the viewer can get a hold of them as people tortured by a vision of honor plagued by false testaments and faux heroism. As many people have observed, they are expendable–disposable figures that rid themselves of “self” to make way for the canning havoc. 

The cast, played mainly by non-actors as rookies, have a way with their occasionally gauche lines that uplifts its overly thought-out nature and makes way for their humanity. The screenplay is the main issue that deviates The Damned from the existential toll it wants to build slowly. But I found myself gripped by the minimalist, and sometimes theatrical, approach to how Minervini frames these moments of self-reflection, each time becoming more psychologically confrontational. These beautifully shot frames and locations contrast with the damnation occurring on the far end of the scenery. It is a vast landscape, yet soldiers’ shifting conditions consume most. 

Minervini deviates from Haneke’s criticism and goes outside what we mostly see in war pictures. It might take a while until most viewers learn to appreciate these types of pictures, ones that break out the notion of modern war films. Hopefully, when The Damned releases formally, it starts to pave the way for such. Its experimentality comes from the minimalism needed to express the vain emotions and catharsis that boils during times like these. While it lacks in its dialogue set-pieces, humanism to each breath and tongue-tied factor increases as the film goes.

Grade: B-