Tag Archives: body horror

Eavesdropping at the Movies: 456 – Together

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Commitment is scary. It’s especially scary when you drink water from a cursed puddle that wants to make a hybrid of you and your partner. Together tells the story of a couple moving to a new home during a questionable period in their relationship: she has a new job and is responsible for the move away; he’s emotionally distant since the death of his parents and relies on her for transportation and financial security. They love each other, but will they last?

First-time director Michael Shanks demonstrates a good instinct for tone, effectively combining comedy and horror – that Alison Brie and Dave Franco (married in real life) are both experienced comic actors helps the film draw out the absurdity of the events it depicts. What quibbles we might have with details of its supernatural basis are easily ignored because its focus always remains on the central couple. It doesn’t matter that some specific detail might not be explained to our satisfaction: the question is always, how do the couple respond to their predicament? Together never loses sight of what’s most important, and that makes it one of the best horrors – maybe one of the best films full stop – that we’ve seen in a while.

Listen on the players below, Apple Podcasts, Audible, Spotify, or YouTube Music.

With José Arroyo of First Impressions and Michael Glass of Writing About Film.

 

 

 

Eavesdropping at the Movies: 453 – The Shrouds

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A psychosexual thriller that’s neither psychosexual nor thrilling enough, The Shrouds is a disappointment. There’s great promise to businessman Vincent Cassel’s invention of a technologically advanced shroud that creates a 3D model of the decaying body it houses, when we’re shown the lust with which he observes his deceased wife’s corpse. The film is peppered with recurrent imagery of her disfigured body, and its importance to Cassel’s character is constantly reinforced, but the film is too talky, its imagery too bland, and its plot too convoluted to make the most of it. A shame.

Listen on the players below, Apple Podcasts, Audible, Spotify, or YouTube Music.

With José Arroyo of First Impressions and Michael Glass of Writing About Film.

 

Eavesdropping at the Movies:

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Listen on the players above, Apple Podcasts, Audible, Google Podcasts, or Spotify.

We talk feminism, body horror, monsters, trans tropes, masculinity and more in our discussion of writer-director Julia Ducournau’s shocking, transgressive, and surprising Titane.

Polina Zelmanova’s video essay, “Horrible Bodies: The (New) Body Politics of Horror”, to which we refer in the podcast, is included below, and her accompanying essay can be read at this link.

With José Arroyo of First Impressions and Michael Glass of Writing About Film.

Eavesdropping at the Movies — 100 – Venom

Venom utterly charms the pants off us, its bizarre knockabout body horror surprising us with a great sense of humour and unexpected variations on the idea not so much Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde as of masculinity at war with itself, inside and out.. From the trailer, Mike was worried about the broadness of Tom Hardy’s accent – actually, it’s tonally perfect as broadness is exactly what the film is going for in every respect, in the very best way.

Hardy is superb, giving his all to a role that demands physical dexterity and comic ability; the CGI bowls José over; the sense of Hardy’s body being shared by another physical entity, rather than being merged with it, is tactile and interesting. Mike’s also been watching the Sam Raimi Spider-Mantrilogy recently, in which Venom appears, and holds court on a trend in the villains he sees Venomas adhering to. And the dog is so funny.

The podcast can be listened to in the players above or on iTunes.

With José Arroyo of First Impressions and Michael Glass of Writing About Film