Elle Fanning and Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi in Predator: Badlands
PREDATOR: BADLANDS
It has an iffy prelude and a generically brutal finale, and Predator: Badlands is still 2025's best summer blockbuster that didn't debut in the summer. Granted, next month's new Avatar could swoop in to claim the title, and I'm not sure how voracious Predator fans will take to the series' latest entry, given that its toothy protagonist isn't merely sympathetic – he's kind of a softie. But I had an utterly spectacular time at director Dan Trachtenberg's sci-fi thriller that's also, brace yourselves, a thoroughly winning buddy comedy. And if any of the devoted bristled at the news that Badlands was the franchise's first release to receive a wimpy PG-13 rating, fear not: The violence is just as savage and, at times, queasily funny as ever. It's just that, as with so many endearing cartoons, no human blood is spilled.
If you were feeling generous, or insane, you could call the pre-title-card opener classically Greek in nature. We're on the planet Yautja Prme, and a vicious altercation between two native Predators is in progress. Turns out, though, it's not a fight; it's training, with the taller, elder Kwei (Mike Homik) teaching combat skills to his less able younger brother Dek (Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi). Kwei also tells Dek that nothing would please their strict, clan-leader father Njohrr (Reuben De Jong) more than procuring the corpse of that notoriously invincible apex predator the Kalisk, housed on the distant planet Genna. Dad, however, isn't convinced that runty Dek will ever be strong enough to survive, and orders Kwei to kill his sibling. Refusing his father's demand, Dek encloses his beloved brother in a spacecraft headed to Genna, is slain by Njohrr for his disobedience, and initiates Dek's mission to find, capture, and execute a Kalisk in order to avenge his brother's death and win his father's approval.
You know what? I take it back. Screenwriter Patrick Aison's setup is classically Greek, and you don't have to be generous or insane to think so. (Making the echoes more vivid is the knowledge that, while De Jong acts the part, Schuster-Koloamatangi performs Njohrr's vocals.) Nevertheless, Badlands' prelude is still relatively bland: the combat between Kwei and Dek is active yet hardly exciting, and the expository statements and bluntly fierce remarks – all of the Predators' Yautja dialogue being subtitled – have that easily-translatable-for-all-regions dreariness that routinely hampers action blockbusters. I was admittedly taken with the sight of Dek looking actively afraid, and then mournful, as I didn't know Predators were capable of any expressions beyond blind rage. (As the film progresses, Schuster-Koloamatangi produces extraordinary examples of facial variety beneath pounds of latex.) Yet the grand fun of Trachtenberg's movie doesn't begin until Dek crash-lands on Gemma, a planet on which literally everything, birds and beasts and vegetation alike, wants to kill you, preferably by eating you.
Though it seems odd that, following his brother's execution, Dek would still want to get into Njohrr's good graces, the Predator sets off to find the Kalisk. He's barely had time to make two narrow escapes from death, however, when he hears a voice from above – and as an angelic voice should, it sounds like Elle Fanning's. First seen atop a tree, Fanning plays Thia, a synthetic from the Weyland-Yutani Corporation (those heartless bastards from the Alien franchise) sent to conduct research on Genna. Having been separated from her body's lower half, Thia has had several weeks to study the planet's threats from on high, and she makes Dek an offer: If he'll help her reunite with her legs, as well as with her cherished synthetic “sister” Tessa (also played by Fanning), she'll help Dek find the Calisk. Grudgingly, gruntingly, Dek agrees, so long as Thia understands that she's nothing but a tool. (“Tool” will become Dek's less-than-enchanting nickname for the synthetic.) So off they go, Thia's upper torso strapped to Dek's back, doing their best to avoid murderous condors and razors and trees. Oh my.
I can't begin to describe how wonderful Elle Fanning is in this thing. Remember the malevolent Ash from Ridley Scott's first Alien? Thia is his polar opposite; it's as if her creators based the synthetic's entire disposition and speaking style on Kimmy Schmidt. Bubbly and optimistic beyond measure and a 'round-the-clock chatterbox, Thia is the sort of comic conceit that would prove excruciating in about two minutes if not also performed with unassailable heart. Fanning, however, convinces you that Thia's warmth and friendliness, like Ellie Kemper's as Kimmy, are genuine and unwavering; she's the physical embodiment of a bright, sunny day. Along their journey, as Dek saves Thia from peril and she far more frequently saves him, the sweetly bickering pair form one of the most unexpectedly charming Odd Couples in recent movies. And astonishingly, events become even more delightful with the introduction of a native Genna creature that Thia will eventually name Bud, and that largely resembles a feral Gleek. (If you know, you know.) Like Thia, this CGI simian-esque entity might've been unendurable – or worse, unmistakable as a chance sell Predator plush toys at Christmas. Trachtenberg and Aison, though, know exactly what they're doing with this critter, whose adorableness is cleverly woven into the plot, and who achieves a supreme moment of hilarity and (in retrospect) narrative importance when Bud accepts a rare gesture of kindness on Dek's part and promptly spits on him.
As our heroic trio traipses the landscape that's as predatory as the Yautja, we also routinely visit Tessa and her fellow synthetics, who are in an equally feverish mission to find the Calisk. While these sequences are more perfunctory than the others, they allow Fanning a welcome opportunity to display her range – Tessa very much is Alien's Ash – and better yet, they introduce a whole set of eventual, expendable victims that can be ripped to shreds without threatening the PG-13. (No blood, no problem!) Everywhere you turn in Badlands, you'll find a smart storytelling choice or an inventive bit of action choreography or a moment of slapstick that Buster Keaton would be proud to call his own, such as the demolition of a synthetic by Thia's upper and lower halves working in tandem; their subsequent high-five is priceless. I've attended Predators since I was 19 – I saw the Schwarzenegger original in the theater on my 19th birthday – and honestly never thought I'd see one that made me laugh out loud, and not derisively, more than a dozen times. No spoilers on why she says it, but when Fanning gives us an all-timer delivery of “Oh, come on!”, the moment is worthy of applause.
In truth, at the finale, I did applaud, and so did the only other person at my screening, who was sitting several rows away. (Let's blame the early-afternoon showtime, on a Friday with kids still in school, for the unfortunate turnout.) We were totally right to do so, I think, because while it's less artful and certainly less bombastic, Predator: Badlands is reminiscent of nothing so much as James Cameron's Terminator II: Judgment Day, complete with its series' former antagonist becoming not just a good guy, but a big ol' sweetie. True, the movie's first few minutes are pedestrian, and the extended beast-on-beast climax is underwhelming, and there might be a little too much sentimental corn – certainly more than some will appreciate. Yet Trachtenberg, in his third Predator after the Hulu releases Prey (which I really enjoyed) and the animated Killer of Killers (which I'm antsy to see), has beautifully retconned material that appeared to be on its last legs two decades ago, and now feels like it could go on, in ever-evolving form, for at least two more. To the surprise of probably no one, the last image and last line offer the none-too-subtle threat of yet another sequel. By all means, bring it on. Badlands? Bad-ass.
FRANKENSTEIN
After his second viewing of Guillermo del Toro's latest, a very dear, cinematically savvy pal sent me a text last Sunday: “For the love of God, I am begging you – nay, I am praying to you: Do not review this film unless you see it on a large screen.” Feeling guilty, yet at a loss given my availability, I explained that I'd have to watch Frankenstein on Netflix (where it debuted this past Friday) like most everyone else, even though the movie was – and for a few more days, still is – running at Davenport's Last Picture House venue following its brief engagement at Iowa City's FilmScene. My buddy hasn't texted back since, except to say “Ugh.” But I'm hoping he'll forgive me for this review of del Toro's monster saga as viewed from my living room, because I really liked it. And in all honesty, I really liked the movie only because I initially didn't care for it yet decided to give it another shot – which I know wouldn't have happened without easy access through streaming.
Of course, it's possible that I wasn't crazy about Frankenstein the first time around precisely because I didn't see it on a big screen, and if you still have the opportunity, that's probably the ideal way to view del Toro's long-gestating passion project. In terms of photographic grandeur, lavishly ornate production design, eye-popping costumes (especially for Mia Goth's Lady Elizabeth), and sweeping Alexandre Desplat score that refuses to give it a rest, this is probably the del Toro-iest del Toro yet made, and it is unfortunate that most viewers, like me, will make their first acquaintance with the film in their homes or, Heaven forbid, on their phones. Yet the Netflix deal makes sense given the filmmaker's history with the service that netted him an(other) Oscar for 2022's stop-motion-animated Pinocchio, and few other studios were likely to hand del Toro a reported $120 million for a project this determinedly weird. Yes, it's a Frankenstein. Given the film's unabashed melodrama and focus on fashioning a monster more human than the humans, it's also an unmistakable Guillermo. From a box-office perspective, and like the movies themselves, those things are certainly hit-or-miss.
Presuming we can largely skip a plot synopsis, the most significant departure from Mary Shelley's 1818 novel, at least as I remember it, is the writer/director's updating of the original material to the mid-19th century Victorian era, a decision I presume was made to incorporate electricity that didn't come from a bolt of lightning. The period detail is staggering. It was similarly staggering in Crimson Peak, The Shape of Water, and Nightmare Alley – movies that still almost forced me to nap. There's too much going on in the first half of Frankenstein, subtitled “Victor's Tale,” for del Toro's latest to be actively boring. But even on a second viewing, having made peace with the deliberate and somewhat stagnant artificiality of it all, I found too little honest drama to stay invested for nearly an entire hour of screen time. Although the piecing-the-body-together scenes inspired a grim watchability, the surface-level soap opera involving Goth's Elizabeth, Felix Kammerer's unnaturally boyish sibling William Frankenstein, and Christoph Waltz's doomed arms manufacturer Henrich Harlander left me cold. Less cold, though, than Oscar Isaac's Victor Frankenstein, whose portrayal never rises above standard-issue “mad scientist” caricature, and whose rage and contempt tend to read as generic pissiness. A generally exciting actor, Isaac is ideally cast on paper. Yet there's no depth to Isaac's mania, just as there isn't to Victor's expressed ardor for Elizabeth or avowed vengeance against God. He's Frankenstein's Frankenstein, and you tend to forget he's around. Or wish you could.
But oh, what the right Frankenstein's monster can do for this tale! Because after Jacob Elordi shows up, all six-foot-five of him, and “Victor's Tale” segues into “The Creature's Tale,” you begin to think you'd have given del Toro twice his $120-mil budget for filmmaking this supple, haunting, and gorgeously tender (barring a few locals getting their limbs severed and jaws ripped out). Initially, it's admittedly disconcerting to see Shelley's famed creature visualized as someone who could readily appear on the cover of Men's Health. Yet Elordi, in a truly stunning performance, is as convincing morphing from barely verbal fledgling to sensitive reciter of John Milton as Emma Stone was – portraying a veritable Bride of Frankenstein – in Poor Things. Elordi is heartbreaking here, and the empathy you extend toward his “monster” isn't diminished when, legitimately terrifying, he decimates a pack of literal (CGI) wolves and their human equivalents. Unlike with other characters (David Bradley's lovingly rendered, unnamed blind man – the Gene Hackman role! – being a notable exception), you always keenly understand, and are moved by, the creature's emotions and responses. And I loved how, in the wake of this being's education, Elordi's physicality, especially his gait, never suggested anything other than naturalism. There's no stereotypical lumbering post-Paradise Lost. His humanity has been found.
I adored the “Creature's Tale” half on a first viewing. I was enraptured by it on a second. And my deep affection for Frankenstein's latter half, after returning to the film, enriched portions of the first that I was initially leery about. Mia Goth no longer seemed dazed and uncharacteristically uninteresting; it was clear that this Elizabeth was a soul perhaps not entirely bound to this world – someone who had long stopped expecting magic yet, in the creature, finally found it. Victor no longer seemed an expectedly (and detrimentally) mad scientist but a genuinely gifted one who, like many geniuses, couldn't fathom the small-mindedness of those who doubted his talents. Most especially, knowing how Elordi's “son” would come to view his “father,” Victor's doings in the first half became uncomfortably recognizable as those of an expectant parent who wants a perfect child … and whose disappointment, post-birth, manifests itself in unconscionable ways. (Few 2025 movie scenes have hurt more than Victor viciously lashing out as his creation for not yet being able to say anything beyond “Victor.”) To my texting pal, huge apologies for not catching Frankenstein on a bigger screen. But I have seen it. And thanks to my unanticipated doubling of views, I do feel, now, that I've truly seen it.
NUREMBERG
You could validly argue that we need movies that directly confront the horrors of Nazism more now than we have since the mid-1940s. But we certainly deserve better options than writer/director James Vanderbilt's Nuremberg, a stodgy, clichéd, two-and-a-half-hour historical drama lacking even a dollop of filmmaking excitement, and a work that essentially tells two stories yet, maddeningly, picks the wrong one to focus on.
In this adaptation of Jack El-Hai's 2013 nonfiction The Nazi & the Psychiatrist, the Nazi is Hermann Göring (Russell Crowe), Hitler's second-in-command – his Reichsmarschall – who was arrested in 1945, on suspicion of war crimes following his führer's suicide. The psychiatrist is Douglas Kelley (Rami Malek), a U.S. Army Major tasked with interviewing Göring in his prison cell and determining whether the man is mentally fit to stand trial. Kelley is also a preening showboat who plans to write a book on the experience, blowing the lid off our collective understanding of murderous inhumanity, and the last thing Malek should ever be asked to play is smug bravado. Denzel Washington and George Clooney can get away with cock-of-the-walk roles because they have ease and charisma. With apologies to his fans (there must be a few, right?), Malek has neither, and when he wants to look arrogant, his ever-busy facial muscles contort more than usual, fashioning an expression that's like an attempt at smiling after a full bite of lemon. Facing off against Crowe's overbaked ham with a thick German accent, the drably tic-y Malek is hopelessly outmatched, and even Kelley's predicted downfall comes with no enjoyment, his drunken spilling of secrets to a journalist merely proving the psychiatrist to be stupid as well as conceited. Your anti-Nazi movie is clearly doing something wrong when you find yourself, against all logic, practically siding with the Nazi, if only because he's livelier company.
With Vanderbilt either unwilling or unable to vary the pace or raise the emotional heat (this is only the Zodiac screenwriter's second feature-length directorial credit, following 2015's Truth), one blandly earnest, achingly unsurprising scene simply bleeds into another, and might've even if the film spent more time on its more engaging storyline. That one finds Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson (Michael Shannon) initiating the original plan for the Nuremberg trials, battling legal obstacles and a curt dismissal from Pope Pius XII, and going on to serve as Göring's chief prosecutor. Among a cast that includes John Slattery, Richard E. Grant, a touching Leo Woodhall, and an all-wrong Colin Hanks (his hallway fisticuffs with Malek forcing you to want both men downed), Shannon gives the closest thing Nuremberg has to a strong performance. Jackson's saga is one we haven't seen on-screen before. Yet even Shannon/Jackson is turned into an afterthought, while Vanderbilt's entire movie is cheapened by the only five minutes in the film boasting genuinely devastating power: newsreel footage of concentration-camp atrocities and the release of the camps' prisoners. Or what's left of them.
These images, rightfully, never lose their power to shock; I'm still haunted by scenes of bulldozers plowing hundreds of Jewish corpses into holes from when I saw my first Holocaust documentary on PBS – the station that gave me Sesame Street and Mister Rogers' Neighborhood – when I was 10. Vanderbilt slightly mars the newsreel inclusions' impact by having Göring melodramatically don sunglasses when faced with the footage in court, his response apparently being the last straw regarding Kelley's ability to see him as a monster. Yet for the most part, Vanderbilt lets the footage run intact without cross-cut interference, and it's the smartest – maybe the only smart – decision the director makes in the film. If a picture is worth a thousand words, the pictures in this courtroom demonstration are worth roughly six million, and returning to the strained melodrama of Nuremberg in their wake feels all the more egregious. The black-and-white footage demands to be seen. It also demands to be seen outside a pro forma Hollywood entertainment so aggressively designed to be black-and-white.
DIE MY LOVE
Given that director/co-writer Lynne Ramsay's Die My Love is ostensibly about postpartum depression, it's a difficult movie to be flippant about. That said, I'm gonna give it a shot anyway, because this downbeat psychological thriller (if that's even what it is) appears so flabbergastingly uninterested in exploring the nature of its protagonist's disorder that I spent nearly the entire film wondering if she was suffering from postpartum depression at all. Is it possible she's just a whack job? Ramsey's in-your-face provocation – co-written by Edna Walsh and Alice Birch, based on a novel by Ariana Harwicz – is the type of feature that makes certain viewers detest the very idea of art-house cinema … and for good reason. Nothing holds together in this thing. But because it has weighty subject matter, a ballsy presentational style, and a showy central performance, we may feel strong-armed into assuming that what's on screen must be symbolic and deep – we're just too dense to get it. Sometimes, however, there simply isn't much to get. Although, in the case of Ramsay's film, there is plenty to get hostile toward.
As Die My Love opens, frisky lovers and wannabe artistes Grace (Jennifer Lawrence) and Jackson (Robert Pattinson) have moved into the ramshackle rural home previously owned by the man's uncle, with Jackson's recently widowed mom Pam (Sissy Spacek) living just down the road. After a speedy sex-and-booze montage, Grace is pregnant. After a speedy sex-and-slightly-less-booze montage, she and Jackson are parents to an adorable six-month-old boy. And from then on, for two punishing hours, Grace systemically loses her shit. Although we're told she's a writer, she never picks up a pen or opens a laptop. What she does instead is crawl around on all fours (a lot), and masturbate, and vacantly handle a butcher knife. She also ferociously dances to Toni Basil's “Mickey” on a seemingly endless loop, and licks the living-room window, and fantasizes about a mysterious biker (a grossly ill-served LaKeith Stanfield) who may be a figment of her imagination. And what is Jackson – a self-proclaimed drummer who doesn't appear to own any drums – up to while his partner is going stir-crazy? He's largely out of town on some unspecified work project, and ignoring Grace's domestic and sexual needs, and bringing home a puppy for Grace to handle along with their child. I'd say the pair deserve each other, but no one deserves either of these assholes.
For a while, Ramsey's latest deep dive into miserabilism (her other credits include the school-shooter lark We Need to Talk About Kevin and the sex-trafficking whimsy You Were Never Really Here) keeps you watching for the promise of Lawrence and Pattinson getting it on, preferably naked, and indulging in their most eccentric acting choices. Yet after that high wears off, you're forced to contend with Die My Love itself, and that's when the experience comes crashing down on top of you. Obviously, we're meant to be in Grace's head-space throughout. But did that have to be such a fuzzy place to be? Is Grace's downward spiral the result of days, or weeks, or months of inner turmoil? (The baby appears no older at the end than at the start.) Is the woman being deliberately obstinate about not seeking help, or does she not realize that she needs any? (Fairly early on, Jackson's mom recognizes Grace's postpartum symptoms and attempts to guide her toward healthy outlets that are categorically refused.) Regarding our perceptions, are we meant to laugh when Grace, with all the righteous indignation Lawrence can muster, cruelly berates an over-talkative cashier and blandly sympathetic party guest merely for their nerve in being solicitous? And I'm sorry, but is Jackson an absolute half-wit? Bringing home the most obnoxious yapping dog in cinema history despite the objections of his clearly overwhelmed partner?
Although a whole lot happens in the film, even if much of it is the same basic thing happening over and over, none of it seems thought out in terms of either realism or dream/fantasy logic. And while Ramsey serves up a few notable jump scares (most of them involving Grace shattering either glass or mirrors), the only true dread she establishes is, needless to say, fear for the baby. Yet the infant winds up fine; the infant is practically forgotten about by the picture's end. Beyond the lingering impression of Spacek's intensely warm, wise performance – despite Pam's disconcerting habits of sleepwalking and wielding a shotgun similarly ignored – all you're left to hold onto is the sight of Lawrence becoming incrementally, exorbitantly unglued, and we already have Darren Aronofsy's mother! for that. Die My Love has nothing to say about postpartum depression other than it's scary for sufferer and spectator alike, and has nothing to say about the trials of new parenthood, for either partner, beyond telling us that even those as beautiful as Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson have problems. Ramsey's movie is enraging for making you actively look forward to its increasing anguish, considering how quickly you glean that the movie has nothing else to offer.
CHRISTY
Plenty of people don't like Sydney Sweeney for reasons understandable and beyond understanding. And while I won't argue that she can't fully pull off the role of professional boxer Christy Martin in director/co-writer David Michôd's bio-drama Christy, I'll also say I can't think of a single other actor who could meet the role's specific needs, which take the fighter from her meager beginnings as an 18-year-old high-schooler to her climactic scenes as a 39-year-old divorcee. Maybe the only director who could've gotten Sweeney there is Richard Linklater, so long as, à la Boyhood, he began filming Sweeney in 2015 and wrapped production in 2036. But Sweeney is phenomenal in this low-key drama boasting high-stakes incident, and the only reason the movie doesn't work as well as it should is due to the time spent with Christy's loathsome, currently incarcerated ex-husband James Martin, who's played by Ben Foster in one of his rare-but-not-rare-enough godawful performances. Christy suffered at James' hands for so long, and now, in a film celebrating her life, she's suffering at them again.
Movies are where I feel both the least and most guilty for not being a sports fan; I loved entering Christy not knowing anything about its real-world subject in advance, but seriously – how had I not been previously aware of this incredible story? Michôd's film follows high-school basketball player Christy Salters from her amateur boxing match introduction (where the novice won a few hundred dollars) to her decades-later title as queen of female boxing, the actual Christy being elected into the International Boxing Hall of Fame in 2020. As is customary with inspirational sports-ascendancy bio-pics, the traditional hurdles – spousal discord, drug use, the Big Loss That Haunts Them Forever – show up here, and Michôd's scenes are blunt and effective but never inventive; 45 years later, and no one has yet held a candle to Scorsese. What makes the title character particularly interesting, beyond her ability to land a knockout with one punch, is that, prior to marrying James, Christy spent the majority of her career as a closeted lesbian who not only denied her gayness but publicly goaded competitors for their perceived gayness. And the shrewdest thing that Michôd's and co-writer Mirrah Foulkes' script does is make Christy's sexuality the crux of the story, demonstrating that her fears of being found out are key to comprehending her aggression in the ring.
Much has been made in the press about Sweeney's physical transformation, the actor having gained some 30-plus pounds of muscle to believably play her pugilist. The transformation is rather astonishing. If possible, though, I was more shocked by the wholly unrecognizable Merritt Wever as Christy's mom, a fundamentalist nightmare – she senses trouble from the first rumor that her daughter is involved with another girl (the lovely Jess Gabor) – who essentially makes Christy feel awful for being herself from minute one. (The girl's father and brother, respectively played by Ethan Embry and Coleman Pedigo, are clearly unable to counter Mom's will.) From the start, it's evident that Christy's in-the-ring anger isn't directed at her opponents, but rather the forces, including in the realm of professional boxing, who won't let her be who she is. And while Sweeney is surprisingly, thunderously convincing as a boxer, she's even more persuasive as a woman who has never been allowed to be herself, and who enters a horrifically misguided marriage of convenience to keep her public ruse as “straight women's boxer” intact.
So let's get Ben Foster out of the way, much as I would've liked him out of the way for the entirety of Michôd's 135 minutes. He's awful. (In appearance and vocal delivery, he's like a malignant Henry Gibson in Nashville without the Tennessee charm.) To be sure, Foster stays in character. But it's not simply that Christy's trainer-turned-abusive-husband James Martin is intolerable. Foster is intolerable as him, playing every scene with the same quiet, ennui-loaded lethargy that De Niro brought to his Raging Bull scenes with Joe Pesci and Cathy Moriarty – only here, instead of being a boxing superstar, James is directing his threats toward a boxing superstar. Every single reading is delivered in a mildly anesthetized sing-song, not unlike Ethan Hawke's basement threats in The Black Phone, and Foster never gives this less-is-more act a rest even when circumstances make it ridiculous. (He employs the same malevolently hushed tones for scenes in the ring with thousands of cheering fans no doubt making his threats to Christy impossible to hear.) Foster's exhausting vocal-banality-of-evil routine, though, also unwisely serves as the movie's chief dramatic motivation, because before too long, all we have on our minds are the questions of when this obvious psychopath is going to snap and beat the shit out of Christy, and how long she's going to put up with it before striking back. As in real life, it takes way longer in Christy for the woman to get retribution, and it's not enough of a victory to make more than two hours of Foster's perverse, exhausting presence worthwhile.
Still, Christy is worth seeing merely for its lead's fearsome commitment, as well as for its sports-bio-pic tale that can honestly be called inspirational, as opposed to “inspirational” in the clichéd sense of underdogs getting an unexpected break. Nothing about Christy Sanders Martin's break was expected, but her rise to fame was hardly cliché. And for those of you not keeping track of Sweeney's extraordinary career trajectory over a fast half-dozen years – Euphoria! The White Lotus! Reality! Immaculate! Anyone but You! Americana! Eden! – you owe it to yourselves to see the subject of so much media consternation in her natural habitat. Forget questions of jeans and genes. Sydney Sweeney packs a pretty phenomenal punch.
IT WAS JUST AN ACCIDENT
The Palme d'Or winner at this year's Cannes Film Festival, writer/director Jafar Panahi's It Was Just an Accident (currently playing at Iowa City's FilmScene) is hard to get immediately on-board with. By intention, Panahi deprives you of crucial information for at least 20 minutes, and afterward, a few spotty performances in lengthy takes (with actors who don't appear fully up to the challenge) suggest that perhaps this fiction by the Iranian filmmaker-slash-persecuted-hero won't live up to its acclaim. By the film's end, though, and long before that, I completely got the adulation. A slow boil to its teeth, Panahi's genre-hopping work, near its finale, boasts an uninterrupted 20-minute shot that's about as riveting as anything I've seen all year. The sight and sounds of the movie's actual climax, an extended closeup during which I'm pretty sure I forgot to breathe, are things I potentially won't ever forget.
The accident of the title comes during the movie's prelude, when family man Rashid (Ebrahim Azizi), driving at night with his wife (Afssaneh Najamabadi) and excitable daughter (Delmaz Najafi), run over a dog, causing damage to their car. The next day, Rashid takes the vehicle to a repair shop, whose owner Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri), without seeing Rashid's face, is curiously drawn to the sound the man makes while pacing in his garage. It's a strangely hypnotic squeak, seemingly caused by the customer's shoes, and when Rashid makes a request to the shop's owner from behind a closed door, Vahid makes sure to remain unseen and, with a finger in his mouth, disguises his voice. The repair work underway, Rashid walks off, and surreptitiously, Vahid follows him. Amidst heavy traffic, Vahid tries, unsuccessfully, to run the man over with his car. That attempt thwarted, Vahid goes on to find Rashid on another street, where he knocks him down with his passenger-side door and brains him with a shovel. When next we see him, Vahid is digging a grave in the desert outskirts, preparing to bury Rashid alive. What, you may wonder (even as you're watching it), is going on here?!
In Panahi's singular blend of thriller, revenge saga, and absurdist comedy, what's going on in It Was Just an Accident is that former political prisoner Vahid, based on that squeak and the customer's voice, is convinced that Rashid is secretly a government official named Eghbal, who spent months cruelly tormenting the imprisoned repair-shop owner for presumed crimes against Iran. The squeak, Vahid recalls, was the noise made from Eghbal's prosthetic leg as he walked, and Rashid does indeed have a prosthetic leg. But the confused, terrified Rashid claims no knowledge of what Vahid accuses him of – he says his leg was lost in the last year, while Vahid's torture was many years ago – and because Vahid was blindfolded when detained, he can't identify his interrogator's face Vahid does, however, stay in contact with others similarly abused, and turns to them to verify the man's identity: a wedding photographer (Mariam Afshari's Shiva); the bride she's photographing (Hadis Pakbaten's Golrokh) for her next-day nuptials; and the damaged live wire (Mohamad Ali Elyasmehr's Hamid) whose girlfriend committed suicide after his incarceration. None of them are entirely certain of Rashid's identity. And so, with Rashid's living but unconscious body in tow, they're all eventually in a van together, trying to determine whether this guy who accidentally stumbled into the wrong repair shop is their tormentor. Golrokh, by the way, is wearing a wedding gown the whole time. Her tuxedo-outfitted fiancé Ali (Majid Panahi) is also along for the ride. Because why wouldn't he be?
This is knife's-edge slapstick: a profoundly unfunny, upsetting narrative made legitimately amusing by its incongruities – the wedding gown and tuxedo! – and canny observations on blandly repulsive capitalist behavior. (The Iranian cops who threaten to blow the travelers' entire scheme are more than willing to accept a bribe to look the other way … and are happy, and prepared, to accept a debit card.) Panahi, though, was himself arrested in 2010, imprisoned for three months, placed in isolation, and routinely interrogated for engaging in anti-Iranian propaganda. Until very recently, he was also banned from travel and making films in his home country. So he knows how not-funny his funny scenario is. (Unlike the characters in his film, he insists that he was never physically tortured.) It's consequently both admirable and astounding that Panahi could make a film that so fully embraces the comic ridiculousness of its premise, with Vahid and company even finding time on their journey to aid a pregnant woman in need and care for her distressed, unwittingly helpful daughter.
It's less surprising, though unquestionably inspiring, that Panahi would make such an urgent case for justice and retribution, and though a series of unbroken, minutes-long takes, our former victims and potential victimizers argue over the morality of what they're doing, even if Rashid is Eghbal. A few of Panahi's ensemble members get repetitive in their readings and effect awfully early, yet the uninterrupted rhythm is hypnotic regardless, and it all leads to a thunderously powerful scene involving just three of them, cinematographer Amin Jafari's camera fixed solely on one as the world either expands or seizes up on them all. By its finale, It Was Just an Accident has morphed from a serious-minded farce into a somewhat farcical morality play of devastating consequence, and when I saw the movie at Iowa City's FilmScene on Saturday, you could sense our audience's collective shock, and feel the blood-curdling terror, as a white car suddenly popped into view. To Panahi's eternal credit, an unforgettable reveal like that is no accident at all.
