In The Strangers, freaky people in masks just show up and stab the protagonists. That’s pretty much all there is to it. I’ve never understood why some people find that movie even remotely entertaining, much less scary. Any good home invasion movie should have that early stage where the home invaders aren’t outed yet. For instance, in Funny Games, two dudes just want to borrow some eggs. In Straw Dogs, the local contractors are just a bit lazy. In Wait Until Dark, Richard Crenna is just a family friend. If you’re going to show up in creepy masks and just start stabbing people, I might as well watch Halloween.
In Their Skin, from first-time director Jeremy Regimbal and written by lead actor Joshua Close, is at its best during these early stages. It plays like a black comedy about the anxiety of meeting new people, about adjusting to unfamiliar social beats, about talking to people who seem like not-people wearing people disguises to study actual people. It’s the horror movie equivalent of a sitcom like Third Rock from the Sun, where the supposedly normal family is slightly askew in its attempt to seem normal.
James D’Arcy, whose interrogator was the least freaky non-Asian Asian in Cloud Atlas, is this movie’s greatest asset for his off-kilter eager friendliness and his fascinating Cumberbatch-esque face. But you also have to credit Rachel Miner — I didn’t recognize her, but she apparently had a stretch on Supernatural — for what she does with the usual supporting wife role. That’s the sort of look in your eye that only a good actress can fake. Her attempt at grief is one of the movie’s most startling moments.
Unfortunately, In Their Skin makes the mistake of ultimately being about the wrong group of characters. But until that happens, it’s a canny home invasion movie that takes the concept of class envy to a new level.
In Their Skin is available on DVD and VOD (watch it on Amazon.com here to support Qt3).
You might not know Spanish director Jaume Balaguero’s name, but surely you know his movie [Rec], a found-footage zombie movie. If “found-footage zombie movie” was a genre, [Rec] would easily be the best. But since it’s not really a genre, [Rec] is instead just a fantastic zombie movie.
[Rec] was co-directed by Balaguero and Paco Plaza. Plaza went on to do the ridiculous and not very effective [Rec] 3. Balaguero, on the other hand, has revisited the location and intimacy of [Rec] with a movie called Sleep Tight, set in an apartment building in Spain where something is going horribly wrong. The genius of Sleep Tight is how it unfolds the something going wrong, and how it puts the audience on the side of the monster instead of the victim. If this works, it is almost entirely because of an actor named Luis Tosar who plays the apartment building’s blandly brooding concierge. Sleep Tight isn’t so much a movie as a fascinating Tosar performance. Also, he has the most amazing eyebrows I’ve ever seen. You could make one heck of a fur coat out of those things.
Although Sleep Tight has some tautly directed sequences and even a few gratifying shocks, it feels inconsequential by the time it’s over. You can slot it neatly next to pretty much any movie about a psycho who does terrible things. Might I instead recommend the more memorable Montreal apartment building in Jacob Tierney’s Good Neighbors? Or just Polanski’s classic 1976 movie, The Tenant?
Sleep Tight is available now on DVD and VOD (support Qt3 by watching it here).
Last year we got two bits of bad news about a possible movie adaptation of Shadow of the Colossus. The first bit of bad news was that it was attached to the director of Chronicle, Josh Trank. That was bad news if you saw Chronicle. The second bit of bad news — which maybe wasn’t bad news given the first bit of bad news — was that Trank would do the Fantastic Four reboot for an early 2015 release. I can think of more than 600 million reasons that 20th Century Fox is keen to get a Fantastic Four reboot underway.
Of course, attaching a hot new talent to a relatively unknown videogaming franchise is no guarantee anything is ever going to come of it, particularly if it has to happen quickly. But today, The Hollywood Reporter notes Sony hired Seth Lochhead to write a new Shadow of the Colossus script, replacing the previous script from the guy who did the Chun Li Street Fighter movie. Did you even know there was a Chun Li movie? Because there was. Give that a look and now imagine the same foundation for a Shadow of the Colossus adaptation.
Lochhead, on the other hand, wrote the script for Hanna, a smart and richly textured fairy tale about children coming to terms with their parents and vice versa, but packaged inside a thriller about a teenage assassin. I’m delighted at the idea of a Seth Lochhead Shadow of the Colossus adaptation.
It’s still entirely likely a Shadow of the Colossus movie will get swept under the rug. It’s not an ongoing franchise for Sony, and cult hit videogames don’t tend to pack the theaters, even when they are part of an ongoing franchise. For the time being, your Shadow of the Colossus silver-screen fix will have to come from its godawful appearance in Mike Binder’s sappy post-9/11 drama, Reign over Me.
