It’s a great disappointment that Park Chan-wook, one of the most acclaimed South Korean directors of the 21st-century, leaves such long gaps between entries in his filmography. His 2016 feature The Handmaiden / 아가씨 has already reached its 10-year anniversary, yet the director has helmed just two films since. But when you sit down to watch them, that laborious wait becomes increasingly understandable. He is a uniquely attentive visual stylist, moving the camera so seamlessly that you almost forget how technically impressive each movement is. In his most recent projects, Decision to Leave (2022) and No Other Choice (2025), his creativity even outdoes his precision, featuring shots that only he could have conceived.

The Handmaiden, by contrast, is more measured, though no less impressive. Whereas the director’s latest works feel as though each scene is competing to outdo the last, The Handmaiden doesn’t let the story’s twists upend its visual cohesion, or vice versa. Adapted from Sarah Waters’ 2002 novel Fingersmith, the film transplants the book’s British setting to 1930s South Korea, which was then under Japanese rule. One persistent through line between both works is their role as psychological thrillers exploring lust through multiple lenses. This passion is at its most authentic between Izumi Hideko (Kim Min-hee), a reclusive, depressive Japanese heiress, and Nam Sook-hee (Kim Tae-ri), her new maid.

But Sook-hee is no mere handmaiden. That is just her cover story; she is actually a lifelong con artist and swindler, raised in the trade by her family. She is embarking on her most ambitious job yet: encouraging Hideko to marry another con artist, known as the Count (Ha Jung-woo), so he can lock the unhappy woman away in an asylum and acquire her fortune. Sook-hee, of course, will receive a bountiful cut. As she dutifully dresses and undresses the waif-like heiress each day, she isn’t just envying the gorgeous gowns and jewellery she handles; she is wearing them in her mind, preparing for the moment she can consummate her desires.

But even stronger desires are silently begging to be consummated as Hideko and Sook-hee slowly fall for one another. It would seem that lust cannot be complicated by deception, whether in the Count pretending to be enamoured with Hideko, or Sook-hee finding herself speechless in the presence of her lady’s beauty while planning to have her committed. Much has been made in cinema of the ways we lie to ourselves, but The Handmaiden is striking because its deceptions are always external. Sook-hee and the Count do not pretend for a moment that they are good people.

The Count is simply a businessman, eager to deliver on his fake promises to Hideko and the earnest ones he tells himself. He is efficient and impersonal, not sadistic. But Sook-hee genuinely pities her employer, allured by her beauty and recognising that her spirit is that of a beautiful bird trapped in a gilded cage. The decadence around Hideko is its own form of decay; the pretty adornments that provide a sliver of escapism from her miserable existence are just another aspect of her prison. Beauty, and its convergence with femininity, is but one of many tools used to trap her. As if that weren’t haunting enough, her room overlooks a giant cherry tree from which her aunt hanged herself. In the dead of night, with no one to attend to her sorrow but dispassionate employees, does she feel it calling out to her, beckoning her closer?

And what of Kouzuki (Cho Jin-woong), Hideko’s strange, sadistic uncle, who lurks in the periphery of her life while simultaneously dominating it? They hardly ever interact, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t secrets tucked away in this grand mansion, in places where Sook-hee cannot follow or intervene. In The Handmaiden, no one is to be trusted. The film begins with deception and refuses to relinquish the motif. Park, who is fond of elegant, ambitious camera movements, sweeps and glides through this palace, which glimmers and sparkles in all its radiant beauty. Cinematographer Chung Chung-hoon, who has worked with Park on almost all his films, produces some of his finest work here; the opulent surroundings and luxurious, deep colours leave a vivid impression.

The most impressive technical element, though, is Park’s ability to map camerawork and shot compositions onto the story’s emotional texture. His blocking is immaculate. Space is utilised superbly, whether to create intimacy or to make it seem as though two characters stand at an impossible distance. There is no denying the sultry elements of the story, whether involving material goods or lust, but Park goes a step further by embracing them fully. He holds on a close-up of a facial expression that says more than a soliloquy ever could, or shifts between the characters’ visual perspectives and shots that place them at a distance from us.

These point-of-view shots are uncertain and uncomfortable, putting the audience on edge; it’s no wonder many occur as a character looks directly into the lens, bearing down on their interlocutor. They are little jolts of subjectivity, employed with handheld camera movements whose slight unevenness mimics shaky hands or provides a visual accompaniment to anxious thoughts. Being seen as one truly is remains a paralysing concept, both for the film’s duplicitous figures and its central lovers. Watching fake and authentic love brush up against one another—sometimes contrasted in the very same scene—thrills and titillates as tension continually rises and falls.

Little can be revealed of the plot, since each new discovery is too evocative in spirit and too expertly conveyed visually and sonically to merit spoiling. Composer Jo Yeong-wook’s score, just like the story, is as tense as it is heartfelt, bracing the audience for anticipation throughout the runtime. The beauty of it is that you hardly know what you are anticipating next.

Each of the film’s four leading actors is a marvel, not just for their performances, but for how well-cast they are. Both Kims are striking leading ladies, but for very different reasons that complement their characters and blossoming attraction. Hideko is a ghost of a woman, her emotions lurking behind a placid, beautiful face. When she remarks that she is always cold, it feels as if one knew this long before she uttered the words. You glimpse that coldness in her muted expression, her forlorn eyes, and her corrupted innocence. Sook-hee, by contrast, is a live wire, eager to please in her new role but too spirited to be well-suited to it. Her war of attrition with the Count, often conveyed through unruly expressions while Hideko is present, is frequently amusing.

While there are some narrative retreads, they enhance the emotional palette of the film and deepen its characterisation. Amid the acclaim this film has received from critics and enthusiasts alike, one semi-consistent criticism is the story’s repetition. Not only did this not prove an issue for me, I would have preferred to watch entire sequences of repeated scenes with this new information in mind, recontextualising our understanding of the character dynamics. Instead, The Handmaiden takes an explicitly expository approach, gliding quickly through these scenes, though never as seamlessly as its camerawork does. By honing in on key pieces of information from different plot beats, the film prevents viewers from savouring the multi-faceted nature of these performances.

There is some debate over whether the film is best served by its theatrical or extended cut. The theatrical appears to be the preferred, more mainstream version, but there are moments when the protagonists’ romance, and the deceptions inherent to it, could be fleshed out to deepen our appreciation. Almost all physical media copies offer just the theatrical cut, though interestingly, it was the extended cut that was made available in UK cinemas upon release.

Though I have yet to see the extended version, the strengths of the film, and the fact that it adds just 20 or so minutes to the runtime, suggest either version is a strong candidate for basking in this audio-visual treat. The Handmaiden is a delicate, tremulous psychological thriller, where unfurling one’s true character could mean certain death or the most passionate, and lasting, of liberations.

You just can’t be sure which one will reveal itself, just as the film keeps you on tenterhooks throughout. Well, almost. The Handmaiden’s third act, when it has no more explaining to do, loses some of its lustre, especially when it ceases to commit to the Gothic backdrop that informed the original novel and still holds sway over the film. But it’s a rare film in that its technical mastery never complicates or burdens its emotional palette, which alone is worthy of praise. Luckily, that is just the tip of the iceberg for the various ways in which The Handmaiden excels.

SOUTH KOREA | 2016 | 144 MINUTES (THEATRICAL) • 168 MINUTES (EXTENDED CUT) | 2.35:1 | COLOUR | KOREAN • JAPANESE

Cast & Crew

director: Park Chan-wook.
writers: Park Chan-wook & Jeong Seo-kyeong (based on the novel ‘Fingersmith’ by Sarah Waters).
starring: Kim Min-hee, Kim Tae-ri, Ha Jung-woo, Cho Jin-woong, Kim Hae-sook, Moon So-ri, Lee Yong-nyeo & Jo Eun-hyung.

The post THE HANDMAIDEN (2016) appeared first on Frame Rated.

Ned Rorem, a prolific contemporary classical composer, was hired to score Jerry Schatzberg’s The Panic in Needle Park. It would have been the Pulitzer-winning composer’s only work for film, but it was not to be; it was later decided that the film would work best with no music whatsoever. Rorem’s score may have been a masterpiece, but the cold,harrowing silence in the film is a formidable match as we watch two helpless lovers tumble down a web of addiction and betrayal. The sly hustler Bobby (Al Pacino) is already ensnared by addiction, and it isn’t long before his new beau, Helen (Kitty Wynn), winds down the same path.

Helen isn’t a noble or awful person, nor does she have a quintessentially perfect life at the film’s outset. This makes it easier to imagine her as someone you could pass on the street, or who might even be in your own family—a necessity given the film’s approach as a cautionary tale. In the very first scene of The Panic in Needle Park, we catch glimpses of her in a subway, looking confused. The editing flits uncertainly between people observing her—or is she doing the observing?—and shots of Helen looking as though she doesn’t quite know who she is or what has led her to this point.She is a confused, helpless stranger, surrounded by people who cannot understand and will not help her.

That feeling of coldness between Helen and these strangers is compounded by something we learn moments later: she has just undergone an illegal abortion. Suddenly, that sense of insecurity and vulnerability gains renewed depth, as if these strangers could see into Helen’s eyes and realise exactly what she has done. It is shame fully embodied, given physical form through handheld camera work and quick cuts. While The Panic in Needle Park is rarely centred on shame, it does revolve around stark depictions of the grim reality of drug addiction, from needles slipping into skin to squalid living conditions and tortured psyches.

But for as much as the film operates as a cautionary tale, it remains respectful of its characters’ lives. There is no empty moralising here, nor explicit preaching of any kind. It depicts this world frankly, with no need for excess frills for the sake of cheap melodrama. Helen is no saint at the start of the film, but at no point does Schatzberg—or screenwriters Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne—turn her into a pariah for having had an abortion. It’s something that happens, just like drug addiction, and the film refuses to shy away from the emotions surrounding these heavy topics.

In doing so, it resists cheap ploys to manipulate its audience, employing a documentary-like visual approach that is all the more harrowing. There are times when it’s easy to forget you’re watching characters on a screen, so realistic are these dingy environments and the figures occupying them. Of course, it doesn’t start out that way. Helen is quick to recover from the ordeal of her abortion, both physically and psychologically, largely due to the arrival of Bobby. He is the type of man who would make a fool of himself in the middle of the street just to make her laugh, bystanders’ opinions be damned.

He’s a natural jester, with a personality too large to be contained by his physicality. It’s a meaty role, one that seems so characteristic of Pacino’s endless on-screen energy. But it is all the more interesting for being the genesis of that vivacious spirit, as this was his first-ever role in a feature film. You’d never think it; he takes on the character of Bobby with such confidence that it’s impossible not to notice the young man’s swagger. Bobby’s entire personality is a middle finger to a normal existence. Like him, Helen lives on the peripheries of society, removed from the hustle and bustle of men and women in work clothes marching through the streets of New York City. As these two young adults navigate a road less travelled, their love becomes intertwined with their habitual heroin use.

But a crisis is sweeping through ‘Needle Park’, the informal term at the time for the Verdi Square–Sherman Square area in Manhattan. In truth, there is always panic amongst these characters, since the life of a drug addict is a precarious scramble for income to procure their substance of choice. Everything else—even accommodation or love—is secondary. A series of betrayals tears through this central relationship, yet the filmmakers never judge their characters.They employ a radical acceptance of their behaviour, confident that audiences will afford them the same charity. For a movie that styles itself as a cautionary tale, it takes a remarkably mature approach, especially compared to some of the more contrived cinematic offerings in this vein, such as Christiane F. (1981).

Helen often does things that should irritate viewers, but there’s enough authenticity in her dire circumstances and desperation to make her actions understandable. The film’s uncomfortably realistic direction and intimate style also place it squarely in the subgenre of bleak New York City films, which, despite waning in relevance in recent decades,has been reinvigorated by the work of the Safdie brothers. The brothers’ feature Heaven Knows What (2014)—another drug addiction narrative—was even programmed by them in double-feature screenings alongside The Panic in Needle Park.

Both films are designed to make you shudder and wince. Both are unabashed in their pursuit of making you sit within the ambience of their environments, observing life in the gutters or on the margins of society. They’re also united by a strong female lead performance, made more impressive by the fact that neither actress had starred in a feature film before. Wynn is a marvel in The Panic in Needle Park, with expressive eyes that, unlike in most drug addiction stories,don’t dim over time. Instead, they do the exact opposite: widening in alarm, they encompass the horror that surrounds Bobby and Helen—a horror the couple are too scared and naive to fully acknowledge. Wynn’s best quality, though, is her ability to make Helen feel as though she could be anyone, as if any poor soul could wind up down this path.

When she and Bobby clash, or betray one another, it feels inevitable. There is no room for loyalty when they’re both in the throes of an all-consuming addiction. The Panic in Needle Park isn’t thrilling, exciting cinema; it is a slow burn towards oblivion, executed with a cinema vérité style. It is a patient, rewarding film that might not always prove absorbing because of its uncompromising realism. But its stylisation is also exactly what is needed to hammer home its message.

The Safdie brothers, who consulted with Schatzberg for Heaven Knows What and asked for his blessing to make it,envisioned their film as a contemporary approach to this subject matter. They didn’t produce a better film in every respect, but theirs is an even more intimate piece of cinema. It features an unconventional narrative structure that more keenly maps onto everyday life than the cautionary message-movie approach taken in The Panic in Needle Park.Instead, Heaven Knows What is attuned to the rhythm of the everyday, where its presentation of the depths of addiction is all the more harrowing for it.

It is a more nuanced film that sits more comfortably in contemporary cinema, especially its independent wing, which has only grown more empathetic towards struggling characters over the last few decades. But it, and so many other intimate, uncomfortable, stark films, wouldn’t exist without being able to stand on the shoulders of the cinematic giants of yesteryear. The Panic in Needle Park isn’t a traditional classic, but it has still found a way to sink its claws into the annals of cinema history—both for its own merits and for the films and filmmakers it has gone on to influence. For anyone seeking a distinctly feel-bad experience, or film lovers looking to trace the origins of Pacino’s legendary career, it’s a rich and rewarding watch that refuses to compromise.

USA | 1976 | 110 MINUTES | 1.85:1 | COLOUR | ENGLISH

Cast & Crew

director: Jerry Schatzberg.
writers: Joan Didion & John Gregory Dunne (based on the 1966 book by James Mills).
starring: Kitty Winn, Al Pacino, Alan Vint, Richard Bright, Kiel Martin, Michael McClanathan, Warren Finnerty & Marcia Jean Kurtz.

The post THE PANIC IN NEEDLE PARK (1971) appeared first on Frame Rated.

There’s a tendency among critics and audiences alike to romanticise cinema that disrupts conventions. Whether it’s dismantling narrative structure, production design, or tonal consistency, contemporary filmmakers are often celebrated for abandoning standards in pursuit of something singular. Boots Riley belongs to that increasingly endangered category of directors who appear completely unaware of the existence of cinematic rulebooks. His work unfolds like an exhilarating stream of unchecked imagination, where every absurd visual flourish and politically charged idea is allowed to coexist without restraint.

Those sensibilities defined Sorry to Bother You (2018) as one of the most audacious directorial debuts of the last decade. Its combination of surrealist comedy and incisive political commentary announced Riley as a genuinely distinctive voice capable of balancing biting satire with narrative anarchy. After parlaying that same artistic ethos into Amazon Prime’s mythical coming-of-age odyssey, I’m a Virgo (2023), he returns with his eagerly anticipated sophomore effort. Fully embracing the bizarre rhythms and absurdist indulgences that have come to define his work so far, I Love Boosters is a righteous middle finger to consumer capitalism, fashionably dressed as a maniacal comedy.

Set in a surreal dystopian version of California, the film follows Corvette (Keke Palmer), an aspiring fashion designer living in an abandoned apartment above a fried chicken restaurant. She survives by leading a shoplifting collective known as the Velvet Gang. Joined by the charismatic Mariah (Taylour Paige) and skeptical Sadé (Naomi Ackie), the group steals large quantities of luxury clothing and resells the merchandise at discounted prices. Corvette idolises Christie Smith (Demi Moore), the grotesquely wealthy head of fashion conglomerate Metro Designers. As the fashion mogul prepares to launch a new clothing line, Corvette discovers that one of her own original designs has appeared in Metro Designers stores. The discovery sends the trio on a mission to dismantle Christie’s empire. However, what begins as an act of retaliation soon pulls the Velvet Gang into a labyrinth of ludicrous conspiracies and a volatile rebellion that exposes the widening divide between commercialism and labour.

After establishing herself as one of Hollywood’s most intriguing screen presences in Jordan Peele’s Nope (2022) and Lawrence Lamont’s One of Them Days (2025), Keke Palmer once again showcases her natural charisma and personality as Corvette. The actress has always demonstrated impeccable comic timing, but that quality is weaponised here to tremendous effect. Whether she’s delivering political monologues that spiral into delirious absurdity or desperately outrunning a gigantic boulder of debt, she knows exactly when to heighten the chaos and when to underplay it.

While employing pitch-perfect comedic timing, Palmer also understands the emotional architecture beneath the chaos. Corvette’s sharp tongue and rebellious spirit conceal a woman hopelessly intoxicated by the very capitalist machinery she claims to despise. Palmer quietly reveals that dichotomy with every prolonged glance as she attempts to dismantle a broken industry from within. In the hands of a lesser talent, the character might have become a mere collection of eccentricities, but Palmer makes her feel alarmingly recognisable.

Although Palmer takes the lead, she’s supported by a powerhouse ensemble. Taylour Paige (Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F) is endlessly entertaining as the irrepressibly charismatic Mariah, imbuing her character with a nervous volatility and an extraordinary physical presence perfectly attuned to the anarchic comic rhythms. In contrast, Naomi Ackie (Blink Twice) delivers perhaps the most emotionally grounded performance as the pragmatic Sadé. Ackie imbues her character with intensity and determination, counterbalancing the heightened absurdity without ever losing sight of the underlying realities of systemic exploitation.

Together, Palmer, Paige, and Ackie form a compelling trio, and their natural dynamic is constantly electrifying. Additionally, Demi Moore (The Substance) delivers a gloriously monstrous turn as the tyrannical fashion mogul, Christie Smith. Transforming her character into a hilarious, caustic depiction of the predatory elite, she devours every scene while espousing outrageous rhetoric about luxury branding and aspirational consumerism.

If Sorry to Bother You represented Riley at his most incisive and controlled, then his latest effort finds him operating in his most anarchic register. I Love Boosters is the cinematic equivalent of taking every absurd idea, political provocation, and visual gag that crossed his mind and launching them at the screen with maximalist abandon. It simmers with observations surrounding inequality and success, but presents as a slapstick comedy lifted straight from the pages of an upside-down Dr Seuss book. It’s simultaneously invigorating and exhausting, constantly introducing novel concepts and inspired images that impress by their sheer audacity.

One memorable moment sees Mariah change the colour of her skin by holding her breath, allowing her to navigate luxury boutiques without raising suspicion among their prejudiced staff. Elsewhere, employees prepare for their insanely short lunch breaks by positioning themselves on starter blocks before sprinting towards sustenance, literally transforming the basic necessity of eating into a competitive event. The world Riley crafts is cartoonish to the point of delirium, but every surreal flourish and amusing detail gestures towards his main concern.

Across his career in television, film, and music, Riley has remained deeply committed to dissecting capitalism and exposing the machinations that exploit labourers and marginalised communities. Yet, beneath his scathing criticism, the filmmaker has always offered his audience a sense of optimism and encouragement to fight against these oppressive social constructs. A defining through line of his entire oeuvre is that meaningful change emerges not through individualism, but through solidarity and organised action.

I Love Boosters is perhaps Riley’s clearest articulation of this philosophy, speaking to the power of unionisation as both a labour strategy and a communal consciousness. Jianhu (Poppy Liu) and Violeta (Eiza González) embody these principles most directly. Jianhu campaigns for compensation and humane working conditions within a Chinese sweatshop, whereas Violeta intends to organise a union to protect the rights of her fellow retail workers. Indeed, the Marxist undercurrents of Violeta’s monologues land with the subtlety of a particular massage chair violently pummelling Corvette’s face. However, underneath the abrasive humour and overt political rhetoric is a network of nuanced opinions and concepts concerning labour that demand attention.

Where I Love Boosters truly shines is in its understanding that survival in contemporary society has become deeply aestheticised. Debt has an identity, burnout has a uniform, and class anxiety often arrives disguised in designer labels purchased on borrowed money. Riley exposes how capitalism systematically commodifies identity itself, transforming appearance into both aspiration and social currency. For the Velvet Gang, stealing clothes isn’t an act of vanity or rebellion; it’s an attempt to reclaim access to beauty and self-expression in a world where luxury has become a mechanism of exclusion.

The filmmaker understands that fashion has long functioned as a language for marginalised communities. It’s an assertion of identity, dignity, and visibility within a system designed to reduce people to labour and consumption. A pair of platform boots or an oversized faux-fur coat can carry the same symbolic weight as a protest sign, particularly for those whom capitalism acknowledges primarily as consumers rather than individuals.

Riley’s inspired political provocations find a wonderful visual accomplice in the art department’s deliberately vibrant visual language. Almost every element of Christopher Glass’s (The Jungle Book) extravagant production design and Shirley Kurata’s (Everything Everywhere All at Once) dazzling costume design feels meticulously engineered to reinforce the filmmaker’s dissection of capitalism. Take Christie’s luxurious skyscraper apartment, tilted at a disorienting 45-degree angle with beguiling decadence. Only she has the ability to navigate the unstable terrain because equality has become so imbalanced that everyone around her stumbles until they fall. Similarly, each of Metro Designers’ clothing lines is saturated in vibrant monochromatic colours that frequently change. It functions as a reflection of consumer culture’s dependence on manufactured urgency and resembles algorithmically engineered trend cycles designed to condition customers to consume out of fear of missing out.

As deliriously inventive as Riley is in visualising his capitalist dystopia, his eccentricities ultimately compromise the end product. The image of Mariah and Sadé leaving a store, cloaked in so many clothes that they may as well have donned fat suits, perfectly encapsulates the bursting narrative. The filmmaker ventures into so many outlandish and conceptually overstuffed detours that he often seems to be struggling to maintain coherence beneath the weight of his own ambition.

Once Corvette’s shoplifting escapades lead to the introduction of a Chinese factory worker spearheading a labour rebellion against Smith’s exploitative manufacturing practices, the screenplay collapses into an unwieldy collage of conspiracy theories, teleportation devices, and a recurring subplot involving a demonic libertine who devours women’s souls. There’s also a compelling conflict between Corvette and Sadé that’s helical, yet barely allowed to breathe. It’s a thread that could have deepened their friendship while interrogating the uneasy contradiction between anti-capitalist ideals and the necessity of financial survival. Yet, there’s a sense that Riley’s stream of ideas takes priority over character dynamics, leaving these moments feeling frustratingly underdeveloped.

Despite its convoluted ambitions, I Love Boosters is bursting with an unpredictable energy that makes it consistently entertaining. Those willing to surrender to these flippant digressions may find Boots Riley’s sophomore effort exhilarating. It simultaneously stands as a daring and flamboyant addition to Hollywood’s increasingly homogenised creative landscape, while also functioning as an earnest rallying call for equality and social justice within the fashion industry.

USA | 2026 | 105 MINUTES | 2:39:1 | COLOUR | ENGLISH • MANDARIN

Cast & Crew

writer & director: Boots Riley.
starring: Keke Palmer, Taylour Paige, Naomi Ackie, Demi Moore, Poppy Liu, Eliza González, LaKeith Stanfield & Don Cheadle.

The post I LOVE BOOSTERS (2026) appeared first on Frame Rated.

Roger Ebert hated Roman Polanski’s The Tenant—absolutely loathed it. The film was “not merely bad”, he wrote, “it’s an embarrassment”, with “an ending that must rank among the most ridiculous ever fashioned for an allegedly reputable movie”. His British counterpart Leslie Halliwell, like Ebert a critic of essentially common-sense and populist values, was equally dismissive: “Rather like a male version of the same director’s Repulsion, this wearisome case history shows the total dissipation of whatever talent he once had.”

And yet, not everybody felt the same way. Vincent Canby in The New York Times was enthusiastic about “the most successful and most consistently authentic Polanski film in years”. Daniel Bird, the scholar of Polish film, has called it “Polanski’s masterpiece”.

It may not be a coincidence that Ebert and Halliwell were writing for a general cinema-going audience, while Canby and Bird wrote for more of an intellectual elite. Which side you fall on where The Tenant is concerned surely depends on whether you are prepared to accept the film on its own flawed terms, as a kind of subjective, impressionistic nightmare, or demand conventional elements like character development and a coherent storyline.

For the problem with The Tenant is that it’s very good, at its best verging on great, in half of the ways that matter – and disastrous in the other half. Polanski demonstrates here that he can be a master of the moment, the unnerving effect, the striking image; parts of The Tenant might remind you of anything from the expressionism of Alberto Cavalcanti’s final story in Dead of Night (1945), to Stanley Kubrick’s Overlook Hotel in The Shining (1980), to the murderous fever dream of Luca Guadagnino’s The Protagonists (1999).

But at the same time, he fatally neglects the larger-scale demands of narrative, compounding this weakness by abruptly shifting the tone and trajectory of the film halfway through. It starts out seeming to be a tale of modern urban stresses; then, without any groundwork having been laid, it suddenly becomes a lurid fantasia of paranoia, delusion and outright horror. The two sides of the film don’t complement or illuminate each other; they’re just stuck together.

To be fair, Polanski himself acknowledged this later: “With hindsight, I realise that [the principal character] Trelkovsky’s insanity doesn’t build gradually enough – that his hallucinations are too startling and unexpected. The picture labours under an unacceptable change of mood halfway through.” But, of course, his later realisation does nothing to rescue the film itself.

As well as directing and co-writing, Polanski plays Trelkovsky, a Polish man (like Polanski) living in Paris (where Polanski was born, though he largely grew up in Kraków). We learn nothing about his past and indeed very little about his present – he is single, seemingly honest and likeable, holds what appears to be a relatively junior office job, and has a few male friends from work with whom he doesn’t seem very comfortable. This lack of character depth works well at first, though it becomes a weakness later.

At the very start of the film, Trelkovsky visits an apartment building, where he rents a flat. The previous tenant, Simone, is in hospital after attempting to kill herself by jumping from the flat’s window, and he feels compelled to visit her – it’s not quite clear why, but perhaps it’s just because he’s a nice guy.

She is wrapped head to toe in bandages, like the Egyptian mummies she studied as a historian, and at the end of the hospital-visit scene she screams from inside them, suddenly, long and loud; it’s a shocking moment, perhaps the most shocking in the whole movie. Far wilder things happen later, but in this scene there is also normalcy, and it’s the contrast that makes the scream so disturbing.

Trelkovsky forms a brief friendship with Stella (Isabelle Adjani), a friend of Simone’s (or, in some readings of the film, her lover). Not long after, Simone dies in hospital.

Trelkovsky tries to settle into his new apartment, but it isn’t easy. The landlord, M. Zy (Melvyn Douglas), is constantly disapproving, both he and the neighbours seem obsessed with noise, and there are repeated, unnerving incidents: a tooth found in a hole in the wall, and strange, immobile figures in the bathroom across the courtyard. As with many other apartment-based movies, from Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954) to Chloe Okuno’s Watcher (2022), The Tenant often uses things seen through the window, beyond the home’s boundaries, to threaten its apparent safety.

At the local café, meanwhile, the staff seem determined to treat Trelkovsky just like Simone, bringing him her preferred hot chocolate and Marlboro cigarettes despite his protestations that he wants coffee and Gauloises.

Eventually, Trelkovsky becomes disconnected from reality, at times seemingly imagining he is Simone, at others believing that the others in the building are trying to make him think that. Of course, he is still sure that he is the sane one in a mad world, and the very last line is one of anguished protest – “I’m not Simone Choule, I’m Trelkovsky!” – but by then it is clear to the audience that his hold on the difference has largely disintegrated.

The problem is that all this comes pretty much out of the blue. Early on, the film seems more likely to be wryly humorous than anything else – there is even some very nicely handled physical comedy in a scene where Trelkovsky struggles on the stairs with bags of rubbish. But then suddenly, for no apparent reason, he is painting his nails, buying a woman’s wig and trying to strangle himself. Earlier weird things could be put down to satire or the genuine strangeness of people; now they can only be understood as hallucinatory, and by the end The Tenant has descended into what Ryan Gilbey calls “near-operatic horror”.

A few scenes simply make little sense, even in the context of the principal character’s breakdown. Why does Trelkovsky slap a small boy in the park for no reason? Why, when Trelkovsky takes his new acquaintance Badar (Rufus) to a bar, does a drunk stranger turn on Badar? Is senselessness itself the point? Maybe, but that line of reasoning leads to a place where absolutely anything can be inserted into a plot.

The kind of old-fashioned, highly theatrical take on mental illness in which Polanski indulges with The Tenant only really works if there is some internal logic to it, and here it is often missing. Trelkovsky’s big speech about halfway through about identity and the loss of it gives some clue as to what is happening, but not to why; and letting the audience see so little of the inner Trelkovsky before his breakdown also makes it difficult to know how much he has changed, making it less troubling that he has.

Despite all these problems with the concept and the writing, it must be acknowledged that Polanski’s performance as Trelkovsky does a lot to hold the film together and keep the viewer’s attention, especially in its first, saner half. Polite to a fault, slightly feminine, but not at all passive – firm about what he thinks and wants – he is a completely believable person. Even when the bigger narrative picture becomes shaky, Trelkovsky’s actions and reactions within individual scenes mostly seem very plausible.

Outstanding elsewhere in the cast are Douglas as the courteously hostile landlord, and a wonderful Shelley Winters as the apartment building’s irritable, misanthropic concierge; the first time she smiles is when she tells Trelkovsky about Simone’s suicide attempt, and if you need convincing that it is possible to wash a window angrily, The Tenant is the movie for you. The casting of these two American veterans as Parisians is a little odd, though, and the international nature of The Tenant’s cast led to an awkward compromise over language – the film was shot with some actors speaking English and some French, and then dubbed as necessary into single-language versions. This dubbing must be the reason for the very artificial delivery of lines in some small roles.

Just as important as any of the people in The Tenant are the settings, particularly Trelkovsky’s flat: this is the last in Polanski’s so-called “apartment trilogy” that also comprises Repulsion (1965) and Rosemary’s Baby (1968).

All three films deal in different ways with mental illness, despair and the loss of identity, and depend heavily on their apartment settings, but it is Repulsion that The Tenant resembles more strongly (although the presence of the supernatural in The Tenant, as in Rosemary’s Baby, is not a totally unsupportable idea either). Indeed, Polanski had originally resisted adapting his friend Roland Topor’s novel The Tenant precisely because it was too similar to Repulsion.

Both movies are much more concerned with depicting than explaining a mental breakdown, although Repulsion is more successful because – unlike The Tenant – it doesn’t introduce events that promise a fully fledged plot and then just abandon them. There are visual connections too: the prone woman at the beginning of Repulsion anticipates The Tenant’s Simone in her hospital bed, and the cracks in the walls of Catherine Deneuve’s apartment are echoed by the tooth Trelkovsky finds in the wall of his in the later film.

And just as the physical decay of the apartment and its contents in Repulsion parallels Deneuve’s decline, so does Trelkovsky’s flat and indeed his whole building signal that not all is right in his world. The camera’s meander around the dilapidated courtyard at the very beginning is thoroughly disorienting, as is the interior layout of the block; it’s impossible to grasp how different parts of this structure relate to one another. Trelkovsky, newly moved in, turns on a tap and a pan hanging on the wall immediately starts to rattle. The lighting of the apartment scenes is suffused with an unpleasant green (it’s notable that the lighting is much nicer in Stella’s apartment).

More generally, the city of Paris is far from welcoming. A huge construction site past which Trelkovsky walks in an early exterior scene seems like an attack on the ground itself. The Seine and the Eiffel Tower are unglamorous, grey and industrial in ambience. Several times on the street we see in the background what seems to be a large poster dominated by a superbly sinister illustration, mysteriously but worryingly entitled La Peinture Lure (“the painting trap”; Topor, the novelist, painted it).

Almost everyone is aggressive, from a nurse in Simone’s hospital to Trelkovsky’s boorish colleagues. (Their faces are often unusual, too – Polanski must have cast for this.) The priest giving Simone’s funeral address starts off talking in conventional religious terms but is soon warning of the worms and putrefaction that await the dead; where, in this scene, does the reality stop and Trelkovsky’s hallucination begin? Polanski is determined, even, to insert the unpleasant into the few scenes of real human connection. While Badar cries to Trelkovsky about the loss of Simone, an indifferent café proprietor counts his takings. When Trelkovsky and Stella visit a cinema, their embraces come across as clumsy, frustrated gropes.

Individually, many of these touches are highly effective. Performances are often good, too, and the environment is used powerfully; the great cinematographer Sven Nykvist sustains a claustrophobic, unsettling visual atmosphere throughout the entire movie. But even so, The Tenant remains the least satisfying of Polanski’s apartment trilogy.

The protagonist’s mental collapse is not nearly as convincing as in Repulsion, nor is Polanski’s brand of surrealist horror quite as creepy (in The Tenant it gets downright silly at times), nor is the apartment as powerful a metaphor. (It’s never clear in The Tenant whether Polanski wants us to understand that the place itself has had some malign influence on Simone and Trelkovsky.)

The realistic, the darkly humorous, and the moments of more extreme horror are not tied together nearly so well in The Tenant as in Rosemary’s Baby, either. For example, there are obvious allusions to Trelkovsky’s outsider status as an immigrant to Paris. He has to adjust to a flat full of someone else’s things, his repeated insistence that he is a citizen does nothing to alleviate others’ suspicions of him, and eventually he finds himself turned into someone he doesn’t want to be. But none of this melds as naturally with the rest of the storyline as Mia Farrow’s doubts about pregnancy and motherhood do in Rosemary’s Baby. The points feel tacked-on.

In the end, this is the fundamental problem with The Tenant. It brings together a bunch of ideas – from psychosis to xenophobia to reincarnation to urban alienation – that don’t naturally fit together, and then offers no persuasive overall premise, story arc or character development to consolidate them. Instead, it lurches from one to the next without making it clear how they connect, if they even do.

Critics like Roger Ebert and Leslie Halliwell may somewhat overstate the case against the film – there are good things in it, for sure – but still, it’s difficult to see it as more than a curiosity.

FRANCE | 1976 | 126 MINUTES | 1.66:1 | COLOUR | ENGLISH

Cast & Crew

director: Roman Polanski.
writers: Gérard Brach & Roman Polanski (based on the novel by Roland Topor).
starring: Roman Polanski, Isabelle Adjani, Melvyn Douglas & Shelley Winters.

The post THE TENANT (1976) appeared first on Frame Rated.

It’s difficult to resist the urge to unduly compliment films that explore taboo subject matter, particularly when we know their filmmakers are taking great risks. It does not take an appreciation of art to mourn these restrictions, but it certainly helps. Even the smallest act of creative subversion committed within the borders of repression is an act of bravery that should inspire and inflame the spirit. It extends a degree of charitability—a desperate hope for the project in question to succeed on its own merits.

But that alone does not make a great film. It’s with great pleasure, then, that I can report that Jafar Panahi, like the best artists, does not just make do with limitations; he figures out ways for them to enhance his work. Forced to operate under a filmmaking ban, the Iranian director has been arrested multiple times by his government and has resorted to hunger strikes on more than one occasion to secure his release. Legal constraints are no surprise to a filmmaker who had to jump through hoops just to get Offside / آفساید made, which included submitting a fake script about a group of young men going to a football match to government officials.

Yet Panahi did not just have these restrictions on his mind. There was also the complicated matter of filming on location during the match depicted in the film: the 2006 Third Round World Cup qualifier between Iran and Bahrain. Part of the movie was shot during the actual game, while the entire narrative hinges on a handful of young women and girls—most of whom do not know one another—who sneak into the stadium and are subsequently detained just beyond the eyeline of the pitch. Panahi, who has faced a litany of restrictions on his filmmaking and personal freedom over the years, must have related strongly to the uniquely agonising torture of being so unbearably near, yet so far, from the source of one’s dreams.

In a sense, the story ends there; each of these girls had a unified goal, and they were all unsuccessful. But for Panahi, that is only the beginning. What is far more tantalising is not the girls’ pursuit, but the way the restrictions surrounding it expose the dehumanisation of women in Iran. The oft-cited reason for banning women from these sporting events is that it will expose them to the bare skin and vulgar comments of men, destroying their purity. There is no room for passion, nor for humanity—just strict gender roles that subjugate women by purporting to uphold them as pure and innocent. To save them from moral corruption, they are treated like women in fairy tales: cast aside in high towers or imprisoned under lock and key, supposedly for their own protection.

At first, we follow just one of the girls as she disguises herself as a boy and attempts to infiltrate the throngs of people entering the stadium. There is a swell of optimism and verve in these crowds, with the match potentially guaranteeing Iran’s place in the qualifying stages of the World Cup. A country’s hopes hinge on the game, yet that gravity is suddenly rendered arbitrary when it comes to allowing these girls to watch it—a space where their existence as delicate objects in need of commandeering could easily be ignored for just a few hours. Instead, the girls are detained and watched at all times by guards who initially appear callous. Gradually, what emerges is a clash between the girls’ passion for this immense sporting occasion and the indifference of the guards detaining them. They are simply following orders, even if the restriction defies any reasonable standard of logic.

Panahi manages a difficult balancing act throughout the film, using digital cameras to move quickly through crowded areas, lending a documentary feel to the unfolding conversations. Arguments flow so freely and conflicts are so naturally introduced that it really does feel as though you are witnessing authentic discussions, yet there is never a single moment in Offside that feels unfocused. The characters are always gently being guided down a new emotional avenue or towards a different way of exposing the hypocrisy and inhumanity of these football bans.

The girls are passionate but never crass; their defiance in words and attitude does not mean they must be innocent waifs or naturally insubordinate rule-breakers. They appeal to their captors’ humanity until it becomes clear that the men keeping them detained are just as frustrated by the rules as they are. The guards appear abrasive and defensive, and while they never fully let their guard down, there is so much humanity flowing through their interactions that it gradually breaks down the resolve of both sides. Some of these guards are barely past their teenage years, thrust into a world whose strict rules they must submit to, even if that requires being an enforcer. They too are standing at a distance from the all-important match, when they could be resting at home or enjoying it from a much better view.

Panahi is a sensitive, insightful filmmaker, effortlessly skewering the hypocrisy behind these arbitrary rulings and how they stifle joy. Yet he’s never morbid in Offside, creating little vestiges of resilience and pushback by slowly weaving in a sense of solidarity between the girls and the guards, uniting them in ways their home country’s government would never dream of. Films like Offside are viewed as crude, impure, and dangerous by regimes like the Iranian government, yet this PG-rated film is as warm, rich, and human as any other.

At first, we follow just one of these girls as she attempts to infiltrate the security checkpoints. However, once detained, she remains near-silent for much of the film, swallowed up by the chorus of young women united in their passion and imprisonment. It’s a fluid transition, expertly matched by the blossoming humanity that emerges from the stone-faced guards. As specific characters dip in and out of focus, a small but forceful chorus of warmth—often antagonistic but always threaded with sympathy where it’s most needed—begins to emerge.

Offside is too pragmatic to be angry; instead, it positions itself around the joys found in minor concessions, the points of contact between segregated groups, and how a spirit of rebellion can be fostered through the simplest of actions. Though its cinematography is not conventionally pretty to behold, it lends itself beautifully to the naturalistic dialogue and visuals. You can easily imagine this dilemma unfolding in real life, especially as it unfolds mostly in real time across the film’s 93-minute running time, where not a single precious moment is wasted. The acting is stellar across the board, with performances as effortlessly naturalistic as Panahi’s direction.

Specific plot details sound like a dry regurgitation of a depressing reality if explained here, but fear not, as Panahi draws the audience into such an intimate storytelling environment that the tensions of an entire country are gradually illuminated. What seem like minor interactions are suddenly threaded with unease, warmth, or a mixture of the two. Watching Panahi work his magic with these alchemic concoctions of emotional texture is a reminder of the power of cinema—made even more perceptive and essential because of the conditions in which it was created.

IRAN | 2006 | 93 MINUTES | 1.85:1 | COLOUR | PERSIAN

Cast & Crew

director: Jafar Panahi.
writers: Jafar Panahi & Shadmehr Rastin.
starring: Sima Mobarak-Shahi, Shayesteh Irani, Ayda Sadeqi, Golnaz Farmani, Mahnaz Zabihi, Nazanin Sediqzadeh, Mohammed Kheyrabadi, Masad Kheymeh Kabood, Hadi Saeedi & Mohsen Tanabandeh.

The post OFFSIDE (2006) appeared first on Frame Rated.

The world is headed for destruction, and it’s beautiful. The weight of our individual lives and shared existence rests on a handful of crucial moments—small interactions that would have been lost in time even without the obliteration of the planet. In Lars von Trier’s Melancholia, this swift end to life as we know it, and life itself, isn’t something to despair over. At least, not exclusively. Divided neatly into two halves, the first part of Melancholia explores the inner turmoil of the newlywed Justine (Kirsten Dunst) on her wedding night, where depression renders any notion of joy obsolete. Her internal ruin is as all-consuming as the impending annihilation of Earth by an approaching rogue planet, Melancholia.

The film, like many of von Trier’s agonised works, was inspired by the director’s own clinical depression. After learning in a therapy session that depressed people often react calmly to crises because they are primed to expect the worst, the Danish director amplified this idea to imagine how the end of the world would appear to someone who has already given up on life. Directially, Melancholia is one of von Trier’s finest movies, melding the slow-motion, free-fall beauty of cosmic destruction with the painful, raw intimacy of the everyday. In this world, beauty and the sublime are reserved exclusively for planetary annihilation. A lengthy opening sequence depicts some of the film’s most iconic shots as life reaches a triumphant, catastrophic crescendo.

This opening introduces a Justine doused in an ethereal glow, awash with calm. It is no coincidence that she drifts slowly down a river, her mood mapped onto the waters perforating the fabric of her wedding dress. Sailing along her own coffin ship, she calmly awaits an eternal slumber—a dark inversion of a dazzling Sleeping Beauty, appearing as though she has spent her whole life waiting to wake up. For this weary, depressed soul, eternal sleep is more peaceful than words can convey. Floating down a river as the planet faces imminent destruction is nothing compared to the ice-cold brutality of being shepherded into baths or out of her bedroom by strait-laced, condescending figures who insist she will become herself again if she just adheres to ordinary social conventions.

We never glimpse the wedding itself. Instead, we first meet Justine and her new husband, Michael (Alexander Skarsgård)—a kind-hearted but uncomprehending man who cannot find a way into Justine’s worldview—as their hired limousine struggles up a narrow road. It is a Sisyphean journey that only Justine finds amusing, perhaps because she knows, deeper than words can express, that all of this is utterly meaningless, and that any minor joy will quickly be snuffed out by her depression.

Throughout this wedding reception, shared with family and held in a grand castle, she is surrounded by the very things that imprison her. It is there in Justine’s wedding dress and all that it embodies, in the guests hemming her in and urging her to perform a role that suddenly feels cheap, and in the stately, impersonal estate encircling her. It’s not just depression that has sunk its claws into her, pinning her to a rigid definition of existence.

For Justine, there is only a single layer separating the smiling, happy people around her from the universe she is submerged in, but it is a crucial one. Occasionally she rises to the surface, not out of resolve or determination, but through sheer luck. In these rare moments of respite, it is less that Justine is smiling through the pain and more that she is able to momentarily forget it. But if the darkness always returns, isn’t that the ultimate truth of her universe? When Justine’s good spirits return, the present moment becomes bearable, and she feels no inclination to think of the future. When they leave her, the entirety of her existence is dulled to a winding line down an unforgivably long, dark road from which there is no escape. Happiness is merely temporary stress relief; her depression is all-consuming.

Von Trier explores this psyche by juxtaposing ethereal imagery and classical music with his trademark choppy editing when the story returns to the domesticity of everyday life. The Danish director often takes extreme liberties to convey the essence of a scene, appearing unconcerned by whether he disorients the viewer. There is a distinct brilliance to the way he melds handheld camerawork with frequent, abrupt cuts, creating an intimate atmosphere that is also jagged and disruptive. It works exceptionally well here, as disorientation frequently befalls Justine, who is trapped in a stasis born of depression and blindsided by the energy of those around her. In the sludge of irreality that overwhelms her, the movements of others are so rapid that they repeatedly daze her—an emotional experience perfectly captured by von Trier’s editing. There is also a painful degree of intimacy to these scenes through handheld camerawork that moves with the characters or, worse still, drifts even when they are still, drawing closer to a reality that is painful to live and painful to watch.

What sticks out most from Justine’s interactions with her loved ones is their shared intransigence. Justine’s sister, Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg), is kind yet insistent that her sister stops running away from her problems. Claire’s husband, John (Kiefer Sutherland), is a cheerleader for rationality, meaning a bride holed up in her bedroom on her wedding night is an aberration he cannot comprehend.

But for Justine, reality is crystal clear. None of the platitudes offered to her about festivities, money, or happiness hold any value. They cannot salvage anything meaningful from the wreckage of her psyche. She flits in and out of the real world, engaging with her friends and family for a few minutes before scurrying away to be alone. It is all part of the same uniform portrait, where blips of contentment are so fleeting they cannot possibly mean anything to her.

Yet even this formula grows stale as Justine oscillates between committing to her respective roles—as a wife, sister, daughter, or ostensibly happy, well-adjusted person—and fleeing them. Aside from one escalation in the drama that confirms Justine’s pitch-black view of life and herself—an act of rebellion that only emphasises her imprisonment—Melancholia settles into a humdrum rhythm when depicting her turmoil. That life simply goes on is less a benefit of the film’s representation of depression and more a sign of a narrative that cannot go anywhere because of it.

This stagnation is only amplified in the film’s second half, which follows Claire’s growing realisation that the world is about to end. Justine, the clairvoyant, is already well aware. She simply knows things; depression has offered her a sense of clarity more powerful than any happy moment or contented outlook. In most films, this would be a false positive, a red herring deployed to be undone so that the protagonist can transcend her illness and look towards the light. Melancholia is not that kind of film. It confirms Justine’s worldview, granting her a sliver of omniscience as the first to realise that the Earth is doomed.

Claire, who is comparatively ‘normal’, responds to impending doom with typical, regular breakdowns. John, meanwhile, is the kind of straight-talking, no-nonsense figure you can imagine being a formidable foe. His charity has a short leash and reaches a swift conclusion. He’s a pragmatist so straightforward and self-serious that he recalls more caricatured roles from recent cinema, like Harrison Lee Van Buren Sr (Guy Pearce) in Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist (2024), or Col. Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn) in One Battle After Another (2025). He’s rationality whittled down to a solitary nub, too self-absorbed to recognise the farcical nature of his existence.

Justine understands she appears delusional and stark raving mad to those around her; she has had to hear it repeatedly. Perhaps that is why it is so much easier to take her seriously than John, who is barely held together as a cliché, let alone a character. The same is true of several side characters, from Justine’s weirdly antagonistic employer, Jack (Stellan Skarsgård), to his new hire, Tim (Brady Corbet). But it is Claire who is most underserved by the script, as ordinary, struggling people seem to have no place in this realm of the soon-to-be-dead. It is Justine’s dilemma that fascinates, meaning that exploring how someone terrified of the end of their life processes this ordeal feels as if the film has moved from a specific narrative to an overly generalised one.

The two sisters do not really demonstrate a bond, or lack thereof, so there is never a strong sense of anticipation when watching them converse. Not even the annihilation of Earth can get them to understand one another, or even try. By zooming in on the beauty and horror of Melancholia’s central concept in its opening scene, von Trier fails to ramp up any stakes or investment in the subsequent story. It is doubtful he wanted to, given that he made this film to demonstrate how the end of the world could seem beautiful to a ravaged mind. Anything more emotionally textured would make for a better film, though it would have sullied his specific vision.

Well-worn motifs linger long after their profundity has been wrung dry, most notably the prelude to Richard Wagner’s opera Tristan und Isolde. It is a perceptive piece of music, inverting the Hollywood-esque romanticism associated with these compositions while still treating the subject seriously—just as von Trier refuses to condescend to Justine. Yet with each repeated inclusion, the music loses its prescience, its bitter edge, and its desperate urge to leave this planet behind and graze against the stars. Gradually, the same becomes true of Melancholia itself.

DENMARK • SWEDEN • FRANCE • GERMANY | 2011 | 130 MINUTES | 2.35:1 | COLOUR | ENGLISH

Cast & Crew

writer & director: Lars von Trier.
starring: Kirsten Dunst, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Alexander Skarsgård, Kiefer Sutherland, Cameron Spurr, Charlotte Rampling, John Hurt, Stellan Skarsgård & Brady Corbet.

The post MELANCHOLIA (2011) appeared first on Frame Rated.

Despite searching for behind-the-scenes articles, every search result for Hudson Hawk yields remarkably similar think pieces titled: “Resurrecting the Hawk”, “Loving the Bomb”, “Screwball Disaster”, “Analysis of a Flop”, and “Of Course, Hudson Hawk Is Ridiculous. That’s the Point.” Written largely a decade or more ago, these articles coincided with the decline of Bruce Willis’s career rather than his health. Many of his twilight choices were simply a matter of securing financial security for his family, before his aphasia and frontotemporal dementia (FTD) diagnoses in 2023 marked a sombre end to his acting life. Yet back in 1991, Willis was just getting started. The blockbuster success of Die Hard (1988) had given him carte blanche to pave his own unique way into Hollywood.

Willis then stumbled through a staggering number of infamous early flops: The Bonfire of the Vanities (1990), Color of Night (1994), and North (1994). Yet these were brushed aside with a carefree charisma and overshadowed by intelligent successes that resisted typical tough-guy trappings. Alongside playing John McClane, he voiced a baby in Look Who’s Talking (1989). Given which of those films made more money, it’s no wonder Willis braved strange choices. He cashed in his most audacious blank cheque with Hudson Hawk—a character that practically shared the audience’s disbelief that the fella from Moonlighting (1985–89) was meant to be an action star.

Fresh from prison, the world’s greatest cat burglar ends both of his heists by alerting the guards, raising the alarms, and dodging gunfire as he falls off a building. He’s forced into a madcap caper by twisted billionaires who want to destroy the economy, CIA agents named after chocolate bars, a special agent nun from the Vatican, and his best friend from Jersey who croons alongside him while they steal priceless artefacts. Critic and author Matt Singer summed up the plot on Letterboxd as “The Da Vinci Code For Assholes.”

That’s a lot to keep up with, and the film wastes time by starting in 1491. Here, Leonardo da Vinci juggles the construction of his gold machine while painting the Mona Lisa (who has a terrible smile, har har) and testing his flying machine. Showing a successful flight up front is indicative of the entire venture; it ensures there’s zero tension when Hawk has to rely on the contraption in the finale. One might think a six-minute prologue could be better spent establishing our lead, but the gold machine cost over $1M before being shipped to Europe, so the film was going to make the most of it. Sinking egregious amounts of money into a project with the thoughtless idea that putting it onscreen will equal profit is a running theme with Hudson Hawk.

Take the line where Hawk flirts with Andie MacDowell and jests, “Not sure if I remember how to kiss girls… not that I ever kiss guys.” His short-back-and-sides haircut, T-shirt and vest combo, and four gold earrings in one ear say otherwise. It’s hard to tell if looking like an aging hipster cosplaying as The Spirit is meant to be cool and mysterious, laughably lame, or some post-ironic blend. But the confusion goes deeper than appearances. He’s dismayed that his old watering hole is now a trendy, expensive bar, yet Hawk looks fit to step onstage and play the flute like Ron Burgundy. What kind of down-and-dirty bar catered to his obsession with cappuccinos? His “masculine European” drink reflects a style as subtle as Joe Camel.

More than anything, it’s the conceited performance that jeopardises the laughs. Hawk dives into the dirt when a car backfires, yet doesn’t flinch when his coffee cup shatters from a bullet. Comic moments are randomly assigned one of precisely two reactions: a ‘DreamWorks Face’ smirk or an incredulous, YouTube-thumbnail eye-bulge. The scant slapstick that borders on clever—like Hawk and Tommy (Danny Aiello) being half-paralysed yet overcoming two assassins—is a ghost of the old-school adventure from Steven E. de Souza’s original screenplay (the writer behind Die Hard and Die Hard 2). Instead, the Looney Tunes exaggeration injected by co-writer Daniel Waters and director Michael Lehmann (who previously made 1988’s Heathers) recklessly abuses the suspension of disbelief, alienating the audience entirely.

The first heist is a joke in itself. Not only are the guards total putzes, but Hawk and Tommy escape by jumping 40 stories safely onto an entrance awning. When a low-ranking goon gets his neck slashed in the very next scene, are we supposed to suddenly take things seriously? People do get killed here—shot in the head, decapitated, blown up—and they all say “fuck” a lot. It’s a massive tonal dissonance alongside the childish antics, but then again, the contrast is meant to be the joke. “You want me to rape them?” asks a dim-witted CIA agent, who then struggles to read Green Eggs and Ham.

Perhaps that made you laugh, and perhaps frenzied A-to-C comedy tickles your funny bone. Hudson Hawk comes off too smart by dancing gleefully around the alphabet, but the relentless shortcoming is that it’s never smart enough to make a satisfying coherent B link between two random happenings. As Nathan Rabin observed for The A.V. Club: “The central joke of Austin Powers is that its hero is a randy, sexist libertine in a politically correct era. That culture-clash gave the film a satirical edge missing from Hudson Hawk, whose premise is essentially, ‘Hey, what if a New Jersey Bruce Willis-kinda guy got involved in all sorts of international mystery and stuff?'”

From Woody Allen in Casino Royale (1967) to Melissa McCarthy in Spy (2015), mismatched protagonists usually create comedy through conflict. The off-the-wall styling here feels closer to Michael Jordan in Space Jam (1996), yet Willis is so eager to mug for the camera that he ruins the culture clash entirely. Rabin’s issue lay primarily with the writing, which is counterintuitive to Willis’s own enthusiasm. The actor once remarked that “people were mad about it or something, they were mad that we were trying to make them laugh.” But were they really trying? The core concept is half-baked, and Willis’s self-aware performance constantly needles the audience with an implicit ‘Isn’t this funny?’ Some viewers might nod along, but many felt unconsciously slighted at having to invent punchlines for unfinished jokes.

Even underqualified cinematic spies usually answer the call to adventure in classic Hero’s Journey fashion. They naturally reject the call at first, which is a fine comedic vein to mine. Hawk is dragged and drugged through the entire runtime to an exhausting degree. If he doesn’t want to be there, why should we? It echoes the well-trodden critique of Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)—that the story would’ve soldiered on with or without Indiana Jones. Indeed, our villains here pull off the third and final heist themselves after Hawk refuses. But whereas Indy would at least feel bad that his refusal led to the deaths of the security guards, Hawk never once falters from his smug bravado.

There have been many revisionist attempts to define the comedy of Hudson Hawk. Though critics admit it isn’t a straight parody, it has been compared to Austin Powers. Critic Jonathan Rosenbaum traced its roots to 1960s genre spoofs like Our Man Flint (1966) and Modesty Blaise (1966). Even Waters himself recognised the trouble mid-production, recalling: “Oh my God, it is Casino Royale, but not in a good way!”

Detractors have derided the inscrutable humour as one big inside joke—a case of Willis and his writers finding things funny enough to parody without ever explaining the joke to the audience. This may be the most curious instance of a parody based on a movie that doesn’t actually exist. De Souza’s screenplay was, by all accounts, a more straight-laced affair; the final product seems to be subverting and satirising serious moments that only the crew ever saw. It’s like Austin Powers existing before James Bond.

Hudson Hawk seems rotten to the core. Was this just a bad script the actors shackled themselves to, as Willis has done later in life? Over a decade earlier, an aspiring songwriter told an aspiring actor (then a bartender) about a character inspired by the biting winter wind that blows from the Hudson River across Manhattan, reminding him of the wind off Lake Michigan in Chicago called ‘The Hawk’. Even the origin story is long-winded. That bartender was Willis, who became fast friends with credited co-writer Robert Kraft, who also produced Willis’s 1987 rhythm and blues album, The Return of Bruno. Yes, Bruce Willis has four albums—well, two real ones, and somehow two compilations titled Classic Bruce Willis and The Ultimate Collection.

Flash forward to the production of Hudson Hawk, and Willis wasn’t just requesting dialogue tweaks or heroic close-ups; he was hand-crafting his baby. An anonymous crew member revealed to The New York Times: “There was no mistaking it. Michael [Lehmann] might suggest a dolly shot, and Bruce would say, ‘That’s no good; let’s do this.’ And we’d have to make the adjustment and do it Bruce’s way.” All the musical heist scenes are entirely his, fuelling his “Bruno” persona. Earlier revisions suggested switching a male villain to a female one, possibly Audrey Hepburn, but Willis nixed the stunt casting. Instead, he decided both characters should exist and be married—perhaps his only sound idea, as Richard E. Grant and Sandra Bernhard absolutely shoot for the moon.

These scattershot impulses led to an initial rough cut of two hours and forty minutes. It was a screening Willis unconfidently insisted upon, determined to try every single joke they had filmed. One entire subplot missing from the final cut involved Hawk’s pet monkey, who gets killed offscreen by James Coburn. If you look closely as Coburn’s character plummets to his death, a photo of that very monkey is stuck to his head.

“The phone rings and it’s [then Warner Bros. exec] Mark Canton calling Bruce Willis, ‘We just had a test screening of The Bonfire of the Vanities. You tested through the roof. We are recutting the movie to make your part bigger.’ Joel Silver kicks me and says, ‘Fucking Mark Canton just fucked his movie and ours. Watch what happens this week.’ Bruce decided the movie should get crazier and crazier and brought in Dan Waters. Finally the studio called me up, ‘You get along with Bruce. We’re sending you, your wife, all expenses paid. You’ve got to take the pencil out of Bruce’s hand.’ Silver says, ‘Bruce hired us. It’s not our job to tell him he can’t make the movie he wants. It’s the studio executive’s’ This guy finds three days in a row to avoid belling the cat. So nobody tells Bruce to stop rewriting the movie and also directing the movie.”—Steven E. de Souza, screenwriter.

Made for $65M—though some individuals involved nudge that figure as high as $71M as production languished—Hudson Hawk grossed just $17M domestically, alongside $97M internationally. Ty Burr predicted for Entertainment Weekly in 1991: “I suspect it’s going to rent surprisingly well. Home video’s economy and privacy make it the perfect medium for guilt-free screening, and besides, people are fascinated when something smells this bad.” Willis claims the film did eventually get into the black through home markets, and the media landscape is so different now that a notorious Hollywood bomb like Hudson Hawk is readily available across several streaming services.

It no doubt fares worse for clicks today than most other Willis films of the 1990s. After all, how many people are discussing Mercury Rising (1998) in any more depth than, “Was that the one where the kid uses autism to crack into the CIA?” And yes, it was. Had Hudson Hawk been produced using de Souza’s original screenplay, there is a chance it could have been one of the actor’s greats. But isn’t it better to be a fascinating novelty than just another forgotten obscurity?

“I like it a lot. I still take pride in that film,” Willis said years later. “We were trying to make each other laugh — make the actors laugh.” One does not relish joining the frenzied mob of critics kicking a man while he’s down, but that latter statement is precisely what allowed a self-indulgent vanity project to take root. The triumph of Die Hard was that John McClane possessed none of the self-assured invulnerability of past action giants like Stallone or Schwarzenegger. Yet Willis nevertheless swaggered into a string of subsequent bombs, coasting on the mistaken confidence that audiences wanted a man at the absolute top of his game, rather than the scrappy underdog who won them over in the first place.

“Bruce Willis used to be funny. I feel like I killed the humour in him with this movie. He’s pretty good in it and you get to see his comic chops. But after the film, if you look at his movie career, he did the most serious and solemn films, with a few exceptions. Something inside of him died after Hudson Hawk.”—Daniel Waters, screenwriter.

Retrospectives and Willis himself have declared Hudson Hawk a cult film. Yet it remains neither a true hit nor a universal favourite; even within the cult scene, it feels rather like a younger brother loitering on the fringes of his sibling’s friend group. The gonzo joie de vivre of this live-action cartoon is reminiscent of Speed Racer (2008)—another bold venture where the Wachowskis dared to reconstruct a cinematic language that audiences initially struggled to decipher. Crucially,producer Joel Silver was behind that passion project too. Beyond its aesthetic hurdles, the enduring audience for Speed Racer connected with universal themes: a love for the race, for family, and for how those anchors support you in finding your purpose. There is nothing behind Bruce Willis smirking at the camera other than a desperate plea: “Don’t you love me?”

Given that this is Willis’s only writing credit, it is easy to presume his subsequent on-screen persona of unassuming quietness developed once he simply stopped trying. Kevin Smith shared a story from the set of Live Free or Die Hard (2007) where Willis responded to a proposed script change with a self-assured ultimatum: “Who is your second choice to play John McClane?” Even so, Smith felt such an intoxicating charisma from the star that he accepted reduced pay just to direct Willis—whom he later called “a fucking dick”—in the “soul-crushing” comedy Cop Out (2010).

This difficult behaviour manifested years before his official aphasia diagnosis in 2022, and well before the late-career, direct-to-video period defined by visible earpieces and obvious body doubles. No one, outside of his immediate family, may know precisely when the actor wouldn’t then couldn’t act. Eventually, there came a point where the Bruce Willis we knew was simply no longer there. Despite all the legitimate criticisms and grievances directed at the actual filmmaking, we can look back at Hudson Hawk with a certain wistful fondness. It allows us to experience a bygone era when an actor, musician, and singular personality—warts and all—truly wanted to be there.

USA | 1991 | 100 MINUTES | 1.85:1 | COLOUR | ENGLISH • ITALIAN

Cast & Crew

director: Michael Lehmann.
writers: Steven E. de Souza & Daniel Waters (story by Bruce Willis & Robert Kraft).
starring: Bruce Willis, Danny Aiello, Andie MacDowell, James Coburn, Richard E. Grant, Sandra Bernhard, Donald Burton, Don Harvey, David Caruso, Andrew Bryniarski, Lorraine Toussaint & Stefano Molinari.

The post HUDSON HAWK (1991) appeared first on Frame Rated.

It’s fair to say that Star Wars has had a rocky road since Disney acquired it from George Lucas. They immediately set about making the long-awaited sequel trilogy to win back fans who thought the 1999–2005 prequels were a letdown, but they did so without a roadmap for where their new story was going. The result was the promising, if overfamiliar, “soft reboot” of The Force Awakens (2015), segueing into the creatively bold but divisive The Last Jedi (2017), which ultimately led to the appalling misfire of The Rise of Skywalker (2019) in trying to appease a fanbase with too much nostalgia.

The franchise retreated to the small screen with a variety of television prequels, still trying to recapture past glories. The best of the bunch was the first such outing on Disney+, The Mandalorian, which at least attempted to do something interesting with its Lone Wolf and Cub template. But even that show succumbed to the temptations of fan service, continually connecting itself back to things it had originally tried to avoid. Carving out a new path for Star Wars now seems nigh impossible, as it has become a playground for revisiting the past more than discovering a fresh future.

After seven years away from multiplexes, it was both alarming and slightly inevitable that Disney would bring Star Wars back with The Mandalorian and Grogu. It’s the only TV show that broke into the mainstream, mainly thanks to the “Baby Yoda” cuteness of its green alien, Grogu. Crucially, it also doesn’t require much awareness of Star Wars history and lore to grasp the core idea: a masked bounty hunter, Din Djarin (Pedro Pascal), goes about his business while protecting a Force-sensitive alien child from the evil Empire. After three seasons on TV, all you really need to know going into their movie is that Din has officially adopted Grogu as his son.

The problem now is one of expectations. Star Wars faceplanted with its sequel trilogy, which some claim is worse than the already-derided prequels, so the franchise feels irrevocably tarnished. Excitement for a new movie was minimal because audiences are flooded with genre entertainment. Star Wars movies were once cinematic events that pushed filmmaking technology into its next era, but now it’s just one click away from “content” on Disney+, delivered straight to your sofa. The Mandalorian and Grogu are “TV characters” in the minds of the audience, and because the budget of their show was so huge, the visual jump to the silver screen just isn’t as acute.

Still, we can have some fun, right? Is that all that matters?

The Mandalorian and Grogu is a two-hour version of the TV series — arguably four episodes strung together. The joins are sometimes clear, as it lacks a traditional three-act structure and instead seems to ebb and flow to the rhythm of a TV binge-watch. And since so much of the mystery surrounding Grogu was explained in the show, and Mando’s character mostly completed his hero’s journey there too, this film suffers from not having a clear reason to exist, except to make money and rehabilitate the Star Wars name with something inoffensive.

Still, it’s just another long adventure for Mando and Grogu, featuring better VFX and more expansive set-pieces that focus on those two characters. While the show overcame the issue of Mando being a voice behind a helmet and Grogu a gurgling puppet, it sometimes feels like they are missing a character or two along for the ride to flesh out the emotional beats. When that does occasionally happen, they tend to be CGI creatures that lack the human touch needed to ground these performances.

Mando accepts a job from the New Republic’s Commander Ward (Sigourney Weaver) to find an Imperial warlord called Coin, an endeavour that requires information held by the gangster Hutt Twins. However, they won’t give up their intel unless Mando rescues their nephew Rotta the Hutt (Jeremy Allen White) — Jabba’s son — who has been taken by a criminal syndicate and is forced to fight for his freedom, gladiator-style, on the planet Shakari.

The film hums along nicely and feels accessible even if you didn’t watch the Disney+ series, as the setup and characters play into archetypes we’ve seen many times across samurai or Western films. The cuteness of Grogu continues to delight, and Mando is a cool presence, even if he is arguably a little too stiff to shoulder a long-form narrative. It doesn’t help that Pedro Pascal likely continued to merely dub Mando’s voice for much of this, as there is only one sequence where his face is visible. Not that it matters exactly, but when you think back to the chemistry and interplay aboard the Millennium Falcon with Luke, Han, Leia, and Chewie, this spin-off doesn’t get close to that level of spark.

And that is a shame, as there is some enjoyment to be had in the spectacle of Mando effectively becoming the John Wick of the Star Wars universe — taking out an entire arena of monsters, a fortress palace of aliens, and whatever else life throws at him. Maybe it was easier to overlook his near-invulnerability on TV, with a week’s break between shorter adventures, but across a two-hour film it becomes almost ridiculous how easily Mando defeats swarms of enemies and even a giant Dragonsnake creature in a water-filled pit.

In terms of themes and depth, we certainly see some growth in Grogu during a sequence where the story follows his perspective as he tries to care for his mortally wounded father. Meanwhile, the situation with Rotta the Hutt touches on the expectations of children to follow in the footsteps of their parents — who, in Rotta’s case, was a murderous gangster feared across the galaxy. But for the most part, The Mandalorian and Grogu is time spent with those two characters zipping from planet to planet as their mission gathers unforeseen complications. Perhaps wisely, screenwriters Jon Favreau, Dave Filoni, and Noah Kloor don’t involve many other characters from the series — who could easily have appeared for a scene or two, or been more involved in general — as such cameos would prompt explanations that the narrative would prefer to spend focusing on its action.

Overall, The Mandalorian and Grogu isn’t a particularly good movie with a lot of re-watchability. It’s a condensed version of a TV season, armed with the budget to put its characters into bigger and more complex scenarios. But it’s rarely dull and the eponymous characters are charming. It’s just a shame the Star Wars brand is now stuck delivering better versions of the Ewok spin-off movies from the mid-1980s, when it was once such an undeniable event that shaped generations and pushed technological limits.

USA | 2026 | 132 MINUTES | 2.39:1 | COLOUR | ENGLISH

Cast & Crew

director: Jon Favreau.
writer: Jon Favreau, Dave Filoni & Noah Kloor (based on characters created by George Lucas).
starring: Pedro Pascal, Jeremy Allen White (voice), Brendan Wayne, Lateef Crowder, Jonny Coyne, Martin Scorsese (voice) & Sigourney Weaver.

The post STAR WARS: THE MANDALORIAN AND GROGU (2026) appeared first on Frame Rated.

We’re still living in the era of prestige television and, for the most part, that’s a good thing. Freed from the time and seasonal constraints once imposed by networks, showrunners have given us classic series we likely never would have seen before the rise of streaming. That said, the format is not without its problems. The most persistent of these seems to be knowing how, where, and when to end a story.

While the new Duffer Brothers executive-produced series The Boroughs delivers many of the best aspects of prestige television — including excellent performances, strong writing, and impressively designed effects — it also suffers from what I’ll call ‘The Finisher’s Curse’. This has previously been seen in otherwise excellent series such as Game of Thrones (2011-2019) the Duffer Brothers’ own Stranger Things (2016-2026).

The Boroughs follows grieving widower Sam Cooper (Alfred Molina) as he moves into a seemingly idyllic retirement community. After the highly suspicious death of a neighbour, Sam teams up with a group of quirky senior citizens to uncover the truth behind the mystery.

At this point, many viewers may think: ‘Isn’t that just the plot of every 1980s and ’90s adventure movie?’ Fortunately, the series is fully aware of that fact, and much of its charm comes from embracing it. Without giving too much away, fans of classic adventure, horror, and thriller films will find plenty of Easter eggs throughout The Boroughs. And while nostalgia certainly plays a role, the show includes enough fresh twists and turns to keep things engaging.

The decision to make senior citizens the unlikely heroes rather than a group of scrappy children is particularly compelling. The screenplays draw thoughtful parallels between the casual dismissal of seniors today and the historic tendency to dismiss children as incapable or unreliable. In the 21st-century, we’ve become increasingly concerned with affirming and protecting children, while simultaneously growing less comfortable with the idea of people over 50 retaining wisdom, agency, and independence.

This dismissal of seniors as a class is embodied in The Boroughs through The Manor, a memory care facility within the community. Anyone who has worked in memory care or assisted living may find the show’s accuracy unsettling. The villains not only describe dementia convincingly, but also employ what are still considered ‘best practices’ for interacting with those suffering from the disease, including allowing residents to inhabit their own realities and drift into the past when necessary.

Equally disturbing is a brilliantly written scene between Sam Cooper’s daughter Claire (Jena Malone) and Blaine Shaw, the president and CEO of The Boroughs. Through calm persuasion and convincing concern, Blaine manages to persuade Claire that her father may be showing early signs of dementia. Thinking back on loved ones I’ve cared for with Alzheimer’s, I found myself disturbed by how easily I, too, might have been swayed by Blaine’s performance.

The show’s exploration of love and grief is handled with equal care. Alfred Molina’s moving performance is the cornerstone of the series’ emotional success. Sam Cooper’s grief is never exaggerated, nor is it minimised. Instead, Molina allows it to exist naturally in all its anger, numbness, fear, and exhaustion. In the hands of a lesser actor, the character could easily have become unlikable. Molina instead gives Sam enough humour and heart to carry the audience with him throughout the journey.

Overall, the performances from most of the main cast allow us to empathise deeply with the characters. Geena Davis is another standout as the free-spirited Rene. That said, some of the characters ask the audience to accept morally questionable behaviour with surprisingly little scrutiny. We are meant, for example, to sympathise with Judy (Alfre Woodard), a married woman who carried on an affair with her neighbour. While infidelity may be commonplace in Hollywood storytelling, some viewers may not be so quick to dismiss it. Unfortunately, Woodard also emerges as the weakest link among the main cast. While perfectly serviceable, she never brings the same depth or pathos to Judy that Molina gives to Sam.

Still, aside from that one uneven performance, strong acting, compelling writing, and several genuinely frightening sequences make the first seven episodes of The Boroughs an exciting ride. Indeed, the opening episode is among the strongest premieres I’ve seen in years and is worth watching on its own merits.

By the eighth episode, however, the audience once again encounters ‘The Finisher’s Curse’. Without revealing too much, death is a major thematic concern throughout the series. The showrunners clearly argue that death is a natural and necessary part of life, and that it’s better to die after a meaningful life than to prolong existence through the suffering of others.

It’s a powerful theme and one explored many times before. Yet, like many modern television writers, creators Jeffrey Addiss and Will Matthews ultimately seem unwilling to fully commit to it — at least where their favourite characters are concerned. The finale’s reliance on plot armour, overly tidy solutions, and an eagerness to abandon the harsher implications of death in favour of something safer and more comforting ultimately weakens the show’s strongest ideas.

Even so, The Boroughs remains absolutely worth watching. Fans of creature features will find plenty to admire in the show’s strong visual design and impressive effects work. And even the disappointing finale includes a beautiful performance from Alfred Molina that nearly compensates for the anti-climax. The Boroughs is a good show, and I can recommend it without reservation. I can only hope that, should the series receive a second season, its creators will fully embrace their themes and finally overcome the old Finisher’s Curse.

USA | 2026 | 8 EPISODES | 2.39:1 | COLOUR | ENGLISH

Cast & Crew

writers: Jeffrey Addis, Will Matthews, Jose Molina, Julie Siege, Keith Sweet II, Tom Hanada, James Schamus & Yona Speidel.
directors: Ben Taylor. Augustine Frizzell & Kyle Patrick Alvarez.
starring: Alfred Molina, Alfre Woodard, Denis O’Hare, Clarke Peters, Carlos Miranda, Jena Malone, Seth Numrich, Alice Kremelberg & Geena Davis.

The post THE BOROUGHS – Season One appeared first on Frame Rated.

Andrzej Żuławski’s Possession is considered a masterpiece by those who venerate it, yet it remains a blind spot for many cinephiles and horror enthusiasts. While this observation may be anecdotal, outside of Letterboxd, video essays, and forum posts, I seldom see it discussed with the same fervor as other legendary genre instalments—or, indeed, the trite banality of modern “cotton-candy” horror.

The single-serving friends I chat with at bars and public gatherings have rarely heard of the film; if they have, they’ve never seen it. Yet, those who have experienced it sing hymns of reverence to its every frame. Possession is, by far, one of my favourite horror films, precisely because its ability to induce overwhelming terror and uneasiness is unlike anything else in cinema.

Żuławski was a filmmaker who defied genre norms, operating in the avant-garde tradition of New Wave icons like Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Věra Chytilová, and Toshio Matsumoto. He constantly played with the boundaries of conventional cinematic structure. His transitions between the orthodox and the unorthodox occur unexpectedly yet seamlessly. It never feels stilted—a level of proficiency that can be traced right back to his debut feature, The Third Part of the Night (1971).

Żuławski’s films drew heavily from his life, weaving multifaceted and layered narratives within specific genres that resonate with the profundity of a experience. In Possession, he uses horror to process the tumultuous volatility of his own divorce. The film captures the deterioration of the psyche and the collapse of domestic stability when faced with cold indifference. Crucially, it illustrates how clinging to a rotted intimacy is the worst way to save what little remains, especially when done solely for the sake of the children.

Possession opens with two separate, one-point perspective shots of the Berlin Wall. It then cuts to a massive black crucifix, its arms wrapped in barbed wire, with a wreath hanging from its base. The only breaks in this ominous iconography are a few red and white flowers protruding from the wreath—a visual overture introducing the film’s themes of separation, atrophy of faith, and marital decline.

From here, a continuous point-of-view shot roves across West Berlin, lingering on derelict buildings and sections of the wall, one of which features the crudely spray-painted graffiti: “Die mauer muss weg” (“The wall must go”). This perspective belongs to Mark (Sam Neill), a spy for a secret government agency. Returning home from a stint of espionage, he is instantly blindsided by his wife, Anna (Isabelle Adjani), who demands a divorce. They confront their mutual emotional decay, though the angst appears painfully one-sided; Anna looks overwrought with internal confusion, frustration, and a total absence of affection.

Her feelings don’t wane. Instead, they ripen in intensity. Mark and Anna’s interactions rapidly dissolve into a dense fog of emotional instability, fueled by mutual contempt, crossed boundaries, infidelity, and bouts of profound hysteria. This escalation of domestic horror makes other cinematic depictions of marital decline pale by comparison. Noah Baumbach’s The Squid and the Whale (2005) or Marriage Story (2019) could never compete.

Mark acts as a physical barrier, trapping Anna in confrontations regarding her fidelity and the state of their marriage. Anna, in turn, succumbs to rage-induced paroxysms—convulsing uncontrollably, slicing her own skin while preparing dinner, and violently striking Mark when cornered. She vanishes for days on end to an unknown location, leaving their young son, Bob (Michael Hogben), starving and neglected. In one heartbreaking scene, Mark returns to find Bob sitting on the hallway floor, covered head-to-toe in peanut butter and jam, desperately trying to feed himself.

This domestic instability provides the film’s initial horror. At times, Anna’s screaming fits reminded me of the outbursts my own mother would have during childhood conflicts. These scenes made the hairs on my back stand up, my skin freezing in terror at the shared emotional recognition.

Yet, the horror in Possession evolves during the second act, trading kitchen-sink realism for a surreal, figurative growth that commits entirely to the breakdown of intimacy. It’s here that the film steers into unapologetic arthouse experimentation.

I adore this trajectory, but I recognize that Żuławski’s extreme metaphorical approach to divorce won’t be to everyone’s taste. My advice: don’t get comfortable with the initial domestic drama, or you’ll be left wondering what the point was.

Beyond the narrative, Bruno Nuytten’s cinematography is impeccable. The dynamic camera movements evoke the suffocating claustrophobia of two people trapped in a dead union. Triangular compositions within the liminal spaces of their apartment mirror their psychological asphyxiation. Close-ups capture every nuance of distress, anguish, and hatred on Neill and Adjani’s faces. Meanwhile, the camera glides in dizzying circles around the actors, amplifying the viewer’s discomfort during tense arguments about custody or bizarre subplots involving secret agencies and a man who exclusively wears pink socks.

Żuławski’s mastery extends deep into colour theory, particularly his calculated use of blue.

The symbolism of blue has shifted drastically throughout art history. In the medieval period, it was reserved for religious iconography to convey holiness and virtue. Because ultramarine pigment derived from lapis lazuli was so rare and expensive, it was used to denote the eternal. These pigments adorned the very churches where marriages were ritualized. By the Renaissance, blue expanded to signify material wealth and aristocratic prestige—not unlike the financial consolidation of modern marriage, with its shared incomes and property.

Then came the Industrial Revolution, which made blue affordable. Pablo Picasso famously used the cheap pigment to define his “Blue Period,” linking the colour permanently to sorrow, poverty, and depression. In an ironic twist, industrialisation stripped blue of its status and turned it into the universal hue of human melancholy.

Żuławski synthesises both the spiritual and melancholic histories of the colour beautifully. Anna is dressed almost exclusively in blue, accented only by black scarves—the colour of mourning. This palette bleeds into their apartment, where blue carpets and fabrics are contrasted against stark white walls. The visual irony of this “pure” environment is striking.

To maximize visual engagement, Żuławski balances these heavy blues with warm, complementary orange hues in the first half of the film: a vibrant orange telephone, earthy book spines, and an amber sofa. In the second half, the palette shifts to a complimentary combination of chromatic reds and greens, the former more towards colouring flesh and viscera while the latter accents interior spaces. As a painter and admirer of art history, I was completely enamoured with Żuławski’s understanding and use of colour theory; the man is a genius.

Possession is a multifaceted, effortless exploration of romantic absurdity that deepens with every subsequent viewing. My admiration grows each time I spot a new, understated detail in the dialogue or frame. I simply can’t get enough of it.

Which brings us to the upcoming, Paramount-funded remake by Parker Finn—the director behind Smile (2022) and Smile 2 (2024). Remakes are always a gamble, as you can rarely recapture lightning in a bottle, but this project feels particularly precarious. The goal of a remake is to preserve the essence of a story while applying a fresh coat of paint. But given how deeply autobiographical the original text is, one has to ask: how exactly does Finn plan to adapt someone else’s divorce?

FRANCE • WEST GERMANY | 1981 | 124 MINUTES | 1.66:1 | COLOUR | ENGLISH • FRENCH • GERMAN

Cast & Crew

director: Andrzej Żuławski.
writer: Andrzej Żuławski (adaptation and dialogue co-written by Frederic Tuten).
starring: Isabelle Adjani, Sam Neill, Heinz Bennent, Margit Carstensen, Johanna Hofer, Carl Düring & Shaun Lawton.

The post POSSESSION (1981) appeared first on Frame Rated.