I didn’t do much in the way of Midnight Madness writing this year. Not only am I going to get my fill of genre stuff at Fantastic Fest this week, but we had the great Monica Castillo on “The Substance” and Zachary Lee hit a few other scary flicks with mostly positive reviews. However, I did see one film in the program, Tim Robinson’s first major project since breaking out on Netflix’s “I Think You Should Leave,” and it pairs well enough with the latest works from two filmmakers who know a thing or two about fake blood budgets: Timo Tjahjanto and David Cronenberg.
Let’s start with Timo, who has become a strong Netflix presence himself with the success of “The Night Comes for Us” on the service and the streaming original “The Big 4.” Tjahjanto is a cinematic maniac, someone who presents ultra-violence in an operatic way, using geysers of blood like an artist uses paint. His latest isn’t his best, but it’s still indicative of his craft, especially when it comes to choreographing deadly encounters that approach cartoonish brutality.
“The Shadow Strays” is Tjahjanto’s variation on the killer’s redemption story, a film that feels like it owes a debt to influential works in the subgenre like “La Femme Nikita” and “The Professional.” Watching Tjahjanto bring his dark view of humanity to the assassin genre will be enough for his loyal fans, but I’ll admit that the plotting here left me a bit unengaged, and the filmmaker oddly shoots so much of his latest in ridiculously low light, often turning his action heroes and villains into, well, shadows. While that may be intentional, it pushes the line to incomprehensible a few too many times to be as effective as the filmmaker intended.
Aurora Ribero plays this film’s Nikita, an assassin trained since childhood to be a killing machine. She works for an organization known as The Shadow, under a mentor named Umbra (Hana Malasan), who sends Codename 13 off to Jakarta after a mission goes awry. The problems start with 13 encounters a boy that she chooses to save from a criminal syndicate, leading to scene after scene of violent chaos. The film actually opens with 20 minutes of shooting, stabbing, and dying. Veins spurt, heads pop off, and Tjahjanto does that thing wherein he sets the bar so high for his action fans that the two hours that follow struggle to top it. On Netflix next month, most people won’t care, remembering the creativity of the action direction more than anything else. Just make sure your brightness is turned up.
As long as we’re talking the visual language of film, let’s move onto Andrew DeYoung’s “Friendship,” a movie with a number of funny beats but one that can’t shake the sense that it was made for television more than the big screen. Starring Robinson and Paul Rudd in a story of cringe male companionship, “Friendship” is entertaining in moments but so visually flat that it hampers the entire production. At one point, I started to wonder if it was so uninteresting to look at because it was parodying the flatness of the TV sitcom, but I don’t think that’s the case. Ignoring the kind of thing that will often bug a film critic more than the average viewer, the truth is that “Friendship” plays a bit too much like “I Think You Should Leave” sketches strung together into a loose narrative. A few are undeniably funny, but it ultimately does what the protagonist here does to most people who meet him: wears out its welcome.
Robinson plays the truly awkward Craig Waterman, who we meet in a meeting in which his wife (a cleverly sly Kate Mara) reveals that she doesn’t orgasm with her husband. Craig is one of those guys who can have an ordinary encounter for only about 90 seconds before saying or doing something awkward, a guy who’s generally looked down on by even his partner and son. When he meets the charming Austin Carmichael (Rudd), he falls for someone so much more interesting than himself, basically becoming obsessed with holding onto a suburban friendship that goes sideways almost immediately.
There are very funny scenes in “Friendship,” including one with a sliding door and an amazing scene in which Craig basically tries to hallucinate. Each of these would have worked as 3-minute “I Think You Should Leave” sketches, and the problem is that DeYoung and Robinson don’t ever truly find a way to connect their best ideas. As a fan of his brand of humor, “Friendship” was one of my most anticipated flicks of TIFF 2024, but it’s ultimately more forgettable than almost any episode of “I Think You Should Leave.”
Speaking of high anticipation, David Cronenberg is one of my favorite living filmmakers—his work in the ‘80s shaped how I watch film, especially in the horror genre. Watching so many filmmakers try to do “Cronenbergian” and fall on their face has only further revealed the degree of difficulty of works like “Videodrome” and even the more recent “Crimes of the Future.” However, Cronenberg isn’t infallible. Just as his “Maps of the Stars” missed its target for me, “The Shrouds” doesn’t connect with what it’s aiming at, almost too personal a story for this undeniably talented filmmaker, ending up as more of an interesting experiment than a complete project. I’m eager to see it again out of the fugue state of the seventh day of a film festival, but it’s the most detached I’ve ever felt from a filmmaker who usually pulls me into his vision of the world.
In 2017, Cronenberg’s wife Carolyn passed away, and that loss is embedded in “The Shrouds,” a film about a tech entrepreneur named Karsh (Vincent Cassel) who doesn’t look like the award-winning filmmaker by accident. It’s such a striking resemblance that I couldn’t shake the idea that Cassel was playing Cronenberg himself as his character worked through the loss of his wife Becca (Diane Kruger) through technology and nightmares, the language of Cronenberg’s work. Karsh has developed a device that allows people to watch the decaying corpses of loved ones, and he spots something strange in that of his wife’s, evidence that perhaps her death was not exactly as it seemed. After his burial ground is vandalized, Karsh is sent on a journey into his own memory and possibly even the involvement of Hungarian enemies to his vision.
To say that I didn’t care about who vandalized the Shrouds or for what reason would be an understatement, and Cronenberg spends too long on these narrative details when I wanted a film more willing to embrace its surreal dark side. Karsh’s memory-driven nightmares are the standout of the film by far, scenes in which Becca comes home from doctor’s appointments with literal body parts missing, a symbol for how disease and decay can take our loved ones away piece by piece before they’re even gone. It’s a story of being able to watch those we care about decompose, sometimes before they’re even gone, and other times even in our own memories. Cronenberg doesn’t make truly bad movies, and this isn’t one of those, it’s just one that I don’t think connects its various themes to an engaging narrative as fully as his best, a minor beat in a major career.