Hey hey hey! It’s SpringFest time, and you know what that means: I jam a bunch of awesome movies into my brain and tell you all about them! My first set of pocket reviews from the fest are below. And stay tuned this week for much, much more (I plan to see too many movies, and I cannot help myself).
Mile End Kicks (dir. – Chandler Levack)
It’s refreshing to see a woman-led coming of age tale where the protagonist is allowed to be messy. Here, she comes in the form of Grace (Barbie Ferreira), a young music critic who decides to move to Montreal in the summer of 2011 with designs on writing a book. She’d also like to fall in love, learn French, and “have real sex,” but as these things go, life, emotions, money, and the onset of adulthood tend to get in the way of even the least lofty dreams.
Levack’s film is set in 2011, and while it makes my knees hurt to see this era used nostalgically, I can attest that the period detail is on point. At the time, Montreal was a hotbed for indie music acts, and was often heralded as the “New Seattle.” Artists would fly by the seat of their pants, living gig to gig while making their names at warehouse shows and loft parties (basement parties being the Philadelphia equivalent). In hindsight it feels like the death throes of an analog culture. The music, the magazines, and the hangouts have since gone digital (and even cigarettes are robots now).
What makes Mile End Kicks such a stunning achievement is that it eschews simplicity in its characterization of the main character. Grace is a passionate young woman who is as flawed as anyone else. She makes dumb decisions, often acting before she thinks. She falls hard for the singer of a band (Stanley Simons), despite his reputation of being “the worst guy in Montreal.” The audience will surely cringe at some of the things she does in the name of getting this immature man into her bed, but then we remember exactly what it was like to be an idealistic, horny, broke 24 year old.
Did I mention my back hurts?
So often, coming-of-age tales are led by men, and in the rare case that a woman is the focal point, the protagonist is hampered by the unspoken and unfair laws of women on screen: a level of chastity must be maintained, a certain body type is required, and her decisions must be rooted in maintaining “likability.” Mile End Kicks breaks all of these rules, resulting in one of the most compelling and human characters in the subgenre (and wouldn’t you know it? She’s as likable as can be!).
This was a very strong opening film for SpringFest.
Hokum (dir. – Damian Mc Carthy)
With the latest film from the brains behind PFF fave Oddity, the horror genre gets a markedly Stephen King-esque spooker that has absolutely no connection to King himself (except in that “every musician owes a debt to The Beatles sort of way). I say this because much like King, Mc Carthy is able to stack dense layers of mythology and character history without diving into broad exposition. The action tells the story, and the characters feel like they existed long before the film begins (and long after it ends … if they survive at all).
Adam Scott plays Ohm Bauman, a popular author who is visiting a small Irish inn with the intention of scattering his parents’ ashes at a nearby location. He’s surly, frequently drunk, and delights in being outwardly cruel toward just about anyone. This puts him at odds with the staff of the inn, all of whom exhibit a level of small town spookiness. Nothing to get too concerned about, right? Well, as long as you stay out of one particular room which, as legend dictates, contains a witch who was trapped inside many years ago. Just a little fun local lore, right?
Right?
The subsequent parade of spooky imagery and cleverly staged set pieces both within the room and in the vast halls below the hotel is the stuff of nightmares. Bauman’s investigative curiosity mixes with his desire to flout authority while he pokes his head into every place that shouldn’t be poked. Soon, he and the Inn’s shady histories are pulled to the forefront while we in the audience regularly screams “DON’T GO IN THERE!”
(Only they don’t actually say it because that would be rude in a theater setting).
By keeping the larger mechanisms of the mythology ambiguous, the film is able to maximize the terror that comes from not knowing, while also ensuring that nothing is too vague as to be frustrating or incomplete. There is one bit of more heightened imagery (see the above photo) that doesn’t quite feel so organic, but the imagery is so potent that it’s hard to care.
And those bookend scenes?? ASTONISHING.
