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Aug. 1st, 2022 11:54 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretI don't watch a lot of horror, but I watched three horror films this weekend. Weird. Two are prep for Worldcon. And Nope just sounded like fun.
Demon
A young Anglo-Polish man returns to Poland to marry a Polish woman in her family homestead. During the wedding celebration, he is possessed by the dybbuk of a young Jewish woman who disappeared during the War. The bride's family tries to carry on the wedding celebration and deny anything is going on; it eventually develops that they probably expropriated a Jewish family's farm during the Holocaust and the way they carry on a similar denial about both their family's historic anti-semitic crimes and the possession skitters unsettlingly between farce and horror.
Jewishly, perhaps the most striking element is the way that the dybbuk defiesthe rules of Christian society- efforts by the town doctor and priest to remove the dybbuk through modern medicine or traditional Catholic exorcism are completely ineffectual. From the Polish perspective, that is the horror of the Jews: they're somehow outside of the rules.
And that had me nagging a little bit... In one sense, the film's sympathies are clearly with the dead Jewish woman and with anyone who empathizes with her, but in another sense the film's perspective is clearly Polish and not Jewish, and the Jewish characters have something monstrous about them. Even if that monstrousness just symbolizes Polish guilt, it still made me feel uncomfortable.
The Vigil
A young ex-Chasid is imposed upon to be the shomer for a night for an old man who died estranged from his children. It turns out the old man was haunted by a mazzik because of Holocaust trauma. As the shomer waits for the chevra kadisha in the morning, the mazzik tries to find a new host.
I loved seeing mazzikin instead of the usual dybbuks as the creature out of Jewish legend. I really liked how Yakov, the ex-chasid, struggled with a complicated mixture of family trauma and Chasidic habits he was struggling to grow out of. I loved the language, the way the film operates in a fluid mixture of English and Yiddish. Maybe I wanted a little bit more humor from it? And I definitely wanted the film to be a little more visually interesting, it tried to milk most of its horror out of the tension of static scenes in boring settings, but there wasn't enough payoff when the excitement came. But I liked a lot about the movie anyway.
Nope
Gosh, what a brilliant, complicated movie. I don't know what to say about it, the Ringer had an interesting review saying that the point is that it's not something you can easily wrap your head around and say "this is what the movie is about." It's about Hollywood and its history with black people, it's about mankind and our relationship to animals, and at its emotional heart it's about two siblings loving each other and figuring out how to support each other even though they're very different people. Keke Palmer and Daniel Kaluuya are so damned good, this is one of the best brother/sister stories I've ever seen. The movie is so deliberate and careful about every detail, creating a build where you are thinking and analyzing everything as you watch. And the final act is so joyous and scary and exciting, a marvelous feeling of release.
Demon
A young Anglo-Polish man returns to Poland to marry a Polish woman in her family homestead. During the wedding celebration, he is possessed by the dybbuk of a young Jewish woman who disappeared during the War. The bride's family tries to carry on the wedding celebration and deny anything is going on; it eventually develops that they probably expropriated a Jewish family's farm during the Holocaust and the way they carry on a similar denial about both their family's historic anti-semitic crimes and the possession skitters unsettlingly between farce and horror.
Jewishly, perhaps the most striking element is the way that the dybbuk defiesthe rules of Christian society- efforts by the town doctor and priest to remove the dybbuk through modern medicine or traditional Catholic exorcism are completely ineffectual. From the Polish perspective, that is the horror of the Jews: they're somehow outside of the rules.
And that had me nagging a little bit... In one sense, the film's sympathies are clearly with the dead Jewish woman and with anyone who empathizes with her, but in another sense the film's perspective is clearly Polish and not Jewish, and the Jewish characters have something monstrous about them. Even if that monstrousness just symbolizes Polish guilt, it still made me feel uncomfortable.
The Vigil
A young ex-Chasid is imposed upon to be the shomer for a night for an old man who died estranged from his children. It turns out the old man was haunted by a mazzik because of Holocaust trauma. As the shomer waits for the chevra kadisha in the morning, the mazzik tries to find a new host.
I loved seeing mazzikin instead of the usual dybbuks as the creature out of Jewish legend. I really liked how Yakov, the ex-chasid, struggled with a complicated mixture of family trauma and Chasidic habits he was struggling to grow out of. I loved the language, the way the film operates in a fluid mixture of English and Yiddish. Maybe I wanted a little bit more humor from it? And I definitely wanted the film to be a little more visually interesting, it tried to milk most of its horror out of the tension of static scenes in boring settings, but there wasn't enough payoff when the excitement came. But I liked a lot about the movie anyway.
Nope
Gosh, what a brilliant, complicated movie. I don't know what to say about it, the Ringer had an interesting review saying that the point is that it's not something you can easily wrap your head around and say "this is what the movie is about." It's about Hollywood and its history with black people, it's about mankind and our relationship to animals, and at its emotional heart it's about two siblings loving each other and figuring out how to support each other even though they're very different people. Keke Palmer and Daniel Kaluuya are so damned good, this is one of the best brother/sister stories I've ever seen. The movie is so deliberate and careful about every detail, creating a build where you are thinking and analyzing everything as you watch. And the final act is so joyous and scary and exciting, a marvelous feeling of release.
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Date: 2022-08-02 09:16 am (UTC)