Hello, and welcome to the Geeky Brummie Film Roundup! Every Thursday we take you through the latest cinema releases and talk about why you should get excited for them. This week we’re delving into the unknown, with imaginary friends, creepy strangers, perilous puberty, and, um… bins…
Usual disclaimer: unless otherwise stated, I haven’t seen these films. All of my opinions are based on trailers, early reviews and other rumours and buzz.
IF
With the Quiet Place films, John Krasinski has proven that he is more than capable as a writer and director. If there’s one thing that’s immediately obvious from the trailer for IF (short for Imaginary Friends), it’s that this is a very different, much louder beast. The film follows a young girl named Bea, recovering from a tragic event in her childhood that has left her with the ability to see and interact with other people’s imaginary friends. Many of those IFs have become detached from the kids who created them after they grew up and stopped believing, so Bea is enlisted to help pair them up with new children.
This promises to be a much more sentimental and cheerful film than A Quiet Place and there is a danger that it could veer into being a little too saccharine. But Krasinski has good form there as well – see for example his Some Good News series on YouTube, which had regular episodes aiming to keep spirits up during the COVID lockdowns and found the perfect balance between sweet and entertaining. If he can replicate that here then there’s scope for IF to be a lot of fun. The fantastical nature of the premise has heaps of potential, as showcased in the trailer with big flashy dance numbers, strange other worlds and a vast array of colourful characters.
Speaking of the army of IFs, the voice cast looks incredible. Steve Carrell voices the main imaginary friend, a giant purple beast named Blue, creating a bit of an Office reunion with Krasinski. But the others include (deep breath…) Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Awkwafina, Emily Blunt, George Clooney, Bradley Cooper, Bill Hader, Matt Damon, Richard Jenkins, Keegan-Michael Key, Blake Lively, Sam Rockwell, Amy Schumer, Maya Rudolph, Jon Stewart, Brad Pitt, and Krasinski himself. Not to mention Ryan Reynolds as Bea’s neighbour Cal who can also see IFs and acts as her guide into their world.
IF is clearly aiming to appeal to kids, but it should be a great family film with plenty for adults to enjoy too.
- IF on IMDB
- IF on Rotten Tomatoes
The Strangers: Chapter 1
I don’t really remember the 2008 film The Strangers, in which a young couple are attacked in their holiday home in the woods by a group of sinister masked strangers. But its $82 million box office haul on a $9 million budget was evidently impressive enough for it to spawn this prequel, a mere 16 years later.
Watching the trailers for the two films back to back, it looks like the prequel is sticking very close to the original formula. In Chapter 1, a young couple (Madelaine Petsch and Froy Gutierrez) are forced to stay in a remote cabin after their car breaks down, where their temporary home is invaded by a group of axe and knife wielding strangers. Tension is built through strange sounds coming from outside, a mysterious knock on the door, and increasingly obvious signs that they are not alone in the house. Even as the tension starts to give way to violence and terror, many of the trailer moments seem to be obvious pastiches or reflections of the original film.
Setting aside the apparent lack of originality, this does look like a creepy horror film. Home invasion movies are often the scariest, as among all the different horror sub-genres they come closest to feeling like they could actually happen to you. The Strangers films go all in on that idea, exploiting the anonymity given by the invaders’ masks and explicitly reducing their motivation to “Because you’re here”. Hopefully the trailer has deliberately been designed to appeal to fans of the original and the film itself will find its own feet instead of just hitting the same notes.
As an aside, one of the masks looks a lot like Phoebe Waller Bridge’s character in IF. Which could make for an interesting double feature…
- The Strangers: Chapter 1 on IMDB
- The Strangers: Chapter 1 on Rotten Tomatoes
Tiger Stripes
Set in Malaysia, Tiger Stripes tells the story of 12 year old Zaffan (Zafreen Zairizal) – a carefree girl who enjoys recording Tik Tok style dances and playing around with her friends – as she starts to hit puberty. It’s a coming of age film focusing on a female cast set in a largely Muslim country, so you might think it’s going to focus on the culture clash between modern female empowerment and traditional religious values, along the lines of Ms Marvel or Turning Red.
But then strange rashes appear, fingernails start falling off (nope, nope. Nope), and children are writhing in pain on the floor. This is actually a full-on body horror, using the natural grossness of puberty as a springboard for something a little more fantastical. First-time director Amanda Nell Eu won the Critics’ Week Grand Prize at last year’s Cannes Film Festival for this, so there should be some quality filmmaking behind the grossness.
- Tiger Stripes on IMDB
- Tiger Stripes on Rotten Tomatoes
Hoard
Speaking of grossness, our last film this week is Hoard – not a horror, but revelling in the disgusting. Saura Lightfoot-Leon plays Maria, whose mother was a hoarder and habitually took Maria out to dig through bins looking for stuff to take home. Years later after her mother has died, Maria finds herself compelled to relive her repressed memories of their family outings and start filling her foster home with her own trashy treasures.
If you have any kind of OCD around cleaning, you will probably want to avoid this one. Maria and her new friend/lover/bad influence Michael (played by former metal-loving bat-wrangler, and future Human Torch, Joseph Quinn) take pride in their lack of personal hygiene – food is flung, spit is spat, and rats run rampant around their home. The trailer introduces us to Maria aggressively peeing with the bathroom door open.
But if you can get past that, this looks like an interesting little film. Maria is a fascinating character whose repressed urges literally spill out into the world around her, and there is a dreamlike, and often nightmarish, quality to the filmmaking that makes it feel quite surreal (despite being by far the most grounded film on the list this week). All the reviews I’ve seen have been very positive, so if you have the stomach for it this sounds like it’s well worth a watch. Maybe not in 4DX though…
- Hoard on IMDB
- Hoard on Rotten Tomatoes
If you only see one film this week…
Directed by Jim from The Office and featuring an unimaginable wealth of cameos, my film of the week is IF
Still in cinemas and worth a watch
- Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes
- The Fall Guy
- Love Lies Bleeding
Trailer of the week
The first season of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power was quite divisive – seen as largely unnecessary and with a ridiculously overblown budget, with some heavily-forecast twists and the occasional slightly-odd filmmaking choice (hello, Mordor!). But it also had a lot of good stuff going for it. The amount of money that went into it is clear in every set, from the dark and imposing mines of Moria to the dappled glades of the elven forests. The music is rich and soaring, and feels like a suitably epic companion to the Howard Shore soundtrack to the Peter Jackson trilogy (one of the best film scores ever written). And for a Lord of the Rings nerd like me it’s exciting to see characters from the history of Middle Earth brought to life – whether that’s Elendil and Isildur in Numenor, legendary elves like Gil-Galad and Celebrimbor, or younger, less mature versions of characters like Galadriel and Elrond (the latter’s scenes with Durin in Moria were a particular highlight). So I am looking forward to season 2, which has just released its first trailer and promises more of everything that I enjoyed. Hopefully the writers have learned some lessons from the criticisms of the first season, too.
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