READY OR NOT
★★★
It’s a simple premise worthy of an elevator pitch: a newlywed is hunted by her wealthy new in-laws in a bloody game of hide & seek. It’s a premise that, in Ready Or Not, is played for black comedy, plentiful splatter-horror, and even a sense of social symbolism.
“It’s true what they say, the rich really are different,” offers Adam Brody, sagely; he the nicest of a host of in-laws who range from haughty to witchy.
Here, the rich have obtained their wealth via a pact with the devil, and maintaining their status on the social totem-pole involves both human sacrifice —especially of the poor — and decadent satanic perversion. They’ve set the (wedding) night aside for this ritual of killing, but it shouldn’t take too long; after all, their patriarch has a tee time at 8am the next morning.
There are, of course, limits to Ready Or Not’s thematic critique. Compared to something like Kleber Mendonça Filho & Juliano Dornelles’ Bacurau, which repurposes ultraviolent ’70s exploitation cinema to author an angry, incisive takedown of contemporary Brazilian politics, Ready Or Not can’t summon such weight. It’s, ultimately, a little silly. But, that isn’t necessarily to its detriment. Part of the fun — and watching it is, indeed, fun — is its over-the-top loopiness; how all its terror and gore is marshalled in service of a comedy.
Summer Bay graduate Samara Weaving plays our hero, all blonde hair and whitened teeth and white wedding dress; a seemingly innocent lamb (or, perhaps, goat) soon to be sacrificed at the altar of evil. She’s, obviously, the personification of the horror movie’s eternal ‘final girl’. But, rather than an embodiment of fragility and, thus, fear, Ready Or Not makes her not some screaming Penelope-in-peril, but a blood splattered bride out to turn the tables on her veritable captors. Here, the prey becomes predator, and we proceed towards a grand, symbolic, subversive victory for the oppressed lower class over the entrenched upper class.
The screenplay, by Guy Busick and R Christopher Murphy, gladly tilts all of this towards humour, especially in the details. Someone searches ‘pacts with the devil real or bullshit’ on their phone. An escape attempt is thwarted by an unhelpful customer service representative, even though the call is being recorded for quality and training purposes (said rep is memorably voiced by Nat Faxon, perhaps best known, these days, as Elfo on Disenchantment). The final line of the film is, in turn, a one liner; a grim, wry conclusion to a movie that, were it not for the jokes, would be survival horror. This finale is a sure sign of how Ready Or Not was conceived: the whole thing a bloody, gore-soaked jig.
THE LAUNDROMAT
★★★1/2
WARNING: Potential spoilers ahead!
The Laundromat is a 95 minute comedy. About the Panama Papers. Written by Scott Z Burns and based, very loosely, on Jake Bernstein’s Secrecy World: Inside The Panama Papers Investigation Of Illicit Money Networks & The Global Elite, it’s an attempt to narrativise a scandal so vast as to resist traditional narratives.
In turn, Burns doesn’t try: his screenplay is divided into chapters, which often feel like discrete stories in an omnibus movie. Zipping hither and yon across the globe, we’re introduced to celebrity actors who may not be long for the screen; Will Forte, billed as ‘Doomed Gringo #1’, lasts as long as that character name suggests. Meryl Streep is essentially the throughline: playing, first, an American widow on a mission to redress an insurance-scam; then a Panamanian secretary who’s put in charge of tens of thousands of shell companies as paper figurehead. But the whole struggles to cohere in the face of so many stories, which are of a similar tone — tragicomic, essentially — but also offer a host of hard pivots away to new stories, new characters, new continents.
The overall effect is almost sketch comic; especially given these chapters feature interludes where Gary Oldman and Antonio Banderas — playing the real life bankers/con men, Jürgen Mossack and Ramón Fonseca, at the centre of the scandal — speaking directly to-camera. With shades of The Big Short, they speak to the audience, putting global financial fraud in simple terms (“the line between tax evasion and tax avoidance” is “as thin as a jailhouse wall”), and putting this dark history in grand philosophical terms. The fourth wall is broken plenty, then eventually obliterated in a final-act to-camera oration from Streep.
Helming all of this is Steven Soderbergh, whose output since his ‘retirement’ has been comically prolific. As is his way, Soderbergh serves as producer, director, cinematographer, and editor. But there’s none of the visual invention, here, that we saw with his other film of 2019, High Flying Bird; nothing distinctively Soderberghian about it. Instead, The Laundromat is both a work of wild ambition and conciliation: a smart film about a big subject that is, ultimately, a 95 minute Netflix menu filler.
LITTLE MONSTERS
★★★
“Not zombies again,” says a US solider with a sigh. “Are they fast ones or slow ones?” This is the obligatory meta movie confession, within Little Monsters, that we’re walking — very slowly, as it turns out — into all-too-familiar terrain. Said meta movie moment feels required because, at this point, depicting a scourge of the undead and having the humans in the picture react with naïveté seems absurd. I mean, what’s a more preposterous concept to imagine: the undead rising from their graves and shuffling among us, or a world in which people have never heard of zombies?
The zombies, here, have broken out of a US military base and are stalking their way through a nature park in NSW; a place where there’s Australian critters, mini golf, and a busload of kids on a school excursion. Looking after these kids (hence the double meaning of the title) is the province of their saintly teacher Lupita Nyong’o, who’s aided by Alexander England, playing a deadshit uncle — a classic manchild dude-bro, unable to face adulthood or reality — along to supervise. He’s the anti-hero that will use this outbreak as a form of moral rehabilitation: reckoning with his failures, ditching the self pity, rescuing the kids, getting the girl.
This is all played as a comedy, and a pretty broad one. Little Monsters’ favourite gag is situating ‘adult’ content — swearing, horror, violence, sex — in proximity to children; this manifest in the form of Josh Gad, who plays an American children’s entertainer who, underneath it all, is full of rage, booze, and a MILF-centric sex addiction. Essentially, the movie, and its comedy, is about the juvenile set against the juvenile, the literal meeting the figurative.
Writer/director Abe Forsythe clearly admires Bong Joon-ho’s monster-movie marvel The Host, but the comparison falls short when it comes to social satire. Here, the presence of an American military base in Australia is no commentary on, say, cultural imperialism. Instead, it’s just a shrine to international co-funding. Given that, last time out, Forsythe turned the great Australian shame of the Cronulla race riots into a satirical comedy, it feels even more notable. Little Monsters is funny, but, beyond riffing on an overtaxed genre, doesn’t have that much to say.
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