culture
Rep Cinema This Week: The Babadook, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, The 50 Year Argument
The best repertory and art-house screenings, special presentations, lectures, and limited engagements in Toronto.
Still from The Babadook.
At rep cinemas this week: a critically acclaimed horror movie about a monstrous mother, a weird child, and their spooky new friend; a hipster Iranian vampire drama; and a loving profile of The New York Review of Books.
The Babadook
Directed by Jennifer Kent
TIFF Bell Lightbox (350 King Street West)
The bond between a high-strung mother and her weird child gets its scariest treatment since The Shining in The Babadook, Jennifer Kent’s auspicious debut. The surprise recipient of a number of best first-feature awards late last year, as well as the kind of glowing reviews that suggest it’s on the fast track to the contemporary horror canon, The Babadook is well worth its salt, even if we’re not so sure it sticks its landing.
Essie Davis stars as Amelia, a widow trying to raise her son Samuel (Noah Wiseman) in relative calm, despite her lingering trauma surrounding her husband’s sudden death and her uneasiness about Samuel’s status on the autism spectrum. Things get even more complicated one fateful night when Samuel pulls a grisly pop-up storybook off the shelf and inadvertently unleashes the titular fairytale monster, who can’t be put away once he’s been summoned, burned books be damned.
Kent has a bit of fun with the allegorical implications of this premise—is mean old Mister Babadook just a physical manifestation of the family’s attic full of traumatic memories, which won’t be denied any longer?—but The Babadook works as well as it does because of the earnestness with which it depicts its central relationship, not because of any (barely suppressed) subtext about the monstrousness of mothers and so on. Horror films tend to be at their best when you fear for the people in them, and on that account, The Babadook is awfully scary.
For her part, Kent is also an accomplished filmmaker, if a bit prone to aesthetic grandstanding: even before the baddie first appears, everything is edited within an inch of its life. One only wishes the tense atmosphere of the first two-thirds didn’t give way to such a tidy ending, which reads more like an academic essay on horror as a way of working through psychological problems than a proper finale in its own right.
A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night
Directed by Ana Lily Amirpour
Revue Cinema (400 Roncesvalles Avenue)
Like so many Sundance wunderkinds before her, Ana Lily Amirpour burst out of the gate after a series of promising shorts before making her feature debut: 2014’s A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night. A half-ironic, half-sincere vampire western set, in a twist on both genres, in an Iranian ghost town identified only as “Bad City,” Amirpour’s film feels like a throwback to a strand of retro-influenced late-‘90s indies made by certified cinephiles like Jim Jarmusch and, at the risk of being obvious, Quentin Tarantino.
There’s no denying Amirpour’s steady directorial hand and sharp minimalist aesthetic, whose stillness and penchant for capturing dreary industrial wastelands in inky black and white reminds one of Jarmusch as well as Montreal’s Denis Côté. That said, beyond the unimpeachably cool style and the filmmaker’s clear cinephile bona fides—from a certain angle, our heroes look like James Dean and Anna Karina—it’s tough to get a grip on just what this film is doing apart from playfully remixing genres. Some will no doubt find its blend of woozy romanticism and understated horror beats beguiling, but we suspect others a bit closer to our own hearts may be more curious about where Amirpour is going next.
The 50 Year Argument
Directed by Martin Scorsese and David Tedeschi
Revue Cinema (400 Roncesvalles Avenue)
Martin Scorsese and co-director David Tedeschi do print journalism a solid in The 50 Year Argument, not just a history of the venerable institution of The New York Review of Books but a persuasive argument about why we still need such outlets today. The film splits its time about evenly between a present-day portrait of founding editor Robert Silvers’s day-to-day operations as the magazine’s singular guiding voice, and a mixed-media tour through some of the journal’s most famous contributions to American cultural and political life from luminaries like James Baldwin and Joan Didion—the former approach registering more strongly as cinema, even as the latter is more inherently interesting.
If Scorsese and Tedeschi lean too heavily at times on the prose of the magazine’s most famous contributors—tracking its winding progression on-screen in extreme close-ups, with underlines and other ostentatious typeface experimentations used for emphasis—they nevertheless make the case for the Review’s importance as an outlet that shaped the conversation at various satellite points in American political and cultural history, from Vietnam to second-wave feminism. We would have appreciated a greater sense of the magazine’s readership outside of its own celebrity pool of authors, as well as some consideration of how a publication like the Review positions itself as a populist (but still high-minded) alternative to academia, but such quibbles don’t detract from what is obviously a polished and well-researched look at a major cultural institution.