The Return of Sex and Scary 💋😈
Alex Mooney on two pairs of recent releases: Challengers and Love Lies Bleeding, and The First Omen and Late Night with the Devil
Catching Up with the Movies: The Return of Sex and Scary
by Alex Mooney
I spent most of the months of March and April—the final weeks of my final year of undergrad at the University of Toronto—in thrall to a veritable mountain of under-the-wire tasks; reading reflections, passage analyses, half-assed stints in Final Cut Pro, an endless string of footnotes and endnotes, and as per the school’s ludicrous breadth requirements, unconscionably misleading exam questions about molecular gastronomy (fellow students beware: “Science of the Modern Kitchen'' is NOT the course you think it is). Emerging from the clammy and cloistered cocoon of academia, I shook loose the torpor and atrophy of all those days and nights of frenzied autopilot and crawled in the direction of my local multiplexes. I saw new releases of varying but largely unsurprising qualities, from the amusingly junky (Godzilla x Kong, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, Abigail) and the charmingly esoteric (Monkey Man, Immaculate, The Fall Guy—this one’s a shocker, I know) to train-wreck-everyone-saw-coming (Civil War) and so-good-I-could-never-hope-to-do-it-justice-with-the-written-word (I Saw the TV Glow). There were four films, however, that in their respective pairings formed a rather eloquent portrait of the pleasures and pitfalls of the current filmmaking climate.
A Girl and a Gun and a Tennis Racket
It seems Godard’s famous adage should have included an addendum accounting for the displaced violence and sexuality of competitive sports. Zendaya’s darting eyes slicing the frame from side to side—and boytoy to boytoy—as she follows the lateral hurtling of a tennis ball from behind her shades is one of those elemental, film-distilling images that are all too rare for Hollywood movies circa 2024. In fact, one of the most satisfying aspects of Luca Guadagnino’s stylistic potpourri, Challengers, is how insistently and flamboyantly it spells out HOLLYWOOD in all caps, not just in its shameless cash-ins on the mannequin-like beauty of its bankable stars, but also its appeal to the basest instincts of its audience (I saw it prosecco-drunk in a packed house with some girlfriends, whole crowd gasping in unified ecstasy and glee). Similarly, the poster for Rose Glass’s Love Lies Bleeding folds an elemental notion of gendered power into the spectacle of a woman body builder’s hulking contours. The image never appears in the film itself, but it’s an eloquent summation of Glass’s project of double-edged titillation, which teeters on the verge of the grotesque.
Emotional grotesqueries abound in a film like Challengers, in which the key players in its decade-spanning love triangle Tashi (Zendaya), her ex Patrick (Josh O’Connor), and his ex Art (Mike Faist) use their words and gestures as weapons off-court. Even tender domestic exchanges between Tashi and husband Art contain a minefield of emotional wounds informed by years of mutual triumphs and disappointments—“I love you”, “I know” plays as much like a playful taunt as it does a wistful acknowledgment. Love Lies Bleeding is in many ways an inversion of Challengers’ erotic set-up; Kristen Stewart’s gym manager Lou is seduced by ambitious out-of-towner Jackie (the buff broad on the poster), and the two are thrust immediately into a domestic set-up that they negotiate and articulate through thrashing, primal sex. Various tertiary points enter and exit their precarious sapphic Eden, from the grating, pathetic Daisy (Anna Baryshnikov) who fawns over Lou to her crime-boss father (Ed Harris) and abusive brother-in-law JJ (Dave Franco), all of whom are violently removed from the equation one after the other. Where Love Lies Bleeding uses triangular formations to reinforce a two-way partnership—and ultimately portray love and sex as a dangerously volatile cosmic force—Challengers builds toward the realization that these individuals can only function as a triangular unit, and the danger and volatility channeled through it can be refigured on the court as both athletic achievements for an audience and (homo)sexual peacocking for a girl who never realized how much she likes to watch. The two films are unapologetic in their sexual frankness and cater with lubricious expertise to the sensory pleasures that populist & genre cinemas are uniquely capable of.
I Saw the Indie IP Glow
Colin and Cameron Cairnes’ Late Night with the Devil is a high-concept indie horror flick that formally emulates a ‘70s television broadcast and its corresponding behind-the-scenes footage to convey the nationwide spectacle of an exorcism-gone-wrong. The First Omen is a cash-in prequel to Richard Donner’s 1976 film (already a cash-in on The Exorcist’s zeitgeist) released by *shudder* Disney’s Searchlight Pictures. On paper, one seems to have the artistic upper hand over the other. On-screen, however, Late Night plays more like cultural vampirism, and Arkasha Stevenson’s forceful feature debut—which wears several influences on its sleeve while aesthetically recontextualizing them for the visual grammar of modern horror—appears trailblazing by comparison.
The justifiable ire the Cairneses drew with their usage of A.I.-generated diegetic promo materials (which are just as hideous, and obvious, as you’ve heard) soured their film’s reception, totally dwarfing whatever ingenuity their formal gimmick might have housed. In certain wobbly, uncanny passages, the film threatens to deliver on the promise of its premise, but by the fourth or fifth ad-break BTS footage sequence (in which the Cairneses try their hand at more explicit media satire) it becomes clear that their presence is merely an excuse for table-setting that takes the pressure off of the showtime scenes that were the film’s main attraction (cutting corners with A.I. was merely the symptom of a larger laziness). In the long run, this back-and-forth only deflates the tension, and neuters the foreboding ambivalence of the television camera. The film is built precariously around David Dastmalchian’s talk-show presence, and perhaps he could have shined if given a more full-bodied role, but I was mostly reminded of how pathologically obsessed America’s living rooms were (and still mostly are) with variations on the Some Guy type.
The First Omen, on the other hand, staunchly eschews originality in favour of execution, and what Stevenson achieves is one of the most impressive cases of studio auteurist smuggling in recent memory. No shade to Immaculate, a perfectly adequate, easy-to-root-for movie that its release-slot-neighbour mercilessly outclasses, but First Omen acquits itself of its sturdily pedestrian script, lengthy two-hour runtime, and franchise-necessitated conclusion through its close and intuitive identification with its lead (Nell Tiger Free) and its commitment to contriving expressively gnarly imagery; the demon hand reaching out from a birth canal (which nearly landed it an NC-17) surely takes the cake for most memorable horror image of this new decade.
Horror of the non-elevated variety has had a major theatrical comeback over the past few years, and the first half of 2024 may have been its saturation point. Late Night and First Omen are among the most ambitious ones, but they’re unlikely to firmly lodge themselves in any sort of cultural memory. There’s comfort in the fact that “forgettable” horror movies are being made with something resembling formal integrity again, but there’s also an irony in just how comfortably that integrity sits next to creative compromise; it’s fitting that the spuriously “meta” film about the price and practice of horror staging, which refuses to plumb the depths of its premise, would be so handily upstaged by the back-to-basics shock effects of a newcomer carving out the space to express herself in an apparatus that so readily sacrifices the personal at the altar of the bottom line.
Alex Mooney is a Toronto-based writer and programmer.
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