Happiness and Brain-death

It’s possibly fair to say that these days, the actual written output of the American author Theodore Sturgeon is less well-known than some of the other things he is responsible: short stories like ‘Killdozer!’ and ‘The Girl Had Guts’ have drifted into obscurity compared to his well-remembered Star Trek scripts, plus the fact that Sturgeon’s Law bears his name (said law being that ninety percent of everything is either crud, or crap, or whatever other close synonym the speaker feels is most appropriate for their audience). That’s posterity for you – though Sturgeon’s shade may derive some sort of pleasure or fulfilment from being the inspiration for Kilgore Trout, a prolific but heroically unsuccessful writer of science-fiction stories who recurs throughout the work of Kurt Vonnegut.

Vonnegut said that he found the Trout character useful as a device for summarising the plots of science-fiction stories thus relieving him of the onerous task of actually writing them out in full – the whole point of an SF book being the idea at its core rather than all the extraneous material about plot and characterisation. It’s a reductive view of the genre but not an entirely inaccurate one, I think. Anyway, this is slightly ironic as it was a capsule description of Vonnegut’s 1985 novel Galapagos (in the Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction) which inspired me to go out and buy the book.

Suffice to say that this is Vonnegut and the plot synopsis absolutely doesn’t give the full sense of what the book is like to read. Well, obviously not really suffice to say, that’s no way to write a review, or even something pretending to be a review. What attracted to me to the story was that, back in the 1990s when I had not yet surrendered to inertia, I was actively kicking around ideas for something which probably owed a great deal to Brian Stableford’s late 70s-early 80s SF, which was fairly rigorous as far as the actual science went. Courtesy of my degree course I was thinking a lot about cognition and the development of the human brain and was struck by the extent to which all the texts on the subject concurred that the large brain which defines the human animal is an unqualified good in survival terms. I started wondering if there might be an environmental context in which having a large brain would become a liability and thus would end up being selected against, and what would happen to human beings in that situation. I couldn’t figure out a convincing and interesting way of exploring the idea so I forgot about it.

Vonnegut was there ten years earlier, naturally. Galapagos is one of those books which really defies genre, being essentially a black farce about the fate of a peculiar assortment of crooks, innocents, and eccentrics caught up in the economic collapse of Ecuador; their escapades conclude with them being shipwrecked on one of the larger Galapagos Islands in the Pacific Ocean. This coincides, Vonnegut’s narrator mentions offhand, with the collapse of global civilisation and the appearance of a micro-organism which causes human sterility. The human race dies out; only the handful of survivors in the Galapagos are around to continue the line.

Evolution goes to work. The islands are not a resource-rich environment, but leaving them means falling foul of the microbes on the mainland. Evolutionary success (i.e., offspring) is mainly a question of attracting a mate with whom one can produce children with a high survival quotient. Over the ensuing million years, having a big brain becomes a liability rather than an advantage; human beings become smaller, and furrier, losing much of their mental capacity and manual dexterity.

Galapagos obviously scores over most evolution-based SF for appearing to understand its scientific conceit. Most pieces of evo-SF generally concern evolution being accelerated or reversed within individuals – see The Sixth Finger, an Outer Limits episode in which David McCallum’s evolution is advanced, causing him to sprout an extra digit and have his head balloon like the Mekon’s, or Genesis from TNG, in which a virus runs amok on the Enterprise causing Worf to turn into a crab, Troi to become a newt, and Picard to come over all lemur-like. Needless to say it doesn’t really work that way. Individuals don’t evolve, populations do, and it isn’t a question of there being a specific goal or of one animal being more ‘highly evolved’ than another.

And yet Galapagos feels like a more marginal piece of SF than either of those, for all that its science is better. This is because the far-future setting of the marine post-humans isn’t really explored in any detail; it’s just there as a framing device, there to be compared to our present day and generally found to be rather preferable – by the narrator, at least. This is the million-year-old ghost who has observed the end of the world and the metamorphosis of the Galapagos colony – he is a Vietnam veteran named Leon Trout, whose own outlook has been somewhat informed by his relationship with his father, journeyman SF hack Kilgore Trout.

Most of the book reads like a black satire of the events of the final days before the survivors board the liner that will take them to their new home – discursive, wry, a bit arch. The theme of the book is made clear quite early on – the source of most of the problems afflicting the human race, and indeed the world, is that their brains are grotesquely outsized and uncontrollable. The brain is what gives someone their capacity for self-deception, for the deception of others, for religious or patriotic mania, for the creation of weapons of mass destruction. It probably sounds quite sour, and to be honest it’s hard to tell the extent to which Vonnegut is striking a pose rather than expressing a sincere belief. The book has various devices and conceits built into it – one of them is to put an * in front of the name of any character shortly to meet their death. Another is to include pithy quotes from a Japanese computer taken to the island by one of the survivors.

I must say it feels to me like really borderline SF, someone leaning over the frontier – but on the other hand, why not disregard genre in this fashion? The results are certainly distinctive: it’s like an incident from one of the early chapters of Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men, as reimagined by the British comic writer Tom Sharpe. Even that may be to do the book an injustice – Vonnegut is a wonderful stylist, with one of the most distinctive narrative voices, and the book is filled with wit, satire and pathos. It’s just not a conventional or straightforward narrative about the future of human evolution. Then again, as Stapledon figured out nearly a century ago, this is not a topic which lends itself to conventional narrative structures. As a satire of modern civilisation, it is probably enjoyably absurd rather than genuinely thought-provoking – though there is enough of that, too, to elevate it well above the level of simple entertainment.

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Rocky and Frankenstein Hit the Road

As we have previously discussed, Roger Corman largely retired from directing in about 1970, but carried on as a producer and overseer of other people’s films for many years after. The list of distinguished people who got their start in the Corman School of Film-making is quite lengthy, though these days the name which jumps out is that of James Cameron. Many of his former colleagues have spoken warmly of the freedom Corman allowed them – provided the film met the quotas of violence and nudity Corman required, they were free to do whatever else interested them, which led to all kinds of unusual and subversive ideas being smuggled into what look like simply very tacky exploitation movies.

‘Tacky’ doesn’t quite do justice to Paul Bartel’s 1975 film Death Race 2000, which enjoys a higher level of name recognition than many Corman movies, though this is mainly due to the existence of a regrettably boring remake with Jason Statham and Tyrese Gibson (just titled Death Race). The original film had its origins when Corman decided to cash in on the success of Rollerball, a violent futuristic sports movie, and optioned the rights to a short story by Ib Melchior (director of The Time Travellers) about a car race. Paul Bartel recalls a lot of his own ideas were cut by Corman to make way for more exploding heads, but the fact this isn’t just an exploitation film is plain to see.

As you might guess, the film is set in the future where, following a financial collapse in 1979, the US has become a dystopian autocracy where elections are a thing of the past. The masses are kept under control by a steady diet of violent sporting spectacle, chiefly the death race of the title, in which the contestants must make their way across the continental USA, scoring points for mowing down as many pedestrians as they can. (Subtle and understated this is not.)

In the field for this year’s race are contestants boasting names like Calamity Jane (Mary Woronov), Matilda the Hun (Roberta Collins), and Machine Gun Joe (Sylvester Stallone – a year before Rocky, with hindsight his appearance here is probably the film’s most eye-opening bit of casting). But the man to beat is legendary driver Frankenstein (David Carradine), so named because of the number of times the surgeons have stitched him back together after a crash. The race is all set to begin, but rebel forces are plotting its sabotage – will anyone make it to the finish line in one piece?

What ensues is a sort of live-action version of Wacky Races, with lashings of gory violence and multiple nude scenes for (principally) the leading female cast members. They really don’t make them like this anymore, folks – while it’s relatively even-handed in many ways (most of the male characters get their kit off for massages, etc, and Carradine wanders around in his pants for a few scenes), the camera doesn’t dwell on them in the same way as Woronov or Simone Grieff (playing Carradine’s navigator and love-interest). Usually this film would be a dead cert for the gratuitous nudity tag, but I suspect Roger Corman would firmly disagree: nudity is an essential part of this kind of film (I imagine he would say), regardless of whether or not it informs the plot. When I’ve seen him interviewed Corman comes across as a pleasant, thoughtful kind of chap, but then you see a film like this one or Humanoids from the Deep (really most notable for its sexual violence) and you are forced to wonder.

Corman’s stipulations aside, it is clear from the start that this isn’t just a knuckle-headed actioner – I’m almost minded to say it has a lot in common with a film like Sleeper, which also uses SF trappings to satirical effect. The main tonal difference between Death Race 2000 and Rollerball is that while the latter is so thoughtful and reserved it’s sometimes a bit of a slog, this film is so outrageously overblown it frequently becomes absurd. The first choice of actor for Frankenstein, Peter Fonda, turned the film down on the grounds it was the most ridiculous thing he’d ever read, and it is impossible to take seriously – but then I don’t think it’s supposed to be. There’s something presentational about the gleeful excess and wild silliness of the film, the audience is treated with intelligence and assumed to be in on the joke. At one point we are told that Death Race coincides with Euthanasia Day at the local hospital, and all the old people are wheeled outside into the road for Frankenstein to run over when he passes – but our hero smartly veers around them and takes out a few of the medical staff instead. That this comes across as black comedy rather than something genuinely sick is down to the tone of the film.

It never stops feeling entirely like a cartoon, and for every off the wall gag that lands – at the end of one of Frankenstein’s arms is a hidden explosive device – that’s right, a hand grenade! – while there’s a running joke about rebel activity being blamed on the French – there’s another which is just a bit too obvious to really work. The low budget often shows, with the racers and their cars notably not in the same shot as the huge crowds which have supposedly turned up to watch the start and finish of the various race stages. The actual action sequences with the cars are pretty good, if you bear this in mind, but don’t compare all that well with car chases from more prestigious studio films.

In the end Death Race 2000 is disreputable good fun. It’s crass, and obvious, and excessive, but that’s the point of it – there’s clearly an intelligence at work in the script and behind the camera. The only real problem with the film is that it doesn’t seem to have a coherent message to put across beyond simply taking pot-shots at every aspect of American culture which crosses its path – sports broadcasting, politics, the media in general. Even so, it’s seldom dull, often interesting, and occasionally very funny indeed.

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Television Will Eat Itself

I’m one of those people who, when Gregg Wallace comes on the tellybox, usually finds a compelling reason to change the channel. It’s probably the air of glazed, noisy, bonhomie that rubs me up the wrong way. Why is he always so loud? Why is he always so cheerful? Why is he always so sure of himself? (There may be an element of my recoiling from a polar opposite going on here, admittedly.) My partner’s occasional viewing of the odd episode of Inside the Factory can thus be somewhat trying, but I suppose it’s good ammunition for when I want to persuade her to watch a Hammer horror on DVD.

I think the only time I have ever knowingly and intentionally sat down and watched a Gregg Wallace TV show was when he was the host on a very brief revival of Time Commanders a few years ago (again – why? The man’s a restauranteur, isn’t he? What was he doing on a military history simulation game show?). The format tweak of the revival was a positive, but Wallace managed to be even more grating than Richard Hammond during his stint on the show.

Nevertheless, set against all of this I must now consider Gregg Wallace’s participation in a new documentary which is one of the most extraordinary things I have seen on TV in a very long time. This is Gregg Wallace: The British Miracle Meat, which was on Channel 4 the other night, and concerned an interesting new lab-grown meat product which shows every sign of helping to alleviate the country’s economic woes. I will say no more this side of a big picture of Gregg Wallace as you should really come to this show knowing as little as possible in advance, but suffice to say it is well deserving of your time, assuming you can locate a copy from somewhere.

Ah, I love a TV hoax, or any kind of fake documentary. I’m not sure why, it just tickles all my buttons in the right way. I have vivid memories of watching Ghostwatch live when it went out on Halloween 1992, and I’m also a great admirer of Alternative 3 (needless to say there are DVDs of both of them knocking about the house somewhere). I strongly doubt Miracle Meat will ever get that kind of release – I gather it has proved somewhat controversial, so it may not even stick around to stream for very long – but one can always hope.

Casting Gregg Wallace as the presenter of this show is one of its main strokes of genius, as he tends to be on TV so much anyway you don’t really pay him a second glance. The show opens with him arriving at a maximum security meat production plant somewhere in England, in cheery-chappy Inside the Factory mode. Donning the usual protective gear, he loudly makes his way around, meeting the staff of the company Good Harvest, spewing out the usual facts and figures – the plant, for example, is where ‘a whopping six tonnes of human meat is engineered every day!’ So perfectly is the jolly tone of one of Wallace’s other shows reproduced that it’s easy to imagine casual viewers letting it wash over them for a while, until what’s actually happening sinks in and they stare at the screen saying ‘human what…?’

Post-Ghostwatch, broadcasters have been twitchy about doing this sort of thing, and it probably becomes obvious a bit too quickly that this is satire – it’s just a little bit too broad, a little too soon. But what a satire this is – I’ve seen nothing close to this in sheer ferocity since Charlie Brooker was still doing Wipes. The premise is that, in a two-pronged assault on the cost-of-living crisis, the economically challenged are being given the opportunity to donate some of their flesh in return for cash (£400 for a double buttock!) – the scraps of flesh are popped into nutrient tanks where they soon grow into hefty ‘meat cakes’ which can be chopped up into steaks, burgers, sausages, and so on, and sold for 99p a portion.

It’s grotesque black comedy – me being me, I couldn’t help remembering Michael Palin and Terry Jones’ Secrets, a 1973 TV play about the launch of human-flavoured chocolates – but the script (the writer is Matt Edmonds, ‘with thanks to Jonathan Swift’) spins the idea in various winning directions – Gregg rocks up at Michel Roux’s place where the two tuck into some human steaks, Gregg meets a donor and her family and follows her through the process, then encounters the company’s terrifying CEO (Julianna Kurokawa) and learns about their new premium range of extra-tender meat.

There is palpable fury and outrage here, astonishingly political in its way – the closest the programme naming names comes when it is revealed that Good Harvest’s business plan has the full approval of ‘the state’. The little throwaway details are what elevate it even further – the plant manager in charge of the nutrient vats comments that, pre-Brexit, this technology would have been illegal (that elusive Brexit dividend finally identified), while a steak that Roux suggests has come from a ‘stressed’ donor is revealed to be produce from an NHS nurse. The CEO, after mentioning a possible future sideline in human leather, responds to Gregg’s repeated questioning as to whether the donation process hurts, is met with the bland (and completely meaningless) answer that it is ‘pain subjective’.

Gregg Wallace has earned his place on the TV roll of honour with Miracle Meat – his performance is up there with Parky’s in Ghostwatch, moving from cheerful self-parody into something more human and troubled as he learns more about the company’s future plans. ‘Are you expecting any moral objection?’ he asks the CEO. ‘It’s tested really well with our focus groups,’ she replies brightly, the kind of bland non sequitur we’ve all grown used to from every political interview in about ten years. Perhaps some people – the kind of shrivelled-soul wretches responsible for the mess we’re in – have been objecting to Gregg’s sign-off, which suggests that industrial cannibalism is a more likely future path for this country than a functioning benefits system and secure incomes for all its citizens. But it all rang horribly true. Kudos to Gregg Wallace, and kudos to Channel 4 for making this thing at all. A contender for TV programme of the year, by any sane metric.

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The Filthy Rich and the Walking Dead

One of the buzz phrases of our current epoch is ‘nepo baby’, which  everyone seems to be using now they have realised that people with successful parents have a much better chance of being successful themselves. There seems to be a degree of resentment of this, but here in the UK I don’t really feel we have any grounds for grumbling given that the majority of people are fine with our head of state basically getting his job because of who his mum was.

Elsewhere in the world – particularly the fizzing realm of Canadian-Croatian-Hungarian movie co-production – things may be different, but this hasn’t stopped Brandon Cronenberg from making his third film. ‘Brandon who?’ you may be wondering – yes, he is the son of David Cronenberg, but it’s probably worth pointing out he was born after Cronenberg Senior made The Brood and so those homicidal infant monsters were not based on him. I expect.

When you are the son of one of the world’s most celebrated horror movie directors it probably influences any movie career you may have – how could it not? It’s hard to imagine the Cronenberg name on a rom-com or a feelgood film. You probably  wouldn’t watch Cronenberg’s new film Infinity Pool without knowing the director’s name and immediately cry ‘Hey, it’s just like a David Cronenberg film!’ – but on the other hand, it’s not totally different, either. It’s certainly a film which arrives from the outermost reaches of commercial cinema, well beyond the boundaries of conventional good taste.)

Alexander Skarsgard plays James Foster, a marginally successful author enjoying  – sort of – a holiday in the  tourist enclave of Li Tolqa (a presumably Balkan country – it looks like it’s just down the coast from Beszel and/or Ul Qoma) with his much wealthier wife Em (Cleopatra Coleman). The holiday is going only marginally well until Foster meets a couple of fans – architect Alban (Jalil Lespert) and his much younger British wife Gabi (Mia Goth). Soon they are hanging out together as couples who meet on holiday do, and Gabi makes it rather clear that she has a more than friendly interest in Foster (he is relieving himself after a beach barbecue when she appears and, ahem, gives him a hand. This sequence is absolutely on the limit of what you can get away with showing in a respectable movie, in case you were wondering).

Things take a darker turn as, driving home from the barbecue, Foster hits and kills a local. Gabi declares that ‘this is not a civilised country’ and insists they leave the scene of the crime without reporting it (echoes here of The Forgiven from last year). But the Li Tolqan police know their business and soon Foster and his wife find themselves under arrest. Despite the notoriously brutal local justice system, the detective in charge (Thomas Kretcschmann) suggests it is unlikely Foster will be executed: foreigners have the option of paying to use the local custom where convicted criminals can have themselves cloned, the clone then being killed in their presence by their victim’s family. The police station has its own convenient ATM, seemingly just for this purpose.

Naturally Foster makes use of this option, but while Em is horrified by the ritual of the execution (another very graphic scene), Foster’s own response is rather ambivalent. He discovers that Gabi and Alban are members of a rather exclusive club of foreign visitors who have been through the Li Tolqan justice system and developed a taste for watching themselves put to death – not least because this effectively comes hand-in-hand with complete immunity to all the local laws. The possibilities are enticing, assuming Foster can get his head around the moral degeneracy involved…

The Cronenberg name means everyone is treating this is a horror film – and, to be fair, this is one of the most wildly graphic films I have ever seen – but there is a rich vein of disquieting Ballardian satire going on here as well. It’s a film about lots of different things, but one of the main ones is what the jaded hyper-wealthy (and sometimes not so hyper-wealthy) get up to in poorer countries. This isn’t quite a film about the phenomenon of poverty tourism, but the disconnect between different economic castes is certainly in the mix.

To the extent that it is a horror film, Infinity Pool is one that sets out to disturb and repel rather than simply frighten. There’s not much in the way of catharsis here, just a profound sense of angst and fundamental wrongness as Foster is swallowed up by a world where morality simply doesn’t exist and no act is too transgressive. There is extreme sexual content to go with the violence, including an eye-poppingly hallucinogenic orgy sequence that left me in no doubt as to why this film had to be cut in order to be released at all in American cinemas. Parts of the film may look innocuous, but it is really a voyage to the heart of darkness (and various other internal organs too).

Alexander Skarsgard has history making fairly extreme films, of course, and he gives another impressive performance in this one. Co-leading the film is Mia Goth as his guide-temptress-tormentor – Goth is acquiring a reputation as someone to watch in the horror genre, and she commands the screen here, even if she never quite manages to shake the impression she’s playing some sort of perverse wish-fulfilment figure. It’s a tremendous turn and what usually gets called a very striking performance (‘striking’ being film-critic code for when an actress takes all her clothes off at least once in a film).

The film’s mixture of profound disquiet, savage satire and deadpan black comedy (‘Think of it as a souvenir,’ suggests Kretschmann as Skarsgard is handed the ashes of his first clone) is certainly reminiscent of the elder Cronenberg’s most distinctive work, but it’s not quite as simple as that – the cerebral chilliness and sense of detachment are absent, replaced by something more visceral. It feels like the younger Cronenberg wants to plunge in, get some skin in the game, where his father would remain an aloof chronicler. It’s a different approach but one which, in this case at least, gets results. Unsettling and challenging results, but ones which are difficult to forget – this is a movie which does not compromise.

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Amuse-Butchery

Here’s a name that has rather unexpectedly drifted up out of the mists of the past: Mark Mylod, long-time film and TV director, whose first movie, 2002’s Ali G Indahouse, dates back even unto the pre-blog days when I was solely doing this on a weird appendage to the BBC website. As you can see if you click the link, I was distinctly unimpressed by the film at the time, but – it may shock you to learn – Mr Mylod has gone on to have a solid career in both the UK and the US. (He’s the kind of person that Former Next Desk Colleague Now Manager may have worked with in his previous life as a TV editor; I must check.)

That said, it’s been a few years since Mylod’s done a movie, and his new one certainly looks like a change of pace from his previous work: it is The Menu, which feels rather like a horror film made for people who are normally a bit sniffy about horror. Or is it a satire? I think it’s probably a satire, to be honest, but a satire which has decided to hedge its bets by looking a bit like a horror film. This strikes me as a sensible strategy and one which doesn’t do the film any harm.

The film opens with enthusiastic foodie Tyler (Nicholas Hoult) preparing for the experience of a lifetime: he and his companion Margot (Anya Taylor-Joy) are paying $1250 apiece to spend the evening at Hawthorne, a very exclusive restaurant on a private island. Also attending are a pretentious food critic (Janet McTeer) and her editor, three nouveau rich bros with far more money than taste, a veteran politician and his wife, and a fading film star (John Leguizamo) and his PA, who is trying to quit but finding it a challenge.

Hawthorne is famous for its unique and enigmatic menus – every sitting is different, and specially prepared with great precision by its head chef, Julian Slowik (Ralph Fiennes). Having received a tour of the island from Slowik’s steely head waiter (Hong Chau), everyone settles down for what they fully expect to be the meal of a lifetime. This turns out to be exactly what they get, although their lifetimes turn out to be somewhat shorter than they had anticipated when they arrived on the island.

Perhaps you can see what I mean about the horror trappings of The Menu: a group of people arrive on a secluded private island and find that their host has more planned than they originally expected. They have, in fact, been specially selected according to a rather particular set of criteria, and the fact that one of the people who have turned up is not the one featured on the guest list turns out to be pivotal to the plot. It’s not a million miles distant from fairly recent films like The Hunt and the horror version of Fantasy Island, in its premise anyway. The trailer makes it quite clear that, before the end, there will be a sequence in which many of the guests will be pursued across country by burly members of the kitchen staff.

That said – and this really shouldn’t come as a surprise given Mylod’s involvement as director – while some of the events of the film may be horrific (there are various stabbings, dismemberments, immolations, a drowning and a suicide) these never feel like the raison d’etre of the film, which they possibly would if this were an out-and-out horror – the movie seldom dwells on the gore, it is more about the idea of the violence than the grisly details. It’s an arch confection, and never that visceral.

Instead, this really is more of a black comedy, and specifically a social satire. The most obvious target is the world of the celebrity chef and the ridiculous adulation they occasionally receive for dishes which no sensible restaurant would have on their menu – a few years ago an elite restaurant in the UK started serving things like snail-flavoured porridge and bacon ice cream, and of course it very quickly became a kind of gastronomic mecca. The sheer absurdity of some of the conceptual courses that Slowik serves up to his guests is genuinely very funny, as are their reactions to the food (not to mention the helpful captions detailing the precise ingredients of the dishes) – at one point he sends out empty plates dabbed with sauces, for rigorously logical and well-explained reasons. Later on, as the tone darkens and the guests begin to suspect what’s going on, they get individualised tortillas, each one laser-inscribed with incriminating images of them.

However, there’s something a little more general going on here too, which is why it isn’t a great surprise to find Adam McKay listed as one of the producers of the film – he may be best known as a comedy director, but – amongst other things – he made the incisive, socially-committed comedy-drama The Big Short. The joke here is on the filthy rich and the careless way they make use of their vast wealth. From early on the film is drawing attention to the different levels of social strata occupied by the serving staff and the guests – Tyler is startled when a junior chef knows his name, but (as Margot notes) it doesn’t occur to him to ask the man’s name in return. Later on the distinction between those who give and those who take proves to be of the deepest significance.

The satire becomes increasingly grotesque one as it continues. You do get the sense that the idea of doing the satire was the priority, and the rest of the plot was built around it – it gets a bit unravelled towards the end, and perhaps could do with losing a course or two – certainly some of the characters’ actions, and their motivations, never quite ring true as those of real people: these are mostly caricatures, arch grotesques.

Nevertheless the performances are excellent, particularly from Fiennes and Taylor-Joy – Fiennes has the tricky job of essentially acting as the MC for the whole movie, and does it rather well. Taylor-Joy has become something of a fixture in all kinds of films since her early roles in horror, but as ever she brings a touch of class along with that truly remarkable bone structure. Then again, this is a classy movie, well-made, witty, and with something to say. Not quite a horror film per se, but horror-adjacent in the best possible way.

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Red Vs Blue Movie

The other day I was a little surprised to discover I still had a checklist in my head of all those movies which the onset of lockdown back in March 2020 stopped me from seeing in a timely manner. Possibly the outstanding item on said list is a movie called Military Wives, which may sound like a niche magazine but is actually one of those uplifting true-life comedy dramas which almost invariably make me feel like opening a vein whenever I watch one. I got as far as watching the first half hour of that at the cinema before the building’s electrics blew and we were all sent home with the promise of a free ticket to a future showing. Five days later the cinemas all closed, and I’ve never heard anything about this movie since (I wasn’t actually enjoying it much so I’m not that bothered about seeing the rest of it).

Perhaps even more unlucky was Craig Zobel’s The Hunt, which had already suffered one delay to its release and came out just in time to play for less than a week. But at least The Hunt has resurfaced on one of the big streamers, where it doesn’t seem to have made a particular impression. Perhaps that’s because this is a movie which was the product of a very particular moment in American culture, which has now to some degree passed, or possibly it’s simply because it’s a rather odd film.

It opens with the audience being made privy to a chat exchange between a group of liberal friends, complaining about the latest outrages committed by (we are invited to assume) Donald Trump. (As we have noted, the film was due to come out in early 2020.) The friends console themselves by discussing an upcoming social occasion, when they will gather at the mansion home of one of them and then hunt and kill a dozen or so ‘deplorables’ – this being a rather loaded expression, derived from a disparaging comment about Republican voters made by Hillary Clinton.

A sequence set on the flight to the hunting grounds then follows, which mainly seems to be here for shock value and to pad out the film to a decent ninety-minute length: the first class passengers gang up to kill someone from cattle class who recovers from the sedative they’ve been given unexpectedly early. And from here we’re off into the hunt itself.

A dozen people wake up on the edge of woodland, close to a large wooden crate; they are all gagged. Inside the crate they find weapons of various kinds, before coming under fire from a hide nearby – several of them are gorily killed before the survivors flee into the woods, contending with booby traps (spike pits, land mines) along the way.

That’s basically all you need to know about the premise of the movie; there isn’t a great deal more to be said about it, to be honest, without getting into the realm of spoilers. There’s a weird diversion where it looks like a replica of rural Arkansas has been constructed in Bosnia to confuse the quarry in the hunt, but this once again feels a bit like diversionary filler – there’s a distinct smell around this film of it being a case of a strong premise that they really had trouble blowing up to feature length.

The idea of people hunting people isn’t an especially new one, after all – readers with serious psychiatric issues may recall that, after The Hunt had its theatrical run cancelled, I consoled myself by watching The Most Dangerous Game, another movie with a similar premise from the early 1930s. It crops up in various genre TV episodes as well – see The Snare, an episode of the Hulk TV show from the seventies. But one also gets the sense that this was conceived as a piece of satire as much as a thriller or a horror movie (it’s certainly gory enough to qualify as the latter).

Exactly which genre The Hunt falls into is a somewhat contentious issue, which has even earned its own Wikipedia footnote. I originally heard it advertised as a horror movie (not surprisingly, given it was produced by Blumhouse, the makers of the Paranormal Activity, Purge and Insidious franchises, as well as the (rather good) recent Halloween films). However, if you slap together any combination of the words horror, action, thriller, satire, and comedy, it is practically certain that someone will have described the film this way.

And the odd thing is that they all do describe the film: there’s more than enough gore for it to qualify as a horror, parts of it are very funny, and there’s at least one really well-staged action sequence. The problem is that, rather than blending all of these things into a single, coherent whole, The Hunt has a rather frenetic quality, hopping from sequence to sequence and topic to topic as if it’s afraid that if it lingers on any of them the audience will realise it’s actually a fairly insubstantial film. The irony is that if anything’s likely to create this impression it’s the fact the movie can’t keep still.

Wrong-footing the audience is often a good idea, and the film does have a go at this, being deliberately misleading about what exactly’s going on. It also attempts to do the old Psycho routine of introducing a character as, ostensibly, the lead, and then spectacularly killing them off relatively early in the film. This can work quite well – but The Hunt does the idea to death, repeatedly seeming to establish a protagonist only for them to meet a grisly fate a few minutes later. It gets a little bit wearisome, to be honest.

The scattershot approach of the film does occasionally pay off: there are some very funny moments, most of them satirical – the liberal elitists responsible for the carnage often pause in planning their mass slaughter to pick each other up for things like cultural appropriation and inappropriately gendered language. These scenes are so knowingly absurd that only an idiot could genuinely find The Hunt to be a provocative and dangerous incitement to division – it’s an exaggerated parody of the splits already existing in modern America.

Needless to say, Donald Trump weighed in and suggested an upcoming film was intended to ‘inflame and cause chaos’ (possibly that very stable genius was concerned about demarcation issues). To be honest, The Hunt is very small potatoes on that particular score, but the central idea – liberals hunting conservatives – was always going to be a bit controversial. The script does attempt to subvert audience expectations, by turning out to have as its main target the tendency of some people to believe anything they read on the internet, and the inflexible and nuance-free nature of so much modern political discourse. But this turns up rather late in the day, and feels like a bit of an afterthought.

Nevertheless, I did rather enjoy it: there are solid performances from what’s largely an ensemble cast (Hilary Swank, Wayne Duvall, Ethan Suplee, Betty Gilpin, Emma Roberts and Justin Hartley all get their moments of prominence) and the piece does have pace, energy, and a degree of wit about it. I’m not sure it hangs together as a coherent political thesis but there are certainly some very nice moments along the way.

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Shallow Impact

The civilisation-toppling apocalypse of choice for most of mid-to-late twentieth century entertainment was the viral pandemic, although this never really caught on at the cinema except in the slightly modified form of the zombie apocalypse. For nearly a quarter of a century now it has been supplanted, some might say a little ironically, by something with a bit more visual potential: the cosmic or astronomical apocalypse. This cheerful subgenre, like so much else of SF, dates back to Wells, in this case his story The Star from 1897. Noteworthy entries over the years include R C Sheriff’s wistful The Hopkins Manuscript, When Worlds Collide (book and film), and Lucifer’s Hammer. For our purposes, however, the ball really got rolling in 1993 when Arthur C Clarke published The Hammer of God, about a huge asteroid on a collision course with Earth. This duly made its way to the screen in 1998, in the much-altered form of Deep Impact, accompanied by Armageddon (essentially a kind of idiot’s version of the same story).

Since then we have enjoyed the rom-com version of the planet-killing asteroid or comet story in Lorene Scafaria’s Seeking a Friend for the End of the World, the unlikely neutrinos of Roland Emmerich’s 2012, really bad weather from space in Dean Devlin’s Geostorm, and many more besides. So another film on the subject should not be that noteworthy.

Except that Adam McKay’s Don’t Look Up has become both much-talked-about and much-viewed, both of which should please the big N, which stumped up yet another eye-wateringly big budget and gave the film its customary just-big-enough-to-qualify-for-the-major-awards-but-no-bigger theatrical release.

It opens in the traditional manner, with PhD student Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence) going about her astronomical research and discovering a new comet. Her excitement, and that of her peers and supervisor Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio), quickly turns to alarm when further analysis reveals that the comet is on course to collide with Earth in a little over six months, producing an extinction-level event for life on the planet.

Needless to say they take their terrible news to NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office (the film is at pains to point out that this is a real thing) and its head Dr Oglethorpe (Rob Morgan), and soon find themselves whisked off to the White House… where they find themselves sitting in a corridor for hour after hour. The President (Meryl Streep) is, unfortunately, an idiot, obsessed with her poll ratings, mired in controversy, and not above giving key government positions to her own children (Jonah Hill plays her son, the chief of staff). Worrying that announcing something like this will make her unpopular, the President decides to sit on the news for the time being.

So the scientists decide to take the story to the media. They find themselves in a minor slot on one of the morning shows, after another political scandal and a story about the personal life of a pop star, and the importance of what they have to say suddenly seems to be less significant than Kate’s hairstyle, Randall’s understated charms, and the importance of keeping everything light and upbeat so as not to alienate the audience…

Things continue in a similar vein: the government finally decides to do something (but only because this will make the President look good), a deranged tech billionaire (Mark Rylance) comes up with a plan to exploit the comet using untested robots and potentially make billions, the internet becomes a battleground between people wanting to do something and ‘comet sceptics’, and so on, and so on.

I suppose this qualifies as another of those movies which was originally intended to help get Donald Trump out of office, although the effects of the pandemic have obviously seen its release pushed back – as a result the movie’s various cracks at the Trump administration feel like empty satire (although Streep is clearly having fun lampooning her old sparring partner). But having a go at Trump feels like only one of the film’s objectives, of which there are many.

McKay has been quite clear that Don’t Look Up is intended as a black satire about the climate crisis and the near-total indifference shown to it by the media, elected officials, and other governments around the world. Actual climate scientists have been giving the film glowing reviews and praising the way in which it reflects their own actual experiences in trying to raise awareness of environmental issues. To be honest, though, it seemed to me that the film isn’t really focussed enough to qualify as just being about one thing. DiCaprio’s character gets his ranting Howard Beale moment towards the end of the film, but the whole movie almost feels like a two-hour-plus yell of despair about the state of the modern world – populist politicians, skewed news values, inane social media obsessions, self-absorbed celebrities, off-the-leash capitalism, the mindless veneration of tech entrepreneurs, and much, much more.

And as such it is often very funny, though seldom especially subtle. Perhaps that’s the point. I know it has been criticised by many proper critics for coming across as rather smug – certainly the film operates from an educated liberal-left perspective, and most of its targets lie in other regions of the political and cultural spectrum. Then again the media being dismissive of a seriously-intended film about a looming disaster is exactly the kind of thing that would happen in Don’t Look Up, so perhaps this is just proving McKay’s point for him. For me the only part of the film which didn’t quite work was a section in which DiCaprio, as one of the mouthpieces of reason, gets outraged about the degree to which the scientific peer-review process has been abandoned, which strikes me as a bit of a niche topic given some of the other things at stake.

In general, though, I thought this was an engaging and often funny film, with a note of genuine poignancy to it which gradually builds as the climax gets closer – no small achievement considering how broad some of the comedy is. There are good performances from the cast, although J-Law saddles herself with the fairly unrewarding voice-of-common-sense audience-identification figure and has fewer chances to shine than DiCaprio. Has it filled me with a burning desire to do something about the state of the world? Well, no, I’m afraid – perhaps I’m just too much of a fatalist. Perhaps it really is just the same kind of cathartic wail that Dr Strangelove was, nearly sixty years ago. McKay isn’t Kubrick and Don’t Look Up isn’t as sharp or funny or dark as it would perhaps like to be – but it’s a worthwhile movie nevertheless.

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An Accidental Mirror

It was suggested that I come up with some kind of contribution on the topic of ‘public art’ for a forthcoming themed issue of the webzine I contribute to. Once I’d found out what that meant and done some googling, it turned out that there are a few films on this subject, mostly documentaries, but for the most part access to them is restricted, either by geography or a paywall. Maybe this is the future of cinema right here: if, as people are seriously suggesting, physical cinemas will no longer be financially viable in the post-pandemic world, then everything is going to depend on where you live and which streaming services you can afford to subscribe to. At which point I think I will simply just throw in the towel and just stick to watching moronic game shows and TV series from fifty years ago.

Thankfully, that awful day is still a few months away, and in the meantime there are still a few relatively free streamers available: mostly those tied to TV networks, which just means you have to endure them stopping the film now and then while they try to sell you things you can’t really afford any more and never needed in the first place. One of them turned out to be showing The Square, directed by Ruben Ostlund (O with two dots over it), an artist whose career has had some ups and downs: The Square won the top prize at Cannes, but on the other hand his previous film, Force Majeure, suffered the indignity of an American remake starring Will Ferrell. So it goes sometimes.

The Square takes place in and around a Stockholm art museum, curated by the suave and thoughtful Christian (Claes Bang). He is something of a public figure around town, and the museum is hosting a number of prestigious shows and installations, including a man pretending to be an ape (Terry Notary) and the ground-breaking ‘Mirrors and Piles of Gravel’, which is pretty much what it sounds like.

All is well in Christian’s world until he sees a young woman begging for help while he is on the way to work one morning: naturally, his decent and humane instincts lead to him being dragged into a scene with her, her violent ex, and another stranger. Everything seems to resolve itself quite peacefully, but then he is horrified to discover it was all a set up and he has been mugged.

This preys rather on Christian’s mind, as you might expect, and somewhat takes his mind off preparations for a new installation called ‘The Square’, which apparently symbolises compassion and shared humanity. Then, one of his staff is able to trace the location of the stolen phone to a nearby tower block, and rather than face a confrontation, Christian decides to send a letter demanding the return of his property to every single flat.

You know this is not going to end well, but exactly how it all goes wrong is not quite so easy to guess. The general thesis of the film is much easier to discern, though, as it’s not presented with particular subtlety: one scene shows a charity worker in a busy street asking the passers-by to ‘Save a human life’, the irony being that she herself seems completely oblivious to the plight of the various homeless people around her. Most of the film is a series of extended riffs on the same idea: characters make a big deal about how decent, humane, refined and liberal they are, but then their actual behaviour suggests they are rather more petty and self-serving.

There are also a number of pretty good gags about the absurdity of the contemporary art and culture world: at one point part of one of the piles of gravel is accidentally hoovered up, forcing Christian to get some fresh gravel and recreate the pile using old photos as a model. (The Duchampian question of what this says about the nature of art is left implicit.) The hip young social media gurus the gallery hires to drum up publicity for The Square come up with a video which is ridiculously offensive and inappropriate, but still somehow entirely credible.

Elsewhere the film perhaps acts as a reminder that satire and comedy are not always the same thing. In one of the film’s big set pieces (and the one depicted in most of the publicity), the artist pretending to be an ape runs amok at a dinner, which is initially greeted with indulgent laughter from the attendees, but eventually results in an angry mob delivering a beating. It’s oddly uncomfortable and unsettling to watch, as are the various scenes where Christian is given a hard time by a young boy who is suffering as a result of his non-confrontational approach to dealing with the muggers.

In the end, if this is a comedy, then it is a comedy of manners and social awkwardness, although one taking place in a milieu that was unfamiliar to me, at least: there’s a scene in which Christian and Anne (Elizabeth Moss), a journalist he hooks up with, have a protracted row over who should be allowed to dispose of the used contraceptive. Another depicts a visiting artist (Dominic West) attempting to give an interview in front of an audience which contains a man with Tourette’s syndrome: it’s all very low-key and naturalistic, but still somehow squirm-inducing. (Apparently this is one of several sequences in the film based on real events; another touch of verisimilitude which led to problems is that The Square is ascribed to real-life artist Lola Arias – there was a dispute over whether she actually gave her permission to be used.)

You know, reading all this back I’m making The Square sound like a solid, thoughtful, intelligent film, a worthy Palm D’Or winner. Maybe it is – Bang’s performance is a fine one (he has since become rather better known in the UK after appearing in the BBC’s Dracula), and it is clearly not one of those films which has just been slapped together. However, as with Force Majeure, I found a lot of it to be so understated, deadpan and slow that I wasn’t sure what to make of it. The problem is compounded here by the fact The Square is nearly two and a half hours long. I’m not saying it sprawls, but I did find it very hard work and in the end watched it, effectively, as a mini-series of three episodes, which isn’t something I normally consider doing. After all that, would I recommend it? I’m not sure. It almost seems more interested in its own austere and careful style than in actually making its points effectively and entertainingly. It actually comes across as slightly pretentious, which for a film aspiring to satirise pretentiousness is not a good look. It’s okay, but I would be wary of giving a more enthusiastic endorsement.

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A Cruise to Lose

My taste in movies is broader than most people’s, but that doesn’t mean I expect all of them to be good. I find it is important to bear in mind that, no matter how talented or discriminating someone is, the chances are they have participated in at least one piece of complete garbage in the course of their careers: successful movie actors just have a much higher hit rate than most. I am reminded of something Michael Caine said, about how one needed to make sure only one film in five was a genuine stinker – Caine’s legendary willingness to appear in virtually anything may have constituted an attempt to stack the odds in his favour.

Much as I have attempted to impress this principle on others, it has not always taken. It would have been in the late summer of 2005 that my father approached me and enquired if I would be recording a showing of Joe McGrath’s 1969 film The Magic Christian, due on TV that evening. I had not planned to; reviews in the TV listings were unenthusiastic and it didn’t look like my kind of thing, let alone his. Nevertheless, he asked if I would tape it for him. I agreed, but asked why: ‘it’s got lots of good people in it,’ was his response. This I cannot argue with: the film’s most distinguishing feature is an astonishing cast list, starting with Peter Sellers and going on to include Ringo Starr, Laurence Harvey, Hattie Jacques, John le Mesurier, Richard Attenborough, John Cleese, Graham Chapman, Spike Milligan, Dennis Price, Yul Brynner, Roman Polanski, Raquel Welch and Christopher Lee, along with many other well-known faces, some of them playing themselves. That the film does not seem to recognise the value of its assets, and fritters them away rather, is thematically appropriate but still bad film-making.

(NB: staring at the poster for three minutes will mean you probably have a longer exposure to Raquel Welch than her entire actual screen-time in the movie. Caveat emptor.)

Peter Sellers plays Sir Guy Grand, an eccentric billionaire, who at the start of the film decides to make up for his childless state by adopting an heir: he chooses a tramp from one of London’s parks, played by Ringo Starr (there have been suggestions the part was actually written for John Lennon, and you can imagine him in it). The duo set out to perpetrate a series of insanely lavish practical jokes puncturing the pomposity of the society they see around them and exposing the venality of the great and the good. As Sellers’ character puts it at one point, ‘Grand’s the name, money’s my game – would you like to play?’

What follows is an almost entirely plotless series of skits and sketches, most of which concern the Grands bribing people to sabotage various aspects of mainstream society. They pay the actor Laurence Harvey to do a striptease in the middle of a performance of Hamlet, pay one of the Oxford and Cambridge boat race teams to ram their opponents and wreck the contest, get someone to enter a black panther (farcically disguised as a dog) at Crufts, and so on. Eventually the Grands set out on a cruise to New York on the liner The Magic Christian, where all manner of strange events start to occur – but is all as it seems? (Hint: no it isn’t, but by this point you will have stopped caring anyway.)

Apart from Sellers and Starr, most of those big names in the cast list turn up for only one or two scenes, and it is a general rule of thumb that the less time they have on screen, the better they come across, as the script for this movie is so slapdash and lousy that hardly any of them can do much with this material. I suppose this excuses most of them, with the possible exception of John Cleese and Graham Chapman: they wrote an earlier version of the script (later replaced by one written by McGrath and Terry Southern, author of the source novel), but the only scenes from this which survived are the ones they appear in – so in a very real sense they are the authors of their own misfortunes here. (This clearly left its mark on Cleese and Chapman: an episode of Monty Python made a couple of years later features an insane, incompetent Scottish film director, and the stage directions in the script drily make clear that he ‘in no way resembles J. McGrath.’)

Some of the more lavishly silly sequences in The Magic Christian do kind of anticipate Python at its most absurd – there’s a bit where Grand goes partridge hunting using an ack-ack gun and a flame-thrower – but the film has a kind of laboriousness about it that takes away most of the fun; much of the humour also comes across as rather problematic, too (many jokes seem racist, sexist, or homophobic).

This is because it seems to be battering away at a supposedly subversive message about how money-obsessed the great and the good of society are. (This is possibly not the most dazzlingly original insight in the annals of British satire.) One has to remember the film was made at the end of the 1960s and does embody, awkwardly, something of the hippy ideal of not being materialist or acquisitive. However, if this film was a person, it would be Sid James dragged up as a hippy at the end of Carry On Camping – the costume is just about right, and he’s saying some of the right words, but it is plainly a disguise and a deeply unconvincing one. It feels more like a hippy exploitation film than a genuine attempt to make a satire embodying the philosophy of the counter-culture – even if it is, it is hopelessly naive and unsubtle.

There is the odd mildly amusing moment scattered through the film – the scene where Roman Polanski encounters a rather unexpected cabaret singer is perhaps the closest it gets to being laugh-out-loud funny – and I suppose Peter Sellers deserves some kind of credit for delivering a solid comic performance that does as much as anything to hold the film together. But even so, this is one sixties artefact which has not aged well, mainly because it was never any good at the time. Paul Merton once went on TV to defend The Magic Christian, suggesting it has a reputation as a bad movie because it has been smeared by various establishment film critics offended by its all-purpose irreverence. Paul, I hate to contradict you, but I have to disagree: The Magic Christian‘s reputation as a bad movie stems mainly from the fact it is a bad movie.

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An Off Day

The actor, writer, director and much else Chris Morris surely landed himself a place on the worth-keeping-an-eye-on list of any sensible person many, many years ago, following his work on On the Hour, The Day Today, Brass Eye, Jam, and much else – this is before we even get to his 2009 movie Four Lions, a film which takes some of the most dubious subject matter imaginable and still manages to be thoughtful, touching, and above all very funny. Suffice to say that expectations were high for his new film, The Day Shall Come. It should not come as a great surprise that the new film has been written, directed, and co-produced by Morris himself; he’s that sort of perfectionist – nor should it really be a shock that much of the film was apparently made in secret in the Dominican Republic, given that Morris was briefly something of a hate-figure for the British tabloid press.

Not on the poster but still the biggest performer in the film (in terms of profile if not actual stature) is Anna Kendrick, who plays FBI agent Kendra Glack. Based out of Miami, Glack is predominantly concerned with a peculiar string of operations where the FBI, for reasons of publicity and political expediency, engages in what is obviously entrapment of a string of nobodies, encouraging them to commit terror-related offenses so they can then swoop in and heroically arrest them at the last minute. No-one on the team seems minded to question the deeply compromised nature of their activities.

Next up on the task force’s list of targets is Moses Al Shabazz (Marchant Davis), who may be a cult leader, might be a preacher, is definitely a psychiatric patient who’s stopped taking his meds, but certainly isn’t any kind of threat to the fabric of society (no matter how fondly he thinks of himself as one). Moses lives in a commune/mission/farm in the middle of the Miami projects, practising a bizarre syncretic religion venerating an amalgamation of Jesus, Allah, ‘Black Santa’ and General Toussaint L’Ouverture. At first he seems a hapless, delusional figure, but one of the points the film makes (if perhaps not strongly enough) is that he has, in a small way, been a force for social good, persuading a number of young men to give up their gang lifestyle and guns and join his ‘movement’; he is also clearly a loving husband and father.

Still, farming in inner-city Miami is not exactly booming and the commune is forced to live off discarded food scavenged from local fast food restaurants, while there is also the issue of paying the rent on the mission building. And thus Moses falls into the orbit of the FBI and its network of collaborators and informants. Completely against his principles and the wishes of his wife (Danielle Brooks), Moses finds himself urged to engage in all kinds of dubious dealings – accepting guns from fictitious IS-supporting sheikhs, acting as middle-man in sales of nuclear material, and so on, in exchange for rent money for his home. But can he actually go through with it? And if he does, are the authorities competent enough to actually arrest their man?

You can definitely see the similarities between The Day Shall Come and Four Lions – Moses and his followers are the same kind of hapless fantasists as the earlier film’s wannabe jihadist martyrs – but I regret to say that it seems to me that the new film falls considerably short of the same standards. To be honest, it’s the first thing I can remember Morris being responsible for which is actually sub-par, in the sense that you can kind of see what it’s trying to do, but it’s also very clear that it’s just not succeeding.

You can see the film comes from a serious place, wanting to explore and expose the absurd workings of the American justice system, and doubtless also touch on issues of race and prejudice in modern America. But the thing is the film is also obviously attempting to function as a genuine comedy as well. There’s nothing wrong with doing comedy about serious issues, especially if you’re a satirist (which is probably one of the things Morris has on his passport), but with any kind of comedy the bottom line is that you have to be funny. That’s the entry fee, the sine qua non of the form. The Day Shall Come is just not consistently funny enough to work on those terms. There are certainly some amusing moments, and you can make out the kind of absurdist, Kafkaesque satire it probably wants to be – but, and these are words I never really expected to be typing, Morris seems to be trying a bit too hard to court a mainstream audience, including various sight-gags and other obvious bits of business, presumably to compensate for the fact that much of the plot is relatively complex and serious. It’s okay to be funny about serious issues; many great films have been the result. But far too often The Day Shall Come is just self-consciously silly, and the resulting tonal mismatch really does the film no favours at all.

It’s also a problem that the film never quite takes off as a piece of cinema, either – obviously, there is a developing storyline which builds up to a proper climax, but this always feels rather more like a string of comedy sketches of varying quality. For a film about such American issues, it always feels curiously British in sensibility, regardless of the fact the only British performer prominent in it is Kayvan Novak. It also feels like a film which is concerned with issues which would have felt much more urgent ten or fifteen years ago – if you want to do satire about the US government now, well, good luck in finding a way to be more depressingly absurd than reality: the inner workings of the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security really feel like quite small potatoes.

Still, Morris clearly feels quite passionate about this, even if it’s hard to share his commitment to it. I’m struggling to find very positive things to say, obviously, but the film does manage to hold together as a narrative and you can glimpse the clever, absurd film he was looking to create. I should also say that Anna Kendrick is obviously working immensely hard to lift the material she has been given. Passion and hard work can only take you so far, though. It’s a little difficult to work out what exactly has gone wrong with The Day Shall Come, beyond the fact that it’s just not funny or clever enough, but go wrong it certainly has.

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