Category Archives: Now Showing

Now Showing

ROSARIO

Producers: Phillip Braun, Javier Chapa and Jon Silk   Director: Felipe Vargas   Screenplay: Alan Trezza   Cast: Emeraude Toubia, José Zúñiga, Diana Lein, Emilia Faucher, Paul Ben-Victor, David Dastmalchian, Constanza Gutierrez, Nick Ballard, Luna Baxter and Guillermo Garcia   Distributor: Mucho Mas Media

Grade: C

This is essentially just a jump-scare horror flick, but it’s given a patina of seriousness by a thread about the lengths to which immigrants will go to reach the U.S. and provide their children with a chance to succeed, and the children’s tendency to ignore their debt to the previous generation when they do.

Alan Trezza’s script begins in 1999 Brooklyn, where young Rosario Fuentes (Emilia Faucher) is being feted with a party on the day of her first communion; her joyful father Oscar (José Zúñiga) has invited all his friends and relatives for the festivities, but amidst the pleasantries her mother Elena (Diana Lein) is obviously ill, and her unsmiling crone of a grandmother Griselda (Constanza Gutierrez) is hostile—and mysteriously wounded. 

Cut to the present, and Rose (Emeraude Toubia), as she now calls herself, is a successful, upscale New York stockbroker.  She’s on reasonably good terms with Oscar, having chosen to live with him when her parents divorced.  But Elena has since died, and Rose is estranged from Griselda, whom she rarely visits and whose calls she avoids taking.

Rose receives a call at work one day from Marty (Paul Ben-Victor), the super at Griselda’s run-down apartment building, who tells her that her grandmother has died and a family member should be present when the ambulance arrives to remove the body, which he and Griselda’s across-the-hall neighbor Joe (David Dastmalchian) have placed on a couch.  After calling her father, she braves an incoming snowstorm to reach the building, where the elevator doesn’t work and the electricity flickers on and off sporadically.  Marty is a surly type who criticizes her for not visiting the old lady more often, while Joe is shy—Marty says he’s ill—and seems interested only in retrieving an air fryer Griselda had borrowed.

The apartment is a wreck, and the sight Griselda’s gruesome corpse is frightening in the moonlight; Rose has to settle in for a long wait as the blizzard rages outside and the ambulance is delayed.  There are spooky noises and inexplicable occurrences, like sudden apparitions (disembodied hands, creepy-crawly things) and appearances by the spirit of Elena, with whom Rose tries to make peace.  Investigating the place, she finds a secret tunnel behind a closet door that contains the paraphernalia of the religion that Griselda practiced—Palo, an eclectic mixture of African tradition, Catholicism and Spiritism widespread in Cuba but also found in Mexico, which, an opening caption informs us, is typical in having aspects of light and darkness.  Rose uses her laptop to research the religion—her findings are helpfully passed along to those of us who are unfamiliar with it—and comes to suspect that Griselda used it to influence her life, even perhaps to lay a curse on her.

The horror escalates exponentially as Oscar finally arrives at the apartment, as also does Kobayende, a powerful spirit god in the Palo mythology; their presence is the catalyst for revelations about Rosario’s past and the efforts exerted by her family to protect her, both during the harrowing crossing of the border and after they reach relative safety in New York.  In the process the roles that Griselda, Oscar and Elena played are made clear, and Rose must come to terms with and learn from them.

All of that, this is presented through the horror tropes director Felipe Vargas relies on throughout, most—like the worms, maggots and crawling hands—realized through practical effects, though CGI is employed in the apparitions.  The film, shot in Colombia aside from a few New York exterior shots, boasts a gloomy, sinister look via Carlos Osorio’s production design and Carmen Cabana’s cinematography, which among other elements includes some complex steadicam tracking shots, like the elaborate trip through the opening communion festivities.  But despite the twists in the final reel, the plot is overall a pretty threadbare affair, and Vargas and editor Claudio Castello find it difficult to maintain tension even over a brief running-time.  The score by Will Blair and Brooke Blair hits the many jump scares of figures popping up from outside the frame or behind the principals in the obvious ways.

This is in largely a one-woman show, and Toubia carries things quite well, bringing considerable intensity to a character who could have been more fully written; she has trouble pulling off the abrupt turn Rosario takes at the very close.  Ben-Victor and Dastmalchian fail to instill Marty and Joe with the creepiness that’s obviously intended, but Zúñiga, Lein and Gutierrez manage to catch the shifting personas of Rose’s elder family members.

Except for its use of an unusual religion, Palo, to drive the plot, “Rosario” is a fairly conventional exercise in confined-space horror marked by a heavy use of jump scares.  But its reference to immigrant experience does give it some added heft, even if that plot element isn’t handled in a particularly deep way.                 

Now Showing

THE SHROUDS

Producers: Saïd Ben Saïd, Martin Katz and Anthony Vaccarello   Director: David Cronenberg   Screenplay: David Cronenberg   Cast: Vincent Cassel, Diane Kruger, Guy Pearce, Sandrine Holt, Elizabeth Saunders, Jennifer Dale, Jeff Yung, Eric Weinthal, Vieslav Krystyan and Ingvar Sigurdsson   Distributor: Janus/Sideshow

Grade: B

“How dark are you willing to go?” is a question that David Cronenberg has been asking audiences for more than fifty years.  Some viewers have responded enthusiastically to the invitation to follow him, even when the director has taken his exploration of forces that transform the human body from within and without to extreme levels.  Others have declined, finding even his more conventional, accessible films too chilly, austere and obscure for their taste and his more distinctive offerings repellent.        

In “The Shrouds” Cronenberg puts the question into the mouth of his protagonist Karsh Relikh (Vincent Cassel), who’s made up to look a bit like the director and has suffered the loss of his wife, as Cronenberg has.  But one shouldn’t try to take the comparison very far.

Karsh delivers the line near the film’s opening, after an introductory scene set in the office of his dentist (Eric Weinthal), who informs him that his teeth are rotting from grief.  Perhaps in response, he goes on a date set up by the doctor, hosting Myrna (Jennifer Dale) at an elegant restaurant situated incongruously in the middle of a cemetery.  He explains that though he’s had a career as a maker of technical films, he now owns both the restaurant and its odd locale, a very unusual cemetery indeed. 

As his wife Rebecca (Diane Kruger) was being prepared for burial, he says, he felt the urge to get into the coffin with her.  So he designed a system that simulated doing so: called GraveTech, it involves covering the corpse in a shroud equipped with a scanning system that provides an extraordinarily detailed feed (“encrypted, pun intended,” he adds) recording the body’s deterioration.  “I’m in the grave with her,” Karsh says, which will become truer when after his death he will be buried beside her.  The other tombstones are similarly equipped, allowing bereaved families equally intimate connection with their dearly departed.

Sandra is intrigued, but is apparently uninterested in a second date.  Karsh instead spends some time with his sister-in-law Terry Gelernt (also Kruger), Rebecca’s twin, who abandoned her career as a veterinarian and is now a dog groomer, a job she finds more amenable.  She also occasionally boards canines while their owners are away.  He shares with her his concerns about some odd growths he’s noticed in the recent scans of his wife’s bones.  Are they caused by the cancer that ended her life, or something more sinister?  Otherwise he’s content to have his life kept in order by Hunny (also voiced by Kruger), a virtual assistant created for him by his brother-in-law Maury Entrekin (Guy Pearce), Terry’s technically adept but emotionally neurotic ex-husband.  He also, however, experiences flashbacks—or waking hallucinations—of Rebecca returning from her treatments, parts of her body removed and pained by his attempt to hug her brittle bones.       

Karsh is soon confronted by a serious business problem: someone has desecrated the cemetery, toppling over some of the headstones and disrupting the scanners’ transmissions.  His project director Gray Foner (Elizabeth Saunders) will handle reconstruction and customer relations, but he will have to deal with larger issues—the expansion of the GraveTech system throughout the world, including to a site in Budapest proposed by a terminally ill mogul, Karoly Szabo (Vieslav Krystan), whose blind wife Soo-Min (Sandrine Holt) comes to Toronto to confer with him.  The two develop a warm friendship that seems destined to develop into something more intense, especially after Karsh discovers that his planned burial plot is already occupied by the corpse of Dr. Jerry Eckler (Steve Switzman), Rebecca’s oncologist, with whom she was having an affair during her illness but who has suddenly disappeared.

The plot gravitates into conspiratorial territory when Maury detects that someone has hacked into the GraveTech system, perhaps from Iceland, where Karsh’s associate Elvar (Ingvar Sigurdsson) reports to him about a cemetery site there.  But Maury is an unreliable source, suspicious that Karsh is having an affair with Terry, with whom he hopes to reconcile.  He also claims to be controlling Hunny and to have worked with those who desecrated the cemetery, a group he identifies with Russian interests.  Karsh also comes to suspect the motives of the Chinese firm that has provided financial backing for GraveTech, as well as Dr. Rory Zhao (Jeff Yung), another of Rebecca’s oncologists, whom he consults about those inexplicable growths on his dead wife’s bones.  The upshot is a suggestion that Chinese and Russian intelligence services might be attempting to develop the Shroud technology into a surveillance system that would go beyond the dead to the wider population.  And Terry, a conspiracy theorist, encourages that idea.

If all this seems more than a little complicated, that’s because it is, and Cronenberg isn’t interested in tying all he threads together in a neat little package.  His purpose, as usual, is to provoke thought about the human condition, not merely to shock, and as usual he’s willing to admit that the questions he poses are really insoluble. There are elements of horror here—the close-ups of decaying bodies (and the consequences of Rebecca’s medical treatment) are deeply unsettling, though quite restrained in comparison to the gore-filled excess commonplace in today’s Hollywood shockers.  But “The Shrouds” is a cerebral exercise rather than a visceral thriller, proceeding largely through dialogue rather than action.  But it’s typically Cronenbergian in terms of its themes and preoccupations, and though slow, solemn and ultimately perplexing, it fits perfectly into his remarkable body of work.

It’s also typically elegant.  Carol Spier’s production is frostily beautiful, and set off gorgeously in Douglas Koch’s steely cinematography, the icy visuals italicized by Howard Shore’s brooding score.  Christopher Donaldson’s deliberate editing gives the plot room to unfold without rush, and the cast time to add grace notes to their characters.  Cassel is suitably unflappable as Karsh, while Kruger brings remarkable variety to her multiple roles.  Pearce, having a banner year, makes Maury totally different from the imperious Harrison Van Buren of “The Brutalist”—weak, querulous, and obsessed. The rest of the cast do what is required of them without fuss, including a dog with the incongruous name of Paddington.

“The Shrouds” may not stand among Cronenberg’s best, but it’s a worthy addition to an extraordinary oeuvre that has maintained its unique personality for more than half a century.