When suddenly / Johnny / gets the feeling / he’s being surrounded by / horses, horses, horses, horses / coming in in all directions / white shining silver studs / with their nose in flames / he saw horses, horses, horses, horses, horses, horses, horses, horses…

—Patti Smith, “Land”

Once in a great while, a horror film emerges that seems to crystallize an exact moment in the American experience, turning over rocks to expose the squirming maggots that were hitherto unacknowledged. Take Shelter is that sort of film, a work of cinema that seems to perceive the fears of 2011 almost intuitively and give them a vivid, disturbing expression. George Romero achieved a similar feat in 1968 with Night of the Living Dead, and Tobe Hooper did it again in 1974 with The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Like a young Romero or Hooper, writer-director Jeff Nichols operates outside the confines of the Hollywood studio system, and like his predecessors he seems remarkably attuned to the anxieties that lurk in the American consciousness. While Take Shelter is a much more polished film than the gritty Living Dead or Chainsaw Massacre, and a much more understated kind of horror story, it possesses a similar, disturbing genuineness.

Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of Take Shelter is the elegant operation of its story on two discrete levels that mingle and reinforce one another. One the one hand is what might be termed the Dream Reality of Curtis’ nightmarish visions. In that reality, the threats are fantastical and attuned to fairly classical horror film conventions. On the other hand is the Waking Reality of Curtis’ daily life, where the threats are of the everyday variety that anyone might confront. The brilliance of Nichols’ script rests on how it employs the particular strengths of each of these realities to create a very powerful, emotionally resonant story.

At the most rudimentary level, horror films function by giving form to everyday human fears: our fear of sexual violation becomes a vampire; our fear of uncontrolled rage becomes a werewolf; our fear of nuclear annihilation becomes a colossal mutant reptile. If a horror film can be said to have a function beyond mere entertainment, it is to provide catharsis for these fears, a safe space where they can be unleashed and subdued. Through the horror genre, the viewer experiences a world in which their worst anxieties are allowed to run rampant, only to be defeated in the end. There are endless variations on this formula—and, of course, in the current cynical era, the monster often wins—but in general, this is the template according to which horror films operate.

The Dream Reality of Take Shelter hews to that template, and it is very effective at evoking old-school, spine-tingling scares. Granted, there is no specific monster in Curtis’ visions, no vampire or werewolf. The threat is a force, an oncoming apocalyptic storm. The nature of the storm is mysterious—there is no explanation as to whether it represents a scientific or supernatural phenomenon—but Curtis knows that it is Bad with a capital “B”. He can feel in his bones that something terrible is going to happen when the storm arrives, and based on what the viewer witnesses in his visions, it’s hard to disagree. Those visions feature vivid and haunting imagery: thick, oily rain; arcs of lightning; flocks of birds; warping gravity; funnel clouds reaching down from the sky. The film is relatively restrained about the use of this imagery, and as a result the emotional effect it elicits is very potent. That said, the most frightening aspect of Curtis’ dream-storm is the effect it has on living things. The family pet turns into bloodthirsty beast, townspeople transform into a frenzied mob, and a beloved spouse becomes a psychotic killer.

The fear of apocalypse is an old subject in horror cinema, but an apocalypse doesn’t necessarily point to a literal physical destruction of the Earth or of human civilization. It can denote a traumatic upheaval or the re-alignment of society into something unrecognizable and frightening. It’s no accident that Night of the Living Dead came along in 1968, when America was seized by a pervasive fear of open race war and of a strange counter-culture that set itself in direct opposition to the dominant ideology. There was a sense that the country was on the cusp of a violent transformation.

In the same way that Living Dead gave expression to the fears of its era, Take Shelter offers an apocalyptic scenario that seems eerily fitting for a twenty-first century of rising extremism, diminishing resources, and environmental devastation. Proximally, Curtis fears that the approaching storm from his visions will harm his family (or change them). However, beneath the surface, the storm represents a swirling mass of contemporary horrors: suicide bombings, regime changes, oil shortages, global epidemics, changing climate, tainted food. It is every looming upheaval that is beyond an ordinary American’s ability to control. Moreover, given that Nichols quite deliberately sets his film in a small-town Heartland setting, the storm carries an undercurrent of Red State anxiety about the racial, religious, and cultural composition of the country. The apocalypse becomes a demographic one: What will happen when we wake up one day and discover that They—the Muslim, the immigrant, the liberal, the gay—outnumber Us?

The film’s Dream Reality is so successful at evoking these anxieties precisely because it does not overstate them. Curtis’ visions function first and foremost as a source of sensory terror. They have a weird vagueness about them that seems to suggest a bad dream. There is that dream-like sense of beginning in media res, and a heightened awareness that something is wrong. There is a plausibility to the surrealism: I dreamed that I was standing in the kitchen. And you were there. And you were soaking wet. And you didn’t say anything. And there was a knife on the counter. And you turned towards the knife… The design of Curtis’ dream sequences creates a very disturbing psychological effect, as it taps directly into the viewer’s first-hand experience with nightmares. There is no need to evoke any of the specific fears noted above, because the Dream Reality contains all of them. Curtis’ visions are simply about the World Going Bad. The normal becomes abnormal, and chaos reigns.

If Take Shelter were merely a story about an evil storm that strikes a small town, it would likely still be an effective horror film. What makes it a great film is how Nichols relates Curtis’ Dream Reality to his Waking Reality. The storm is not a threat that roams about physically menacing the characters, as a normal horror movie monster would. Instead, it is locked inside Curtis’ mind, a phantom threat (although it feels all-too-real to Curtis). This returns the film to the territory of a mundane small-town American drama, and something closer to reality, where fear itself is the enemy. It’s not the storm that tears Curtis’ family, work, and life apart, but his own fear, and the succession of poor decisions he makes when he tries to confront that fear on his own.

While the terrors of the Dream Reality are apocalyptic in nature, the terrors of the Waking Reality are more intensely personal. Take Shelter is in large part a tragedy about a person who is losing their mind… and is perfectly, horribly conscious of it. This is a fairly unique thing in cinema. There are numerous films featuring unreliable protagonists whom the viewer follows down the rabbit hole of madness, but most of these hapless characters are not aware of what is happening to them. Moreover, in most instances, there is some horrible trauma or stress that is the cause of the character’s break with reality. Darren Aronofsky’s recent film Black Swan provides an interesting contrast. That film presents a portrait of a mind cracking under the colossal pressures of rivalry and perfectionism at the most elite levels of professional ballet. Needless to say, those are pressures that most viewers will never experience. In comparison, Curtis in Take Shelter appears to be an easygoing working-class family man. He has no particular strains beyond those experienced by just about every member of America’s Ninety-Nine Percent. Which is, of course, part of the genius of Nichols’ script: It uses Curtis’ mental illness to delve into a host of everyday anxieties that are all-too-familiar. The threat of the evil storm in the Dream Reality is still present, but layered over it are the much more immediate and relatable threats of the Waking Reality.

Curtis fears that his own mind has become a kind of runaway genetic locomotive, barreling towards a future in which he is transformed from a provider into a burden. Suddenly, everything that was good and decent in his life, everything that his friend Dewart claimed to envy, is under threat. If he is indeed losing his mind, how long will he be able to keep his job? If he loses his job, he loses his health insurance, and his daughter Hanna loses her chance at hearing. If his mental condition gets bad enough, if they find him wandering the streets like his mother, will his wife Samantha be able to support him? Curtis’ psychiatric crisis throws into relief the instability just beneath the surface of the American Dream, taking the film beyond the shapeless fears of the Dream Reality and into to the more urgent fears of being one paycheck away from calamity.

And yet despite Curtis’ awareness that his frightening visions are most likely the product of chemical imbalances in his brain, he can’t stop preparing for the storm. He knows that building a shelter for a storm that is not real is the textbook definition of crazy, he knows it makes no sense, but he still feels compelled to do it. This, ultimately is the primal fear at the root of the Waking Reality: the fear of the disintegration of the rational mind, of losing one’s identity to biological forces that are beyond one’s control. It’s the fear of madness, but also the fear of addiction, the fear of dementia—any condition which in which the mind is in revolt, in which we cannot explain why we do the things we do. It’s the terror of becoming That Guy, the one who used to be so normal… Take Shelter provides us with a rare reverse-shot glimpse of That Guy. It is the untold story behind the gossip that most people in town will hear, about the night that Curtis lost it at the Lion’s Club supper.

The essential tragedy of Take Shelter is that Curtis’ behavior is both perfectly reasonable and utterly foolish, often at the same time. If one examine Curtis’ actions dispassionately, they make a kind of pragmatic sense in light of his visions. He reacts reasonably to the information he has at his disposal. When he dreams that the family dog attacks him, he responds in the waking world by fencing the dog up in the backyard, and then eventually giving it away. Although Curtis’ visions are probably a figment of his own diseased mind, his behavior is not erratic. He’s not running around with tinfoil on his head and his pajamas on backwards. He’s preparing as best he can for a storm he doesn’t fully understand. It’s hard to argue with his logic. To wit: His dreams suggest that something about the storm will drive people to homicidal madness. Maybe it’s something in the air? Better get some gas masks.

However, even assuming that Curtis’ visions are real omens, and not just short-circuiting neurons, his is a pitiable situation. Nichols is an Arkansas native, and both this film and his first feature, Shotgun Stories, reveal that he has a keen grasp of the small-town milieu and all its corresponding psychological baggage. He depicts a good-natured but essentially blinkered and reactionary society that is ill-prepared for one of its own to suddenly begin behaving in a way that falls outside accepted norms. The film observes a rural America with little infrastructure for people suffering from mental illness, a feeble safety net for families suddenly hobbled by an incapacitated breadwinner, and zero patience for dealing with anyone who strays outside a narrow range of tolerated behavior.

Curtis’s isolation from those around him marks Take Shelter as part of a larger tradition of independent American films about people with an intense, fearful worldview that separates them from loved ones and members of the community. Other entries in this sub-genre include: Bill Paxton’s Frailty, about a blue-collar single father who believes he must slay demons concealed in human form; Todd Haynes’ Safe, about a housewife who is obsessed with the idea that environmental chemicals are eroding her health; and Michael Tolkin’s The Rapture, about a woman whose fanatical belief in Armageddon leads her to reject both life and God. All of these films share a mood of intense alienation, where a Cassandra-like character finds themselves the lonely steward of a terrible truth.

No matter how unfortunate Curtis’ situation is, no matter how unsympathetic the townsfolk who surround him are, some of the blame for his plight rests with Curtis himself. He permits his own dumb Midwestern pride to overrule his common sense, and as a result he stubbornly (and disastrously) conceals his fears and his plans from his wife and friends. He refuses to explain himself, to admit to the diagnosis that he freely makes to the psychologist at the clinic, or even speak the word: schizophrenia. Admittedly, he’s been dealt a lousy hand, in the form of a genetic predisposition to mental illness. However, he allows his fear of that illness to cloud his judgment, and makes some spectacularly bad decisions that reverberate and cause even more hardship for him. The viewer sympathizes with Curtis, because they have seen the horrifying visions he’s seen, but they cannot excuse his mistakes: his deceptions, his abuse of trust, and his systematic alienation of everyone around him. This, of course, is why fear is the mind-killer: It makes a bad situation even worse.

And what of the film’s final scene? What does it mean? Were Curtis’ visions real prophecies all along? Was he ever really insane? Does this mean that he’s been proven right in the end? Digging too deeply into the intellectual meaning of the film’s final moments upsets what is essentially a perfect emotional conclusion to Curtis’ story. The true narrative climax of the film occurs earlier, in the storm shelter. Curtis finally confronts the crippling fear inside him with Samantha’s help and opens the door to face whatever is on the outside. The tornado may not have done any significant damage, but that’s beside the point: The intensity of the storm shelter sequence stems from the viewer’s shared terror with Curtis down there in the dark. At that moment, it’s unclear which would be worse: To find an apocalyptic landscape behind that door, or nothing unusual at all? By the final scene on the beach, the film has already offered that essential moment of narrative tension and release. Curtis has changed, because he’s let Samantha into that most shameful place and faced his fear with her aid. He’s no longer alone. There’s horror in the realization that the apocalypse actually is coming, but there is also relief and resolve. David Wingo’s magnificent, rising score in that final scene reveals as much. It’s a moment of power and perfection, reflected in the simple fact that Samantha only has to utter one word, “Okay.” That one word says so much: “I see it too. I believe you. I’m with you. We’re ready for what’s coming.”

For a little over four years now, I’ve been using the Gateway Cinephiles blog to pour out my thoughts about virtually every film I’ve seen theatrically during that period, and a good chunk of the films I’ve watched in my own home. The motivations to engage in this project have been numerous: the personal gratification of having a self-motivated commitment to fulfill; a desire to hone my writing craft in a forum where it is constantly open to criticism; and a rather egotistical certainty that I had something interesting to say about cinema.

My efforts to make the Gateway Cinephiles blog a space of depth, integrity, and singular perspective haven’t gone unnoticed. Writing for this blog has has allowed me to makes some wonderful connections in the St. Louis film community, and provided a (ahem) gateway to a freelance job with the St. Louis Magazine arts blog, Look/Listen.

That job is going to be demanding more of my time in 2012, as I provide reviews, retrospectives, festival coverage, and other posts at Look/Listen. Given that commitment—not to mention obligations to my family, the demands of my day job, and the other interests I want to pursue—I can no longer provide content to the Gateway Cinephiles blog on a regular basis. To put it simply, something has to give, and unfortunately that something is Gateway Cinephiles. It’s a purely elective pursuit, albeit an enjoyable one.

I’ll still be posting here sporadically, when the mood strikes me or I have something vital to say about the current cinema that isn’t appropriate for Look/Listen. Nothing is forever, so in the event that I have a loosening of commitments elsewhere, I might someday return to blogging on a routine schedule at Gateway Cinephiles.

Thanks to all my readers. I’ll be posting links on Facebook to my Look/Listen pieces and to any future, occasional essays here, so feel free to track me down and friend me if you want to keep track of my future writings.

Andrew Wyatt
January 3, 2012

My annual year-in-review feature is up at Look/Listen. Check it out. You’ll discover the cinema that was great, good, overrated, and worth another look in 2011.

An argument can be made that David Fincher’s adaptation of Steig Larsson’s phenomenally popular pulp whodunit, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, is an exercise in style over substance. Certainly, the film’s opening credit sequence lends credence to this position: Yeah Yeah Yeahs vocalist Karen O growls out a cover of Led Zepellin’s “Immigrant Song” as oily black liquid oozes over human figures that are embraced and penetrated by writhing computer cables. It’s jarringly reminiscent of a James Bond opening, and perhaps a sly inter-textual joke at that, given that leading man Daniel Craig is serving as the current 007. The rest of the film is only moderately less brash.

However, such aggressive styling proves to be a tick-mark in the film’s favor, at least when one considers it alongside both the source material and Niel’s Arden Oplev’s comparatively flat, mirthless 2009 Swedish film adaptation. Under Oplev’s hand, Larsson’s grim tale of buried family secrets and socialist democracy gone freakishly awry was many things—workmanlike, satisfactory, disposable—but stylish it was not. The most valuable card up the sleeve of the 2009 film was Noomi Rapace, who embodied waifish, wounded hacker-sleuth Lisbeth Salander with eerie precision and a curious kind of dark magnetism.

Fincher’s take doesn’t add any appreciable depth to Larsson’s tale, and in this respect it is remarkably similar to the Swedish film. Screenwriter Steve Zallian wisely excises the Scandinavian politics and finance that dominated hefty stretches of the novel. Such components are arguable crucial for understanding the wider context of Larrson’s story, but what is digestible on the page is probably unworkable in a film. Zallian also trims and tweaks the narrative in other ways, mostly to make the story a little smoother and more symmetrical. From a thematic perspective, however, the new film is unsophisticated, offering little beyond the visceral appeal of an unsolved mystery, seat-squirming tension, and a streak of white-hot pseudo-feminist rage.

Insofar as this is the extent of what any version of the The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo could offer, David Fincher’s film is an unquestionably handsome and persuasive realization of the tale. It’s visually striking, crisply conveyed, and blessed with a lucid, seductive aesthetic and mood, which is more than one can say of most murder mysteries. Rooney Mara—slinky and wide-eyed beneath ghostly eyebrows—conveys her own variation of Lisbeth, more shrinking, awkward, and defensive than Rapace’s portrayal, but also more fearsome and razor-edged when provoked. Beyond Mara and Craig the film features a cast of familiar faces—Christopher Plummer, Stellan Skarsgård, and Robin Wright among them—as well as Swedish stars and long-lost character actors (Julian Sands!), all of whom acquit themselves well enough. (Perhaps the film’s only formal blunder is the vaguely accented English dialog, which is distracting given the explicit decision to retain the Swedish setting.)

The real stars here, however, are the craftsmen behind the film, a team of returning Fincher collaborators who manage to render a stomach-churning tale of rape, murder, and revenge as something deliriously attractive. Cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth bestows a familiar yellowish “greasy-gothic” look to most of the interior spaces, but elsewhere a chilly gray dominates, and appropriately so. The adroit editing from Kirk Baxter and Angus Wall—who have now cut the director’s past four films—keeps things humming along with enviable vigor and clarity, a necessary asset in a story so laden with exposition. Just as essential is the score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, which effectively evokes an atmosphere of pure wrongness by layering plucked-out, discordant melodies over ambient droning and buzzing. These various visual and aural elements coalesce (perhaps “curdle” is a better term) into an atmosphere that is oppressive, gnawing, and eminently fitting for the tale. And therein lies the primary appeal of The Girl With a Dragon Tattoo: As a lurid, shallow thriller steeped in hideous beauty.

My review of Tomas Alfredson’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is up at Look/Listen. Check it out.

Adapting the beloved Tintin stories to film has been a passion project for Steven Spielberg for nearly three decades. The director first sought to option the work of Belgian comic artist Hergé in 1983, after the runaway success of Raiders of the Lost Ark and E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial had solidified Spielberg’s reputation as a Hollywood powerhouse. Twenty-eight years is a staggeringly long time for a film to languish in Development Hell, but the feature that has finally emerged, The Adventures of Tintin, is no worse the wear for its long gestation. In fact, Tintin is that rarest of things in this era when aggressive, directionless ugliness dominates the cinema of big-budget spectacle: a work in which cutting-edge technology allows a genuine film artist to express themselves without the usual analog limitations. It’s telling that the seeds of Tintin were planted by the Steven Spielberg of 1983, a man who had so recently given the world Raiders, one of the most perfect action-adventure films of all time. The Adventures of Tintin—which is, astonishingly, the first animated feature of the director’s career—gives splendid, ebullient expression to the same rousing spirit of derring-do that suffused the first chapter of the Indiana Jones saga. Moreover, Tintin finds the veteran director newly empowered by the potential of the digital film-making space, where his camera can be anywhere and move in any way he might imagine.

Adored in his native Belgium and among comics aficionados the world over, the eponymous Tintin is a young reporter of uncertain age and boundless pluck, who has an affinity for stumbling into globe-trotting adventures with his loyal wire fox terrier, Snowy. Adapted by a trio of British screenwriters—Steven Moffat, Joe Cornish, and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World director Edgar Wright—The Adventures of Tintin incorporates three of Hergé’s Tintin stories: The Crab with the Golden Claws, The Secret of the Unicorn, and Red Rackham’s Treasure. Apart from amalgamating the various plot elements from these books, the only significant change that the script makes to the source material is to switch Tintin’s nationality from Belgian to British, an alteration that is no doubt heretical among more impassioned devotees of the ginger-haired journalist. However, this change allows the characters to speak in English without the need for distracting logical leaps, while also preserving the decaying colonial tone of Tintin’s mid-twentieth-century escapades.

The film’s events begin with Tintin’s purchase of an antique model ship, and from there proceed to all manner of chases, escapes, fisticuffs, and shoot-outs, at locales ranging from the streets of London to an ocean freighter to a Moroccan palace. To say more about the story would rob the viewer of one of the primary pleasures of The Adventures of Tintin: A thrilling awareness that the next clue could take Tintin and Snowy anywhere in the world and reveal almost any wonder. Aside from Tintin himself (Jamie Bell), the film features many iconic Hergé characters, including the perpetually soused Captain Haddock (Andy Serkis), the imperious Ivanonvich Sakharine (Daniel Craig), bumbling police inspectors Thompson and Thompson (Simon Pegg and Nick Frost), pickpocket Silk (Toby Jones), and opera diva Bianca Castafiore (Kim Stengel). Created with motion-capture animation from Weta Digital, the film boasts a unique look that is at once realistic and cartoonish. Rather than attempt an animated realization of Hergé’s style, Tintin uses the character designs of the cartoonist’s original stories as a reference point and then extrapolates from there. The result is something that is more soft and natural than the exaggerated plasticity of most computer-animated characters, but also obviously drawn from the traditions of European comic art. As such, it seldom risks the Uncanny Valley of Robert Zemeckis’ digital monsters.

Beyond the characters, the world of The Adventures of Tintin is almost ludicrously detailed and gorgeous, an ever-so-slightly stylized vision of the mid-twentieth century. Unlike the setting of the Indiana Jones films, Tintin’s world is mostly free of supernatural threats, and as such the obstacles that the reporter and his dog confront seem downright prosaic from a twenty-first century vantage. There are encrypted riddles, secret compartments, locked doors, trackless oceans, searing deserts, and lots of goons with guns. Contemporary viewers might ask, “Shouldn’t there be some mummies or aliens in there?” Perish the thought. One of the film’s singular achievements is how marvelously thrilling Tintin’s materially-grounded adventures seem, in part because the work is saturated with such giddy affection for its source material, without being embarrassingly slavish or self-referential. However, it’s also due to Speilberg’s enviable skill at rendering elemental action sequences—e.g. Snowy chasing a truck through the London streets—with breathtaking vigor and wit.

That skill achieves its unrestrained potential in Tintin, as the unfettered director luxuriates in the liberation of his virtual camera. For some film-makers, such freedom can become an excuse for indulgent flourishes and headache-inducing excess. Not so with Spielberg, for while Tintin is often breathless and frenetic, it is also one of the most visually seamless and handsome things that the director has ever created. In short, Spielberg takes to the realms of computer animation like a sailor takes to drink, and the result is by turns jaw-dropping and just plain heavenly. A bravura escape sequence through a desert port on a hill—presented as a single, unbroken shot that swoops through windows and roars down narrow alleys—is probably the most thrilling thing to bear Spielberg’s name since Dr. Jones dangled from the grill of a cargo truck. Tintin’s scene is lessened only by the knowledge that it did not require the blood, sweat, and tears of analog stuntwork.

However, what’s truly novel about Tintin is not the meticulous choreography of its action set pieces—although I am hard-pressed to recall a feature film that is this flat-out gorgeous while also moving very, very fast—but the marriage of its distinctly modern animation approach to a very simple, determinedly old-fashioned story. There’s something almost wistful about the way that Tintin goes to the library to do research (!), and then reads vital exposition aloud for Snowy’s (i.e. the viewer’s) benefit. Quite apart from such quaint details, however, the film impresses with the sheer minimalism of its scenario. Through all the rushing to and fro from one destination to the next—whether by car, boat, or plane—the goal remains clear: Reach the Prize before the Bad Guys. Tintin is presented with a keen awareness that it is not narrative convolutions that draw the viewer into a treasure hunt, but the propulsive progression from A to B to C to X.

Perhaps, in this respect, Tintin risks some flimsiness, for it appears to have no point beyond simply existing as a rollicking action-adventure picture with a Boy Scout’s soul. However, given that such pictures are so rare, and almost never this luscious and smartly-crafted, it seems woefully hardhearted to grouse that Tintin lacks depth. Of course it lacks depth: It’s a Boy’s Own tale brought to glorious life. Other problems do weigh on Tintin here and there. The film possesses all the rhythmic hiccups that one might expect from the first of two feature-length films adapted from multiple books. (Spielberg and producer Peter Jackson will purportedly be co-directing the second Tintin film.) Moreover, Tintin never scans as a particularly rich character, given that his primary qualities are his utter fearlessness, quick-thinking, and almost super-heroic knack for wriggling out of trouble. Such characteristics make him an excellent hero for the purposes of a breezy adventure tale, but don’t lend him much personality. Of course, Tintin must be an Everylad who can appeal to any viewer who daydreams of sunken galleons and palm-studded oases. In this sense, Tintin’s earnestness and dauntless courage make him exactly the right hero for the film that bears his name. For who wouldn’t like to be so brave in the face of danger; to alternately clobber and maneuver and reason their way out of harrowing situations; and to race across the world in search of fortune and glory, all with a loyal pooch by their side?

Guy Ritchie’s 2009 re-imagining of the Great Detective and his adventures in Victorian London proved to be a luscious guilty pleasure. To be sure, Sherlock Holmes is overstuffed with garishly rendered action sequences and rushed-over plot twists, but the past two years have been unexpectedly kind to the film. Robert Downey, Jr.’s portrayal of Holmes is fittingly charming, while also conveying a man who is supercilious, unpredictable, and deeply unhappy. It’s a performance that never fails to elicit a smile, while revealing the actor’s ability to convey nuanced characterization beneath his trademark rapid-fire witticisms. Moreover, repeat viewings have strengthened the triumph of Sherlock Holmes’ other pleasures: the staggeringly rich production design, the cunning nods to the Holmes Canon, and the sneaky strength of the performances from Jude Law as John Watson and—yes—Rachel McAdams as Irene Adler.

Unfortunately, the new sequel, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, doesn’t possess the same spark as its predecessor, for reasons that are somewhat slippery. The banter between Holmes and Watson is a little slacker, the humor is a little more cartoonish, and returning director Ritchie doubles down on the over-long action sequences that groan under his heedless employment of showy techniques. These include stuttering shifts in speed, smudged and distorted images, CGI zooms on slamming firing pins, and the like. Such flourishes aren’t irksome in isolation, but A Game of Shadows employs them with wearisome consistency. The whole film feels somewhat undernourished and ungainly, especially the script, which is surprising given that Sherlock Holmes’ gaggle of writers (usually an ill omen) has been replaced by a mere duo for A Game of Shadows (Michele and Kieran Mulroney). None of these flaws is glaring, but together they make for a film that doesn’t live up to its potential.

Despite this catalog of gripes, A Game of Shadows works gratifyingly well as an honest-to-goodness sequel. It advances its predecessor’s story in appealing ways, changing the stakes while mostly preserving the inimitable snap-and-crackle tone. (In this, the film recalls, of all things, this year’s Kung Fu Panda 2.) Like the first Sherlock Holmes film, A Game of Shadows takes a peculiar approach to its source material. It cheerfully disregards the Canon while also weaving in a dizzying number of references and allusions to Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories. In particular, the film borrows some of its narrative turns and window dressing from the Holmes tale “The Final Problem”. (If you’re a Holmes purist, it’s probably appalling. If you’re a fan of Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, it will seem familiar.) The new film likewise recreates the style and ground rules of its predecessor. Although it is set in an anachronism-laden and steampunk-tinged England in 1891, A Game of Shadows is nonetheless firmly rooted in the twisted, secular world of cold-blooded criminality. Ghosts and goblins need not apply.

Indeed, the first Sherlock Holmes succeeded in part due to its nimble treatment of the villainous Lord Blackwood (Mark Strong). That film plays Blackwood’s B-movie menace for maximum effect, while also allowing the Great Detective to scoff at the man’s occult-draped theatrics and promise a rational explanation for everything (dutifully delivered by the end). In contrast, A Game of Shadows dispenses with the supernatural trappings altogether, presenting a grim tale of diplomacy, terrorism, and global conflict. It’s almost prosaic stuff compared to black magic and diabolic scions, but fortunately A Game of Shadows features the Canon’s most notorious villain, the esteemed mathematics professor and secret criminal mastermind Professor James Moriarty (Jared Harris, an inspired choice). Moriarty makes a brief appearance in the first film, but for this outing the man Holmes calls the “Napoleon of Crime” is front-and-center.

A Game of Shadows presents Moriarty as a dark reflection of Holmes, an intellectual equal who possesses the respected public persona and daunting political clout that the Great Detective lacks. Moriarty’s reach is seemingly limitless. In one of the film’s most chilling moments, the fiendish professor clears a crowded restaurant simply by clinking his glass. (How does that work? Is every Londoner but Holmes and his allies on the underworld payroll?) A Game of Shadows opens with Holmes and Moriarty already locked in conflict, despite the fact that they have not met face-to-face. Taking place several months after the events of the first film, the sequel finds Holmes more unbalanced than ever, obsessed with the web of crime that he sees radiating out from the professor. Moriarty’s master plan alights on simmering Franco-German antagonism, Continental anarchist plots, and a caravan of French gypsies—including Noomi Rapace as a fortune-teller in search of her missing brother—but the details matter less than the archvillain’s persona.

Harris portrays the professor as unassuming and unflappable on the outside, but vain and sadistic within. It’s no mistake that Moriarty emerges just as Holmes’ loneliness begins to prick him, nor that the professor seems to take pleasure in his crimes on a visceral level, much as Holmes views each case as a personal challenge. Both men seem self-aware that their rivalry is one for the ages, which allows the film to set up some delicious scenes between Downey and Harris. Most memorably, the crescendo of Moriarty’s plot takes place off-screen as he and the Great Detective play chess, with each man narrating the events in the adjacent room. (This also permits Watson, bless his mustache, to play the part of both sleuth and man of action as he unravels Moriarty’s scheme without Holmes’ lead.) It’s a gripping scene, crisply edited and directed by Ritchie with more restraint than elsewhere. And it ends bleakly, in a manner that echoes Yimou Zhang’s martial arts epic Hero. Even as Holmes’ ability to peer into the future with his vaunted logic sidesteps the need for a brawl, it ultimately leads him to one final, inescapable conclusion. It’s a good thing that Ritchie’s playfulness wins out before the credits roll, lest the film be saddled with a discordantly glum ending.

My review of Joann Sfar’s Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life is up at Look/Listen, timed for the film’s five-day run at the Webster University Film Series that begins this Sunday . Check it out.

Sean Durkin’s unsettling, skillfully crafted debut feature, Martha Marcy May Marlene, offers abundant moments of skin-crawling tension. However, it’s not quite accurate to describe the film as a thriller. That generic tag suggests the primacy of a propulsive narrative and stunning reversals, features which the film pointedly lacks. What it in fact presents is a character study of an abused and harrowed psyche, a study that places the viewer deep inside the titular Martha’s dazed, fearful headspace with disquieting ease. The terrors that the film presents are the terrors of the past, which seep up through the ground and distort the present into a narcotic haze. Fully half of the film takes place in flashback, as Martha recalls her horrific experiences in a Manson-like pseudo-spiritual criminal cult. The achievement of the film lies in the befuddled immediacy of Martha’s remembrances, which scramble past and present and leave her (and the viewer) in a state of perpetual raw-nerved paranoia. It is, in essence, an immersive portrait of post-traumatic stress disorder, deftly realized in cinematic form.

The film opens with Martha’s (Elizabeth Olsen) hasty, surreptitious flight on foot from a rural commune, where what little we see—women toiling in mute subservience to the men—suggests something Not Quite Right. Cult member Watts (Brady Corbet) quickly catches up with Martha in town and lays some vague menace on her, but she nonetheless manages to place a tearful call to her estranged older sister, Lucy (Sarah Paulson), who shows up a few hours later and whisks Martha away. This sets up the rest of the film’s framing narrative, in which a shell-shocked Martha takes up hesitant residence at the massive, dreadfully tasteful lakeside summer home of Lucy and husband Ted (Hugh Dancy). There she attempts—with little success—to re-acclimate to the outside world and shake the unnerving sensation that she is being watched. These scenes at the lake house are intercut with flashbacks which gradually reveal the hellish extent of the traumas Martha suffered while in the fold of the cult.

Underneath a flimsy veneer of wooly New Age positivity and utopianism, the cult is exposed as a witch’s brew of misogyny and cynical criminality, all roiling around the father figure of Patrick (John Hawkes), a charming tyrant who viciously rapes each female recruit under the guise of “cleansing” them. The tactics that the cult utilizes to control its members are as old as the hills—a toxic mingling of love, reward, and fear designed to remake each captive into their own jailer—but the film wisely devotes ample time to observing exactly how such emotional terrorism unfolded in Martha’s specific case. This is essential, as it allows the viewer to appreciate Martha’s actions as reasonable given her situation, neatly heading off the incredulous objections that inevitably sprout in any abuse scenario (”Why didn’t she just leave?”). Moreover, the flitting between past and present highlights Martha’s discomfort with the wider world, not to mention her still-fresh dread after escaping a nightmarish situation. Several moments will often pass before it is clear whether a new scene is a flashback or not, a confusion abetted by the film’s often purposely ambiguous framing, lighting, and design. For Martha, the past isn’t even past.

Unfortunately, Lucy and Ted, while initially charitable and patient, are a tad too self-absorbed and suffused with bourgeois sanctimony to provide Martha with the empathy she desperately needs. (They are, after all status-obsessed yuppies, which under the conventions of American indie film marks them as, at best, clueless obstacles to the main character’s liberation.) The film is vague about Martha’s life prior to the cult, suggesting only that it was lonely and troubled. By lecturing her about her lack of ambition and strange behavior, Lucy and Ted provide Martha with daily reminders of why Patrick’s superficially loving and accepting ideology proved so enticing. In her defense, Big Sis is operating under limited information. Martha offers Lucy virtually no explanations for where she has been, even as signs surface that the cult has followed and is now watching her. Panicked second-guessing prevails: Are the nocturnal taps on the roof dropping pinecones, or are they pebbles tossed by cultists, mimicking a common diversion they employed during their bloody home invasions? Martha’s comfort with life in her sister’s house wanes just as her paranoia waxes, leading to an outright meltdown when she mistakes a bartender at a party for a cult spy.

Events eventually spiral towards a conclusion that crackles with tension, although the film refuses to decisively resolve the story. Martha isn’t exactly an unreliable narrator; rather, the ominous signs that crowd the final minutes of the film can reasonably be interpreted as either meaningless occurrences or the telltale rustles of something Very Bad that is about to go down. Like this year’s definitive American film, Meek’s Cutoff, the non-ending of Martha will likely frustrate some viewers accustomed to more concrete resolutions. While Martha never discovers the former film’s philosophical, historical, and mythic depth, the thrust of its final moments is similarly devastating. To a mind battered by trauma—war, torture, abuse—there is no discernible difference between a stranger sitting on the beach and a murderous fanatic bent on dragging you back to Hell.

Into the Abyss might be the closest Werner Herzog will ever come to creating a work of outright agitprop, and yet it’s still light-years from the cinematic polemics of film-makers like Charles Ferguson and Alex Gibney. Herzog’s ambitions are far too multi-faceted and high-minded to indulge in political swipes or straightforward argumentation, even in a film that tackles a topic as contentious as the death penalty in America. At every turn, Into the Abyss proves intriguingly divergent from what one expects from a documentary on a Very Serious Issue, although it is in most respects exactly what one expects from a Werner Herzog documentary.

The entry point for the writer-director’s somber new feature is a shocking and senseless 2001 triple homicide in the Houston suburban-rural fringe community of Conroe, Texas. In separate trials, Jason Burkett and Michael Perry were convicted of committing the murders in the course of a scheme to steal a Camaro, with Burkett being sentenced to life in prison, and Perry to death by lethal injection. In the film, Herzog largely refrains from indulging in his customary lyrical musings, appearing only as the interrogating voice in interviews with Burkett, Perry, and others: family members of victims Sandra Stotler, Adam Stotler, and Jeremy Richardson; law enforcement officials who worked the case; locals who recall encounters with the convicted men; a chaplain and former guard captain from Texas’ Death Row; and Burkett’s advocate-turned-wife, whom he married through the glass in the prison visiting room.

Unlike Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky’s Paradise Lost documentaries about the (now exonerated) West Memphis Three—films that simmered with journalistic agitation and white-hot indignation—Into the Abyss isn’t especially concerned with whether Burkett and Perry actually committed the murders for which they were convicted. Both men maintain that they are not to blame for the brutal triple murder, but both are also weirdly elliptical about what exactly happened, and Herzog doesn’t press them on the matter. The film regards the bloody details of the Conroe slayings not as an end, but a means to a sweeping-yet-intimate rumination on American murder, of both the criminal and state-sanctioned varieties. The tone of Into the Abyss is set in its first interview, wherein the Death Row chaplain—after outlining his solemn duties—describes his encounter with a squirrel on a golf course. The anecdote is sort of absurd, and yet it moves the chaplain to tears as he relates it. In that inimitable Herzog way, the film regards the man’s ache with both vague amusement and deep reverence.

Into the Abyss does not spend its time building a case against the death penalty, despite the director’s declaration early in the film that he finds capital punishment abominable. The film is much more interested in reflecting on death and murder as phenomena, on the way that they reach out with scarlet fingers and touch strange places. This philosophical but human-centered approach allows the film to discover some of the rawest moments in any Herzog film since Little Dieter Needs to Fly. Some of these moments are undeniably potent, as when the former Death Row captain describes his own nervous breakdown following the execution of Carla Faye Tucker in 1998. Other scenes contain a more subjective emotional element: Parents will probably be most sensitive to the confessions of Burkett’s dad, also imprisoned for life, as he tearfully describes his memories of holding his infant son and his realization of his absolute failure as a father.

Such heart-tugging is a far cry from the more cerebral, transcendent cogitations of Encounters at the End of the World and Cave of Forgotten Dreams. As a result, Into the Abyss can’t help but feel a bit facile in comparison. It’s arguably easy to achieve poignancy by pointing a camera at a murder victim’s daughter and asking her to talk about her grief, but, as usual, Herzog’s interview methods—the pregnant pauses, the peculiar questions, the intermittent schoolboy coyness—almost always manage to elicit something unexpected. The film regards moments of searing pain and startling eccentricity with the same awed curiosity.

Into the Abyss seems ordained to invite comparisons to In Cold Blood, but unlike Truman Capote’s celebrated non-fiction novel, it has little to say on the relationship between the two perpetrators. Housed in separate prisons and facing different fates, Burkett and Perry barely acknowledge one another, save for the purposes of shifting blame. In the decade since the murders, Perry has maintained a gawky, adolescent countenance and become a born-again Christian. Personable and polite, he betrays no fear of death, but neither does he exhibit any remorse for his deeds. Nor does Burkett, whom prison life has made thicker and tougher, and who maintains that he will one day be exonerated.

The film reserves it most cockeyed fascination for Burkett’s wife, Melyssa, a glassy-eyed murder groupie who has somehow conceived a child with her husband without ever having been alone in the same room with him. (Herzog, clearly amused, asks about a contraband sperm sample, but gets only a non-denial-denial.) The film regards Melyssa with leery skepticism, but is also beguiled with the idea of life emerging so improbably and even farcically from death. It’s a sentiment embodied even more succinctly in a quintessentially “Herzogian” revelation: When the police attempted to move the impounded Camaro years later, they found that a sapling had grown through the floor and into the car.