Movies
Sundance ’10: Ryan Daley Reflects Back on 6 Films of the Fest
The Sundance Film Festival is traditionally a mixed bag, but this year’s Park City at Midnight line-up was easily one of the strongest I’ve ever seen. Almost all of the movies featured were in some way entertaining, and three of the films were downright excellent. Here’s how I rank the six horror movies I saw at this year’s festival.
The audience at my midnight screening was initially enthusiastic about The Butcher Brothers’ most recent effort, but that enthusiasm soon gave way to disenchantment, and eventually scorn, as the directors took a fun sub-genre (the 70s exploitation film) and stomped all the life out of it. All but impossible to sit through.
Even high production values couldn’t save this one, a sci-fi drama that’s all over the place in terms of tone. Is it a semi-instructional film about how to raise a mutant baby? Or is it a lurid sex flick featuring human-on-mutant groin-slammin’? Hard to tell. A weird mash-up of genres that never quite congeals.
The definition of mediocrity stretched to its breaking point. A couple of amusing scenes try to carry the load, but with the majority of the movie buried under a hapless heap of “who cares?” plot developments, this is a flick that quickly wears out its welcome.
Ryan Reynolds rocks the screen hard in a singular, no-holds-barred performance. Some will question the ending (avoid all reviews if you plan on seeing it), but in the world of tightly-wound, independently financed thrillers, Buried knows no equal.
Like Martyrs, this is torture-porn for the intellectual set. Those who enjoy their cinematic brutality served up with a side of emotional realism are in for a real treat. Sometimes graphic, sometimes restrained, 7 Days is the perfect amalgam of gut-wrenching horror and high art.
After a slow and baggy set-up, director Adam Green really brings the pain for the full remaining hour of his winter extremes horror film, a truly harrowing experience that provokes hours of discussion once the credits have rolled. By the time I left the theater, my armrests were slick with hand sweat.
It’s been eight years since Ari Aster came onto the scene and helped usher in a new wave of horror with Hereditary, one of the rare horror movies from the past ten years that still seems to come up in conversation every single week. And it’s back in the conversation this week, with Ari Aster revealing at an event that he’s already written a prequel to Hereditary!
Ari Aster was on hand at the American Cinematheque for Bleak Week: Cinema of Despair last week, a Los Angeles festival that screened all of Aster’s movies to date. The website Gold Derby reports that Aster revealed the Hereditary prequel script during a Q&A at the event, and you can watch the full Q&A conversation below for confirmation on the website’s report.
“I wrote a prequel to this,” Aster told the crowd, referring to Hereditary. “It never feels like the right time to do it. It’s a prequel, not a sequel so I don’t know where this goes.”
Would a potential Hereditary prequel dig deeper into the mythology of demon king Paimon? Unfortunately, Aster provides no further details on his prequel approach at this time.
Aster said of Hereditary during the same Q&A, “I was just trying to make a really good horror movie.” I think most horror fans would agree that he more than accomplished that goal, and the past eight years have proven that Hereditary is an enduring classic of its generation.
We celebrated the fifth anniversary of Hereditary here on BD back in 2023.
Ron Breton wrote, “Hereditary offers a similar emotional resonance to this new generation of horror – my generation of horror– as movie-goers in the seventies when they first saw Exorcist. Much like Aster’s film, we see the incomprehensible evil wear the face of a young girl; the victim of a raw deal she had no say in, as it tears a family to its core. Sure, both films offer so many terrifying visuals that can make the hair stand up on anyone’s neck – but it also depicts intense relationships and emotions that are tangible. Real. Familiar.”
“In that familiarity lies the uncanny, ready to rear its ugly head and force us to confront thoughts and horrors laying dormant and clawing at our psyche,” Breton continued his 5th anniversary celebration of Hereditary. “And it doesn’t matter if it’s been five or fifty years. These horrors are always there, as we become pawns in its horrible, hopeless machine.”
Toni Collette, Gabriel Byrne, Alex Wolff, Ann Dowd, and Milly Shapiro star in Hereditary. In the film, “A grieving family is haunted by tragic and disturbing occurrences.”
That’s putting it mildly, eh?!
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