Movies
The Man from Nowhere (V)
“Hitting all the revenge thriller notes with obvious relish, it’s a slick, highly satisfying piece of anger-rush cinema.”
The press notes describe The Man from Nowhere as “Taken meets Oldboy”, but it’s more like Taken had an orgy and invited Oldboy, The Professional, Man on Fire, I Saw the Devil, and pretty much every other revenge thriller to be released in the last 20 years. Virtually everything cool about The Man from Nowhere seems to have been lifted directly from another movie, but that doesn’t render the resulting film any less awesome. There’s a reason this was the highest grossing movie in Korea in 2010. Hitting all the revenge thriller notes with obvious relish, it’s a slick, highly satisfying piece of anger-rush cinema.
Tae-Sik Cha is a quiet loner with manga hair who runs the pawnshop in his seedy neighborhood. He befriends the young daughter of a drug-addicted dancer, but when a drug deal goes bad, the mother and daughter are kidnapped and dealt to an organ-smuggling ring. After the mother’s body is discovered––sans organs––Tae-Sik Cha takes it upon himself to rescue the young girl before her corneas can be harvested (!)
Although it lacks I Saw the Devil’s visceral shocks or Oldboy’s pervy twist ending, The Man from Nowhere knows how to deliver when it matters, primarily in the final third. More than a few colorful bad guys are introduced early on. It’s like the giddy pleasure that comes with seeing a bunch of stupid teenagers introduced at the beginning of a slasher movie––there’s no question that these fuckfaces will die, but how…and in what order? When Tai-Sik Cha finally opens up his can of whoop-ass and gets down to business, action fans will have a hard time wiping the shit-eating grin off their collective faces.
The hand-to-hand combat is mesmerizing, a flurry of punches, slaps, and twists. One insanely cool camera shot follows Tai-Sik Cha as he sprints down a hallway, crashes through a window, and drop rolls to the pavement below. It’s completely bad ass.
Bin Won (Mother) plays Tai-Sik Cha with just the right amount of quiet charisma, a performance that‘s effortlessly engaging. As he progresses through the common rituals of the revenge flick––suffering through a feverish bullet wound recovery in one scene, shaving his head while shirtless and staring intensely at his own mirrored reflection in another––he builds sympathy and tension all the way up to the The Man from Nowhere’s brutal, bone-snapping climax.
There’s been a lot of talk about how Christopher Nolan snuck in some horror elements into his epic adaptation of The Odyssey. However, even before the Cyclops began to eat Ithican soldiers and Circe subjected them to magical body-horror, cinemagoers were already witnessing supernatural terror through a certain trailer that was attached to most IMAX screenings of Nolan’s film.
It turns out that this trailer was for Rob Savage’s Other Mommy, an adaptation of Bird Box author Josh Malerman’s horror novel, Incidents Around the House. With the teaser now available online and revealing that the award-winning Jessica Chastain is playing the titular antagonist (as well as her ill-fated human counterpart), not to mention the fact that the picture is being helmed by the director of hits like Host and The Boogeyman, genre fans are understandably hyped for this upcoming thriller.
That’s why I’ve decided to take a closer look at the trailer and share four things we learned from this sneak peek at Other Mommy!
4. Rob Savage is Going Back to His Supernatural Horror Roots
I know I’m in the minority when I admit that Dashcam is my favorite Rob Savage movie, but even I understand why the filmmakers’ fans have been waiting a while for the director to get back to telling more grounded paranormal stories as he did with 2020’s Host.
Other Mommy obviously isn’t a found footage movie, but moments like the poltergeist activity on the kitchen table combined with the nature of the source material, which actually features a full-on exorcism, indicate that this adaptation is more than a simple creature feature. That’s why I think Savage is once again going to borrow from the same ghostly narratives that made his debut film such a viral hit.
3. Other Mommy is a More Convincing Doppelganger in the Adaptation
Part of the horror from Malerman’s original novel came from the fact that the entity taking on the form of Bela’s (Arabella Olivia Clark) mother wasn’t very good at passing itself off as human. This resulted in several uncanny moments where other characters began to notice that there was something visibly wrong with the family and decided to keep their distance.
Savage’s film appears to be taking a different route, with the trailer showing a version of the entity that can, at least physically, imitate Chastain’s character perfectly. This change is likely the result of the filmmakers wanting to incorporate more paranoid scenes where Bela and her father, played by Jay Duplass, are confused about which Mommy is safe to interact with.
2. The Family is Also Better Off This Time Around
Incidents Around the House featured some interesting subtext about how poverty can negatively affect American family dynamics. After all, the main characters were already feeling scared and isolated before the entity emerged from Bela’s closet and began scratching at their emotional wounds. The trailer for the movie, however, depicts the family as being relatively well off before these incidents begin to occur.
I can only imagine that this part of the story was changed so that the family’s fall from grace can be even more dramatic as the mom and dad’s pasts are revealed and Bela falls further into the clutches of the demonic antagonist.
1. Jessica Chastain is Embodying Evil Dead Rise’s Alyssa Sutherland
Mothers turning against their children is one of the most disturbing horror tropes out there (just check out classics like Hereditary and Carrie if you need proof), but it takes a remarkably skilled actress to pull off such a monstrous transformation. This is especially true when both a regular, loving mother and the Other share the screen in the same film.
That’s why I appreciate how Chastain appears to be channeling another evil redhead mother that recently traumatized audiences with her performance. It’s too early to be sure, but I’m fairly confident that Chastain’s character has at least some amount of Ellie in her cinematic DNA – Ellie being the iconic deadite brought to life by Australian actress Alyssa Sutherland in 2023’s Evil Dead Rise.
Let us know in the comments if you think we missed any important details from the trailer, and don’t forget to check out Other Mommy when it hits theaters on October 9!
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