Movies
Wrecked (V)
“As a result, Wrecked loses its shine the longer you watch it. There are only so many scenes of Brody elbow-crawling through pine needles that a man can take before the magic starts to wear off.”
The success of one-man shows like Buried or Moon depend almost entirely on the acting prowess of the leading man. Although both films were expertly shot and edited, it’s the presence of Ryan Reynolds and Sam Rockwell (respectively) that pushed them into the annals of cult greatness. In Wrecked, star Adrien Brody plays a man who wakes up in a mangled car, in the middle of the woods, with his leg trapped under the crushed dashboard. In a raw, bruised performance, he certainly proves he’s got the chops to shoulder a one-man, limited-scope indie flick.
When he first regains consciousness––his face banged all to shit, his eyelid swollen to the size of a super-ripe grape––Brody wears his confusion like a plaintive mask. He’s in the passenger seat of a totaled sedan, there’s a male corpse in the back seat, and it’s completely obvious that Brody has no idea where he is or how he got there. His amnesia is conveyed with a minimum of dialogue (Brody only says a handful of words during the first 30 minutes of Wrecked), which is a credit to both Brody’s performance and the gaunt script by screenwriter Christopher Dodd. Brody eventually manages to free his broke-ass leg from the wreckage, but after discovering a half-spent revolver under the car seat and hearing a local news report on the car radio, he’s not so sure he wants to be rescued.
Eating bugs and drinking captured rain water, Brody’s crippled forest survival becomes the focus of Wrecked, essentially ignoring the audience’s desire to find out how and why he got into that stupid car in the first place. And that’s the primary problem with the film: the story is too skeletal to carry any real weight. It’s obvious that Brody was involved in some bad shit, but the film is far too deliberate in doling out its secrets. A plot that can be summarized in one sentence takes the movie a full 90 minutes to reveal. As a result, Wrecked loses its shine the longer you watch it. There are only so many scenes of Brody elbow-crawling through pine needles that a man can take before the magic starts to wear off.
The trailer for Ti West’s upcoming adaptation of A Christmas Carol raised a lot of eyebrows when it dropped earlier this week. While plenty of folks initially dismissed Ebenezer as a derivative project meant to cash in on the recent wave of unnecessary prequels that expand the backstory of beloved characters (such as 2023’s Wonka), Charles Dickens’ original novel already made a point of exploring Ebenezer Scrooge’s origins in detail – meaning that this new film is likely just a particularly faithful adaptation of the source material under a different name.
Couple that with the fact that the movie is being helmed by a genuine horror auteur and I think it’s safe to say that the latest iteration of the first modern ghost story is in good hands.
That being said, one detail that immediately jumped out at me during the brief teaser (other than a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it nod to Johnny Depp’s iconic bedroom death scene from the original A Nightmare on Elm Street) is the fact that many of Ebenezer’s ghosts appear to have been directly lifted from the iconic John Leech illustrations that accompanied the first edition of Dickens’ novel.
Here are a couple of stills from the trailer compared to the original artwork:
The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come in ‘Ebenezer’ and ‘A Christmas Carol’
The Phantoms in ‘A Christmas Carol’ and ‘Ebenezer’
Marley’s Ghost in ‘Ebenezer’ and ‘A Christmas Carol’
Mainly working with old-school wood and steel engravings that would later be transferred to print, Leech was instrumental in crafting the iconic look of history’s most influential phantoms – especially since Dickens is said to have been deeply involved with the creation of these so-called “comic illustrations.”
And since the novel is commonly said to have popularized spiritualism in Victorian England, much of the ghostly iconography that we still see in genre media to this very day (including some of Ti West’s previous films) can be traced back to the author’s partnership with Leech.
Ebenezer won’t be the first A Christmas Carol adaptation to borrow heavily from these designs, but I can appreciate how Ti West is incorporating an important part of horror history into his latest film.
Ebenezer will be available in theaters starting November 13.
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