‘One thing Is About to Occur’
Lease or purchase it on most main platforms.
For many of its two-hour run time, Antonio Méndez Esparza’s slow-burn thriller doesn’t really feel like a horror film. There’s no gore, evil spirits or gorgons. But, because it follows a middle-aged girl who loses her grip on actuality, the movie chillingly embodies Sartre’s commentary that hell is different individuals.
Life isn’t going effectively for Lucia (Malena Alterio), a big-hearted however naïve and generally prickly girl who lives together with her ailing father in Madrid. She has few mates. She misplaced her job at a dental firm and cash is tight. She’s heartbroken when her crush — a good-looking neighbor who mentioned his title was Calaf, just like the prince in Puccini’s “Turandot”— strikes away unexpectedly.
To assist remedy her woes and really feel extra related to the world, Lucia begins driving a taxi. Her life brightens after she strikes up a friendship with certainly one of her riders, Roberta (Aitana Sánchez-Gijón), a classy theater producer who takes an curiosity in Lucia’s troubled previous. When a betrayal comes — and there are lots of on this tender however despairing movie — the horror turns into insufferable, for Lucia and, virtually, for the viewer, straight by way of to a horrific ending. Alterio offers a fearless and gripping efficiency that deservedly gained her a Goya Award, Spain’s model of the Oscars.
Assume nothing: That’s my recommendation earlier than watching JT Mollner’s dazzling and ingeniously-constructed thriller.
The movie opens as a gun-toting, wild-eyed younger man named (Kyle Gallner) pursues a bloodied younger girl (Willa Fitzgerald), in a truck down a abandoned highway within the Oregon wilderness. To this point, we’re speaking customary stalker-slasher movie stuff, proper? Lifeless mistaken. As a result of who these individuals are and the way they bought to this terrifying second are the dastardly twists that drive this movie, a horror spotlight of 2024. I gained’t say extra as a result of the much less , the higher. However perceive this: Its six delirious chapters are scrambled for good cause.
Throughout the board, the performing is formidable. Fitzgerald is sly, menacing and feral. As within the “Smile” movies, Gallner is equal elements vulnerability, menace and intercourse. As apocalypse preppers, Ed Begley Jr. and Barbara Hershey go low-key nuts. And Giovanni Ribisi shines in his debut as a characteristic movie cinematographer — the man is aware of make an evening at an inexpensive resort room appear to be a date on the satan’s playground.
‘Curse of the Seven Seas’
Stream it on Netflix.
I virtually scrolled previous this movie when Netflix added it to my advisable queue. The mysterious nautical title recommended I is likely to be in retailer for a G-rated, Scooby Doo-inspired household journey movie. I’m glad I took an opportunity on it, as a result of what the Indonesian director Tommy Dewo delivers is a weird however entertaining possession movie that punctuates its unevenness with critically sick-in-the-head slaughters.
The story is steeped in Indonesian folklore and will get convoluted, but it surely boils right down to this: Sucipto (Christian Sugiono) is determined to guard his household from a generational curse through which family, together with his son Ardi (Ari Irham), see demons. Because the dwelling and undead battle it out on the household dwelling and on the streets, Dewo kills off characters in outrageously surprising methods. I misplaced rely of what number of occasions barbed wire plunged by way of pores and skin and got here out trailing blood-slick physique elements. (One decapitation doused the digicam lens.) Probably the most lovely little boy will get the most ugly demise.
C.G.I. snobs will scoff on the unpolished digital results, however I discovered them, and the gnarly, homemade-looking costumes and gross-out prosthetics, to have actual VHS-era appeal.
‘The Lifeless Factor’
Stream it on Shudder.
Swipe after swipe, hookup after hookup, Alex (Blu Hunt) is having no luck courting males in Los Angeles. When she meets Kyle (Ben Smith-Petersen), he appears too good to be true. He’s good-looking, form hearted and enjoys listening to her. The intercourse is out of this world. However when he ghosts her — actually, within the movie’s first of many supernatural twists — his disappearance, or probably reappearance, units Alex off on a quest to determine why, and the way, this good man bought away.
Elric Kane’s assured movie seamlessly blends parts of science fiction and psychological thriller to thoughtfully study the human concern of demise, utilizing the foibles of contemporary courting, surprisingly, to underscore its factors. (A number of the script’s woo-woo speak concerning the human situation left me chilly.) Regardless that the setting is within the now, the movie has softer but nonetheless chilly qualities of a grindhouse thriller from the ‘70s, right down to Michael Krassner and Robin Vining’s atmospheric rating — lengthy dwell flute solos! — and Ioana Vasile’s shadowy cinematography.
‘The Park Maniac’
Stream it on Amazon Prime Video.
Earlier this 12 months, I advisable “The Calendar Killer,” a German psychological thriller that’s greatest loved for its camp, not its terrors. This month, we journey to Brazil for a serving of equally trashy luridness.
Based mostly on a real case from the ’90s, the movie is about Francisco (Silvero Pereira), a pasty-faced serial killer who the media nicknames the Park Maniac, as he terrorizes younger ladies in São Paulo. The director Mauricio Eça movies Francisco’s brutal assaults in close-up, giving us ghastly views of what the creep sees by way of bulging eyes.
On the madman’s tail is Elena (Giovanna Grigio), an formidable younger journalist who needs to make a reputation for herself in her boys-club newsroom by discovering the psychopath earlier than the cops do. As Elena turns into hellbent on understanding the Park Maniac, he turns into obsessed together with his infamy.
Does the plot make sense? Generally. Does it matter? Not likely, when Pereira (and his curly locks) offers such a constantly creepy efficiency. Bonus: The movie makes hits of the ’90s, from C & C Music Manufacturing facility’s “Gonna Make You Sweat” to Sepultura’s “Territory,” someway sound macabre.
