Two Movies I Missed

            Overall, the movies this year have been okay, but due to vacation and illness, I was not able to write about two of my favorite movies this year, and with two not so great movies coming out this past weekend, I figured I would take the time to back track and talk about two stressful gems, although they were stressful for very different reasons.

            The first movie came out while I was on vacation in South Carolina, Undertone. It is a movie that is right up my alley, it is a horror movie, and the main characters are podcasters. The only thing I am more addicted to than watching movies is listening to podcasts.

This movie is very self-contained. It all takes place in one house, and there are only ever two people on the screen, Evy and her Mom. Evy does a podcast with Justin, whose voice we hear regularly when they are recording, but we never see him. They do a horror podcast, they listen to stories from others or read headlines, and they decide if there is any validity to them.

            Justin receives an email, and it has ten audio files in it, so for an episode, they decide to go through the files. Initially, they start out normal, and then they slowly start to become more disturbed. At first it is just one member of the couple that is experiencing these weird episodes, but by the end, they are both in on it, and the audio files become very disturbed.

            What makes this movie so effective is that the scariness really lives in the mind of the viewer. They are recording this podcast at night, and Evy’s mom is deathly ill and comatose, so she is basically alone in this house recording the podcast, and they make the shots so wide so that all the space behind her can be seen, but it is mostly dark. So my eyes were constantly scouring the background looking for something to pop up, and it was rare that anything popped up. Oddly enough I was craving something to pop up to break the tension, because then the scare would be done, but instead, the film makers make the audience sit in the uncomfortable tension.

            The ending when everything went off the wall left me feeling disturbed. It was very off putting in a way that deeply bothered me, and this rarely ever happens after I watch a movie. The horror just seeped into my bones and did not want to leave. It left me feeling like I had actually watched/listened to a cursed tape. Maybe I was now haunted. Thankfully this was not the case, and my life went back to normal the next day, but it is rare that a horror movie sits with me like that.

            (SPOILERS) The other movie is The Drama, which stars Robert Pattinson and Zendaya. It was sold as a wedding movie, but there is a big twist once the movie starts. Emma and Charlie are getting married, and their two best friends, Mike and Rachel, are at dinner with them to help them pick their wine and food for the wedding, but then a game starts out of what is the worst thing you have ever done? Everyone shares, and they have all done things that have hurt others, and then it becomes Emma’s turn, and she says that she almost committed a school shooting.

            This, of course, makes everyone start to feel uncomfortable, but most importantly it made Charlie start to question whether he should still marry Emma. It felt like nothing she said to him or her friends could help. The tension between the two was palpable, and as they went through their final wedding preparation everyone could tell that something was bothering them. Nonetheless, the wedding does end up happening, and it is as awkward as expected, and it all ends in one big blow up where Charlie gets punched in the face.

            In the end, it seems like they still end up together, because they end up at the same dinner and sit together and pretend like they are meeting for the first time, and that may be easy for them to overcome, but I just can’t imagine having to explain to everyone what happened if they stay together. Like at some point they will probably have to have their wedding again, and both sets of parents probably hate the other. It would just be a big mess.

            I do think the whole thing is overblown. She did not do it, and she was severely bullied, she did not have any friends, and it seemed like she did not have supervision or support at home. Not that these would have excused a school shooting, but then she became a part of a group at school, which just happened to be anti-guns. Then Emma had friends, and she threw her dad’s gun into the swamp. So this was all theoretical, but what the other people did actually hurt people.

            Rachel locked a kid that she said was slow in a closet in an abandoned nasty RV, and she had the chance to tell the kid’s dad where he was, but instead she lied, and they did not find the kid until the next day. That is messed up, and she gave Emma the hardest time. Charlie said that he cyber-bullied a kid so badly that the kid had to move away. Also pretty messed up. Mike said that he used an ex-girlfriend as a shield from an attacking dog. That is more funny than messed up, but it still had the potential to cause real harm to someone else.

            When I looked at who directed and produced the movie right before I went and saw it, that completely changed how I viewed it going into it. Kristoffer Borgli directed Dream Scenario, a very weird movie that stars Nick Cage. Then I saw that Ari Aster was one of the producers, so I knew that I was now in for an incredibly weird and stressful movie, and it delivered. It went in a direction that I had not expected at all.

It also helped that Zendaya and Robert Pattinson are two of my favorites right now. Zendaya is about to have one of the most incredible years. She was in this, she is in Euphoria, she is in the new Spider Man movie, she is in Dune Part 3, and she is in The Odyssey, so she is going to be a part of making the box office some serious money this year!

So these two movies were better than Faces of Death and You, Me, and Tuscany, although the later was fun, and it made me very hungry after seeing all the Italian food, specifically the sandwiches. I have Undertone as the fourth ranked movie this year, and I have The Drama at third. I gave both films 3.5 Stars.