Adoration

The Truth Is Still Putting Its Shoes On

2008 // Canada // Atom Egoyan //June 21, 2009 // Theatrical Print

C- - Up to the halfway point in Atom Egoyan's latest elliptical drama, Adoration, I felt pangs of frustration even as the director's invigorating style held my attention. Adoration boasts the Egoyan fingerprints in spades, particularly his gloriously stark aesthetic and his penchant for teasing a haunting mood from the most banal landscapes and conversations. What frustrates is the absence of the profound sadness and confusion that are manifestly the objectives in Adoration, and which characterize much of Egoyan's work. Few things are as disheartening as watching a talented artist miss his mark, and the conceptual and emotional misfires in this film induce regretful wincing. Such stumbles are small potatoes, however, compared to the narrative inanity that starts to pile up in Adoration's second half. It's never a good sign when the main characters start behaving like mental patients in what is ostensibly a melancholy drama about deceit, bigotry, and birthrights.

Like most of Egoyan's films, Adoration has a bit of a shuffled narrative, although here the formula is also sprinkled with fantasy sequences and dreams of past events. Compared to the looping, finely minced structure of, say, The Girlfriend Experience, however, Adoration is relatively straightforward, the overall thrust of the plot preserved to lend the film something resembling a dramatic arc. As a French language exercise, Canadian high school student Simon (the lanky, engaging Devon Bostick) and his classmates are instructed to translate a magazine article about the Israeli security forces foiling a terrorist plot. For personal reasons that even he doesn't quite comprehend, Simon latches onto this story about a Muslim terrorist who tricked his pregnant fiancé into carrying a bomb onto a plane. It turns out that Simon's father (Noam Jenkins) was a Canadian Arab and violin-maker who swept Simon's white, classical violinist mother (Rachel Blanchard) off her feet. Both died in an auto accident when Simon was a young child, leaving the boy to be raised by his mother's brother, Tom (Scott Speedman) a working class guy with a belly full of familial and cultural resentments and an anger management problem.

Owing to lingering questions about his parents' deaths--Did his father drive into the oncoming car deliberately?--Simon internalizes his French assignment and recasts it as a story about his parents. His teacher, Sabine (Arsinée Khanjian), bizarrely encourages this for reasons that only become apparent later (and even then, not so much). Before you can say "urban legend," Simon's essay has cropped up online and reopened wounds about the real bomb plot, not to mention provoking a flurry of debates about racism, moral relativism, and political and religious violence. Simon's attitude towards these firestorms is contradictory, alternately provocative and alarmed, but he seems to recognize their cathartic potential. The controversy serves as a starting point for him to tackle his uncle's disengagement with the world, confront the bigoted legacy of his recently deceased grandfather (Kenneth Welsh), and untangle the real story of his parents' love.

Characteristically, Egoyan addresses these emotional and social aspects of his tale with supreme delicacy. His characters feel things, but they don't like to discuss them, except on the Internet, where all bets are off. The online dimension to the film's story, however, is also its most conceptually and emotionally problematic. Egoyan seems convinced that extended sequences of teenagers videoconferencing to indulge in meandering philosophical and ethical discussions makes for riveting film-making. He runs afoul of a bedrock rule of contemporary film: the Internet, when presented with realism, is not cinematic. That's not to say that the right director couldn't make a videoconference compelling in the right context. (Hitchcock could have made a thrilling one, I'm sure, and Lynch can probably make one terrifying.) In general, however, watching scenes of people talk about Serious Issues on the Internet is just a notch above watching scenes of people filling out tax returns, no matter how gorgeously lit those scenes might be. It doesn't help that such scenes are mostly lifeless in Adoration. (In one exception, a blustering Maury Chafkin declares that even if a mass murder is prevented, the intended victims are still "dead." Huh?)

Further upsetting Egoyan's ambition is his frail embrace of far too many thematic parcels.Adoration certainly seems to be about a lot of things: race, religion, extremism, nihilism, family, memory, truth. Unfortunately, it doesn't actually do much with any of those things, nor does it have much of interest to say about them. This enervates the whole enterprise, draining it of the pathos it so desperately wants to evoke. The film even fumbles Egoyan's most essential building block, the lost and despairing soul, failing to find much empathy for any of its characters. The director's personal masterpiece, The Sweet Hereafter, offers an instructive contrast. In that film, Egoyan took one ugly truth--that tragedy can fatally poison the bystanders--and explored it through a multitude of permutations. Adoration's concerns are so thinly sketched and so wide-ranging that the film never quite condenses into a satisfying exploration of much of anything. The gorgeous violin score by Mychael Danna suggests that grave and weighty matters are afoot, but the film takes only a cursory interest in them, like an idle window shopper.

This might have rendered the film merely unsatisfying, but Adoration goes completely off the rails by the time its second act starts to play out. When Egoyan pulls back the curtain and explains, in fits and starts, what is actually going on, he recasts scenes that previously seemed mysterious and expectant as pointlessly peculiar. The plot ultimately relies on characters acting so childish, obsessive, and clumsily deceitful that whatever gravitas the film had is shattered. Sudden reversals are all well in good, but they should never invoke incredulous guffaws from the audience, which Adoration managed on several occasions. What's more, the film's increasingly ridiculous turns occur around the same time that Egoyan indulges in some truly absurd dialogue, most conspicuously a conversation about a baloney sandwich that escalates into a fist fight. That sentence should be a screaming red warning flag that Adoration gets very, very silly by its end, to the point of wearing out its welcome. Coming from Egoyan, that's a disappointing destination.

Treeless Mountain

Little Blossoms Adrift

2008 // USA - Korea // So Yong Kim // June 17, 2009 // Theatrical Print

[Treeless Mountain was recently featured in a limited engagement on June 17-19, 2009 at the Webster University Film Series.]

A- - Films about childhood abound, but So Yong Kim's delicate, affecting Treeless Mountain is a rarer thing: a film whose principal psychological attribute is its profound empathy for children, in a manner that never condescends or romanticizes. Painting in short strokes, Kim establishes an emotional wilderness of school-age loneliness, anxiety, and disillusionment. Seven-year-old protagonist Jin (Hee-yeon Kim) stands at the center of the film's story and visual language, but Kim, evincing a masterful talent for understated characterization and narrative, maintains a prudent and slightly saddened distance from her subject. She plumbs Jin's inner life by observing her face's restless contortions and her responses to the exasperating dilemmas that vex her and her little sister, Bin (Song-hee Kim). Kim's approach gently elevates the film from a poignantly observed tale of childhood, which would have been enough to satisfy, to an astonishingly mature examination of the ways in which naive expectations shape one's day-to-day habits, emotional topography, and interactions with others.

Treeless Mountain follows as responsibility for the care of Jin and Bin is passed along from their single mother to their father's sister, and then to their father's parents. From the adults' distracted perspective, this is essentially all that happens in the film. However, Kim examines these events from Jin's viewpoint, cultivating a secondary, more detailed plot about the effects that this sequence of uprootings has on the girls. While Kim provides just enough whispers and sharp words to suggest why Jin and Bin are shuffled from relative to relative, such matters are less salient to the film's thematic interests than the schemes and scrapes of the girls themselves. Thus, while there are vague asides about their absent, good-for-nothing father, much more attention is paid to the girls' cooking of crickets in a vacant lot, and their ad hoc play dates with a local boy with Down's Syndrome. Much of the "action"—if one can call it that—revolves around a particular totem: a cheap plastic piggy bank, which the girls believe will summon their mother if they fill it with coins accumulated via good behavior and guile.

The pacing of the film is both languid and fidgety, reflecting time's slow creep to a bored child and the anxiousness that an emotional upheaval so often engenders in kids. This unconventional cadence proceeds from Kim's distinctive style of film-making, if one allows that two features are sufficient to establish a "style" for a budding auteur. Her debut was the splendid In Between Days, a bitter fusion of an immigrant's tale and an adolescent romantic tragedy. There, as in her new film, her storytelling technique was marvelously lean, the narrative assembled from a succession of discomfiting, low-key confrontations, despairing interludes, and attentive observations. Despite this decidedly soft touch, at no time does Treeless Mountain suffer from narrative ambiguity. For a film with so little expository dialogue, it is remarkably precise, discovering through facial expressions, gestures, body language, and mumbled asides everything the viewer needs to know about Jin's predicament and her stance towards the world. Conspicuously, Kim brings her camera down roughly to the girl's eye level; low angles abound, and adults are often slightly out of frame or focus.

It would be excruciating to spend ninety minutes with the child characters from most films, but Jin possesses none of the forced charm or creepy adult mannerisms of such creatures. She is authentic and complex, alternately quiet, bold, manipulative, sulky, thoughtful, and quixotic. No mere cloying assemblage of adult neuroses, Jin behaves as a real child would in her circumstances. Several laudable films of recent vintage have used child actors to fine effect. Witness Simon Iteanu's luminous performance in Flight of the Red Balloon, or Catinca Untaru's scene-stealing in The Fall. With Hee-yeon Kim's Jin, Treeless Mountain achieves something equally fascinating: a seven-year-old heroine who engages not due to fantastic abilities, but due to her relatable qualities that transport us back to our own childhood aspirations, disappointments, and uncertainties.

Although Treeless Mountain is divisible into three narrative segments—mom, aunt, grandparents—these are not so much traditional dramatic acts as phases with distinct emotional and environmental qualities, each one containing abundant interactions and contrasts. Mom's urban apartment gives way to auntie's small-town cottage, and then to grandpa and grandma's farm. This outward migration is matched by Jin's meanderings through her own heart, as she attempts to deny and then reconcile her desires with the reality that the adults—those selfish, enigmatic beasts—have thrust upon her. Commerce is a central motif in Kim's story, exemplified by the girls' piggybank, but recurring in a variety of exchanges, rewards, gifts, and bribes, from auntie's attempt to extort money from the parent of a bully, to Jin's sly appearance at a cookie-dispensing household whenever she is hungry. Tellingly, the film lingers over little Bin's meticulous reconstruction of the piggybank's peeling eye with a magic marker. In this seemingly oblique scene, Kim foreshadows the moral thrust of her story. Jin must eventually abandon both the ruthless grasping of her lackluster adult role models and the magical thinking of her peers. With a little kindness and sensitivity, she may get halfway to the family she longs for.

Up

Oh, The Places You'll Go!​

2009 // USA // Pete Docter // June 18, 2009 // 3D Theatrical Print

A- -One of the most pleasurable aspects of Pixar's rise to the artistic apex of American commercial cinema has been the expanding sophistication of the themes that the studio is willing, even eager, to tackle. That sophistication reached its pinnacle to date in last year's WALL•E, an unexpectedly stirring film experience that addressed myriad science fiction concerns with a grace, liveliness, and humor unmatched by any genre offering in recent decades. This trend—the studio's determination to make the most challenging kid-friendly fare the public will accept—first emerged with Monsters, Inc., so it should come as little shock that that film's director, Pete Docter, has delivered yet another feature whose breathtaking surface conceals deep currents. If Up feels slightly less groundbreaking than Pixar's recent offerings in terms of sensory dazzle, perhaps that's because the comparison is so monstrously unfair. Standing alongside the virtuoso direction and cinematography of Ratatouille, or the futurist vistas and elegant storytelling of WALL•E, Up is merely marvelous, rather than devastatingly marvelous. However, Docter delivers what is the studio's most essentially human story since Monsters, and certainly its most mature in terms of its psychological resonance. Woven into a relatively straightforward tale of adventure, Up offers a poignant examination of how the reality of everyday life can gnaw at our dreams and seed cynicism in our hearts, tragically hardening us to the possibility of emotional connections with other people.

Up breaks from Pixar's previous features in that its high-concept enticements are not easily reducible to a one-word description (Toys! Bugs! Monsters! Fish! Superheroes! Cars! Rats! Robots!) Although strange creatures are central to the story, Up's hook is visual: the image of a tidy little house drifting through the wild blue yonder, suspended under a colossal cluster of rainbow-hued balloons. The owner of that airborne domicile is Carl Fredericksen (Ed Asner), a dour septuagenarian with a mug like a squashed and swollen Easter Island statue. Explaining why a retired schlub like Carl would transform his house into an airship comprises only the first thirty minutes or so of Up, but it's a deeply affecting slice of cinema, not as crisp as WALL•E's perfect first act, but more narratively and emotionally propulsive.

We are introduced to Carl as a shy and bespectacled child of a pulp-tinged 1930s America. Capering about in flight helmet and aviator goggles, he dreams of grand adventures like those of his idol, Charles Muntz, a dashing explorer, inventor, and zeppelin pilot. Muntz has recently departed on his latest foray to Paradise Falls in South America, where he hopes to capture a rare, enormous bird with the aid of his loyal hounds. While playing around his neighborhood, Carl runs afoul of Ellie, a tomboy whose zeal for adventure is, if anything, even more fervent than his. Ellie confides her ambitions: to follow in Muntz's footsteps and one day live at the top of Paradise Falls (South America is "like America, but South," she intones seriously.) In a deft sequence of cinematic exposition, the film then fast-forwards through time, looking in on Carl and Ellie as they eventually fall in love, get married, and share decades of bliss and heartbreak, the latter embodied in the childlessness that biology foists upon them. The promise of Paradise Falls continues to beckon, but the inconveniences and setbacks that so often characterize life curtail their plans time and again over the decades. Eventually illness claims Ellie, and Carl is left widowed and ruing the adventures they never had together.

In the present day, Carl is embroiled in a battle with the stock cinematic menace of elderly homeowners everywhere: greedy developers. Also lurking on his doorstep is the ovoid Russell (Jordan Nagai), an enthusiastic tyke who needs a willing subject for his Elderly Assistance merit badge, the last notch on his path to Senior Wilderness Explorer. After things go from bad to worse with the developers, Carl hatches and implements his aeronautical scheme seemingly overnight, promising his departed wife that they will get to Paradise Falls yet. With a groan of heaving foundation and bursting pipes, Carl's house breaks free and he is South America-bound... with Russell inadvertently along for the ride. Where the pair go from there is best left for the viewer to experience, but I will say it involves Muntz's avian quarry and a pack of talking dogs. Yes, talking dogs, a trick accomplished through electronic collars that broadcast their every thought. (For a dimwitted mutt named Dug, this mainly consists of "I love you!" and "Squirrel!")

Once Carl and Russell are airborne, Up is dotted liberally with various chase sequences, smartly executed but not especially salient to the film's core emotional notes. (In this, the film mirror's WALL•E's breathless yet somewhat conventional sequence of escapes following the action's shift to the Axiom.) Up is most marvelous in its quietest moments, when it gently and persuasively permits Carl's grief and regret to bubble up to the surface, and Russell's own familial anxieties to be given voice. The film pointedly implicates Carl's lifetime accumulation of disappointments as a blinding phenomenon, one that prevents him from recognizing the everyday miracles of his life with Ellie, or seeing Russel's palpable craving for small, paternal intimacies. Recall that this is ostensibly a children's film, and it is all the more remarkable that Docter fixes his attention on the risks of emotional stagnation that can characterize old age. Like WALL•E, Up is thematically dense fare. The former expanded our sensitivity to a galaxy of ideas about humanity, technology, and the environment. In contrast, Docter's film turns its gaze inward to plum how our achievements and failures color our outlook, particularly our receptivity to the needs of others.

Perhaps Up's most unexpected and deliriously elemental accomplishment is its pinpoint evocation of a specific childhood urge to remake our surroundings according to whims that are fantastical, yet somehow reasonable. Many of Up's set pieces resonate with that youthful longing for secret hideouts, dream houses, custom rocketships, and other wonders constructed according to Crayola principles of engineering. While nothing within Up exactly embodies these imaginary havens—there's nothing close to the riot of plastic glee that was Pee-wee Herman's magnificent abode in his Big Adventure—the film echoes them just enough to prick the viewer's dormant longings for a special place crafted in tribute to shameless desires. It goes without saying that a house cannot fly under the power of helium balloons, but using balloons to fly off to a tropical Shangri-la is giddily reminiscent of the elaborate yet simple-minded schemes we all dreamed up at a certain age. (Carl and Ellie go so far as to place their own crayon drawing of the house at Paradise Falls on their mantle, enshrining their shared childhood dream as a sort of domestic snapshot not yet taken.) Who wouldn't want to camp in the rainforest with chocolate bars and animal pals? Or be waited on by talking canines that can serve dinner and fly airplanes? It's Docter's cunning decision to evoke this aura of splendid daydreams—the promise, if you will, of chewy, chewy cocoa-beans and monkey butlers—that makes Up so engaging. Moreover, this impulse acts as a potent counterpoint to the lines of sorrow and disillusionment that crease the film's heart. Up asserts that sharing the most innocent pleasures with kindred souls is a balm that, improbably, miraculously, cools the sting of loss.

Tyson

2008 // USA // James Toback // June 13, 2009 // Theatrical Print

B - It's tempting to dismiss James Toback's absorbing documentary Tyson as an unapologetic hagiography of former heavyweight champion, Mike Tyson. The film is narrated and produced by the champ himself, and it doesn't merely gloss over Tyson's rape conviction, but permits him to hurl insults at his alleged victim. Yet Toback's canny approach does much more than solidify a sympathetic characterization of the man. The director interviews Tyson from an indulgent distance, using the footage as the key component of an ambitious and unexpectedly personalized tale. Tyson recounts his life and expounds on his views in sprawling monologues replete with malapropisms, upwellings of rage, and moments of poetic clarity. Toback's camera swallows Tyson's version of events whole, but also devours his eccentricities and slumbering-lion features with a blend of awe and puzzlement. Refreshingly, the director is less concerned with hewing to a Fallen Sports Hero narrative arc than capturing the specifics of his subject matter with passion. The film reinforces the enduring wonder of Tyson's athleticism with a triumphal style, but offers its revelations in a reserved manner, allowing the viewer the freedom to mull over, discount, or titter at them.

The Girlfriend Experience

That Certain Female

2009 // USA // Steven Soderbergh // June 9, 2009 // Theatrical Print

B+ - Perhaps unexpectedly, Steven Soderbergh's lean, chilly The Girlfriend Experience shares two key elements with the director's previous film, the four-hour biopic Che: an admirable lack of artistic compromise and a thematic nucleus that is oddly straightforward given the elaborate character of the presentation. Once again stepping away from his brand of pleasurable, blissfully hip commercial fare to create a film wholly on his own terms, Soderbergh brings his talents to bear on a relatively simple story of entrepreneurial and sexual peril that plays out in the hotels, restaurants, and boutiques of Manhattan. Perhaps "story" is the wrong word. In contrast to Che's grand, exhaustive study of revolution as process, Girlfriend barely bothers with a plot. Or, more accurately, the plot is so thoroughly fragmented that the film's events and their relationship to one another are plainly not Girlfriend's focus. (This alone is a fascinating departure for the director of the Ocean's films, where the elaborate heists are the Whole Point.) Employing a structure that one could term "narrative cut-up," Soderbergh slices and dices the life of a New York call girl in October 2008 into a collage of cinematic musings on self-worth, loyalty, and autonomy.

The escort in question is Chelsea (Sasha Gray), a young twenty-something with a soft-spoken manner and a hidden competitive streak. The Girlfriend Experience revolves around Chelsea's interactions with her clients and her boyfriend, Chris (Chris Santos), as well as a few other personalities of benign and dubious intentions. Inasmuch as the film can be said to have a story, it is the tale of these encounters. However, Soderbergh presents them as a jumbled series of snippets, hopping around in time in a manner that is too disciplined to be called avant-garde, but friskier than if the aim were merely to construct a puzzlebox plot. Certainly, a disciplined viewer could decipher the clues—outfits, objects, demeanors—to assemble a "chronologically correct" edit of the film, but there would be little point. There are no mysteries left unresolved by the end of The Girlfriend Experience, but neither are the resolutions particularly striking. This reinforces that Soderbergh is much more fascinated with what the events unfolding on screen reveal about his thematic concerns than in the appeal of story for its own sake.

Much of Girlfriend is dedicated to Chelsea entertaining her clients, with sex being only one facet of the service she provides. Fundamentally, her clients want her to be available, on their terms and for their purposes. Depending on the man, she can be a companion for a night out, an accessory, a witty conversationalist, a shoulder to weep on, or a sexual object to delight or demean. In their presence, Chelsea is attentive and charming in a demure sort of way. Afterward, she is more relaxed, briskly tapping away at a laptop where she records every detail of the "client meeting": I wore these shoes, he ordered this entrée, we had sex that many times. She comes home to Chris, a personal trainer who is aware of her profession, and modestly supportive of her ambitions the way he imagines a good boyfriend should be. The film occasionally wanders away to follow Chris as he oversees his clients, contemplates a switch to a more upscale gym, and moonlights as an athletic wear vendor. When a customer generously offers to bring him along for a "guy's weekend" in Las Vegas, he makes a show of his reluctance for Chelsea, but we already know he's going.

The twinnings at work in Chelsea and Chris highlight the shared commodification of their bodies and the experiences those bodies promise. However, Soderbergh isn't aiming for anything as crude as an equivalency between the fitness industry and prostitution. Rather, what Girlfriend emphasizes is the extent to which Chelsea and Chris, both attractive people, have lashed their identities to their careers, with all the pitching and rolling that entails. Chelsea feels threatened by the emergence of new girls in the Manhattan escort scene, talks anxiously with a developer about upgrading her website, and is denigrated by a slovenly "escort reviewer" (played, incidentally, by estimable cinema blogger Glenn Kenny). Chris is turned away by sporting goods stores and dressed down by the manager at his gym. Everyone the pair talks to obsesses about the collapsing economy and the upcoming presidential election. Watching the self-worth of these two otherwise stunning people wilt in the face of criticism, competition, and financial uncertainty is the kind of humane observation that Soderbergh knows how to pull off without a trace of condescension or mean-spiritedness.

The film returns repeatedly to two conversations that provide commentary on the focal scenes. In the first, Chelsea commiserates with an older escort friend, wondering aloud how close she should get to a client with whom she feels an emotional connection. In the second, she meets a journalist for lunch, a man who smells a story in the life of an urbane call girl, but whose prodding questions put Chelsea on edge. These exchanges accent what is occurring elsewhere and elsewhen. The primary scenes of Girlfriend reveal a simple story of piss-poor judgment that grows, cancerously, from uncertainty about the future. Tough messaging in these glum economic times, perhaps, but Soderbergh tackles it soberly, the aloofness of his style providing the necessary distance. Girlfriend suggests that a stressful atmosphere amplifies natural human impulses towards hubris, cowardice, and defiance, and also exacerbates the consequences of those ugly urges.

Real-life pornstar Gray acquits herself well as Chelsea, a role far too complex for mere stunt casting. Gray's unexpected, low-key manner establishes Chelsea as a woman of prudence and discipline, rendering her eventual stumbles all the more tragic. Soderbergh evinces a barbed awareness of his actress' physical and sexual niche, for while Chelsea envisions herself as a sophisticate, Kenny's gleefully malicious windbag derides her as more suited to a "girl-next-door" role. The rest of the performances are satisfactory, with the exception of Kenny's distracting (if suitably discomfiting) turn. However, the acting in Girlfriend is secondary to the main attraction: the distinctive look and sound of a Soderbergh film, full of gorgeously lit locations that ooze contemporary style and a jazz soundtrack that jiggles with expectation. The allure of The Girlfriend Experience is that of a consummate stylist tackling fundamental aspects of human behavior, all while dismissing parochial storytelling with a wave of his hand.

Drag Me to Hell

It Burns, Burns, Burns

2009 // USA // Sam Raimi // June 7, 2009 // Theatrical Print

B+ - Horror films with a camp sensibility are a dime a dozen, but outright giddy horror is a much more elusive creature. In his much-ballyhooed return to the form after a seventeen-year hiatus (if we disregard 2002's The Gift), director Sam Raimi delivers the latter species in Drag Me to Hell, a wicked delight so gratifyingly realized that calling it a "genre exercise" seems faint praise. While its title suggests exploitation schlock in the vein of Die Screaming, Marianne and I Spit on Your Grave, the trappings of Raimi's film are standard occult thriller fare. The tone, however, summons forth the nightmarish, absurdist character that was previously endemic to the Evil Dead films. Also evident is the bleak, even malevolent worldview that emerges from Raimi's smaller (read: non-Spider-man) films, from Darkman to A Simple Plan. Exhibiting both tremendous confidence and a ravenous appetite for unholy fun, Drag Me to Hell deserves better than a soft-mouthed label like "tribute" or "throwback." Let's be clear: It's a damn fine horror film in every way.

Raimi has always had affection for anonymous working schlubs, but Drag Me to Hell devotes significant attention to the personal details of its heroine, Christine Brown (Alison Rohmer), an eager-to-please loan officer living in Pasadena. In this, oddly enough, the film hews closely to Spider-Man, with its bittersweet tittering at the indignities heaped upon Peter Parker. Doe-eyed and perky as a daisy, Christine is not accustomed to antagonism or subterfuge. Her ambitions and doubts are as plain as the traces of babyfat on her face, which hint at the farmgirl life she is striving to leave behind. At first blush she seems an unlikely foil for Sylvia Ganush (Lorner Raver), the decrepit gypsy hag who comes to Christine seeking a third extension on her mortgage. Yet the dichotomies that emerge upon reflection are striking. Christine is achingly fresh-faced, quivering with aspirations, and struggling mightily to sever the ties to her old self. The haggard and ailing Sylvia desires nothing more than to stay put, evoking both a defiance in the face of death—the ultimate "eviction"—as well as the stateless existence of the Roma. (A strangely touching undertone given the film's distinctly Hammer-esque characterization of gypsy culture.)

Christine elects to turn Sylvia away in order to demonstrate her managerial ruthlessness to her boss. She is unfortunately oblivious regarding the consequences of scorning an old gypsy woman, especially one with a literal evil eye. Their confrontation eventually culminates in Sylvia's invocation of a foul gypsy curse. She summons a demonic spirit known as a lamia, which will torment Christine for three days before—you guessed it—dragging her down to Hell itself. This pretty much sets the story off and running, with the remainder of the film devoted to the escalating agonies that Christine suffers at the hands of the lamia, and to her attempts to avert her infernal fate. She turns to her professor boyfriend (Justin Long), a New Age guru (Dileep Rao), and a Mexican medium (Adrianna Barraza) for aid, but demons, as it turns out, are notoriously resistant to dissuasion.

Purely in terms of scare-the-bejeezus-out-of-you spectacle, Drag Me to Hell is pitch-perfect horror film-making. Raimi demonstrates that his skills as a horror director have sharpened considerably in the years since The Evil Dead's skuzzy shocks first made the midnight movie circuit snap to attention. Here the rhythms of the form—the frights, the lulls, the vise-like tension—are employed to masterful effect, all for the estimable goal of keeping the viewer giggling and shrieking with glee. As a rule, I consider myself a savvy and jaded horror filmgoer, and yet Raimi somehow had me begging for the scares. Moreover, there is cinematic cunning of a high order at play in Drag Me to Hell, albeit inconsistently, rivaling the most assured moments of Argento and Carpenter. The film boasts unexpectedly bravura compositions and camerawork that, while often outrageous, are never ostentatious. Space and motion are utilized to deliver terrifying gut-punches and establish a shifting tonal landscape of gross-out slapstick, harrowing violence, cartoonish absurdity, and tightening despair. (Watch for a slow pan early in the film that contains one of the best reveals I've ever seen.) The sound design is singularly terrifying, almost overwhelming, employing shrieks, roars, creaks, whines, and buzzing to convey the implacability of both the monster and Christine's destiny.

The moral universe of the Dead films has always been a troubling place, where supernatural evils seem to exist not within a traditional gothic framework, but as a kind of terrifying elemental force, albeit one with an unsettling sadistic streak. Drag Me to Hell follows this approach as well. Raimi's horrors don't belong within a theological hierarchy of good and evil. Rather, they lurk around the fringes of normal human experience, licking their fangs in anticipation, a sick, lethal joke courtesy of the Devil. Accordingly, both the Dead trilogy and Drag Me to Hell feature heinous and weirdly disproportionate punishments for actions that are only faintly callous, or even completely innocuous. It does raise the question: What are we to make of Raimi's apparent contention that one can blunder into damnation simply by doing one's job? (Admittedly, a loan officer burning in hell is really just the updated punch-line to a lawyer joke.) The sheer cruelty of a cosmos that would allow such a thing is unsettling, to say the least, but Raimi has always been less interested in establishing overarching mythologies than creating fantastical scenarios and permitting them to play out. Christine at different times is assailed by a malevolent shadow, an undead gypsy, a goat-horned devil, an invisible force, and a homicidal handkerchief. While Raimi establishes a foundational principle for his supernatural horrors—the three-day deadline—many of his set-pieces are just free-form riffing on a fundamental fear: the nightmare of being terrorized by unholy forces.

Christine is a particularly clever choice for a heroine, containing elements as she does of a slasher film's Final Girl, the menaced "normal" of countless occult thrillers, and even a bit of Bruce Campbell's signature resilience and cold-blooded exasperation. (Ash might have cut off his own hand, but he never had so much hair ripped out or so many revolting substances forced down his throat.) Rohmer bestows Christine with the requisite good-girl sweetness and—eventually—a blazing hatred for her tormentor. It's not a performance that leaves a deep impression, but it is exceptionally well-suited to the film that surrounds it. And Rohmer does get some great moments, particularly a few delicious deadpan lines and a fresh take on the expression, "Here Kitty, Kitty..."

Drag Me to Hell operates according to Raimi's particular blend of lucidity and unreality. By this I mean that his narrative is coherent, even elegant, as it ushers Christine from Points A to B to C. There is none of the aimlessness that often characterizes the genre, nor does his heroine ever do anything woefully stupid (although she makes a couple of understandable but tragic blunders). Still, an aura of the preposterous clings to the film, providing ample meat for nitpickers. Dozens of people behind a doorway can be dead silent one moment, then boisterously dancing and feasting the next. Los Angeles can boast a gothic graveyard with a violent thunderstorm as backdrop. When Christine's plight requires an anvil hanging from a pulley, one is provided, in Bugs Bunny fashion. Whether this sort of thing is troubling depends on whether the viewer is willing to accept Drag Me to Hell on its own succulent terms, as an exquisite device for extracting squeals of terror. The ending, a shocker to stand alongside Carrie and Friday the 13th, is just the ghastly cherry on top.