The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

2011 // USA // David Fincher // December 19, 2011 // Digital Theatrical Project (Wehrenberg Ronnies 20)

An argument can be made that David Fincher's adaptation of Steig Larsson's phenomenally popular pulp whodunit, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, is an exercise in style over substance. Certainly, the film’s opening credit sequence lends credence to this position: Yeah Yeah Yeahs vocalist Karen O growls out a cover of Led Zepellin’s "Immigrant Song" as oily black liquid oozes over human figures that are embraced and penetrated by writhing computer cables. It’s jarringly reminiscent of a James Bond opening, and perhaps a sly inter-textual joke at that, given that leading man Daniel Craig is serving as the current 007. The rest of the film is only moderately less brash.

However, such aggressive styling proves to be a tick-mark in the film’s favor, at least when one considers it alongside both the source material and Niel’s Arden Oplev’s comparatively flat, mirthless 2009 Swedish film adaptation. Under Oplev’s hand, Larsson’s grim tale of buried family secrets and socialist democracy gone freakishly awry was many things—workmanlike, satisfactory, disposable—but stylish it was not. The most valuable card up the sleeve of the 2009 film was Noomi Rapace, who embodied waifish, wounded hacker-sleuth Lisbeth Salander with eerie precision and a curious kind of dark magnetism.

Fincher’s take doesn’t add any appreciable depth to Larsson’s tale, and in this respect it is remarkably similar to the Swedish film. Screenwriter Steve Zallian wisely excises the Scandinavian politics and finance that dominated hefty stretches of the novel. Such components are arguable crucial for understanding the wider context of Larrson’s story, but what is digestible on the page is probably unworkable in a film. Zallian also trims and tweaks the narrative in other ways, mostly to make the story a little smoother and more symmetrical. From a thematic perspective, however, the new film is unsophisticated, offering little beyond the visceral appeal of an unsolved mystery, seat-squirming tension, and a streak of white-hot pseudo-feminist rage.

Insofar as this is the extent of what any version of the The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo could offer, David Fincher’s film is an unquestionably handsome and persuasive realization of the tale. It’s visually striking, crisply conveyed, and blessed with a lucid, seductive aesthetic and mood, which is more than one can say of most murder mysteries. Rooney Mara—slinky and wide-eyed beneath ghostly eyebrows—conveys her own variation of Lisbeth, more shrinking, awkward, and defensive than Rapace’s portrayal, but also more fearsome and razor-edged when provoked. Beyond Mara and Craig the film features a cast of familiar faces—Christopher Plummer, Stellan Skarsgård, and Robin Wright among them—as well as Swedish stars and long-lost character actors (Julian Sands!), all of whom acquit themselves well enough. (Perhaps the film’s only formal blunder is the vaguely accented English dialog, which is distracting given the explicit decision to retain the Swedish setting.)

The real stars here, however, are the craftsmen behind the film, a team of returning Fincher collaborators who manage to render a stomach-churning tale of rape, murder, and revenge as something deliriously attractive. Cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth bestows a familiar yellowish “greasy-gothic” look to most of the interior spaces, but elsewhere a chilly gray dominates, and appropriately so. The adroit editing from Kirk Baxter and Angus Wall—who have now cut the director’s past four films—keeps things humming along with enviable vigor and clarity, a necessary asset in a story so laden with exposition. Just as essential is the score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, which effectively evokes an atmosphere of pure wrongness by layering plucked-out, discordant melodies over ambient droning and buzzing. These various visual and aural elements coalesce (perhaps “curdle” is a better term) into an atmosphere that is oppressive, gnawing, and eminently fitting for the tale. And therein lies the primary appeal of The Girl With a Dragon Tattoo: As a lurid, shallow thriller steeped in hideous beauty.

The Adventures of Tintin

2011 // USA - New Zealand // Steven Spielberg // December 17, 2011 // 3D Digital Theatrical Projection (Wehrenberg Des Peres 14)

Adapting the beloved Tintin stories to film has been a passion project for Steven Spielberg for nearly three decades. The director first sought to option the work of Belgian comic artist Hergé in 1983, after the runaway success of Raiders of the Lost Ark and E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial had solidified Spielberg’s reputation as a Hollywood powerhouse. Twenty-eight years is a staggeringly long time for a film to languish in Development Hell, but the feature that has finally emerged, The Adventures of Tintin, is no worse the wear for its long gestation. In fact, Tintin is that rarest of things in this era when aggressive, directionless ugliness dominates the cinema of big-budget spectacle: a work in which cutting-edge technology allows a genuine film artist to express themselves without the usual analog limitations. It’s telling that the seeds of Tintin were planted by the Steven Spielberg of 1983, a man who had so recently given the world Raiders, one of the most perfect action-adventure films of all time. The Adventures of Tintin—which is, astonishingly, the first animated feature of the director’s career—gives splendid, ebullient expression to the same rousing spirit of derring-do that suffused the first chapter of the Indiana Jones saga. Moreover, Tintin finds the veteran director newly empowered by the potential of the digital film-making space, where his camera can be anywhere and move in any way he might imagine.

Adored in his native Belgium and among comics aficionados the world over, the eponymous Tintin is a young reporter of uncertain age and boundless pluck, who has an affinity for stumbling into globe-trotting adventures with his loyal wire fox terrier, Snowy. Adapted by a trio of British screenwriters—Steven Moffat, Joe Cornish, and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World director Edgar Wright—The Adventures of Tintin incorporates three of Hergé's Tintin stories: The Crab with the Golden Claws, The Secret of the Unicorn, and Red Rackham’s Treasure. Apart from amalgamating the various plot elements from these books, the only significant change that the script makes to the source material is to switch Tintin's nationality from Belgian to British, an alteration that is no doubt heretical among more impassioned devotees of the ginger-haired journalist. However, this change allows the characters to speak in English without the need for distracting logical leaps, while also preserving the decaying colonial tone of Tintin's mid-twentieth-century escapades.

The film's events begin with Tintin's purchase of an antique model ship, and from there proceed to all manner of chases, escapes, fisticuffs, and shoot-outs, at locales ranging from the streets of London to an ocean freighter to a Moroccan palace. To say more about the story would rob the viewer of one of the primary pleasures of The Adventures of Tintin: A thrilling awareness that the next clue could take Tintin and Snowy anywhere in the world and reveal almost any wonder. Aside from Tintin himself (Jamie Bell), the film features many iconic Hergé characters, including the perpetually soused Captain Haddock (Andy Serkis), the imperious Ivanonvich Sakharine (Daniel Craig), bumbling police inspectors Thompson and Thompson (Simon Pegg and Nick Frost), pickpocket Silk (Toby Jones), and opera diva Bianca Castafiore (Kim Stengel). Created with motion-capture animation from Weta Digital, the film boasts a unique look that is at once realistic and cartoonish. Rather than attempt an animated realization of Hergé's style, Tintin uses the character designs of the cartoonist's original stories as a reference point and then extrapolates from there. The result is something that is more soft and natural than the exaggerated plasticity of most computer-animated characters, but also obviously drawn from the traditions of European comic art. As such, it seldom risks the Uncanny Valley of Robert Zemeckis' digital monsters.

Beyond the characters, the world of The Adventures of Tintin is almost ludicrously detailed and gorgeous, an ever-so-slightly stylized vision of the mid-twentieth century. Unlike the setting of the Indiana Jones films, Tintin's world is mostly free of supernatural threats, and as such the obstacles that the reporter and his dog confront seem downright prosaic from a twenty-first century vantage. There are encrypted riddles, secret compartments, locked doors, trackless oceans, searing deserts, and lots of goons with guns. Contemporary viewers might ask, "Shouldn't there be some mummies or aliens in there?" Perish the thought. One of the film's singular achievements is how marvelously thrilling Tintin's materially-grounded adventures seem, in part because the work is saturated with such giddy affection for its source material, without being embarrassingly slavish or self-referential. However, it's also due to Speilberg's enviable skill at rendering elemental action sequences—e.g. Snowy chasing a truck through the London streets—with breathtaking vigor and wit.

That skill achieves its unrestrained potential in Tintin, as the unfettered director luxuriates in the liberation of his virtual camera. For some film-makers, such freedom can become an excuse for indulgent flourishes and headache-inducing excess. Not so with Spielberg, for while Tintin is often breathless and frenetic, it is also one of the most visually seamless and handsome things that the director has ever created. In short, Spielberg takes to the realms of computer animation like a sailor takes to drink, and the result is by turns jaw-dropping and just plain heavenly. A bravura escape sequence through a desert port on a hill—presented as a single, unbroken shot that swoops through windows and roars down narrow alleys—is probably the most thrilling thing to bear Spielberg’s name since Dr. Jones dangled from the grill of a cargo truck. Tintin's scene is lessened only by the knowledge that it did not require the blood, sweat, and tears of analog stuntwork.

However, what's truly novel about Tintin is not the meticulous choreography of its action set pieces—although I am hard-pressed to recall a feature film that is this flat-out gorgeous while also moving very, very fast—but the marriage of its distinctly modern animation approach to a very simple, determinedly old-fashioned story. There's something almost wistful about the way that Tintin goes to the library to do research (!), and then reads vital exposition aloud for Snowy's (i.e. the viewer's) benefit. Quite apart from such quaint details, however, the film impresses with the sheer minimalism of its scenario. Through all the rushing to and fro from one destination to the next—whether by car, boat, or plane—the goal remains clear: Reach the Prize before the Bad Guys. Tintin is presented with a keen awareness that it is not narrative convolutions that draw the viewer into a treasure hunt, but the propulsive progression from A to B to C to X.

Perhaps, in this respect, Tintin risks some flimsiness, for it appears to have no point beyond simply existing as a rollicking action-adventure picture with a Boy Scout's soul. However, given that such pictures are so rare, and almost never this luscious and smartly-crafted, it seems woefully hardhearted to grouse that Tintin lacks depth. Of course it lacks depth: It's a Boy's Own tale brought to glorious life. Other problems do weigh on Tintin here and there. The film possesses all the rhythmic hiccups that one might expect from the first of two feature-length films adapted from multiple books. (Spielberg and producer Peter Jackson will purportedly be co-directing the second Tintin film.) Moreover, Tintin never scans as a particularly rich character, given that his primary qualities are his utter fearlessness, quick-thinking, and almost super-heroic knack for wriggling out of trouble. Such characteristics make him an excellent hero for the purposes of a breezy adventure tale, but don't lend him much personality. Of course, Tintin must be an Everylad who can appeal to any viewer who daydreams of sunken galleons and palm-studded oases. In this sense, Tintin's earnestness and dauntless courage make him exactly the right hero for the film that bears his name. For who wouldn't like to be so brave in the face of danger; to alternately clobber and maneuver and reason their way out of harrowing situations; and to race across the world in search of fortune and glory, all with a loyal pooch by their side?

Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows

2011 // USA // Guy Ritchie // December 12, 2011 // Digital Theatrical Projection (Wehrenberg Chesterfield Galaxy 14)

Guy Ritchie’s 2009 re-imagining of the Great Detective and his adventures in Victorian London proved to be a luscious guilty pleasure. To be sure, Sherlock Holmes is overstuffed with garishly rendered action sequences and rushed-over plot twists, but the past two years have been unexpectedly kind to the film. Robert Downey, Jr.’s portrayal of Holmes is fittingly charming, while also conveying a man who is supercilious, unpredictable, and deeply unhappy. It’s a performance that never fails to elicit a smile, while revealing the actor’s ability to convey nuanced characterization beneath his trademark rapid-fire witticisms. Moreover, repeat viewings have strengthened the triumph of Sherlock Holmes’ other pleasures: the staggeringly rich production design, the cunning nods to the Holmes Canon, and the sneaky strength of the performances from Jude Law as John Watson and—yes—Rachel McAdams as Irene Adler.

Unfortunately, the new sequel, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, doesn’t possess the same spark as its predecessor, for reasons that are somewhat slippery. The banter between Holmes and Watson is a little slacker, the humor is a little more cartoonish, and returning director Ritchie doubles down on the over-long action sequences that groan under his heedless employment of showy techniques. These include stuttering shifts in speed, smudged and distorted images, CGI zooms on slamming firing pins, and the like. Such flourishes aren’t irksome in isolation, but A Game of Shadows employs them with wearisome consistency. The whole film feels somewhat undernourished and ungainly, especially the script, which is surprising given that Sherlock Holmes’ gaggle of writers (usually an ill omen) has been replaced by a mere duo for A Game of Shadows (Michele and Kieran Mulroney). None of these flaws is glaring, but together they make for a film that doesn't live up to its potential.

Despite this catalog of gripes, A Game of Shadows works gratifyingly well as an honest-to-goodness sequel. It advances its predecessor’s story in appealing ways, changing the stakes while mostly preserving the inimitable snap-and-crackle tone. (In this, the film recalls, of all things, this year’s Kung Fu Panda 2.) Like the first Sherlock Holmes film, A Game of Shadows takes a peculiar approach to its source material. It cheerfully disregards the Canon while also weaving in a dizzying number of references and allusions to Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories. In particular, the film borrows some of its narrative turns and window dressing from the Holmes tale "The Final Problem". (If you’re a Holmes purist, it’s probably appalling. If you’re a fan of Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill's The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, it will seem familiar.) The new film likewise recreates the style and ground rules of its predecessor. Although it is set in an anachronism-laden and steampunk-tinged England in 1891, A Game of Shadows is nonetheless firmly rooted in the twisted, secular world of cold-blooded criminality. Ghosts and goblins need not apply.

Indeed, the first Sherlock Holmes succeeded in part due to its nimble treatment of the villainous Lord Blackwood (Mark Strong). That film plays Blackwood’s B-movie menace for maximum effect, while also allowing the Great Detective to scoff at the man’s occult-draped theatrics and promise a rational explanation for everything (dutifully delivered by the end). In contrast, A Game of Shadows dispenses with the supernatural trappings altogether, presenting a grim tale of diplomacy, terrorism, and global conflict. It’s almost prosaic stuff compared to black magic and diabolic scions, but fortunately A Game of Shadows features the Canon’s most notorious villain, the esteemed mathematics professor and secret criminal mastermind Professor James Moriarty (Jared Harris, an inspired choice). Moriarty makes a brief appearance in the first film, but for this outing the man Holmes calls the "Napoleon of Crime" is front-and-center.

A Game of Shadows presents Moriarty as a dark reflection of Holmes, an intellectual equal who possesses the respected public persona and daunting political clout that the Great Detective lacks. Moriarty's reach is seemingly limitless. In one of the film’s most chilling moments, the fiendish professor clears a crowded restaurant simply by clinking his glass. (How does that work? Is every Londoner but Holmes and his allies on the underworld payroll?) A Game of Shadows opens with Holmes and Moriarty already locked in conflict, despite the fact that they have not met face-to-face. Taking place several months after the events of the first film, the sequel finds Holmes more unbalanced than ever, obsessed with the web of crime that he sees radiating out from the professor. Moriarty’s master plan alights on simmering Franco-German antagonism, Continental anarchist plots, and a caravan of French gypsies—including Noomi Rapace as a fortune-teller in search of her missing brother—but the details matter less than the archvillain’s persona.

Harris portrays the professor as unassuming and unflappable on the outside, but vain and sadistic within. It's no mistake that Moriarty emerges just as Holmes’ loneliness begins to prick him, nor that the professor seems to take pleasure in his crimes on a visceral level, much as Holmes views each case as a personal challenge. Both men seem self-aware that their rivalry is one for the ages, which allows the film to set up some delicious scenes between Downey and Harris. Most memorably, the crescendo of Moriarty’s plot takes place off-screen as he and the Great Detective play chess, with each man narrating the events in the adjacent room. (This also permits Watson, bless his mustache, to play the part of both sleuth and man of action as he unravels Moriarty’s scheme without Holmes’ lead.) It’s a gripping scene, crisply edited and directed by Ritchie with more restraint than elsewhere. And it ends bleakly, in a manner that echoes Yimou Zhang’s martial arts epic Hero. Even as Holmes’ ability to peer into the future with his vaunted logic sidesteps the need for a brawl, it ultimately leads him to one final, inescapable conclusion. It’s a good thing that Ritchie’s playfulness wins out before the credits roll, lest the film be saddled with a discordantly glum ending.

Martha Marcy May Marlene

2011 // USA // Sean Durkin // December 6, 2011 // Theatrical Print (Landmark Tivoli Theater)

Sean Durkin’s unsettling, skillfully crafted debut feature, Martha Marcy May Marlene, offers abundant moments of skin-crawling tension. However, it’s not quite accurate to describe the film as a thriller. That generic tag suggests the primacy of a propulsive narrative and stunning reversals, features which the film pointedly lacks. What it in fact presents is a character study of an abused and harrowed psyche, a study that places the viewer deep inside the titular Martha’s dazed, fearful headspace with disquieting ease. The terrors that the film presents are the terrors of the past, which seep up through the ground and distort the present into a narcotic haze. Fully half of the film takes place in flashback, as Martha recalls her horrific experiences in a Manson-like pseudo-spiritual criminal cult. The achievement of the film lies in the befuddled immediacy of Martha’s remembrances, which scramble past and present and leave her (and the viewer) in a state of perpetual raw-nerved paranoia. It is, in essence, an immersive portrait of post-traumatic stress disorder, deftly realized in cinematic form.

The film opens with Martha’s (Elizabeth Olsen) hasty, surreptitious flight on foot from a rural commune, where what little we see—women toiling in mute subservience to the men—suggests something Not Quite Right. Cult member Watts (Brady Corbet) quickly catches up with Martha in town and lays some vague menace on her, but she nonetheless manages to place a tearful call to her estranged older sister, Lucy (Sarah Paulson), who shows up a few hours later and whisks Martha away. This sets up the rest of the film’s framing narrative, in which a shell-shocked Martha takes up hesitant residence at the massive, dreadfully tasteful lakeside summer home of Lucy and husband Ted (Hugh Dancy). There she attempts—with little success—to re-acclimate to the outside world and shake the unnerving sensation that she is being watched. These scenes at the lake house are intercut with flashbacks which gradually reveal the hellish extent of the traumas Martha suffered while in the fold of the cult.

Underneath a flimsy veneer of wooly New Age positivity and utopianism, the cult is exposed as a witch’s brew of misogyny and cynical criminality, all roiling around the father figure of Patrick (John Hawkes), a charming tyrant who viciously rapes each female recruit under the guise of "cleansing" them. The tactics that the cult utilizes to control its members are as old as the hills—a toxic mingling of love, reward, and fear designed to remake each captive into their own jailer—but the film wisely devotes ample time to observing exactly how such emotional terrorism unfolded in Martha’s specific case. This is essential, as it allows the viewer to appreciate Martha’s actions as reasonable given her situation, neatly heading off the incredulous objections that inevitably sprout in any abuse scenario ("Why didn’t she just leave?"). Moreover, the flitting between past and present highlights Martha’s discomfort with the wider world, not to mention her still-fresh dread after escaping a nightmarish situation. Several moments will often pass before it is clear whether a new scene is a flashback or not, a confusion abetted by the film’s often purposely ambiguous framing, lighting, and design. For Martha, the past isn’t even past.

Unfortunately, Lucy and Ted, while initially charitable and patient, are a tad too self-absorbed and suffused with bourgeois sanctimony to provide Martha with the empathy she desperately needs. (They are, after all status-obsessed yuppies, which under the conventions of American indie film marks them as, at best, clueless obstacles to the main character's liberation.) The film is vague about Martha's life prior to the cult, suggesting only that it was lonely and troubled. By lecturing her about her lack of ambition and strange behavior, Lucy and Ted provide Martha with daily reminders of why Patrick's superficially loving and accepting ideology proved so enticing. In her defense, Big Sis is operating under limited information. Martha offers Lucy virtually no explanations for where she has been, even as signs surface that the cult has followed and is now watching her. Panicked second-guessing prevails: Are the nocturnal taps on the roof dropping pinecones, or are they pebbles tossed by cultists, mimicking a common diversion they employed during their bloody home invasions? Martha’s comfort with life in her sister’s house wanes just as her paranoia waxes, leading to an outright meltdown when she mistakes a bartender at a party for a cult spy.

Events eventually spiral towards a conclusion that crackles with tension, although the film refuses to decisively resolve the story. Martha isn't exactly an unreliable narrator; rather, the ominous signs that crowd the final minutes of the film can reasonably be interpreted as either meaningless occurrences or the telltale rustles of something Very Bad that is about to go down. Like this year's definitive American film, Meek's Cutoff, the non-ending of Martha will likely frustrate some viewers accustomed to more concrete resolutions. While Martha never discovers the former film's philosophical, historical, and mythic depth, the thrust of its final moments is similarly devastating. To a mind battered by trauma—war, torture, abuse—there is no discernible difference between a stranger sitting on the beach and a murderous fanatic bent on dragging you back to Hell.

Into the Abyss

2011 // Germany - Canada // Werner Herzog // November 29, 2011 // Theatrical Print (Landmark Tivoli Theater)

Into the Abyss might be the closest Werner Herzog will ever come to creating a work of outright agitprop, and yet it’s still light-years from the cinematic polemics of film-makers like Charles Ferguson and Alex Gibney. Herzog’s ambitions are far too multi-faceted and high-minded to indulge in political swipes or straightforward argumentation, even in a film that tackles a topic as contentious as the death penalty in America. At every turn, Into the Abyss proves intriguingly divergent from what one expects from a documentary on a Very Serious Issue, although it is in most respects exactly what one expects from a Werner Herzog documentary.

The entry point for the writer-director’s somber new feature is a shocking and senseless 2001 triple homicide in the Houston suburban-rural fringe community of Conroe, Texas. In separate trials, Jason Burkett and Michael Perry were convicted of committing the murders in the course of a scheme to steal a Camaro, with Burkett being sentenced to life in prison, and Perry to death by lethal injection. In the film, Herzog largely refrains from indulging in his customary lyrical musings, appearing only as the interrogating voice in interviews with Burkett, Perry, and others: family members of victims Sandra Stotler, Adam Stotler, and Jeremy Richardson; law enforcement officials who worked the case; locals who recall encounters with the convicted men; a chaplain and former guard captain from Texas' Death Row; and Burkett’s advocate-turned-wife, whom he married through the glass in the prison visiting room.

Unlike Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky’s Paradise Lost documentaries about the (now exonerated) West Memphis Three—films that simmered with journalistic agitation and white-hot indignation—Into the Abyss isn’t especially concerned with whether Burkett and Perry actually committed the murders for which they were convicted. Both men maintain that they are not to blame for the brutal triple murder, but both are also weirdly elliptical about what exactly happened, and Herzog doesn’t press them on the matter. The film regards the bloody details of the Conroe slayings not as an end, but a means to a sweeping-yet-intimate rumination on American murder, of both the criminal and state-sanctioned varieties. The tone of Into the Abyss is set in its first interview, wherein the Death Row chaplain—after outlining his solemn duties—describes his encounter with a squirrel on a golf course. The anecdote is sort of absurd, and yet it moves the chaplain to tears as he relates it. In that inimitable Herzog way, the film regards the man’s ache with both vague amusement and deep reverence.

Into the Abyss does not spend its time building a case against the death penalty, despite the director’s declaration early in the film that he finds capital punishment abominable. The film is much more interested in reflecting on death and murder as phenomena, on the way that they reach out with scarlet fingers and touch strange places. This philosophical but human-centered approach allows the film to discover some of the rawest moments in any Herzog film since Little Dieter Needs to Fly. Some of these moments are undeniably potent, as when the former Death Row captain describes his own nervous breakdown following the execution of Carla Faye Tucker in 1998. Other scenes contain a more subjective emotional element: Parents will probably be most sensitive to the confessions of Burkett’s dad, also imprisoned for life, as he tearfully describes his memories of holding his infant son and his realization of his absolute failure as a father.

Such heart-tugging is a far cry from the more cerebral, transcendent cogitations of Encounters at the End of the World and Cave of Forgotten Dreams. As a result, Into the Abyss can’t help but feel a bit facile in comparison. It’s arguably easy to achieve poignancy by pointing a camera at a murder victim’s daughter and asking her to talk about her grief, but, as usual, Herzog’s interview methods—the pregnant pauses, the peculiar questions, the intermittent schoolboy coyness—almost always manage to elicit something unexpected. The film regards moments of searing pain and startling eccentricity with the same awed curiosity.

Into the Abyss seems ordained to invite comparisons to In Cold Blood, but unlike Truman Capote’s celebrated non-fiction novel, it has little to say on the relationship between the two perpetrators. Housed in separate prisons and facing different fates, Burkett and Perry barely acknowledge one another, save for the purposes of shifting blame. In the decade since the murders, Perry has maintained a gawky, adolescent countenance and become a born-again Christian. Personable and polite, he betrays no fear of death, but neither does he exhibit any remorse for his deeds. Nor does Burkett, whom prison life has made thicker and tougher, and who maintains that he will one day be exonerated.

The film reserves it most cockeyed fascination for Burkett’s wife, Melyssa, a glassy-eyed murder groupie who has somehow conceived a child with her husband without ever having been alone in the same room with him. (Herzog, clearly amused, asks about a contraband sperm sample, but gets only a non-denial-denial.) The film regards Melyssa with leery skepticism, but is also beguiled with the idea of life emerging so improbably and even farcically from death. It’s a sentiment embodied even more succinctly in a quintessentially “Herzogian” revelation: When the police attempted to move the impounded Camaro years later, they found that a sapling had grown through the floor and into the car.

Troll Hunter

2010 // Norway // André Øvredal // November 19, 2011 // Netflix Instant

In most respects, the Norwegian horror-fantasy Troll Hunter is a fairly representative “found footage” thriller. It possesses the jittery camerawork, generally unpleasant characters, and old-school matinee-monster teases that are now bedrock elements of that sub-genre. What most distinguishes director André Øvredal’s film is the engaging mythological framework that it constructs for its story, a framework that the film regards with affection and sincerity while also acknowledging its innate absurdity. Absent an intense and detailed viral marketing campaign—as in The Blair Witch Project or Cloverfield—most found footage features do a dreadful job of conveying the broader fantastical universe that rustles outside the audience’s field of view. Too often, every aspect of these films is pitched slavishly to the camera’s eye, with little regard for textured world-building, as though a first-person camera automatically bestows all the necessary verisimilitude. Not so with Troll Hunter, which utilizes expository dialog, creative set design, and four or five thrilling special effects set-pieces to intimate a rich and dryly amusing pagan-fantasy mythos. (In this respect, Troll Hunter plays as a wily, lo-fi cousin to the Nordic-influenced How to Train Your Dragon.)

The conceit: All the footage that the film presents was ostensibly shot by a group of student documentarians—director/interviewer Thomas (Glenn Erland Tosterud), sound woman Johanna (Johanna Mørck), and cameraman Kalle (Tomas Alf Larsen)—who are shadowing a suspected bear poacher in western Norway. Despite being curtly warned off by their subject, Hans (Otto Jespersen), the trio doggedly follows his movements through campgrounds and rugged wilderness areas, going so far as to tail him during a nocturnal expedition into the forest. Eventually, the students stumble upon the outlandish truth: Hans is no poacher, but a government-employed field agent (the only field agent, actually) for the Troll Security Service (TSS). Disillusioned by decades of thankless work under an agency that values secrecy above all else, Hans agrees to allow the students to film his lonely, day-to-day routine, as well as his matter-of-fact explanations of troll biology and behavior. This proves to be the set-up for the real meat of Troll Hunter, which is a succession of fearsome, often funny encounters with different varieties of troll.

The unsuccessful aspects of Troll Hunter are distressingly familiar within the annals of found footage cinema. The only truly compelling character in the film is Hans, a reserved and hard-nosed old salt who doesn’t have a shred of romanticism left about his life’s work, but betrays a streak of wary fondness for trolls. Every other character is either featureless or actively unlikable, which necessarily restrains the tension of the various action-horror sequences. The film drags a bit in spots, and is liberally padded with lingering shots of the admittedly gorgeous winter landscapes of rural Norway, to the point where it seems to have ambitions as a promotional film for Scandinavian tourism. However, fifteen or so minutes of bloat notwithstanding, the story is neatly structured around Hans’ investigation of a recent, unprecedented rise in troll rampages, with each scene revealing new details and flowing smoothly into the next. The whole thing is a bit schematic and predictable at times--when a 500-foot-tall troll species is mentioned in passing, its eventual appearance is virtually guaranteed--but still gratifyingly executed.

Troll Hunter never quite figures out whether it wants to treat its titular monsters as wholly scientific subjects or émigrés from a lost magical era. The film offers some biological gobbledygook to explain why trolls turn to stone when exposed sunlight, but elsewhere ridicules other alleged attributes as fairy-tale nonsense. On the one hand, Hans states flatly and without elaboration that trolls are definitely mammals. On the other, the film doesn’t even attempt to present a pseudo-scientific explanation for trolls’ ability to smell Christian blood, a characteristic that proves to be a crucial plot point. Such contradictions might have been more vexing if Troll Hunter weren’t having so much vintage monster-movie fun with its signature creatures. The sheer spectacle of seeing mythological brutes marauding through a contemporary landscape is half the appeal of the film, which does a marvelous job of conveying the threatening nature of the trolls while also portraying them as faintly ludicrous. Blessedly, the viewer is spared the sight of “darker, edgier” trolls. Instead, the creature designs draw from the works of whimsical contemporary fantasy artists, such as Brian Froud’s witty creations and Rien Poortvliet’s seminal illustrations for Wil Huygen’s gnome books.

Troll Hunter takes sardonic aim at a wide variety of targets: romanticism and revisionism regarding Europe’s pagan past; the glib flimsiness of hero myths; government bureaucracy and its aversion to transparency; and the tension between development and environmentalism. It’s not what one could call a vicious work of satire—it is Norwegian, after all—but in the end, the modesty of the film’s cultural commentary proves a wise decision. Troll Hunter functions first and foremost as an old-fashioned creature feature, one that boasts an absurdly deep mythology and abundant moments of giddy, comic terror.