The Little Pakeha

2022, directed by Hannah Barlow and Kane Senes

You know that thing where a character just keeps on making bad decision after bad decision as everything goes to shit around them? I can’t stand that thing. Snowballing consequences can be done really well when all of a character’s choices make sense in the moment, otherwise I end up torturing myself for days afterwards thinking about all the things they could have done to prevent everything that came afterwards. I can’t entirely say that Sissy (rather, Cecelia – much of the film is spent with her trying not to be seen as Sissy) could have prevented everything, since Alex was the one to initiate the first major confrontation, but she could definitely have chosen not to go to the entire weekend in a rural area that she wouldn’t be able to escape from to spend time with someone she had an incredibly fraught history with and who had no idea she’d been invited.

But then, while we’re clearly set up to sympathise with Cecelia to begin with, there are signs right from the start that things might not be quite how they appear. Even in the home video when Sissy declares that she and Emma are best friends because they have so much in common we aren’t actually given any examples before Emma launches into the story of how they’ve known each other since birth. There’s a clear delineation in Sissy’s apartment between her filming space and her cluttered, messy kitchen, and then when she runs into Emma in the pharmacy the camera work exquisitely creates a sense of frenetic, manic smothering through close ups on their faces as they over-act their (whether sincere or not) excitement at seeing each other again.

This social claustrophobia carries through until the weekend and it’s easy to feel Cecelia’s stress and anxiety rising as she attempts to re-connect with Emma. It’s when the bodies start inevitably piling up that it becomes clear that it’s not so much about Emma, or even about Alex, as it is about Cecelia and her futile attempt to fill a hole inside herself. (You do have to wonder about the racial dynamics when they choose to cast a Black woman in this inherently damaged role, though at the very least she’s not the only Black character.)

I do think this is a well-made movie, but I found it extremely hard to watch and deeply uncomfortable to the point of struggling to finish it due to the… I suppose it would come under second-hand embarrassment, though it didn’t feel entirely like embarrassment the way you typically get from watching media in which someone deeply uncool tries to come off as suave, or someone tries to salvage a relationship with a person who’s no longer interested in them. Sissy instead evokes something like desperation, almost revulsion, of a kind I don’t like to subject myself to. Maybe that just means it was successful.

The title of Don’t Move is somewhat evocative of Don’t Breathe, another fairly successful horror movie. I haven’t actually seen Don’t Breathe but have it on my “someday if there’s nothing more interesting available” list, and the premise of Don’t Move is a little more interesting to me – a woman is targeted by a serial killer and injected with a paralytic to create a state of induced locked-in syndrome. Locked-in syndrome is specifically, genuinely horrifying to me, so I was both curious how they’d tell a story with a protagonist who literally cannot move for large stretches of the movie as well as interested in some thrills.

Unfortunately while it was well-acted and well-produced, Don’t Move just didn’t work for me. It was an interesting story, but it wasn’t as horrifying as I expected, and after some consideration I believe I came up with a large reason as to why: for almost the entire movie, the camera is focusing on the protagonist Iris from the perspective of someone else in the room. The most we get of her internal experience is close ups of her face, and I think it would be a lot more harrowing if there were more shots of what she could see, where we can hear other characters moving around off screen without being able to turn to look at what they were doing. That’s the horror of locked-in syndrome! But instead of experiencing what she’s experiencing, we’re just watching her experience it, and that’s a massive miss.

2023, directed by Anna Kendrick

Woman of the Hour is… such a weird movie. It’s based on the real life story of serial killer Rodney Alcala, but it’s not a documentary – it’s described as a crime thriller. It’s been criticised by one of his surviving victims as taking liberties with the truth (the supposed main character Sheryl never spent time with him one-on-one in reality but this is a major scene in the movie) but could have benefitted from fictionalising things more because most of the ongoing threads in the movie have no narrative pay-off before the end comes completely out of nowhere.

If this story was actually fictional, at least one of the women who shows up repeatedly throughout the film would have more of a role in his eventual capture. Or, well, any role. If it was actually a documentary, Anna Kendrick’s character would have been less important to the story, because aside from the ‘hook’ of having picked him out of three men in a dating show she had very little significance in the events of real life.

Perhaps it would have been more coherent if it had focused on Alcala himself as the central character rather than Sheryl, but on the other hand I think we’ve had quite enough of true crime that focuses on the killers while sidelining their victims. The issue is just that in this case, if you want to be accurate you need to change less, and if you want to tell a compelling story that actually feels like a satisfying story you need to change a lot more. Woman of the Hour fails to commit to either and ultimately suffers for it.