‘The Coffee Table’
One of last year’s most controversial horror movies was the Spanish director Caye Casas’s taboo-breaking psychological drama about the aftermath of an unspeakable act. Now that it’s streaming for free, the faint of heart should steer clear but the brave should buckle up.
The film begins as Jesús (David Pareja), against the wishes of his wife, María (Estefanía de los Santos), buys a gaudy coffee table. As if the table being ugly wasn’t enough, when Jesús installs it in the bickering couple’s living room, it becomes the centerpiece of a sickening act of violence while Maria is at the supermarket. When Maria returns home and visitors arrive, Jesús is forced to reckon with the ghastly horror in their midst.
I’ll hand it to Casas: He goes there, especially at the start and the finale of this sinister and surprisingly comic film. The pacing sags in the middle, when the screenplay (by Casas and Cristina Borobia), slowly treads dread and repetitively underlines issues of postpartum depression and toxic masculinity. Still, “The Coffee Table” is a welcome shocker at a time when risk-taking horror has become too rare.
In 2019, the German filmmaker Tilman Singer knocked my socks off with “Luz,” his nutso experimental possession film. He’s back with a bizarre body horror-meets-bird horror film that’s thematically oblique but is lots of fun to get lost inside.
Gretchen (Hunter Schafer), an American teenager grieving the death of her mother, travels with her father (Marton Csokas) to live with their new family at a remote resort in the Bavarian Alps. There, Gretchen meets a strange doctor, Herr König (Dan Stevens, sick and slick), with an interest in birds but also in Gretchen’s mute younger half sister, Alma (Mila Lieu).
Singer and his cinematographer, Paul Faltz, vividly capture Gretchen’s subsequent descent into hell with a parade of warped cinematic flourishes: mysterious avian sounds, disorienting camera angles and, best of all, supernatural moments, like a jump scare in which Gretchen is pursued one dark night by an entity in fabulous sunglasses.
The finale feels too much like an action film with no direction other than over the top. But after the smoke clears, what’s left is a smart and startling meditation on grief.
A pandemic is sweeping through America. The wealthy survive by escaping to the country, while those who are less well off, including immigrants, fend off sickness any way they can. Battles are waged in legislatures and in newspapers over whether or not people should quarantine and wear masks in public. But this isn’t Covid. It’s the 1918 influenza.
That’s the setup to this horror-adjacent historical satire written and directed by Austin Stark and Joseph Schuman. The film stars Billy Magnussen as Jay, a wealthy and hypocritical journalist sheltering with his family at their rural estate, and Peter Sarsgaard as Floyd, a working-class chef with a grifter past who, by the end of this diverting film, turns Jay’s hopes for safe and healthy future into a bloody mess.
The main reason to watch are for the leading actors’ fine tuned performances but also for Kristine Nielsen in a supporting role as Jay’s maid. Nielsen, who memorably appeared with Magnussen in Christopher Durang’s 2012 Broadway comedy “Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike,” imbues her character with the kind of absurdist humor that Durang, the Tony Award-winning satirist who died last year, would have adored.
‘Nowhere Land’
I’m a sucker for any pop culture dark corner that desecrates happy-faced children’s shows, from the demented television series “Wonder Showzen” to last year’s toxic-father family drama “Mr. Crocket.”
That’s why, for fans of low-budget experimental horror, I’m recommending this flawed but twisted fable from the directors Gerald and Michael Crum. MarkAnthony Baca plays a grieving father whose quest to find his missing daughter leads him to “Nowhere Land,” a scrappy children’s television show with threadbare puppets who command malicious forces in the real world.
You’ll need patience to weather the barely-there acting, a weakness that almost tanks the film. But the film cranks it to 10 when the actors shut up and the Crums focus on a warped visual vocabulary: analog video, gruesome special effects, taunting puppets and, most especially, Daryll Arellano’s skin-pinching sound. It’s in those moments that the film serves macabre cinematic delights akin to those in “I Saw the TV Glow,” another (and superior) film about the grip that television can have on an adult psyche long after a weird but formative show goes off the air.
‘The Mouse Trap’
Unlike a lot of horror fans, I have a high tolerance for the recent crop of horror movies that turned Winnie the Pooh, the Banana Splits and other beloved children’s characters into bloodthirsty evildoers. I’m looking forward to horror films based on Bambi and Popeye that might come later this year.
Add to the deranged list the “Steamboat Willie” version of Mickey Mouse that first appeared in a 1928 Disney animated short film. Taking advantage of the character’s expired copyright protections, this Canadian horror comedy transforms Steamboat Willie into a supernatural killer in a sad Mickey Mouse mask who butchers this way through a suburban game arcade. (A lengthy title sequence reminds the viewer that Disney “had nothing to do with this film.”)
What the director-cinematographer-editor Jamie Bailey and the writer Simon Phillips lack in slasher film originality they make up for in mild chutzpah. Depending on your appreciation for Steamboat Willie and the Disney canon, watching clips of the mouse’s original short film interspersed with modern-day graphic violence will leave you thrilled or horrified or both. Keep your curiosity high and your expectations low.
