‘Sound of Silence’
Rent or buy on most major platforms.
When Emma (Penelope Sangiorgi) learns that her father has been seriously injured at her childhood home in Italy, she rushes overseas from New York to be with her parents. But there’s something off about her old turf. The hospital looks empty. The only resident seems to be a woman who runs a food truck in a desolate parking lot. And who typed “HELP” on a piece of paper still in the typewriter? It’s uncannily creepy, but nothing compared to what Emma sees and hears when she turns on an old radio she finds among her family’s belongings.
Alessandro Antonaci, Stefano Mandalà and Daniel Lascar — an Italian trio who go by T3 — wrote and directed this deeply unnerving film that seamlessly and tenderly blends issues of mental illness and domestic violence into a surreal ghost story with shades of “A Quiet Place” and “The Conjuring.” (The film is in English with occasional Italian subtitles.)
Antonaci’s tenebrous cinematography forces you to keep an eye on what lurks in the shadows that darken almost every scene, and it’s a thrill. But it’s Federico Malandrino’s sound design that really hit me in the face. Watch with the volume cranked.
I was not prepared. For how the writer-director Courtney Glaude grabbed me by the neck and slowly tightened his grip. For flashes of Shudder-level brutal violence. For the macabre sense of humor. And, most surprisingly, for Mo’Nique, who gives my favorite horror movie performances of 2023 so far.
The film opens as Emma (Mo’Nique) survives a home invasion by assailants who slaughter her husband and daughters. Cut to a year later and Emma, eager to promote her new book about the ordeal, sits down for an on-camera spiritual reading with Sky (Chasity Sereal), a young medium whose powers are only half-phony: Sky actually does see spirits. As Sky channels Emma’s dead family members, Emma suddenly gets up, locks the doors and turns the reading, and “The Reading,” upside down.
Glaude’s supernatural thriller feels borrowed — it’s like “Long Island Medium” but Black — and there’s no way Emma’s house is big enough for an extended cat-and-mouse game. But forget all that, because Mo’Nique will kick you in the pants with a fearless and commanding (and darkly comic) performance, and that gripping twist will put an I’ll-be-damned smile on your face.
‘Holy Shit!’
Adventuresome horror fans listen up: This horror comedy from the writer-director Lukas Rinker is about a guy who gets trapped inside an overturned porta-potty. Repulsive? Absolutely. But behind the gag-triggering premise is a film that’s comically daring, craftily directed, unmercifully vulgar and all the way German.
Frank (Thomas Niehaus), an architect, wakes up sitting against the potty hole of the coffin-like plastic outhouse, his arm pierced by a metal rod. As he tries to free himself, Frank realizes through a series of flashbacks that his business partner, Horst (Gedeon Burkhard), is a saboteur responsible for Frank’s predicament, and for the rest of the film, Frank tries bravely to wrest free so he can lay Horst to waste.
Niehaus delivers an exceptionally physical, ludicrously clownish performance as a man trying to MacGyver his way out of a foul situation using his feet and his one free arm while covered in very convincing-looking raw sewage and hot blood. That Rinker made a pulsing, nutso comedy out of such dark matter makes me eager to see what he drops next.
‘Deadly Estate’
Zakiya (Samantha Walkes, terrific) works at the front desk of the Magnate Hotel, a fancy-pants place where rich men know their sexual assignations will be discreetly ignored. When a sketchy guy checks in as first name Cash, last name Money, she intuits that his intentions are more than romantic. Sure enough, the next morning someone in his suite winds up dead, and the shady people who recently bought the hotel sure as hell aren’t going to take the blame. Zakiya is.
That’s the simple but extremely effective setup to this Tubi original thriller directed by Sam Coyle. The film slowly builds with the small tensions of an old-fashioned made-for-TV movie from the ’70s. A low-budget one, too: For a ritzy hotel, there don’t seem to be many guests. (Yet the script has more plots than a New England graveyard.) The film breaks no ground, but it hooked me like that mystery novel I once found at a garage sale and started reading right then and there. I couldn’t put it down, so I paid $1 and took it home and stayed up late that night finishing it over cold ziti. Plus, the film is yet another example of Tubi’s commitment to original thrillers led by Black female characters, an effort that puts Hollywood horror to shame.
‘Unwelcome’
When I saw in this film’s press notes that the director Jon Wright was inspired by “Gremlins” and “Straw Dogs,” I thought: Let’s go. After watching the film, the journey is a trip that doesn’t quite reach its destination.
Having survived a brutal attack, a young couple, Jamie (Douglas Booth) and Maya (Hannah John-Kamen), move from London to rural Ireland, where Jamie’s dead aunt left him a beautiful old house in a small village. There’s a catch: Every day, a blood offering, like a slice of liver, must be left for the Redcaps, the hungry, hooded hobgoblins who call the property home. When Maya and Jamie forget to keep the Redcaps fed, the goblins get hungry for more than a snack. It doesn’t help that the boorish family doing home renovations for them, led by an ornery dad (Colm Meaney), is monstrous in its own way.
Tonally the film is a mishmash of thriller, dark comedy and, most disappointingly, gory creature feature without enough gore or creature. That is until the ludicrous and bloody final stretch, when the Redcaps — who look like the children of Yoda and the Herzog Nosferatu — go carnage crazy. This one’s best for fans of goofy Irish folk horror who need a break from rewatching “Leprechaun.”
