‘Dead Talents Society’
The Taiwanese director John Hsu’s rollicking horror-comedy raked in awards, raves and strong box-office numbers last year for very good reason. Set in a world where ghosts compete to get haunting licenses, which allow them to stay on among the living and avoid permanently fading away, “Dead Talents Society” marries the gonzo style of “Beetlejuice” with the interpersonal antics and conflicts of the best backstage dramas. The world of the film is built out with exquisite, tongue-in-cheek detail: Specters hustle to get on the covers of magazines called “Death” and “Morgue,” win endorsement deals for formaldehyde brands, and adapt tried-and-true tricks — emerging from closets, crawling backward — to the new age of internet scares.
Into this context arrives The Rookie (Gingle Wang), a newly dead teen, whose unremarkable demise and lack of confidence make her a pretty awful candidate for a haunting license. That is until Catherine (Sandrine Pinna), a once-legendary and now-fading ghostress, and Makoto (Chen Bolin), her manager, take The Rookie under their wing and decide to make her a ghost worthy of eternity. A familiar underdog coming-of-age story gets a zany and charming makeover with spoofs of popular Asian horror movies and an of-the-moment satire of social media and the influencer industry.
‘The Adamant Girl (Kottukkaali)’
P.S. Vinothraj’s Tamil-language film is a road trip from hell. From its very first scenes, in which an extended family in a South Indian village prepares raucously for a journey, the movie is loud and relentless, a storm in constant motion. In the midst of all of this commotion is an oasis of quiet: Meena (Anna Ben), the stubborn woman of the title, is silent and passive, staring into nowhere with vacant eyes as she is ferried, along with a rooster, in an auto rickshaw stuffed with her relatives.
Details slowly emerge as this journey proceeds through unpaved roads and grassy fields, and the characters yell and fight and encounter myriad obstacles: meddling traffic cops, unplanned bathroom breaks, a bull blocking the street. Meena is being taken to a seer in another village to rid her of the evil spirits that have supposedly bewitched her. Of course, a “possessed woman” is usually code for a woman who dares to be independent and defy patriarchal constraints, and Meena is no different, as it soon becomes clear. Ben’s performance is the central marvel of “The Adamant Girl (Kottukkaali)”: She has just one line of dialogue in the course of this intense, extremely verbose film, but her face, both resigned and resolute, speaks louder than any of the other characters’ words.
‘Only the River Flows’
The pleasures of the noir genre derive from its blending of form and content — from how light, shadows, place and plot all combine into an ambiguous world where the lines between good and evil, reality and dreams, all start to blur. Wei Shujun’s crime drama, set in the 1990s in a small, riverside Chinese town, nails that affect. The premise is a classic one: A noble, hardworking detective (Zhu Yilong) investigates a series of murders that lead him down a rabbit hole and unsettle his sanity.
The entire film is shot on 16 mm film, with a tactile graininess that emphasizes both the period setting (a key prop in the film is a cassette tape) and the moral murkiness of the case; the locations are perpetually drenched in rain, rendering everything slick and glistening, and always on the verge of being washed away. Familiar noir tropes recur throughout — a madman on the loose, a cross-dresser in the closet, an illicit love affair — but “Only the River Flows” never feels jaded. It plays out like a loving, beautifully crafted homage to a genre that is evergreen for a reason: it confronts us with a world that is fundamentally unknowable and uncertain, where the harder we look, the less we really see.
‘Astrakan’
Directed by David Depesseville, this French film about foster care is a neorealist tale told with a surrealist twist. Samuel (Mirko Giannini), a 12-year-old orphan, has been taken in by Marie (Jehnny Beth) and Clément (Bastien Bouillon). Their home initially seems like a rural idyll, shot lusciously by the cinematographer Simon Beaufils: The family lives in a stone cottage surrounded by verdant trees, fields and lakes, which Samuel explores with his foster brothers when he’s not hanging out with the girl next door or attending gymnastics classes.
But ripples soon start to appear in this observational portrait of makeshift family life. Fostering Samuel is primarily a way for his adoptive parents to make some extra money. The exploitative, sometimes violent undertones of the arrangement impress upon the quiet and gloomy boy, whose reticent demeanor belies unspoken trauma. Repression is a key theme — Samuel struggles with passing motions — and by the film’s end, the hints of menace and transgression running through “Astrakan” crescendo in a frenzied sequence of images as narratively bemusing as it is emotionally cathartic.
‘To Nowhere’
Two queer youngsters skip school for a day of drinking, smoking and wandering through London. That’s all there is to the plot of Sian Astor-Lewis’s debut feature, a sparse, low-budget drama with a few locations and only three central characters that nevertheless packs a hefty emotional punch. The high-schoolers Tulip (Lilit Lesser) and Finn (Josefine Glaesel) wake up groggy in Tulip’s house, where she lives with her father and her uncle in the wake of her mother’s death. Tulip is sad and gentle; Finn, who presents as gender nonconforming (though this is never directly addressed in the film), is perpetually angry, and seems to harbor a deep grudge against Tulip’s uncle. The two stumble through the day erratically; they make out, fight, giggle and get into all sorts of knotty situations. Astor-Lewis allows them to be irascible and often unlikable, offering only stray moments of sordid context about their difficult home lives. Instead of neat back stories or tidy resolutions, the filmmaker invites the viewer to recognize, in the self-destructive rage of her sad, confused protagonists, a hurt that runs deeper than they have language to articulate.
