Fantasy, flashback or something even STRANGER?
Andrew Haigh has made some lovely films, with 45 Years, starring Tom Courtenay and Charlotte Rampling, and Lean On Pete, which partnered Charlie Plummer with an under-performing racehorse, among my favourites. His latest,
All Of Us Strangers, picked up six Bafta nominations but, be warned, turns out to be a much odder offering than you might expect.
At least the disconcerting moment that first indicates all may not be as it seems comes early on, when Adam, played by the sought-after Andrew Scott, unexpectedly visits his parents at their suburban home. Suddenly you start doing the maths.
Scott is a fit 47 while Adam’s parents, clearly dressed from another era, are played by a moustachioed Jamie Bell, 37, and a spiral-permed Claire Foy, 39. So is this scene fantasy, a flashback, a memory, or something more magical? If you’re anything like me, you’ll still be asking that question hours after leaving the cinema.
Until then, Adam has seemed relatively straightforward – an apparently lonely writer struggling for inspiration in his high-rise apartment and cautiously drawn to his only neighbour, Harry, played by fellow Irishman Paul Mescal, who turns up drunkenly at his front door one evening and makes a clumsy pass. But if Adam’s parents aren’t really there, then who is? All Of Us Strangers is beautifully shot and edited, very nicely acted and its use of Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch’s score exquisite. But much of its sparse storyline feels familiar, while the unresolved manner of its telling may frustrate commercial audiences.
The Color Purple also requires a health warning. This is not a simple remake of the much-admired 1985 film that starred Whoopi Goldberg and Oprah Winfrey and was directed by Steven Spielberg. No, this is a film version of the 2005 Broadway musical, and right from the outset the high-energy singing and dancing are absolutely full-on.
With an almost entirely black cast and a period rural setting (it begins in Georgia in 1909), you can see this as a black response to Seven Brides For Seven Brothers… until you remember how relentlessly miserable and violent the Alice Walker novel, on which this is still very much based, actually is.
That was a problem for Spielberg and it remains a problem now, although Ghanian director Blitz Bazawule pours heart and soul into solving it. I loved much of the musical content, but the violent male abuse meted out to poor Celie (Fantasia Barrino) is difficult to watch and the decades-spanning story does drag in the final quarter.
Still, you can see why Danielle Brooks secured an Oscar nomination this week for her supporting performance as the fabulous Sofia, a woman with the empowering belief in saying ‘Hell no’, and why Taraji P Henson, fabulous as the blues singer Shug Avery, might feel aggrieved to have missed out. A horror film that kills off the great Peter Mullan
before the opening titles clearly has some creative confidence, and so Baghead initially proves as we watch the young and impoverished Iris – nicely played by The Witcher’s Freya Allan – decide what to do with the German pub she has suddenly inherited from a father she hasn’t seen for years.
When she discovers the nearderelict pub offers an unusual way of making some much-needed cash, she decides to keep it. Which is a big mistake as her father – Mullan, of course – has already warned us there’s something very nasty lurking in the basement.
Based on a short film from 2017, Baghead gets off to a wonderfully atmospheric start, but director Alberto Corredor makes the mistake of showing and explaining too much too soon and ends up with a horror film that is good but never quite frightening enough.
Jackdaw is impressively well shot, uses music to good effect and makes the most of its run-down industrial coastal setting. But this would-be gritty thriller – about a pick-up that goes badly wrong – is let down by an unconvincing story and – Jenna Coleman apart – some distinctly ropey acting. Shame.