TURNING RED
★★★★
OUT NOW (DISNEY+) CERT TBC / 95 MINS
DIRECTOR Domee Shi CAST Rosalie Chiang, Sandra Oh, Ava Morse, Maitreyi Ramakrishnan, Hyein Park
PLOT Toronto, 2002. Meilin (Chiang) is a confident and contented 13-year-old with top grades, great friends, and a loving relationship with her mum (Oh) and dad (Lee). But soon, bodily changes begin to kick in: when she gets overwhelmed or overexcited, Mei transforms into a giant, fluffy red panda.
IN SO MANY ways, Pixar’s Turning Red — the feature debut from Domee Shi, the filmmaker behind Oscar-winning short Bao — is all about asserting a renewed identity. Chinesecanadian almost-teen Meilin (Rosalie Chiang), aka Mei, has an assured sense of self, right from the off; she’s an unapologetically dorky academic achiever who loves playing the flute, feeding her Tamagotchi, and pining over boyband 4*Town (sample song: ‘Girl, I Love Your Jeans’). But as puberty — and an additional spiritual transformation — rears its head, she changes; some of the old Mei is left behind, but the new Mei is a blast.
Shi’s film offers a new identity for Pixar, too. For once, this is not a buddy movie. It’s not an adventure flick either, resolutely a coming-of-age story from start to finish. The Ludwig Göransson score thrums and flutters like only a Ludwig score can. And the distinct visual style — incorporating anime speed-lines, face-filter emoji reactions, and a defiantly tween-girl pastel-pink sparkly sheen — means it looks unlike anything the studio has done before. Turning Red not only keeps Mei’s experiences and emotions at the heart of the story; the entire film feels like it’s filtered through her personality: ebullient and energetic and irresistible.
In typical Pixar style, Turning Red’s premise offers instinctual simplicity and wild invention. Pitched somewhere between Eighth Grade, The Incredible Hulk and Scott Pilgrim, it externalises Mei’s inner transformation into an allegory for bodily changes and evolving interpersonal relationships. Overnight, she goes from parents’ delight to literal raging hormone monster: when her magnified feelings of embarrassment, joy and anger manifest, she blows up into a giant red panda. For all the metaphors at play, Shi doesn’t shy away from the specific realities of teen girlhood either, with a frankness that would be refreshing in any movie, let alone a Pixar one — during Mei’s first transformation, she hides in the bathroom, her mother Ming (Sandra Oh) handing her sanitary pads as she assumes “the red peony” has bloomed.
Turning Red isn’t just direct; it’s frequently unexpected, too. Most tellings of this story might involve Mei trying to keep the panda secret. Instead, Shi’s film is more about how Mei chooses to own this new side of herself, exploring the ways it impacts her relationship with her mum and her trio of ride-or-die besties, Miriam (Ava Morse), Priya (Maitreyi Ramakrishnan) and Abby (Hyein Park — a comedic standout).
Compared to the livewire opening half-hour, Turning Red’s middle act drags a little, pacingwise, but the extraordinary finale offers an exquisite blend of spectacle and sentiment. While a climactic pop-concert kaiju battle (with pitch-perfect early-’00s pastiche songs penned by Billie Eilish and Finneas) offers real cinematic thrills, the moments that linger longest are the emotionally charged conversations and quieter personal revelations. Behind the burly exterior, the final reel is ultimately a dialogue between generations of Asian women — one which posits that the forces of familial love, self-acceptance and inherited destiny are as powerful as any boyband anthem. Long live the new Pixar.
★★
OUT 18 MARCH CERT TBC / 115 MINS
DIRECTOR Adrien Lyne CAST Ben Affleck, Ana de Armas, Tracy Letts, Rachel Blanchard, Lil Rel Howery
PLOT Vic (Affleck) is a wealthy former tech designer, living in a marriage of mind games with his younger wife Melinda (de Armas). After a joke about a missing man – also a former friend-with-benefits of Melinda – arouses suspicion in his small-town community, Vic seemingly becomes embroiled in a series of murders.
ON PAPER, ADRIAN Lyne looked like a safe bet when it came to choosing a director to bring an erotic, psychological thriller like Deep Water to life. Based on the Patricia Highsmith novel of the same name — about a husband and wife, the lovers she takes, and the fallout of a lie about murdering her last paramour — it is exactly the type of story that the filmmaker behind 9½ Weeks, Indecent Proposal and Lolita would be suited to. And yet, after a 20-year absence since the release of his last film, 2002’s Unfaithful, Lyne seems to have softened his edges.
The odd couple at the centre of this smalltown intrigue are Vic and Melinda Van Allen, played by Ben Affleck and Ana de Armas, who, after seven years together, have made a pretty iffy deal: she can have affairs with other men as long as she stays in the marriage for the sake of a daughter that only he seems to show much affection for.
That ‘Sad Affleck’ meme comes to mind every time the camera closes in on Vic’s face while watching his younger, dissatisfied wife flirt around with pretty boys at various locations: a neighbour’s garden here, another neighbour’s pool there, even their own dining room. De Armas certainly doesn’t endear Melinda to you, delivering her flagrant marital disregard with stunning viciousness and indifference to her husband’s feelings. But even though she shows motherly distance towards their child, Evelyn, the underlying pain and frustration in her wide eyes do evoke empathy for a woman who feels like a trophy wife and might have been pressured into parenthood too early.
Affleck, on the other hand, seems miscast as the sort of mild-mannered cuckold who, after teasing the idea that he murdered his wife’s ex-lover who disappeared, may just have developed his own dangerous, sociopathic impulses. Even when the narrative descends into entertaining ’90s-thriller levels of violent absurdity, Affleck is never convincing. He’s unfortunately not as charmingly disturbing as his pal Matt Damon in the title role of The Talented Mr Ripley — another of Highsmith’s psychopathic leading men — and as the movie hinges on this protagonist’s movements, it’s an underwhelming undertaking.
Deep Water couldn’t be further from the glossy, Mediterranean aesthetic of Anthony Minghella’s Ripley adaptation. Most of the action takes place in the expansive homes of a wealthy
American community. That everything looks cold and clinical reinforces the Van Allens’ frosty and inhospitable marriage — as does composer Marco Beltrami’s melancholic strings in the score — but it also makes for a drab-looking film that reduces the potency of the sex scenes. They’re tempered further by erratic editing, especially in moments where imagination and reality collide. Paparazzi photos of De Armas and Affleck from their brief relationship are believably hornier than most scenes. It is easily Lyne’s tamest erotic thriller.
The script, co-written by Zach Helm (Stranger Than Fiction) and Sam Levinson (Euphoria, Malcolm & Marie) makes various changes from the original novel as a way to more obviously establish the potential for amorality in its male protagonist. An awkward garden party scene between Tracy Letts’ intrusive pulp-fiction writer Lionel and Vic, discussing the latter’s early retirement from selling a microchip for military use, is subtle but aptly lays the foundation for not only their antagonistic relationship but also for suspicion and paranoia to ferment. Yet the writers pull their punches by the final act and never follow through with Highsmith’s shocking ending.
The Van Allens rarely function as more than stock characters in need of deeper introspection to warrant our attention, and it is really only through the sensual, kinetic performance of de Armas that any sense of passionate sentiment or nervous emotion is given life. The film is hindered by lacklustre direction and a script barely willing to scrape the surface of what could have been an intense, psychosexual exploration of masculinity, morality and marriage.