Borat Subsequent Moviefilm
Dir: Jason Woliner (1hr 36mins) (15)
★★★
Fourteen years after Borat’s first cinematic outing, Sacha Baron Cohen’s “monstrous creation, the clueless reporter from Kazakhstan”, is back for a second film, said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian. Once more, Baron Cohen executes “situationist stunts” and “gross-out hoaxes” that skewer Americans’ conservative attitudes and their painfully polite tolerance of (or sympathy with) Borat’s “antediluvian” views. But this time, “the shock of the new” is gone, and with it, some of the power and hilarity of the 2006 original. It doesn’t help that most people now recognise Borat, so he largely appears in disguise, delegating many pranks to a new character, Borat’s 15-year-old daughter Tutar (Maria Bakalova) – brought along in a horse box as a diplomatic gift for “Vice Premier Mikhail Pence”.
There are moments of “squirmy joy” in the new film, said Tom Shone in The Sunday Times. But the “sad truth” is that Borat – such an outlandish creation back in 2006 – “passes almost unnoticed in Trump’s America”. The tacit racism Baron Cohen exposed then is now overt, and Borat’s suggestion that a surgeon should use potatoes to give Tutar a cut-price breast enlargement is scarcely more ludicrous than Trump’s idea of curing Covid-19 with bleach. The film’s “climactic gotcha” has been widely hyped, said Robbie Collin in The Daily Telegraph. It’s an interview in which Trump confidant Rudy Giuliani “gets a little touchy-feely” with Tutar – but I felt the former New York mayor came out of it looking no worse than in any of his recent talk show appearances.
Available on Amazon Prime.
“overfamiliar” genre, said Benjamin Lee in The Guardian. Husband and wife Bol (Sope Dirisu) and Rial (Wunmi Mosaku) are asylum seekers from Sudan, recently arrived in the UK after losing their daughter in a dinghy voyage across the Mediterranean. Having spent some time in a detention centre, they are given a grimy council house in an unspecified part of England. But their relief turns to anxiety as their environs prove disorientating and hostile (“Go back to f***ing Africa,” shouts a local black youth). Still worse, “they start to believe they’re not alone” in their new home.
The story has echoes of the Japanese chiller
said Ed Potton in The Times, with “holes in the wall, rolling apples and far more lurid terrors”. But Weekes keeps the horror rooted in the couple’s grief and guilt, and “the hold on their imagination of African folklore”. The result is powerful, with excellent performances from Mosaku and Dirisu – and a “wry” supporting turn from Matt Smith as a “wide boy” council worker. As the tension rises, we are treated to increasingly “ambitious and surreal visuals”, said Chris Hewitt in Empire – flashbacks to the horrors that drove Bol and Rial from Sudan, and a “creepy campfire consultation” with the entity haunting their house. With well-drawn characters and a “particularly nasty” spirit, the film is both scary and moving – “one of the best horror debuts in years”.
Dark Water,
In cinemas and available on Netflix.