list.co.uk/fi lm Reviews | FILM
ARTHOUSE TO THE WONDER (12A) 112min ●●●●● DRAMA LORE (15) 109min ●●●●●
HORROR MAMA (15) 100min ●●●●●
You wait six years for a new Terrence Malick film – that was the gap between The New World and The Tree of Life – and then another one materialises barely a year later. Advance reports indicated that this was the enigmatic director’s most autobiographical work to date, drawing on his own romantic relationships.
Even by Malick’s standards, the ‘story’ in the
impressionistic To The Wonder is slender: a beautiful Ukranian single mother (Olga Kurylenko), living in Paris, falls in love with a visiting American (Ben Affleck). She and her 10-year-old daughter Tatiana move to Mid-West America to live with her new beau, in a parish where a lonely Catholic priest (Javier Bardem) is experiencing a crisis of faith.
Rapturously shot by Mexican cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki the elliptical To the Wonder won’t win over the Malick-sceptics. Yet the direcor has few equals in using all the tools of cinema to convey the memory of both being in and falling out of love. In the face of the film’s overwhelming visual beauty, no official religious f aith is required to feel that you are witnessing paradise gained and lost. (Tom Dawson) ■ Limited release from Fri 22 Feb.
Nine years after her sensitive debut Somersault, about a teenage runaway in Australia, director Cate Shortland brings us her second feature Lore, adapted from a short story by Rachel Seiffert. Newcomer Saskia Rosendhal plays the titular
character in this story set at the end of World War II as the Nazi regime is toppling in Germany. The teenage daughter of a Nazi official, she finds herself having to make a journey across her broken country with her young siblings in tow. On the way they meet Thomas, a mysterious young man whose intentions to the group are unclear. What’s intriguing here is the idea of a young woman,
brought up within – and completely convinced by – Nazi ideology, trying to exist as that world comes crumbling down. Shortland creates a palpable sense of atmosphere, and coupled with fluid camerawork and a verdant forest backdrop, Lore looks and feels a world apart from other World War II-set dramas. But the relationship between Lore and Thomas is less successfully explored: their strange powerplay occasionally coming across as contrived rather than an insight into these two conflicted characters. (Gail Tolley) ■ Limited release from Fri 22 Feb.
Picked up under Guillermo del Toro’s production wing following an utterly terrifying short film online, the feature length version of Mama comes to the screen under auspicious circumstances. The film initially makes good on these promises, but struggles to extend successfully beyond its original conceit.
Lilly (Isabelle Nélisse) and Victoria (Megan
Charpentier) are two sisters who, under grisly circumstances, have been left to fend for themselves in the woods. They are discovered and brought back into civilisation, under the care of their uncle Lucas (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) and his girlfriend Annabel (Jessica Chastain). Little do these guardians know that the girls have another, supernatural carer – one who doesn't take kindly to being replaced. First time director Andrés Muschietti shows talent and confidence in the first hour, letting us catch only peripheral glimpses of the unearthly Mama while letting the excellent Nélisse and Charpentier run feral through the plot. Unfortunately both the story and the effects take a slide into silliness in the third act, as the open-ended short lurches into a melodramatic conclusion that chimes with del Toro’s taste for fairytale excesses. (Niki Boyle) ■ General release from Fri 22 Feb.
THRILLER STOKER (18) 98min ●●●●●
Despite director Park Chan-wook’s previous involvement with vampires (Thirst), his American debut has nothing to do with Dracula writer Bram Stoker. Instead India Stoker (Mia Wasikowska) is a teenage girl mourning the death of her father Richard (Dermot Mulroney) after a mysterious car accident.
India’s mother Evie (Nicole Kidman) is comforted by the arrival of Uncle Charlie (played with saturnine menace by Matthew Goode), but India senses that his intentions may be darker that he admits. Aunt Gwendolyn (Jacki Weaver) raises concerns about Charlie, but she soon comes to a sticky end while staying at a local motel. Soon India finds herself involved in a battle of wills with Charlie, with the prize being Evie’s attention, but India’s growing difficulties with boyfriends at school indicate that the Stoker family traits run deeper and darker than just a famous name . . .
Working from a script by Prison Break star Wentworth Miller, which
made the 2010 Black List for the best unproduced scripts, Stoker is an unusually intense slice of American Gothic. Although the brooding air of suspicion that permeates the film recalls Alfred Hitchcock’s 1943 film Shadow of a Doubt, complete with its own dubious Uncle Charlie character, Stoker’s macabre poetry is more in line with Chan-wook’s famed Korean output, notably Sympathy for Lady Vengeance and Oldboy. Indeed, the tangled mop sported by Wasikowska in her wilder moments recalls the grizzled appearance of Choi Min-Sik in Oldboy; the primness of her Alice in Wonderland role is forgotten in a breakout performance that crackles with repressed sexual tension. Neither dealing with the supernatural nor particularly violent, Stoker
might not appeal to horror fans, but manages to create something fresh in the thriller genre. A repeated image of flowers with their leaves splattered in gore sets the tone; Stoker mixes beauty and blood to shocking effect. (Eddie Harrison) ■ Limited release from Fri 1 Mar.
21 Feb–21 Mar 2013 THE LIST 61