Film Reviews: New Releases for Oct. 6

The Exorcist: Believer **1/2
Co-writer/director David Gordon Green’s latest attempt at a horror reboot—following his Halloween legacy-quel trilogy—presents such an audacious, thoughtful basic premise that it’s deeply annoying when he loses it in the midst of providing franchise callbacks. In a Georgia suburb, 13-year-old Angela (Lidya Jewett) and her friend Katherine (Olivia O’Neill) disappear into the nearby woods to attempt a summoning of Angela’s deceased mom, and return three days later both carrying some demonic baggage. Conflict emerges between Katherine’s devoutly Christian parents and Angela’s atheist single-dad (Leslie Odom, Jr.), setting up a scenario that involves an interfaith exorcism, and suggests that the Devil’s greatest trick was dividing humans based on what they believe about God. That's a bold notion, but unfortunately, Green and his screenwriting team can’t help themselves from trotting out touchstones from the legendary 1973 original Exorcist: profane adolescents, levitations, jumpy beds, satanic vomit, rotating heads and, of course, the much-publicized return of Ellen Burstyn as Chris MacNeil, whose story feels almost desperately shoehorned into this one. Green’s neither willing nor able to get as primally disturbing as the movie he’s aping, and keeps losing the thread of the potentially compelling tale at his disposal. A kindly nurse (Ann Dowd) at one point says that the Devil’s goal is “to make us give up,” but if filmmakers would give up trying to duplicate un-duplicatable classics and instead focus on their own original ideas, that would be heavenly. Available Oct. 6 in theaters. (R)

Invisible Beauty ***
Profile documentaries depend both on a compelling subject and an approach to telling their story that actually has a point of view—and this latest journey into the world of high fashion from co-director Frédéric Tcheng (Dior and I, Halston, Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel) goes two for two. Tcheng opens with the meta-conceit of asking his subject—pioneering Black model, agency owner and activist Bethann Hardison, who also serves as co-director—how she thinks the movie should open, and that sense of Hardison having to reflect fully on her own rich life permeates the narrative, including a throughline of her challenges figuring out how to construct the memoir she’s under contract to write. And while the movie hits obligatory biographical bullet points about Hardison’s Brooklyn childhood, the influence of her Black Muslim father and seeing life in the Jim Crow-era American South, there’s more going on here than can be found in a Wikipedia page. Most of that comes from Hardison’s own presence, capturing the ferocious determination behind her attempts to address racism in the fashion world, yet also finding a melancholy reality of how living her particular kind of life  affected her own relationships, including occasional estrangement from her son, A Different World actor Kadeem Hardison. The result is a full, consistently engaging tale of what it takes—and what it costs—to be someone who feels the need to change the world. Available Oct. 6 via Broadway Centre Cinemas. (NR)

The Royal Hotel ***1/2
Following up her unsettling 2019 debut feature The Assistant, director Kitty Green once again digs into the existential terror of being a woman among male predator, albeit in a completely different setting. American post-collegiate pals Hanna (Julia Garner) and Liv (Jessica Henwick) find themselves short of cash during their backpacking travels through Australia, and opt for a short-term gig working at a remote bar in the Outback, where the rowdy clientele is almost exclusively the male workers at the local mine. Green and co-screenwriter Oscar Redding don’t mess around with establishing the casual sexism of the women’s new environs, including the bar owner (Hugo Weaving) dropping the “c-word” in a way Liv assures Hanna is just “a cultural thing.” Like The Assistant, this is a monster movie, though we actually get to see the monsters this time, and recognize that a sense of entitlement can take forms that are more or less obviously threatening. And while Green does a great job with building tension in individual scenes, she’s found a perfect muse for her thematic interests in Garner, whose physical performance is built on that distinctively female dynamic of needing to be perpetually on guard, while also having to convey a lack of weakness. It’s an effectively creepy portrait of existing in the space where the mere request that you “smile” can feel like a threat. Available Oct. 6 at Broadway Centre Cinemas. (R)

She Came to Me **
The thematic undercurrent of writer/director Rebecca Miller’s comedy-drama—the particular things that make us ecstatic—winds up a bit too jumbled in the many different character stories she’s trying to tell. For operatic composer Steven Lauddem (Peter Dinklage), ecstasy comes from his work—except that his anxieties have left him blocked. For Katrina (Marisa Tomei), it’s an addiction to romance, which complicates things when she and Steven have a one-morning stand to which she becomes immediately attached. And it’s further complicated by the fact that Steven is married to Patricia (Anne Hathaway), whose own passions may be taking her towards a religious vocation. For a little while, it seems like Miller is leading the story to a farcical version of Fatal Attraction, as Steven uses his encounter with Katrina as creative inspiration. But there’s also a subplot involving the romance between Patricia’s teenage son Julian (Evan Ellison) and his high-school classmate Tereza (Harlow Jane), along with Tereza’s immigrant mother (Joanna Kulig) and Civil War-reenactor stepfather (Brian d’Arcy James). It all ends up noisy and overstuffed, with shifts in behavior emerging out of nowhere and a particular weirdness to Hathaway’s obsessively clean therapist. In a novel, these individuals might have had time to populate a fully fleshed-out story about how much we need intense feelings, and how hard it can be for other people to understand ours; in 100 minutes of movie, those notes of passion turn into a cacophony. Available Oct. 6 in theaters. (R)

Strange Way of Life **1/2
The Human Voice ***1/2
In the same way that a short story isn’t just a novel, but shorter, a short film is its own particular storytelling medium—which makes it interesting to observe two different examples from the same filmmaker that demonstrate different levels of understanding that distinction. Pedro Almodóvar’s new short Strange Way of Life, involves an Old West setting where two men—rancher Silva (Pedro Pascal) and sheriff Jake (Ethan Hawke)—reunite 25 years after they had a brief sexual affair. Almódovar manages to fit a lot of backstory into his 30-minute run time, even squeezing in flashbacks. But the narrative—which also involves a murder investigation where Silva’s son is the main suspect—feels cramped and rushed, in a way that doesn’t allow the central relationship to build real power. Compare that to his 2020 short The Human Voice, “freely adapted” from a Jean Cocteau play, focused on a woman (Tilda Swinton) having an anguished phone conversation with an ex-lover. Though it premiered at a time that made it effectively the first “pandemic movie” in its context of emotional and physical isolation, that’s not the only thing that makes it powerful, as Almodóvar allows us to see the artifice of the movie’s staging to emphasize the structures we create to provide the illusion of normalcy. The result is a half-hour tone poem that feels whole and complete in conveying its emotional truth. Available Oct. 6 at Broadway Centre Cinemas. (R)

When Evil Lurks **1/2
As Scream taught us long ago, horror movies are famously built on very specific “rules”—and writer/director Demian Rugna’s Argentinian feature is at its best when ignoring a lot of genre expectations, but also far too locked into clarifying its own rules. On a remote farm, Pedro Yazurlo (Ezequiel Rodríguez) and his brother Jaime (Demián Salomón) learn that a neighbor’s son has a strange malady that everyone believes is a demonic “pregnancy,” and that killing it is the one way to guarantee that it will be born. Rugna demonstrates a facility for creepy compositions, but his neatest (and nastiest) trick is understanding that horror audiences assume that very specific do’s and don’ts apply to children and animals in these movies, and therefore earning his most shocking moments out of ignoring those principles. Unfortunately, he’s also determined to create a fresh mythology around his possessing entity, complete with trained exorcist/abortionists and their elaborate toolkits. And that mythology becomes so unnecessarily convoluted that it becomes a challenge trying to keep track of who is at risk, from whom, and why. If you’re going to make a supernatural thriller based on its own set of rules, you should worry more about making us uneasy based on what we see on screen, not on wondering whether a character faces death thanks to violating Section D, Paragraph 3, Subclause iv. Available Oct. 6 in theaters, Oct. 27 via Shudder. (R)