Due to a friend’s birthday, getting swindled by a charity, and the fleeting nature of time, I missed doing last week’s review, so today let’s do three in one.
Q: What does a film about South Korean child traffickers have in common with a horror movie set in the Stone Age and a film in which a bear snorts millions of dollars of cocaine and goes on a killing spree?
A: Quite a few things, surprisingly.
If you haven’t guessed from that, over the last few days I’ve watched Broker, The Origin, and Cocaine Bear.
For anyone not in the know, here’s three very quick synopses sans spoilers:
Broker: A young woman abandons her baby outside a church, said baby is then taken by two men to be sold to parents incapable of having children.
The Origin: A small Stone Age tribe arrive in a barren land where they are terrorised and pursued by something, but they do not know what.
Cocaine Bear: A bear discovers a bunch of coke in the woods from a drug distribution mishap, sniffs it and does a whole lot of killing.
So, what do they all have in common?
For starters, all of these films center around characters being stalked and pursued. Right from the get go everyone is on the backfoot and all three narratives follow varying levels of high-tension pursuit.
The second commonality is the importance of a family unit. Not necessarily blood, but people around you that you can rely on. Even Cocaine Bear, believe it or not, has some genuinely tender moments once you strip away the silliness, and could not follow the plot it follows without family being at the heart of it.
The third point of similarity is, again, at varying degrees, the lengths people will go to when pushed to their absolute limits. How people can transform, see themselves and the world anew, and do things they neither previously thought possible, or considered deeply and utterly immoral, when put into high-pressure, or emotionally straining situations.
Ok before I go any further and talk about something that only The Origin and Broker have in common, I would be remiss to not say a few things about Cocaine Bear, because I had an absolute ball watching it. The whole cinema did. For 94 minutes everyone was in peels of laughter. It was just so ridiculous. And despite being a very silly film, it was tightly written and well acted. Simultaneously parodic yet new, not entirely pastiche, and very much its own thing. Everyone did everything they needed to do, and Mark Mothersbaugh’ score was the perfect musical underpinning for a film that I will never watch again, but am very glad I did. So if you’re looking for something dumb to watch that’s actually well made, I could not recommend this more.
Right, leaving the powdery woods behind there are a few more serious points I have to make about two films that I found to be very moving, very well written, and very well performed.
Despite being extremely different films, bringing about their pathos and catharsis in very different ways, something that Broker and The Origin both handled extremely well was showing the damage that religious dogma has on people, especially women, and by default, children. Both films deal with problems of bodily autonomy and ideas of divine punishment, how one’s god or gods can put you at great risk and warp not only how you see yourself, but how other people see you. And how all of this can and does directly impact your life, often for the worse. I don’t want to say too much about this, because it makes for some incredible moments in both films that I’d hate to ruin. But I found both of their handlings of it, one from a Christian POV and the other pagan, to be simultaneously fascinating and deeply sad.1 There’s a good 45,000 years between the narratives and yet they both manage to get to the heart of the problem, that it isn’t the gods we have to worry about, but people.
In terms of praise directed at each film in particular, I really enjoyed Broker. It’s sad and touching and somehow manages to be hilarious, though I will say that it should have ended about 5 minutes before it did. The whole last sequence was just unnecessary and tried to wrap up some loose threads while remaining ambiguous, despite those threads not needing to be wrapped up. By doing away with this, the greater sense of ambiguity it would have given the film’s end would have, in my opinion, massively improved things and heightened the quiet stream of life-altering pain running through the film. It was strange, an ending that was both schmaltzy and imbued with morally confusing and incredibly sad implications, sacrificing pathos for bathos. A shame.
I guess also from an ethical point of view the film’s pretty strange and despite aiming for verisimilitude, does often fail to feel like the most real representation of events as presented. Although I also don’t think that the film is necessarily aiming for extreme verisimilitude. I think it’s moreso presenting an interesting story in a novel way. Like you could so easily make it a really externally hideous and cruel story with the most grotesque of characters, but the quiet, and at times loveable, portrayals of people all guilty of various crimes and moral boundary crossings worked, I think, in the film’s favour. It felt like it allowed the viewer to make up their own mind. It also isn’t hard to accept that almost everything happening in the film is horrible and sad for various reasons. Nor does the film seek to make light of these things, it just handles them lightly, kind of. I dunno, it’s strange. But I think its verisimilitude regarding subtle aspects of human relationships and the reasoning behind the character’s decisions, as opposed to, say, how criminal investigations work, or what human traffickers are actually like, makes for a much better film.
So that’s Broker, now I want to talk about The Origin.
I don’t really know where to start with this one because it was one of those films that ticked so many boxes for me that part of me just wants to praise every single aspect of it and babble on and on endlessly about how fucking good it was. And I’m not just saying that because it ticked a lot of boxes for me, on a personal taste level, but because the more I think about this film the more convinced I become that from the first frame to the last, everything was done as it should have been. And what makes it all the more impressive is that it’s the debut feature for both the director, Andrew Cumming, and writer, Ruth Greenberg.
For starters, the film has, what Greenberg said in the Q&A after the showing at Glasgow Film Theatre on Sunday night, the perfect elevator pitch: that it’s a Stone Age horror movie.
But also to call it a horror movie, even if we switch out movie for film to give it a touch more gravitas, feels like it’s underselling it. Because, and I say this even though Greenberg gladly admits to being a genre writer and the film being a genre film, it is so far above your average horror film, that despite it now ranking among the very best I’ve seen, it risks putting any potential viewers into a very different state of mind going into it, having various preconceived notions and so on. But then also that feels like it’s not respecting those people, nor then the film either, as it stands to shatter all of those preconceived notions etc. I dunno, I guess that even though I am obsessed by taxonomy and order, I do feel that genre in art is a massive hinderance. The way I see it is that even though it can be incredibly helpful in terms of reference and context and archiving, it can also hold back and impact how works are perceived and received. Kind of like how in academic painting you had the six accepted genres, all of which were ranked in level of importance and value, with History painting being top dog, followed by Genre painting (everyday scenes both real and imagined), portraiture, still life and landscape. From the mid 19th century onwards artists (in the plastic sense) sought to destroy those parameters and have been largely successful. Though personally I see things like horror and fantasy (both in cinema and literature), suffering (even though a tonne of it’s absolute shit and/or I tend not to like it) from the implications of their position on the ladder of contemporary art. There’s a whole dissertation in this so I won’t go on about it any longer, but I hope I’ve got some sort of point across, at the very least that this film transcends genre and that genre is itself a thorny thing.
Cumming’s direction was brilliant, and while the film was his baby, in terms of where the idea first started out, without Greenberg’s writing this film stood to be absolutely terrible. Another person handling the script could have made it the cheesiest thing going. Whereas it ended up being one of the most harrowing and powerful things I’ve seen in a good while. From the use of silence (the first draft of the script only had a hundred lines apparently, that’s one per page, practically Beckettian), to its themes of terror and despair, hunger and survival, religion and family, to its deeply feminist roots (yeah, a film set in the Stone Age that provides truly profound feminist critique and portrayals—insane, pulling that off the way they did deserves its own 2000 or so words), to the deeply human fears it exploits, to just what lengths people will go to when under duress, to an examination of how we interact with each other and the world and here I go doing what I said I wouldn’t do and just babbling on about every single aspect of the film.
Fuck me it was good.
Oh yeah and they even used a made up language that actually worked! How badly could that have gone? And yet not once, thanks to it being a mélange of Basque (the oldest spoken language in Europe), Arabic and Sanskrit (and perhaps others too that I’ve forgotten), did it sound goofy or unbelievable. This was one of the first things I heard about the film before going to see it, and I was both perplexed and concerned to see how they pulled it off; but from the opening scene all of my concerns were waylaid. Right from the get go it had this immense sense of naturalism to it, the actors being so comfortable with their lines that, unlike, say, with Klingon in Star Trek, and how there are countless examples of that just sounding silly and made up, you were convinced that this was a real language spoken by real people. Apparently one of the actors was so good with it that she even improvised a scene in which she pulled a few lines from the list of set phrases the film’s linguist had created for them, and conjured one of the film’s most memorable moments. That’s hard enough to do in English let alone a language that’s been created for a film, and is testament to how good the performances were throughout.
Nor then have I seen a cinema have such a visceral reaction to a film. It was like how movies show audiences reacting to horror movies, which always feels over the top and silly, and yet, for the duration of the film people were jumping out of their seats, hunched over with tension, sighing with relief when said tension was eased (not that it was ever eased all that much), or loudly exclaiming, as one man did, when he let out a loud “shit” as something particularly gory happened. When the screen went black and the credits rolled people were just sat in silence. I’m not sure how long it took for the audience to come round and do the customary film festival applause because everyone seemed to be in a state of exhaustion, sat in stunned silence taking in the devastating and bleak 90 minutes we’d just bore witness to. It was magnificent.
I keep thinking about more things to talk about but this is getting pretty long as it is and nothing I can say will be as good as going and seeing this film. Unfortunately I’m not sure when it’ll hit more screens since it’s only just premiered and is still on the film festival circuit. But given that it got a bunch of nominations (and one win) at the British Independent Film Awards, I reckon it’ll probably get a UK run pretty soon. Nonetheless you should email your local cinema and demand they screen it. Threaten them, chain yourself to the doors, do whatever it takes to make sure this film is seen by as many people as possible. You will not regret it.
Despite not being heavily discussed in the film, I found it to be a really interesting glimpse into just how deep Christianity has sunk its teeth into East Asia. There’s a tonne to be said about that, and I won’t go into it here coz I don’t know nearly enough about it to say much more than what I’m saying here. It just fascinates me. Places with such different cultures and religions to our own—though sharing, as so many religions do, similar aspects— undergoing varying degrees of cultural and personal transformations over the past 400 or so years as a direct impact of various Christian churches and proselytising missions that have mutated into their own unique, and occasionally homogeneous, forms. Shinzo Abe’s assassinator, for example, killed him because of his and his government’s support of the Unification Church (commonly known in the West as Moonies): an apocalyptic Christian cult that preys on its members and had bankrupted this man’s mother as well as socially isolating her.