Category: Suspense

UNDER SUSPICION

By Marc S. Sanders

I’ve noted before how sometimes you can’t decide if you like a movie until it reaches the final, climatic five minutes that remains.  That’s the experience I had with a below the radar picture called Under Suspicion, which features two of the best headlining actors ever – Morgan Freeman and Gene Hackman.  Well, I didn’t care for the last five minutes of the film.  So, I didn’t care for Under Suspicion.

Gene Hackman plays Henry Hearst, a wealthy, hot shot tax attorney who resides and practices on the island of Puerto Rico.  When the film opens, he’s already dressed in his tuxedo and his gorgeous, much younger wife, Chantal, played by Monica Bellucci, is zipping up her black evening gown.  They are on their way to a benefit dinner to honor him for his charitable fundraising for underprivileged children.  Henry has to take a quick detour to the police station however to answer a few questions that Captain Victor Benezet (Freeman) has regarding the recent strangulations of two young girls. Victor plays good cop, while his underling, Felix Owens (Thomas Jane), does the bad cop routine on Henry. 

Since this is Gene Hackman playing a likely suspect, it’s no surprise that he’s cool as can be with Victor’s inquiries into some inconsistencies that have been uncovered.  Flashbacks to recent moments of where Henry has been jogging or visiting his sister-in-law cut in, and director Stephen Hopkins puts a present-day Victor within the scene of Henry’s recollections.

The theme of Under Suspicion is all about the gradual breakdown of a powerful guy.  Victor and Felix chip away at Henry’s alibis.  While Henry starts out virtually bulletproof to the cops’ questions, soon he’s reduced to being stuck without explanations, and even physically humiliated.  Let’s just say that more than just his tuxedo gets torn.  Eventually, the officers bring Chantal into the fold and the story diverts into a checkered relationship that Henry has with Chantal’s sister and her family, but what does that really have to do with the murders of two girls?  I hoped I’d see some relevance by the time the conclusion arrived.  I didn’t, and that’s the problem with this picture. 

What did I gain from the prior two hours that I was watching?  The main question at hand is did Henry murder these two girls?  Only if he did commit the acts is what the picture will have you believe is pertinent.  The script from John Wainwright (based on his book Brainwash), and Claude Miller & Jean Herman (based on their 1981 screenplay Garde à vue) never really scratches the surface for a motive.  Implications that Henry could be a child sex pervert come up, but I didn’t think it was explored deep enough to then bridge it to murder.  All that Victor and Felix seem concerned with is whether Henry killed the girls.  That’s too simple.  The movie isn’t thinking hard enough for us.  What makes this self-assured guy, with the familiar cockiness of Gene Hackman’s many other film personas, tick?

When the veil is finally lifted on who committed the murders, I felt emptyhanded like I’d been dealt a bait and switch.  The reveal comes out of nowhere and then the credits roll.  Under Suspicion practically promises a plot twist that never materializes.  A shame really, because there are winning moments between these two acting giants on screen.  Not an ounce of dialogue is memorable, however.  Yet, to see the pair together longer than the screen time they shared in Clint Eastwood’s award-winning film Unforgiven, bears my attention and curiosity.  Ultimately, Hopkins’ film is further proof that a script must come first before the talent is recruited.  It doesn’t matter if you have contracted the likes of Hackman and Freeman for your film.  If you don’t give them anything interesting to say, then there’s nothing interesting to see them do.

THE FUGITIVE

By Marc S. Sanders

In 1993, Andrew Davis directed the best Alfred Hitchcock film that was not directed by Alfred Hitchcock. The Fugitive with Harrison Ford being pursued by Tommy Lee Jones was a runaway smash. As we now live in an age of cell phones and the World Wide Web, you’d think this film might be somewhat dated but it is the last thing on your mind while watching. This is a tense, taut thriller that never, ever lets up. Another favorite picture of mine.

The opening credits serve as a prologue, showing Dr. Richard Kimble struggle with a one armed man in his home after his wife (Sela Ward) has been assaulted and killed. Kimble becomes the accused and eventual guilty party who is sentenced to death.

Davis is now ready to show his first of many wonderful set pieces. As Kimble’s prison bus careens off the road landing on railroad tracks, an oncoming train collides with the bus. Kimble and another prison inmate now have the opportunity to escape and go on the run. Enter Tommy Lee Jones as Deputy Sam Gerard and his team of smart, intuitive misfits to catch up to Kimble who has made a mad dash into the dense Illinois woods. Because Kimble and Gerard are depicted to be incredibly smart, Kimble only remains a few steps ahead throughout the picture. Later in the film, Kimble makes his way back to Chicago to search for the one armed man and uncover exactly why his wife was murdered.

Location shots are masterfully done in The Fugitive. From the woods to a sewer system (a manufactured set I believe), to the streets of Chicago and Cook County Hospital.

The train crash is one of the all time best moments in film. No miniatures. No CGI. This is a fully loaded train crashing into a bus, and this is where you can not deny the craftsmanship of great filmmaking. Cameras were positioned at multiple angles to capture the mayhem in one take.

The other great set piece occurs during the actual St Patrick’s Day parade in Chicago. Gerard once again gets Kimble in his sights and Kimble manages to blend in with the parade marchers. The quick editing of improvisational camera work is spectacular here. Kimble and Gerard are literally in the same frame and yet Gerard can’t see what’s under his nose. Moments like these can’t be storyboarded. Andrew Davis’ production could not stop the actual parade for another take. It all had to be done on a now or never basis.

I watch The Fugitive and I always think back to Alfred Hitchcock’s best work like The Man Who Knew Too Much and North By Northwest. An innocent man is unexpectedly swept up in a conspiracy where he becomes the target and his adrenaline and instincts must kick in to save himself. The only thing he’s armed with is his mind. There’s also an unusually creepy antagonist, The One-Armed Man. This makes the film incredibly foreboding. I know the film stems from the legendary television series, but Davis treats this villain as if he’s among the ranks of Hitchcock’s use of Martin Landau or James Mason.

Harrison Ford is great at never glamorizing his role. He doesn’t suddenly become Rambo. He becomes a man of convincing desperation. Ford shines in roles like these such as his other films like Witness, Air Force One, and Frantic.

Tommy Lee Jones gives one of my most favorite performances on film. He plays Gerard with non stop adrenaline. He has exquisite chemistry with his team, including Joe Pantoliano. As well, Gerard is only interested in fetching what has escaped. He has no interest in guilt or innocence, until he realizes that Kimble has no interest in the consequences of escape. Kimble is interested in his innocence. Even Gerard becomes attuned to Kimble’s drive. Here is where the script is wise. There is no dialogue to imply what Gerard is thinking. Tommy Lee Jones has a way of giving a great close up to show what he’s thinking. He trusts the audience will presume what’s driving his intuition.

Davis pulls out all the stops with this film. There’s magnificent action shots of Gerard’s helicopter quickly flying over the ambulance that Kimble is racing away in. A great cat and mouse maze sequence happens within a sewer system. Lighting is perfect, there. Nothing is overly dark. There’s also incredible overhead shots of the dam and ravine that Kimble makes for a getaway with an absolutely surprising dive from an enormous height.

The Fugitive is smart and action packed to the teeth. You are in full focus while watching the ongoing pursuit. This film was nominated for Best Picture. Rare for an action film, but also a testament to its greatness. Tommy Lee Jones deservedly won the Oscar for Supporting Actor.

No doubt for me that The Fugitive is a must-see film for any kind of moviegoer. There are moments to feel scared, to laugh, and to cheer. When it is finally over and the story arrives at its satisfying conclusion, you cannot help but let out a deep breath. You feel like you’ve run a hundred miles, or at least as long as Richard Kimble ran towards his innocence. Your time will be well spent investing in the The Fugitive. An absolutely fascinating picture of great, mounting suspense.

DUEL

By Marc S. Sanders

Duel – Steven Spielberg’s first full length film which he directed in 1971.  While it was originally a television movie in the United States on the ABC network, the feature made its way to European cinemas after Universal requested that Spielberg shoot additional scenes to bring the running time up to at least ninety minutes.  The final product still holds as a tight and intense depiction of nail biting, paranoid suspense.

The story couldn’t be simpler.  A sales man (Dennis Weaver) driving a red Plymouth sedan across a never ending California highway comes up behind a grotesquely, offensive looking, smoking oil tanker.  He takes it upon himself to pass the truck on the left to continue his journey to his next appointment, and either a road rage from the unseen truck driver, or just a need to play cat and mouse begins.  No matter how fast and far the man’s car goes, the hulking, angry truck is terrorizing him to no end.  The truck will tailgate the car, or cut it off, or even just wait silently up ahead as the car continues on its path.  The salesman cannot understand the madness behind this unexpected scenario. 

As a film lover, what’s most fun about Duel is easily recognizing Spielberg’s attempt of building fear within his audience.  Steven Spielberg always has a unique approach to thrilling audiences.  He believes that what you don’t see is scarier than what you look at plain as day.  Like his eventual third feature film, Jaws with the submerged great white shark, along with Close Encounters Of The Third Kind and the unknown aliens that are blinded out by colorful light, or the hidden dinosaurs of Jurassic Park, and even Saving Private Ryan with the gear, grinding, at first unseen, German tank that occupies the final act of the film, with Duel you may get a look at the monster at play but you never get to meet the mind of the monster.  At best all that you see of a sinister truck driver is his left arm waving out the window or his cowboy boots.  Soon we learn that left arm is only baiting the salesman to drive into oncoming traffic destined for a violent collision.  (The shark’s fin in Jaws teases its hunters into similar kinds of danger as well.)  Otherwise, this mysterious truck driver has no dialogue, and expressions of evil come through close up and advance shots of the “face” the front of the truck seems to have with a long snout like extended hood for a nose/mouth and the dirty windshield for its eyes.  This approach alone is what keeps you glued until you reach the picture’s climax.

After the man is driven off the road the first time, Spielberg depicts the protagonist’s fear with a long hand-held camera that follows him walking from his crashed car into a diner across the street, past folks eating lunch, into the wash room and then back out again, only to end the shot on the enemy truck resting outside the restaurant as if it is waiting for its new found prey.  This truck is as scary as Spielberg’s shark or his dinosaurs.  The film was made long before the age of Steadicam, and this moment serves as a masterful sequence.  The poor guy is a stranger in an even stranger situation, and because none of us have seen what this terrorizing truck driver looks like, we are no wiser than this guy who is being victimized.  A voiceover of his thoughts plays out where he tries to reason with himself if what he did is so bad, or perhaps it’s all over and this crazed driver will let him go on his way now, or which one of the men sitting at the counter could possibly be the driver of this rusted, greasy, metal monster.  Even if he wanted to, the salesman can’t reason or negotiate with his new found enemy.  The paranoia is very real. 

Reading up on the background of Duel, many film critics and admirers seemed to have found certain symbolism with the film ranging from comparisons of status symbols of the car vs the truck, or between the two drivers.  The salesman’s name is David Mann. Is this biblical perhaps, like David vs. Goliath? Plus his last name is so simple – Mann. Observers even took note of a small early scene where the salesman has a tiff with his wife over the phone.  When he hangs up, the wife is long gone from his mindset and he’s left on his own to survive anything that comes his way.  I, however, didn’t regard the picture with much depth other than that Spielberg shot a taut film in just 12 days.  I didn’t need to look for much else.  My heart was racing.  My curiosity to see the truck driver stayed hungry and my need to know how or if this poor guy was ever going to escape this daylight nightmare persistently held strong.  

As well, I was amazed at the camera work on display.  No two shots of the vehicles appear the same.  Spielberg positions his camera on a low moving motorized crane (first used in the film Bullitt) to keep pace with the truck for upward facing perspectives.  He’s got overhead shots, perspectives from the rear and the sides and then of course the front with zoom close ups to bring a visual, frightful roar to the big rig.  The Plymouth also has its own blend of camera work that’s very effective.  Dennis Weaver as the salesman is seen looking in the rear-view mirrors.  Spielberg captures paranoia from inside the car underneath the steering wheel looking up and next to the actor from the passenger side or from the back seat.  He’s got close up shots of Weaver in sweat inducing paranoia.  For a car chase picture, every sequence looks new and different from what you see earlier in the film.  A young Steven Spielberg was always reinventing himself.

Though the film was made 50 years ago when the term “road rage” was not even thought of, the situation seems all too real and quite possible when watching it now.  The man relies on telephone booths or stops at gas stations to try and help his situation.  Not much good comes from that though.  Had Duel been made today, the car driver would use his cell phone and he’d likely drop it by accident or the battery or signal would die.  The point is at given moments in life, we are all left to our own devices and completely alone.  On a lonely, endless highway help is not necessarily something to count on.  Police cars are not to be found at any given moment.  The man finds opportunities to see if locals or another passerby could help, but no one is so inclined.  How often do you help a stranger that comes upon you on a desolate road?  So, you are left to fend for yourself where a vicious beast need not concern itself with the boundaries of law or morals.  The second half of Jaws would follow this theme as well.  Out in the middle of nowhere with no one around, what do you do when it only comes down to you and the terror that hunts you?

I believe Duel is essential viewing for any film lover.  More than standard schlock slasher films, Steven Spielberg’s film offered the new wave of presenting an effective thriller like Alfred Hitchcock had built his reputation on.  There’s nothing supernatural in this film.  This could happen at any given time.  People face insurmountable bullies or challenges that are never welcome and the strength of ourselves is tested when we realize we need to overcome these obstacles alone, without a hand to hold or a guide to steer us to safety.  It happens when we lose a loved one.  It could happen in a boring office job when the work is piling on or during finals week in school or while driving on a lonely stretch of highway.  When the challenge does occur though, and you are unfairly never given all of the facts, how will you react?  What will you do?

FLIGHTPLAN (2005)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

Director: Robert Schwentke
Cast: Jodie Foster, Peter Sarsgaard, Sean Bean (who, miraculously, does NOT die in this film)
My Rating: 8/10
Rotten Tomatometer: 37%

PLOT: A bereaved woman (Foster) and her daughter are flying home from Berlin to America. At 30,000 feet, the child vanishes, and nobody will admit she was ever on the plane.


I get it. Flightplan strains at the leash of credibility. A lot. In order for the plot to work, the audience has to believe that a number of people would have to be involved in a massive conspiracy, a cacophony of coincidences that screams “CONTRIVED” to any sane moviegoer.

But, as ridiculous as it seems, the movie still works incredibly well, even upon repeat viewings. Director Robert Schwentke has not exactly distinguished himself since this film (credits include R.I.P.D., Red, and the last two Divergent movies), but Flightplan displays a surefire command of tone, creating a claustrophobic atmosphere while keeping the camera free to move around the plane along seemingly impossible paths.

This film is a classic example of what Roger Ebert called a “locked room” puzzle. A girl is missing on an airplane – admittedly a very LARGE airplane, but still. There are only so many places she can be. The plane is searched, but she’s nowhere to be found, leaving only two possibilities: she was never there to begin with, or someone’s lying. But who? And why? She thinks she recognizes an Arab passenger on the plane…was he staring in her apartment window the previous night? Is she going crazy, or has there been an actual kidnapping? That’s the central mystery, and it carries the movie for most of its brief running time.

(There’s a neat section where Foster’s character (who, coincidentally, helped design the plane they’re on), monkeys around with the plane’s electronics and gets the oxygen masks to fall, to create a diversion for herself. Tell you what, that would get MY attention.)

The final resolution is…well, let’s say it answers all the questions of what happened without addressing HOW it happened. A lot of folks found that unsatisfactory (thus the 37% on Rotten Tomatoes), but the movie is so well-made and executed that, by the time the credits rolled, I didn’t mind it so much. But, you know…that’s just me.

FRENZY

By Marc S. Sanders

London is being terrorized by the necktie strangler.

In 1972’s Frenzy, Alfred Hitchcock hearkened back to his killer classic themes remembered from Psycho. Only this time he is much more macabre with his material. Frenzy is Hitchcock’s only R rated film and his first movie to show outright nudity. Naturally, it’s all pretty eye opening, and considering that the film’s killer is regarded as a “sex maniac,” necessary as well.

Richard Blaney (John Finch) is not doing so well. He’s broke and he’s just lost his barkeep job. Subsequent from that he turns to his ex wife Brenda (Barbara Leigh-Hunt), a successful marriage and friendship counselor for comfort. It does not help that Brenda’s secretary overhears Richard violently losing his temper. Nor does it do any good when he has an outburst while dining with Brenda in a crowded restaurant. Why, this could only make him look suspicious of a crime, and the infamous, serial necktie strangler has yet to be caught.

When Brenda turns up dead by means of a necktie around her throat, all accounts point to Richard. Once again, Hitchcock’s protagonist is the Everyman caught up in an unwelcome conspiracy.

Frenzy is thankfully like many of Hitchcock’s best films. It gets straight to the point. Just as the film begins, the naked body of a dead girl floats up from The River Thames. Then it follows through with Richard and introduces likely suspects and or villains including Richard’s friend Robert Rusk (Barry Foster) and his bar waitress co-worker Baba Milligan (Anna Massey)

Hitch goes more horrifying than he might have had the liberty to do so a decade prior to this release. The necktie strangler’s rape and murder of the first victim is quite graphic and disturbing. This is a deranged individual and his victim is rendered helpless.

What keeps viewers interested in a good Hitchcock yarn is the suspense he manufactures for the one who is blamed, as well as for the killer. Hitchcock doesn’t dwell on mystery. Rather, he focuses on what his principal characters are going to do next, now that they are swept up in intrigue. The strangler continues his killing spree but overlooks one thing that could implicate him. The man who is blamed seems to get little help from anyone. Richard is in quite a pickle after all. As well, how will these two people encounter one another to wrap up the storyline?

Humor also comes through quite nicely with Chief Inspector Timothy Oxford (Alec McCowen) who is blessed with a loving wife who relishes analyzing the gruesome details of his investigation while preparing dinner time meals that look awfully worse than the corpses the Inspector encounters; quail with raisins for example. To look at her concoctions will certainly make you wince. It’s great side humor for the suspense at play.

A film like Frenzy hardly explores dimension in its characters. Many of Hitchcock’s films never get weighed down with too much material. The stories he directs are lean, only focusing on the central plot at play. The fun is in the disturbing angles he uses like a woman’s outstretched hand or frozen expression after succumbing to strangulation. Overhead shots of a man imprisoned in a small room can also be jarring. He keeps you engaged as tightly as the fingers of a dead body gripping a significant piece of evidence.

Films like Frenzy or Psycho cannot be made today. There are too many advances in technology and science to undo the developments of simple, yet grossly disturbing stories like this. DNA evidence and cell phones would wrap up any of these plot lines in five minutes. It’s fortunate that we can still transport ourselves to the period when these tales of suspense were originally developed. It doesn’t make it easy for the innocent man, the victims or the killer. I wonder how Hitch would approach today’s conveniences of modern science. If anything, he’d likely make his signature cameo on the wallpaper of someone’s iPhone. Nevertheless, I’m sure he’d find a way to continue to build his suspense. He had such an eye for his camera, his captions and his edits.

Frenzy is a demonstration of classic Hitchcockian thrills.

TRANSSIBERIAN (2008)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

Director: Brad Anderson
Cast: Woody Harrelson, Emily Mortimer, Ben Kingsley, Eduardo Noriega, Kate Mara
My Rating: 9/10
Rotten Tomatometer: 93% Certified Fresh

PLOT: An American couple takes a trans-Siberian train ride across Russia, but things take an odd turn when they meet another mysterious young couple.


One of the reasons I like writing about movies is that it gives me the opportunity to talk up great movies that I’ve discovered off the beaten track.  Movies like the stunning stop-motion film Mary and Max (2009), or Sunrise (1927), hands-down the greatest silent film I’m ever likely to see, or Wild Tales (2014), an Argentinian anthology film that plays like The Twilight Zone crossed with Quentin Tarantino.

Or Transsiberian, a virtually unknown film from 2008 that is one of the finest examples of Hitchcockian suspense in the modern era.  It was an international co-production of – get this – Germany, the UK, Spain, and Lithuania.  It was co-written and directed by Brad Anderson, a man who’s directed a LOT of episodes of various television shows, and so has a good sense of efficiency and economy in his style and pacing.  It has yet another stunning Ben Kingsley performance as a Russian narcotics detective.  And it turns the screws on the heroine of the story in such a way that you can tell exactly why she’s doing what she’s doing, when every good instinct says she should be doing the exact opposite.

After a brief prologue involving a police investigation in Vladivostok, we meet Roy and Jessie (Woody Harrelson and Emily Mortimer), a married couple traveling home from China after a faith-based missions trip.  They decide to take a 6-day train trip across the Russian continent because Roy feels it would be nice to take an adventure…plus, he LOVES trains.  He’s one of those enthusiasts who don’t realize when they’re boring you with talk of gauges and coal-burners and cow-catchers. (Sheldon Cooper would have loved this guy.)  Jessie seems like a nice woman, but she seems to be keeping this adventure at arm’s length; you can tell she’d rather be flying coach than spending six days in a double-berth cabin.  I empathized with her right away.  They make a good couple, even though he wants kids and she doesn’t, she smokes and he’d like her to quit, he drinks and she doesn’t, et cetera.  Pretty normal.

A little while into their trip, Roy and Jessie meet the couple they’re sharing a cabin with, Abby and Carlos (Kate Mara and Eduardo Noriega).  Abby seems much younger than Carlos, but Jessie lets that slide, especially because Carlos seems to take an immediate interest in Jessie, and he doesn’t seem too concerned about hiding it.  Abby seems annoyed, but says nothing.  Roy is too jazzed about being on trains and interacting with the locals to really notice.  Carlos also seems to be pretty cagey about the souvenirs he’s carrying around in his suitcase.

At one of their scheduled stops, both couples leave the train to stretch their legs.  When the train leaves for the next leg, Jessie suddenly realizes something: Roy’s not on the train.  She didn’t see him get back on.  In fact, no one can recall seeing Roy re-board the train.  The movie plays a little by making us think one thing has happened, when it may or may not have…we can’t be sure.

And then, in true Hitchcock fashion, things start to spiral into one unexpected development after another, until the movie becomes about something entirely different than what you thought it was going to be.  Without getting into too many other details, Jessie finds herself trapped in a lie that she absolutely cannot back out of, no matter how much she wants to, because doing so would cause more harm than good.  Even when she’s presented with a life or death situation, she still can’t go back on it, and the story is constructed so tightly that it’s never for a moment unclear on her motivations.  You always see the “why” to her actions.

This other level to the movie is what separates it from the pack and places it in a higher weight class.  The screenplay is a masterpiece of suspense.  There’s a scene involving her camera that had me yelling, “Oh, NO!” at the screen…and I’ve SEEN the movie before.  You won’t believe the amount of suspense that will be generated with a slightly-open camera bag, or the fact that there’s never a garbage can around when you need one, or just the absence of a train stewardess.

This movie stands apart in its genre because the characters behave EXACTLY as they should, with perfect logic, and it never feels forced.  The bad guys are never too stupid, and the good guys are never too smart.  (They get pretty lucky a couple of times, but what are you gonna do?)  I don’t think I’m giving anything away by saying that, by the end, some characters are happy and others are not quite so much, but I don’t think you’ll be able to guess who will last that long.

This is a treasure of a film to be sought out and…uh, treasured.

US (2019)

By Miguel E. Rodriguez

Director: Jordan Peele
Cast: Lupita Nyong’o, Winston Duke, Elizabeth Moss
My Rating: 9/10
Rotten Tomatometer: 94% Certified Fresh

PLOT: A family’s beach vacation turns sinister when a group of doppelgängers begins to terrorize them.


[SPOILER, SPOILER, MOST CERTAIN SPOILERS TO FOLLOW]

It’s abundantly clear after two films (with hopefully many more to come) that Jordan Peele was and is an enormous fan of The Twilight Zone, that legendary TV show that presented tales of strange and the weird situations that very often turned into legitimate horror stories.  For me, that’s what Us is: a feature-length episode of The Twilight Zone, with everything amped up to 11, including the ambitious nature of the ending which, I think, bit off a little more than it could chew.

However, the ending is not what makes this film special, it’s how we get there.  And the events leading up to the end of the film make for one of the most unsettling movie experiences I’ve ever had.

I cannot stress the creepy nature of this story enough.  A family’s beach vacation is interrupted when intruders invade their home, and the intruders turn out to be…their doubles.  Doppelgängers.  Virtually identical except for disturbing aspects, like an additional scar or a perpetual smile or a cloth mask.  When these “others” faced their victims inside the house, I was indescribably terrified.  I found myself asking, what would I do in this situation?  If I found myself sitting across from an exact duplicate of me, a duplicate who never spoke but just stared and smiled and made weird clicking noises instead of talking?

I’d s**t myself, that’s what I’d do.

The story takes some interesting twists and turns, and it doesn’t follow traditional genre convention when it comes to who lives and who dies.  Whenever I expected one thing to happen, the movie neatly sidestepped my expectations ingeniously.

There’s also unexpected comedy, especially when someone tries to use their automated personal assistant at a crucial moment.  Think of all the times Siri has misinterpreted your questions.  Yeah.  It’s one of THOSE moments.

The movie is an amalgam of the best moments of Rod Serling, M. Night Shyamalan, Alfred Hitchcock, John Carpenter, and even a little Spielberg here and there with the comedy moments.  It’s clear that director Jordan Peele has digested the best films from these directors and crafted his own take on the horror/suspense genre, using those masters as a guide.  (I’m referring to Shyamalan’s EARLIER films when I call him a master, because they WERE masterful…not his later stuff, which is…not great.)

I, for one, found myself sucked into the story, hook, line, and sinker.  It did become clear, however, that the underlying reason for the existence of these doppelgängers was, inevitably, going to be a LITTLE disappointing.  Science experiment gone awry?  Space aliens?  Results of a newly-emerging virus?  As the movie entered its final stages and the meaning behind the doubles’ existence was revealed, I did find myself a little disappointed.  Like when someone shows you how a stunning magic trick was accomplished with a simple fake thumb.

Would it have been more interesting to leave the existence of these doubles unexplained?  To make it a TRUE Twilight Zone episode and leave the audience with a mystery instead of a true resolution?  I think it would have been more interesting that way, so instead of shaking my head at the almost banal nature of the doppelgängers, I would have left intrigued.  After all, John Carpenter never explained how Michael Meyers vanished after being shot several times at point blank range.  But it was CREEPY, brother.

So, there you go.  I loved it, the ending was a little disappointing, but not disappointing enough to kill the movie for me.  The journey was more important than the final destination, in my book.

I CONFESS

By Marc S. Sanders

Alfred Hitchcock’s 1953 film noir I Confess is an absolute must see. An underrated film that held my attention all the way to the end. Perhaps because of its subject matter and setting within the Catholic Church it didn’t hold the reputation of Hitch’s other more well known classics like Psycho, The Birds and North By Northwest. Those films played with their suspense. They had fun with humor and special effects to carry their adventures and horror. I Confess has a little more serious weight to its story, as it examines the scruples of its characters within a murder yarn.

Montgomery Clift portrays Michael Logan, a Catholic Priest, who hears the confession of a murder from the church’s maintenance man (O.E. Hasse), late one night. Only now, sworn to his oath of confidence, he must keep it undisclosed. That might be a little challenging when it is gradually revealed that Fr. Logan might have a connection to the victim, a well known attorney.

Anne Baxter plays Ruth Grandefort, the wife of a politician, caught speaking with Logan just outside of the scene of the crime the next morning. Inspector LaRue (Karl Malden) has reason to follow up on these people. Immediately, your mind will likely go somewhere. When a man and a woman are caught whispering to one another in any murder mystery, well, what are you gonna think? Still, could it be something else entirely? Alibis are not quite solid and unlikely suspects are caught together. Why? What do they know? What’s the connection?

Hitchcock shoots a mystery turned inside out. You know who the killer is in the first five minutes. From there he pursues the red herring until it’s conclusion. The mystery isn’t really the issue here. The question is whether Logan and Grandefort will avoid a frame up. Can Fr. Logan maintain his oath while maintaining his innocence? Det. LaRue has every reason to believe he’s got his culprit, and yet he doesn’t.

Film noir set in Quebec sidles up to questions of morality beautifully here. I was truly wondering whether Logan was going to get exonerated. Hitchcock applies the suspense in that perspective. It’s a great twist on the traditional Agatha Christie motif. He’s got a great tracking shot (actually he was probably carrying the camera and walking on his own two feet) of the maintenance man walking at a fast pace alongside Logan down a hallway, reminding him of his commitment of confidentiality. “As long as you’re a priest…”. Hitch got my pulse racing at this moment.

The three principal players (Clift, Baxter and Malden) are very good here. None of the performances feel dated. As well, Hasse as the murderous German caretaker makes for a good, creepy foil, always looking in from the outside to make certain the investigation never sways away from Logan.

The set up is really well executed from Hitchcock using a script by George Tabori & William Archibald, adapted from an early 20th century play by Paul Anthelme. It’s a little surprising to see a priest caught up in a murder and perhaps some other sinful acts in a film from 1953. There were actually aspects of the original script that Warner Brothers insisted be excised.

However, had this film been made today, there’d likely be an uproar over a Catholic Priest being considered for murder or even participating in a possible affair.

The shock of it all still works in I Confess. A priest is a prime murder suspect? Never! How could it be? Yet, that’s what engaged me. We all are capable of carrying out the worst acts imaginable. The same could be said that we are all capable of holding true to our moral character. Our capabilities are embedded in our human mindset. The question is what is everyone willing to believe.