![]() ![]() The chintzy, dirty row house they are finally given doesn’t exactly feel cozy, cold comfort against their blazing memories of escape, which included the death of their young daughter. To say too much more is to chance spoiling this Sundance 2020 standout (Netflix, quite wisely, snapped it up out of the festival, ensuring a wide audience), but we can certainly try.īol (Sope Dirisu) and Rial (a heartbreaking Wunmi Mosaku) are Sudanese refugees searching for a new home (and a new start) in the middle of nowhere, UK. ![]() Nelson) asks the callous developer why they built here the guy delivers a devastating reply: “They were just… people.” -CBįirst-time filmmaker Remi Weekes went big for his debut, a truly chilling ghost story on its face that also tucks some disturbing, incredibly real horrors within its impeccably written screenplay (also from Weekes, as adapted from Felicity Evans and Toby Venables’ clever original story). Turns out that an entire cemetery was uprooted, the bodies buried there disinterred and disrespected, in order to build this neighborhood. Over-the-top jump scares eventually replace the more subtle chills of the earlier part of the movie, but “Poltergeist” does veer into as critical a take on suburbia and the cluelessness of the gated-community mentality as Spielberg’s ever given. And not just episodes of “Benson.” Messages from ghosts, who eventually suck her in to their world. It sure feels more in line with his work than Hooper’s scuzzy “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.” In a gated community in the suburbs the Freeling family is going about their lives until five-year-old daughter Carol Anne (Heather O’Rourke) starts hearing and seeing things through the family TV. But the best-known blockbuster formulation of ghosts haunting our media is Tobe Hooper’s relentlessly eerie, and eventually just relentless, “Poltergeist.” How much did producer Steven Spielberg actually direct of this movie? Probably a lot. “Pulse” reimagines the concept for the digital age. Think about the times you’ve heard of people who’ve lost a loved one suddenly reporting their TV turning on at random - was it a message from the beyond? Certainly there’s a classic episode of “The Twilight Zone,” in which Gladys Cooper keeps getting phone calls from a dead man on the other end. Northwestern University film studies professor Jeffrey Sconce wrote a book in 2000 called “Haunted Media,” about the phenomenon of people thinking their TVs or radios or phones are haunted. “This is not the end,” Masao’s late wife insists. “I Was a Simple Man” only grows more intimately entwined with Masao’s remembrances of things past as it reaches back into the post-war period, and its lucid commentary on the commercialization of Hawaii’s beauty is borne out through a personal story of otherness and outsiders that’s reflected by Masao’s estrangement from his own family’s unyielding Japaneseness. But his imminent death won’t necessarily strain those bonds to the breaking point. ![]() They’ve come to prepare him for his own journey, and also - perhaps even more importantly - to insist that they’ve never really left. The phantoms casually start popping up soon after Masao is diagnosed with terminal cancer, beginning with his late wife (Constance Wu) who hasn’t aged a day since she died on the same 1959 night that Hawaii was claimed by the United States. “I Was a Simple Man” (Christopher Makoto Yogi, 2021)Ī lush and spellbinding ghost story that’s haunted by the spirit(s) of an entire island, Christopher Makoto Yogi’s “I Was a Simple Man” layers the spectral hush of “Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives” over the elegiac domesticity of “An Autumn Afternoon” as it mourns the fading O’ahu that Masao Matsuoshi (Steve Iwamoto) knew in the 20th century. Melancholic but not tragic, “Corpse Bride” is a moonlit ghost story that touches on conspiracy and revenge but is at its most rewardingly self-possessed when conveying uncomplicated heartbreak. When the hapless groom accidentally stumbles into a second engagement with an undead bride named Emily (voice of Helena Bonham Carter) the night before his wedding, the treacherous love triangle puts the land of the living on a collision course that spells catastrophe. Image Credit: Courtesy Warner Bros/Everett CollectionĪ spiritual successor to 1993’s well-loved “The Nightmare Before Christmas,” Tim Burton and Mike Johnson’s co-directed “Corpse Bride” begins with the gleefully grim introduction of an awkward arranged marriage between Victor, the timid son of a fish merchant (voice of Johnny Depp), and Victoria, the beautiful daughter of disgraced aristocrats (voice of Emily Watson). “Corpse Bride” (Tim Burton and Mike Johnson, 2005)
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