It’s Halloween eve, and while DVD distributors have oddly refrained from flooding the shelves this week with apposite horror fare, Netflix has held up their end of the bargain with some class. Landing on the streaming service after last month’s Toronto festival premiere, Osgood Perkins’s I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House is one of the year’s most elegant chillers. Not a film of gut-knotting shocks, it hits the back of your neck like an icy draft blown through a lace curtain. The spirit of classic mystery novelist Shirley Jackson courses through Perkins’s film in more ways than one, with Paula Prentiss (in her first major film role in 35 years) playing a senile, Jackson-inspired horror writer tormented by the spectre of one of her own literary creations. Ruth Wilson, terrific as ever, is the nervous young homecare nurse drawn into the haunting. It’s a classic gothic setup that nonetheless unfolds in obliquely poetic ways. Perkins (son of Anthony, aptly enough) gives it a cool but still-beating heart.
Nicolas Winding Refn, on the other hand, doesn’t have much time for feeling in The Neon Demon (Icon, 18), though there’s more than enough rapturous beauty (and equally ravishing grotesquerie) in this semi-waking Los Angeles nightmare to occupy the senses. Both bloody and unnerving enough for 31 October viewing, this is a not-so-cautionary tale of an ethereal young model honeytrapped into the carnivorous couture scene. Winding Refn’s film is that rare fashion satire that doesn’t idly ridicule its milieu, but rather has a peer’s obsessive eye for design, form and bodily manipulation. Whether he’s best placed to examine how female image merchants destroy each other is up for debate, but his vision is a stunning, unshakeable one. It’s a film equally, breathtakingly, about looking and looks.
For those of you fobbing off Halloween entirely and seeking something wholly delightful to watch, Maggie’s Plan (Sony, 15) will do the job. Rebecca Miller’s breezy screwball romp of romance and reversal among the New York academic set hardly breaks new ground in a territory Woody Allen originally demarcated, but Miller and her high-end ensemble execute it with no-sweat expertise and sincere human affection. The effect is as warm and snug as the cardigans favoured by Greta Gerwig’s sweetly klutzy heroine, though not without a barbed (or bobbled?) streak of cynicism.
That’s mostly absent from Learning to Drive (Precision, 15), Spanish director Isabel Coixet’s amiable but pappy tale of companionship between a middle-aged divorcee (Patricia Clarkson) and her Sikh driving instructor (Ben Kingsley). It never goes as deep into the human condition as its homily-filled script imagines, but Clarkson’s peppery zeal livens it up. Broadly zealous performing is the chief draw – perhaps even the raison d’etre – of Elvis & Nixon (eOne, 15), a self-explanatory dress-up exercise that imagines the 1970 meeting of the two eponymous American titans to little narrative objective. Still, Michael Shannon and Kevin Spacey give their respective caricatures some cured-ham conviction. Considering that their physical resemblance hovers around nil, Shannon’s distended, uh-huh-huh Elvis is particularly inspired.
On the blockbuster front, The Legend of Tarzan (Warner, 12) is somehow a more distant memory than its summer release would suggest. Minus the big-screen’s magnification of its digital spectacle (and Alexander Skarsgård’s improbably non-digital abs), there’s little in this retro revival of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s vine-swinging saga to hold on to. There’s more spark to Central Intelligence (Universal, 15), even if this buddy-cop comedy traces sloppily around its set template. It’s the daffy, ping-pong chemistry between Kevin Hart and Dwayne Johnson that keeps it perky.
Finally, Oasis: Supersonic (eOne, 15), Mat Whitecross’s thorough, absorbing, suitably bolshy history of the brothers Gallagher will be the week’s big documentary seller, but the nonfiction treasure of the week is a double feature from American experimentalist Robert Greene. Fresh from its acclaimed cinema release, Kate Plays Christine (Dogwoof, 15) is a spiralling, fascinating conundrum that takes the tragedy of 1970s newscaster Christine Chubbuck, who famously killed herself mid-broadcast, as the starting point for a bristly essay on the ethics and politics of performance – as actress Kate Lyn Sheil grapples with the difficulties of playing Chubbuck in a hypothetical biopic. (No relation to the excellent, upcoming narrative portrait Christine, in which Rebecca Hall takes on the challenge.) Happily, it has been paired in a box set with Greene’s equally brilliant 2014 doc Actress, never before released in the UK – another head-scrambling thespian meditation, in which working actress Brandy Burre finds her domestic and professional lives trickily entangled. Both films sneak under the skin as disquietingly as any Halloween horror.
