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JUSTIN TANNER REVIEWS THE CIVIL DEAD
THE CIVIL DEAD Director Clay Tatum’s funny and smart debut feature “The Civil Dead” has more than a few things in common with Martin McDonagh’s “The Banshees of Inisherin”: a one-sided friendship that has reached its sell-by date, the specter of death, the weaponization of niceness, along with elements of the fantastical and a bitter streak of cruelty. “Banshees”, however, even with its twenty million dollar budget and stellar cast, can’t quite make its various shifts in tone and credulity-straining plot land successfully.
Whereas “The Civil Dead”, with a microscopic budget and no stars, manages to enchant, disturb, nail its fantasy elements, juggle abstraction and reality without sacrificing narrative sense, and serve up more laughs in the first five minutes than “Banshees” does in its entirety. And unlike McDonagh’s film, Tatum’s actually delivers a satisfying shocker of an ending — one which continues to haunt long after the credits roll. When his long-suffering wife, the endearingly brusque Whitney Weir (”The Time I had a Threesome for a Cheeseburger”) goes out of town, the deadbeat Clay promises to try and drum up some work. Instead, he drags a mattress into the living room so he can watch skateboard videos on TV and drink beer.
It’s later, while trolling for photographic inspiration in the LA River bed that he runs into an old acquaintance named Whit — played with a sweet and slightly creepy edge by Whitmer “GLOW” Thomas — and the movie’s plot jumps into high gear. This friendly reconnect is welcome at first, but gradually moves from pleasant to tiresome to genuinely terrifying, forcing the laid-back Clay into a series of increasingly extreme actions just to keep his sanity. To give more away would be criminal: “The Civil Dead” is a movie best savored as a puzzle without foreknowledge, the less you know the better. Presenting itself initially as a lightweight slacker comedy — one that really delivers the laughs — it morphs, by the end, into a deeper statement about loss. And even the smallest grace notes circle back to make their thematic presence felt. Whether taken literally as a primer on how to get rid of an unwanted relationship or metaphorically as a cautionary tale about the dangers of holding onto the past, Clay Tatum’s film is that rare gem. A movie so absorbing you don’t realize until it’s over how deeply you’ve been shook. IN THEATERS
KNOCK AT THE CABIN When a movies starts out with a seven year old girl telling a joke about grasshoppers farting it’s a sure bet you’re either in Stephen King or M. Night Shyamalan territory. And since there’s no Quarter Pounder or Big Gulp references, Shyamalan it is. Has any blockbuster dramatist ever so eagerly gone out of their way to be mistaken for a text-generating AI? “It was the fastest screenplay I’ve ever written,” Shyamalan said recently, referring to the script for “Knock at the Cabin”, “I think you can feel it when you watch it.” I’ll say!
No character, not even for a moment, sounds like anything resembling a human being. Well, that’s not exactly true: Shyamalan himself appears for a brief cameo as a Home Shopping Network huckster, and he’s actually quite funny, giving himself the most realistic sounding dialog in the film. If only the rest of the cast had found a way to shed the stultifying tone of atomic-level earnestness they’re saddled with, because absolutely no one else survives this thing unscathed. Even David Bautista (”Glass Onion”), who’s been getting raves for his somewhat underplayed role as the leader of a lamebrained home invasion scheme, can’t manage to sell his apocalyptic balderdash. His ability to keep a straight face while mouthing the movie’s leaden doggerel, however, is awe-inspiring. For the uninitiated, the film’s plot concerns a couple of gay dads and their adopted daughter who are accosted while on vacation in a remote cabin by a group of messianic cultists bent on ‘saving the world’. And I admit, initially this mixture of “Funny Games” and “Any Day Now” sounded intriguing. But one of the problems Shyamalan has created, by positioning himself as the king of the twist-ending, is the necessity to deliver a socko punch every time. Because outside of the twist itself, he doesn’t really have much to offer. And if you’ve seen the “Knock at the Cabin” preview — which I’d suffered through numerous times before watching the film — you know it gives everything — and I mean EVERYTHING — away. Consequently the cabin attack — which should’ve carried all kinds of tension — is dramatically flattened since the preview has told us the attackers aren’t actually going to attack — at least not the protagonists. And, frankly, Shyamalan, with one exception (the brutal home invasion scene in “Unbreakable”), is pretty much toothless when it comes to violence and dread. His movies, which resemble the family-friendly parables coughed up by Christian film companies like Affirm, Advent or Angel Studios, may tease with the possibility of menace but are in actuality as hard-edged as a throw pillow.
You can’t entice us, for instance, with the grim possibility of the death of a seven year old child when we know for certain it will never happen. Instead we just wait for whatever trite feel-good ending — with bible verse accompaniment — is coming, because we just know it’s coming. Finally: can we please stop writing gay characters whose storylines are primarily delineated by the shadow of homophobia? Yes bigotry still exists, but defining people by their potential for victimization is reductive to say the least. Ben Aldridge (”Spoiler Alert”) and Jonathan Groff (”Mindhunter”) are fine as the sexless daddy-drones dealing with an “Abraham and Isaac” moment of decision, but being oppressed is not much of a character trait, and the story provides nothing else for them to play. Of course being a religious flick, they don’t even get to kiss before the ultimate sacrifice is made. Shyamalan serves up queer just like the Bible ordered: neutered and ready for the slaughter. IN THEATERS
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