Spanking the Monkey

The Monkey (2025) - Perkins Bespectacled Hal gets bullied around in school, also by his twin brother Bill at home. The twins live with their single mother (Tatiana Maslany). It's the 90s. They find a windup toy monkey left by their absent father (Adam Scott, shown briefly in the beginning, blow torching the monkey). When the monkey gets winded up, people around it die in some horrible accidents. After their mom dies of brain aneurism (because of the monkey), Hal chops up the monkey and throws it away. After the twins get adopted by their aunt and uncle and move to Maine, they find that the monkey has followed them. It doesn't matter why monkey chose them. It just is. Uncle with the impressive lambchop sideburn (played drolly by Perkins himself) dies first, stampeded by band of horses in a sleeping bag while camping, then twenty five years later, aunt dies horribly too. After many more highly inventive kill offs with many of the population in town dead, Bill and Hal need to finish the job of destroying the monkey, if they could. If not, they will need to learn how to live with the monkey.

If Osgood Perkins's Longlegs left you scratching your head in dissatisfaction, as it walked the tight rope between being a psychological horror and a comedy, please give him another chance with The Monkey, an all out horror-comedy that will wipe off your doubts about his talent as a filmmaker-to-watch. Perkins has a very peculiar sense of humor, to say the least. And his take on Stephen King's short story is an unabashedly slap-sticky, full on gore-fest that doesn't take itself too seriously.

Just like Longlegs, the pace of The Monkey is breezy. It progresses too quickly for us to question what's happening or why. And it's a good thing. Soon you realize that the narrative doesn't really matter. It's all just vibes. Theo James, playing both Hal and Bill, is eagerly along for the ride and keeps the serious face the whole time. Maslany hamms it up to match the film's weird vibe. All the peripheral characters - Hal's boss at the hardware store, the rookie priest, Elija Wood's creepy self-help guru, Perkins's uncle Chip and the tiny Asian girl bully all enhances to the truly peculiar vibe of the movie.

The Monkey is not necessarily the movie that we asked for, but the movie we need in these dark times.

Keeping it Together in this Crazy World

How to be Normal and the Oddness of the Other World (2024) - Pochlatko It's all in the perspectives when talking about our mental health, considering the wild and crazy world that we are living in right now. Austrian director Florian Pochlatko plays with this idea in his zany debut feature How to be Normal and the Oddness of the Other World. We see Pia (played drolly by Luisa-Céline Gaffron), a sullen young woman, being discharged from a mental institution and moving back to her childhood room in her concerned parents' house. Mom, Elfie (Elke Winkens), is a voice actor for narrating documentary programs and dad Klaus (Cornelius Obonya) owns a printing company.

Jumbled up timeline and fantasy sequences, you don't quite know what we see on screen is real or not, neither does our unreliable narrator Pia, who is on a variety of colorful anti-psychotic pills. We get to know a little bit of details in Pia's life - her boyfriend Joni (Felix Pöchhacker) has moved on, but Pia is still deeply in love. And it gets a little touchy when she confronts him and his new love. Also Pia is paranoid about men in black suits, very much like Agent Smith from the Matrix movies, following her around everywhere. Are they real or her drug induced hallucinations?

In order to give some stability to Pia, her parents decide to give her a job at dad's company, doing dull office work. They hope that a daily routine would help her. But the real world is not as stable as everyone hopes to be. Increasingly sensationalist tendencies in documentary topics that Elfie narrates - parasite infected zombie snails, wayward asteroids that might collide with the earth, combined with daily atrocities and natural disasters blaring on TV, test Elfie's sanity causing her to crash her car in a traffic heavy motorway. Klaus struggles with his company being taken over by a huge conglomerate called 'Friendly' (a stand-in for Amazon). It's as if there's a very thin line distinguishing being normal and insane. Not only Pia, but everyone slowly loses grip on their reality, as the world keeps spinning out of control.

How to be Normal asks big questions about what is perceived as normal when the world around us is insane. Pia, constantly under pressure to be normal, is trying to hold on to the idea of home and self-worth in the world constantly in turmoil. Pochlatko, like Daniels' Everything Everywhere All at Once, balances the heady subject with plenty of humor and great visual gags. As paranoid and delusional Pia appears to be, she provides the film's many hilarious moments as she appears as a giant monster with a piece of Gouda cheese across her face lumbering like a Gozilla in the city, or using the post-it notes to cover her face at her job. Gaffron is fantastic as a acne ridden, heavily medicated young woman desperately trying to find a footing and self-worth, so is the rest of the cast with their droll performances.

Can Pia find peace and stop slashing her wrists with a plastic knife? Is there a brighter future for mankind? Pochlatko poses these questions and asks us to contemplate what it means to be sane and normal in the world that is completely nuts.

Symbols

Hysteria (2025) - Büyükatalay German filmmaker Mehmet Akif Büyükatalay's Hysteria touches upon sensitive subjects in modern day, multicultural Germany: racism and representation. The film plays out like a tense thriller until it morphs into a chamber drama where the identity politics within the immigrant community are dissected and hotly debated. Hysteria might not be as subtle as fellow Turkish descendent filmmaker Thomas Arslan (A Fine Day)'s work, or as flashy as Fatih Akin (Head-On)'s, but the film is more direct and piercing in dealing with the complex subject matter. The plot sometimes feels clunky and forced as it gets tangled up in its own intricate web, and the seemingly important loose ends don't tie up neatly by the end. But Hysteria is an anxiety inducing pressure cooker of a film that concludes with the literal fiery end.

Hysteria starts with an arson, a staged one: it is revealed in a long zoom out that the house being torched is in a giant film stage. The film director Yigit (Serkan Kaya) interjects and gives the context to the image - it's the reflection of the arson attacks that took place in Germany in the 90s by the ultra right-wing groups against Muslim immigrant communities that killed hundreds of innocent people. What Yigit is trying to capture is immigrant non-actors’ emotions, going through the aftermath of the arson attack. These extras are culled from a local refugee center for authenticity's sake. After the shoot, it is revealed that the copy of Quran is burned along with other household items during filming and some of the extras are upset. One of them, Majid, walks off the set. So, the driving duty falls on a young and eager intern Elif (Devrim Lingnau). She has to drive extras back to the refugee center and drop off the film negatives (the project is shot on film) to an apartment that belongs to the film's producer Lilith (Nicolette Krebitz) who is also well known, respected filmmaker herself.

Elif has a healthy discussion with the extras about what the project is about on the way back to the refugee center. Mustafa (Aziz Çapkurt), himself a theater director back home, thinks Yigit is just perpetuating the victimhood on screen, which has been long prevalent in German cinema - so called "Gasterbeiter (Guestworker) Cinema" or "Cinema of Duty" of the 70s and 80s. These are the films the white liberals can have their conscience clear and make them feel good after viewing. Others disagree, including Elif, a university student with a Turkish immigrant father, who thinks the film is saying something important.

After Elif drops them off, she arrives at Lilith's but realizes that she lost the keys to the apartment. After calling a locksmith, she places several fliers about missing keys around the neighborhood. But she conceals the lost key incident to Lilith for some reason. This little deceit snowballs into full blown paranoia when she gets text messages about the lost keys from a stranger. The texts, with bad grammar and their profile picture and their social media linked to some scary looking Muslim extremist group, Elif, sufficiently freaked out, calls Said (Medhi Meskar), a young immigrant who was an extra in Yigit's film and tells him what's been happening. When Yigit and Lilith come back, to Elif's dismay, they find the footage that contains the burning Quran is gone. Someone broke into the apartment and lifted the footage. Yigit, furious and suspects the extras and calls cops on them. Mustafa, Said and Majid all deny any involvement in wrongdoing.

Lilith, who wasn't fan of the footage and in fear of controversy, convinces Yigit to file a theft insurance claim and reshoot the scene without Quran. The problem solved. But for Elif, the problem is far from solved. She confronts Lilith and Yigit with Mustafa, Said and Majid, and asks for an apology. This is where things get a little shaky in terms of narrative contrivances. While I appreciate the need of seeing frank discussions about how people perceive others and others perceive themselves, class disparities, 'write what you know,' etc., but nothing really gets sorted out in Hysteria. The jarring tonal shift, untied loose ends, underdeveloped motivations and obvious symbolism (not only Quran but actual negative film catches fire at the end) devolve into a melodrama. Büyükatalay has a knack for making an anxiety inducing thriller. But issues don't necessarily get solved themselves even when they are screamed out loud for everyone to hear.

Parti pris

Armand (2024) - Tøndel Halfdan Ulmann Tøndel's scathing primary set school drama Armand features a stunning lead performance by Renate Reinsve (The Worst Person in the World). Reinsve plays Elisabeth, a mother of Armand, a troubled 6 year old kid who is accused of sexual assault on a classmate. The supposed victim is a son of Sarah (Ellen Dorrit Petersen), who is a sister of Thomas, Elisabeth's dead husband. The emergency PT conference is called in the backdrop of the empty, old primary school since the school is out for summer. Elisabeth is first seen frantically driving to school, trying to connect to Armand on the phone. With jewelry, makeup, a revealing top and high heels, she exudes a partygirl vibe. She wipes off her lipstick before she enters the school. Waiting there in school are - harried principal Jarle (Øystein Røger), an inexperienced young teacher Sunna (Thea Lambrechts Vaulen), and an administrator Ajsa (Vera Veljovic-Jovanovic), as well as Sarah and husband Anders(Endre Hellestveit).

An attempt, led by Sunna, to appease both parent parties and make light of the situation fails miserably as the temper and accusations fly. It's a serious accusation that Armand hit the kid and pulled his pants down and uttered the words 'anal sex'. The situation is too much for a young teacher to handle. Jarle and Ajsa step in. As they weigh in the steps that need to be taken by the school, Elisabeth has a laughing fit that lasts several minutes, as everyone else increasingly feels uncomfortable. It's as if she is sabotaging the process and dragging it out, as if she doesn't want to face the accusations. Sarah is convinced that Elisabeth, an actor, is out to manipulate the situation by creating a drama and making everything about herself, the victim. She urges Jarle and everyone to consider Elisabeth's profession, and in turn her mental fitness for being a mother. Who knows if she has something to do with Thomas's accidental death? Jarle who has known Thomas and Sarah since they were kids who attended the same school, increasingly believes Sarah's opinion of her.

Armand reminded me of another Scandinavian film with the similar subject, Thomas Vinterberg's The Hunt, starring Mads Mikkelsen, a kindergarten teacher accused of a sexual abuse by a young girl, which turns out to be a little lie. A grandson of Liv Ulmann and Ingmar Bergman, Tøndel, a young Norwegian filmmaker, shows his pedigree with Armand. The filmmaker uses those empty interiors to his advantage (with DP Pål Ulvik Rokseth), playing with silhouettes and focus shifts.

Directing the actors, with simmering tensions and emotional turmoil dealing with such a delicate subject, Tøndel shows a firm grasp of working with seasoned actors. For Reinsve, it's a very hammy role, balancing between a seductress and an innocent woman who is persecuted by her looks in a physically demanding role. And she gives it all.

Armand is a tense movie with warring factions calling for blood. But it also leaves some room for poetic moments of reprieve as Elisabeth dances with the school's custodian with a broom and an intense physical altercation fantasy sequence near the end involving Elisabeth and a group of parents who were there to recap the school year with the administration who just heard about the accusation. The scene where everyone's hands are on Elisabeth, poking, nudging and grabbing her, is reminiscent of the scene from Repulsion. In this, it's as if the accusers are trying to get a piece of the accused with their preconceived notion of Elisabeth, the unfit mother. With the strong performance from Reinsve, Armand is a commendable first feature from a promising young director. Armand receives will have limited theatrical release on Friday 2/7 at IFC Center. Nationwide release will follow.