The Phantom of the Opera (1998)

 

Rewatched Monday 10th March 2025

 

Director: Dario Argento

Screenplay: Dario Argento, Gérard Brach (and Giorgina Caspari)

Based on the novel by Gaston Leroux

Cast: Julian Sands as The Phantom of the Opera, Asia Argento as Christine Daaé, Andrea Di Stefano as Raoul, Baron de Chagny, Nadia Rinaldi as Carlotta Altieri, Coralina Cataldi-Tassoni as Honorine, István Bubik as The Rat Catcher, Lucia Guzzardi as Madame Giry

 

Somehow because of Gaston Leroux, I can connect Lon Chaney Sr., Claude Rains, Dario Argento...and Andrew Lloyd Webber together among the many who've adapted or starred as the titular Phantom, Leroux's 1910 work first creating this figure terrorising the Paris. This is in mind I forgot Julian Sands was in this now taking up the role, emphasising alongside being a very idiosyncratic casting choice for Argento that this entire project was more idiosyncratic than I remembered. With the prologue suggesting Batman Returns (1992) in the origin of the Phantom as a baby Sands being floated across the waters of a cave in wicker basket, only with rats replacing the penguins, Argento's take with co-writer Gérard Brach taking its own direction with the source material. More so as I thought that Batman Return reference as a joke to myself as I re-watched the opening, only to forget a rat drags the wicker basket to safety and an animatronic rat puppet head in close-up is depicted as their friendship as human to rodent is shown.

Considering his 1987 film Opera, it makes sense for Argento to tackle this setting again, especially as he was always apparently adamant to Leroux's novel at some point. With the Budapest Opera House in Hungary used for the shooting location, designed as a copy of the Paris Opera House central to Leroux's story, alongside scouting real caves in Italy for the underbelly the Phantom looms in, this feels like a passion project and a really ambitious film even for Argento in terms of production. I'd argue the production value is great as a result, a period horror romance tragedy which is one of the few times in his career he went back in time. This also stands out considering this was made at the same time there was sadly the declining end of the Italian genre industry. Argento, even if also filming in Hungary, clearly had some influence least enough for the production values here to depict everything from the back stage areas full of props (even a huge life-size ship stage in one shot) to the washrooms for the linen to the caves below the Paris Opera.

It focuses on the Phantom fully as a romantic anti-hero, one who brutally kills people but has his own moral code, including one most would understand in dealing with an older male creeper of young girls obsessed beyond wanting to force chocolate on them. He is not physically disfigured, which is a significant change, arguably progressive in its own way, as the scarring is psychologically for good reason in being forced to like with rats. Sands is also really appropriate for a figure that compels Asia Argento's lead Christine Daaé, an aspiring opera singer, with the chemistry that would be found between them. As the film goes, the story finds itself deviating into differences such as explicit psychic powers that force a rat catcher to put his hand into a trap of his own set up, or the sense of humour which is that and deliberate.

A gorier and more sexually explicit take is found, feeling like Argento's full blown Gothic period horror which fully embraces its dramatic weight and doesn't suffer the many issues, particularly budget, that afflicted Dracula 3D (2012). The tonal changes and production style actually move this film in Argento's career closest to a wave of films from the nineties, such as those by Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro like Delicatessen (1991), of tonally shifting genre films which embraced their practical production values and weren't above very strange moments of humour. This will put some off, but Argento's cinema was already getting weirder by the eighties, where Saxon randomly blares out in the middle of Opera with their heavy metal riffs, and probably the "weirdest" of his films, Phenomenon (1985), involving Jennifer Connelly being able to psychically communicate with insects and a chimpanzee with a razor blade.

It befits that era of baroque genre films with arguably its more lurid and tonal shifting moments helping the film from becoming too dry, be it the strange early CGI effects like Julian Sands seeing a mouse trap in the full of nude men writhing in pain superimposed in the full moon, or the bombast in style even for humour like a close-up of a singer's tonsils out of artistic creativity. Some of this does feel ridiculous but more often than not it feels like for deliberate humour - like a stint in an all-welcome sex bath house with, the potential second love interest for Christine, where equal opportunity nudity of all ages and sizes is contrasted by clothed men arguing philosophy violently in the pool.

There's the potential discomfort with this film's throw-in-the-kitchen-sink tone, if you connect the dots, with the more sexually frank moments knowing Asia Argento is Dario's daughter, though she has worked with him over the later decades to a film like Dark Glasses (2022), so thankfully theirs has felt more a happier familial relationship. Even if films like The Stendhal Syndrome (1996) before had a really deliberately uncomfortable thriller dealing with sexual violence, there's a feeling of greater trust between them which thankfully makes the pair comfortable in collaborating as they have as family in such films. Also she fits here as Christine - dubbed with another's singer voice, she does to Asia Argento's credit fit the role as a period horror lead who is meant to present the pure hearted singer an outcast like Sands would fall for. Including her conflict, when she starts to question if he is trying to dominate her as much as the reality that theirs is to be as much a tragic love, she thankfully feels like an appropriate casting choice. I like Julian Sands too, someone who befits this more glamorous version of the Phantom as much as someone who would also bite a person's tongue out for trying to steal his underground treasure.

In general, the film is over-the-top in a way that might put purists of the source off. It's not enough to have the famous scene of the huge chandelier being dropped mid-performance as a warning, but shirtless Sands sledge hammering its stone support to justify his warnings, and for it to bloodily maim a baker's dozen of the theatre patrons below. The completely abrupt tangent of a rat killing proto-golf kart would not be included in other adaptations, nor so much other Argento productions, but I can't help but think it feels broad on purpose, becoming a flex in Argento's career which you rarely see and with hindsight is appreciated for the heightened delirium of this particular film. The closest thing to this in Italian genre cinema I've seen in general was the directorial work of former actor Michele Soavi from this era, his tragically short filmography for this period even when it was more explicitly serious horror like The Sect (1991) deliberately cutting to a rabbit being able to operate a television remote for a humour jolt.

The curious mix of romance, horror, style and silliness of The Phantom of the Opera feels like the culmination of Argento's more absurd touches, and one thing that has made me be won over by the film is knowledge that this is still at the time before his most divisive, lower budget films came to be. Everything after The Card Player (2004) up to Dark Glasses are his most maligned works and projects where he was having to work with lower budgets. Here, there is the budget, and its sincerity in shifting between romantic tragedy to gore to absurd comedic shifts is feels less like many compromises have come to play, but are the point. As a result, I feel the film's been unfairly maligned in Dario Argento's career and have come to appreciate it.

Phenomena (1985)

 

Director: Dario Argento

Screenplay: Franco Ferrini and Dario Argento

Cast: Jennifer Connelly as Jennifer Corvino, Daria Nicolodi as Frau Brückner, Dalila Di Lazzaro as the Headmistress, Patrick Bauchau as Inspector Rudolf Geiger, Donald Pleasence as Professor John McGregor, Fiore Argento as Vera Brandt, Federica Mastroianni as Sophie, Gaspare Capparoni as Karl, Fiorenza Tessari as Gisela Sulzer, Mario Donatone as Morris Shapiro

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

It can definitely be said Phenomena is a wildly idiosyncratic film in terms of Argento's career. It has a simple premise at heart, a killer murdering young women in Switzerland, but it is one of the strangest in how it is telling it, with nods to Suspiria (1977) and the terror of boarding schools, entomology and insects, and Murders in the Rue Morgue by Edgar Allen Poe among other details. You also get Iron Maiden on the soundtrack and Donald Pleasence with a chimpanzee assistant, and that is not even factoring in our lead, Jennifer Connelly as a young woman with the telepathic ability to communicate with insects.

She is Jennifer Corvino, daughter of a popular actor, staying in a strict all-girls school where its headmistress, when learning Jennifer has an extreme form of sleepwalking, has her strapped to a bed, examined on by a doctor, and thinks she is high on vague drugs. From here, when she is pulled into the main story, it definitely emphasises Dario Argento did not embrace logic in many of his films conventionally despite the acclaim for his earlier seventies giallo. We get to her meeting Donald Pleasence, as a Scottish entomologist who has a female chimpanzee assistant due to being wheelchair bound, by way of the most dreamlike take on sleepwalking that includes Jennifer being a "kinda" witness to a gristly murder. In context to the films which came before from Argento, I can definitely say this one is more significantly ridiculous, a film which might put people off entirely for how bizarre it is. It argues thought, whilst with their own potential flaws, the era of his films especially after the Millennium have been misread for Argento in terms of plot logic criticism, more so when he was already entering films with more tangents to them. Case in point, with Dark Glasses (2022), the abruptness with its killer and rationale for their actions, alongside having an uncomfortable real life logic to it as it involves a misogynist killer picking off random women, feels a lot more grounded next to the likes of Phenomena or Inferno (1980), though the later has a more precise structure to it. In general, Argento's films, even his giallos, have their moments that deliberately break from logic in what he clearly thought would be more dynamic and dramatic; with Phenomena, the result is broader, which may be a tipping point for many, yet I love Phenomena itself for this lack of logic and fully aware of how absurd this is.

The strange airs around it help even in terms of accidental ones, such as for when the editing choices were made for these films when distributed in their original English dubs, which make no sense in hindsight, they have ended up with passages only available in their Italian language version for the restored version. Maybe Motörhead abruptly playing in one scene is the one odd choice even for me - I have gotten to appreciate Argento's use of heavy metal in the eighties even if not for everyone, and Iron Maiden's Flash of the Blade in multiple scenes actually works well - but even that adds to the personality of the game for the better. Details in the plot like the emphasis on the "Swiss Transylvania" this is set in and the Alp air's strange effect on the people, are the type of details you normally do not get enough of in some horror films and are the flourishes, even if never part of the main plot, that add weight. They feel like tonal flourishes you get from an Edgar Allen Poe tale, apt as he is referenced explicitly in a tribute to one of his iconic stories, Argento bringing in Donald Pleasence, a great casting choice, and giving him a chimpanzee as a sympathetic character who is yet an excuse, when tragedy leads to her needing to get revenge, to have her inexplicably find a switchblade in an outside bin the middle of nowhere and gun after the culprit.

Contrasted by the washed out blue touch that permeates the film, as Tenebrae (1982) was stark in its use of septic white, the film does feel like a dream. It started off from the idea of insects and their life cycles being able to identify the time of death, which was clearly the main fascination for the script, and spring boarded into something like a fever dream. Has all of it aged well? You can argue its plot reveal of the killer, in its take on mental asylums and disability, has not aged well, but the result includes a monster child with a spike on a retractable steel stick in a boat, so the film's absurd edge thankfully undercuts any bad taste to this, alongside giving Daria Nicolodi, despite this being the time her relationship with Argento ended for good, the chance to chew the scenery for the better. It is helped by Jennifer Connelly too; she is a visibly charismatic figure who helped keep the film grounded for all its absurd turns and ridiculous dubbing readings. The scenes in the worst all-girls' school possible, leading to her summoning a swarm of insects around the building, is ethereal as a set piece, and she keeps someone there in the centre to prevent this stumbling over, as it gets weirder. That also is the case when the film becomes more morbid, as it effectively gets into a killer who likes keeping the decaying bodies of their victims like a blanket comforter, then moving to a new house leaving them behind. Eventually when we get an entire underground swimming pool of decay in the location of the finale, one of the most grotesque scenes from the director, Connelly is still there to allow a legitimately sympathetic figure in the centre of this.

Add to this the music which is not the heavy metal, scored by Goblin and as strong as expected from them, and the film has always been one I have loved even if the one, even next to the Three Mothers films with their surrealist nightmare tones, that feels the maddest and peculiar in Dario Argento's career. This would have definitely been a film which gained a greater appreciation as time went on, with the irony knowing that the weight of expectation over Argento's career would have been harsh on the likes of this and Opera (1987), also with its heavy metal tinged eccentricities, next to his seventies smashes. For me, watching Phenomena even next to some of the great Italian genre films of the era did bring up the fact that Argento had become an auteur at that point. Even if one of the horror genre, he gained a traction and a weight to his name where Phenomena, for all its strange decisions in the plot, feels like a big event production in terms of the gravitas and style filtered through it. Rather than playing safe too, he decided to make something like Phenomena, and that realization has made my love for the film grow further.

Poor Things (2023)

Director: Yorgos Lanthimos

Screenplay: Tony McNamara

Based on the novel by Alasdair Gray

Cast: Emma Stone as Bella Baxter, Mark Ruffalo as Duncan Wedderburn, Willem Dafoe as Dr. Godwin "God" Baxter, Ramy Youssef as Max McCandles, Christopher Abbott as Alfie Blessington, Kathryn Hunter as Madame Swiney, Jerrod Carmichael as Harry Astley, Hanna Schygulla as Martha von Kurtzroc, Margaret Qualley as Felicity, Vicki Pepperdine as Mrs. Prim

An Abstract Candidate

 

There was something perversely delightful in seeing Poor Things in a multiplex in the afternoon, rather than at night at a specialist cinema. Despite having been a big prestige production, with a Best Picture nomination at the 96th Academy Awards, we are still dealing with a horror/dark comedy with very adult content and subject matter, sexually explicitly and proudly weird. Based on the work by Alasdair Gray, an acclaimed Scottish author and artist, and involving Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos, behind transgressive and idiosyncratic productions in his homeland like Dogtooth (2009), it makes me proud that a director I always admired in Lanthimos managed to find a way to enter the British film production industry, with this a British-US-Irish co-production, and not yet compromise his interest in the idiosyncrasies and weirdness of human behaviour.

What we get is a retelling of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein if taking the next logical step in how, once Victor Frankenstein created his being, the being becomes Dr. Godwin Baxter as played by Willem Dafoe, a begrudgingly accepted member of Victorian society and a teacher of human anatomy and surgery in London. Central to the film, as a huge contributor as a co-producer and the lead, is Emma Stone as the logical extension of the Bride of Frankenstein, or in this case the Daughter of Frankenstein in Bella. It is a slight spoiler, but she is a woman who originally committed suicide, throwing herself off London Bridge, only for Baxter to resurrect her with the mind of her unborn child in her womb placing the mother's mind, bringing to life a figure who starts as a grown woman with the mind of the child until she begins to mature psychologically. One of Baxter's students Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef) is hired to record her progress, falling for her but with Bella herself always the central character, as her growing self awareness leads her to want to leave the house she has lived in all her life.

It is fascinating to see Lanthimos break through over the years, and here he gets to have the most visually ambitious of his work, an alternative Victorian era world where Bella is our centre, beginning to grasp the world around her slowly in a confined and artificial world under a father she literally calls God. Her journey, played as absurdist and deliberately provocative, is learning back to Dogtooth in the prologue, under her loving father's thumb until he relents to let her have a worldwide affair with a chad named Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo). Dogtooth was about a patriarchal figure forcing a confined world on his adult children with their own logic, but here there is the inverse to that film where God relents and lets her, after her discovery of adolescence and her sexuality at the dining table, go off with this womaniser aware of the necessary to let her grow. To the growing frustrations of Duncan, Mark Ruffalo eventually becoming one of the funniest figures in the film for how increasingly exasperated he becomes, Bella's journey becomes existential as she grows and learns of the world in her own way.

The obvious themes, set in the Victorian era, is definitely with "civilised" society as reflected in all the men in Bella's life, how she is meant to be to them in terms of acceptable behaviour and manners, but it does avoid locking this theme to the past, thus neutering the thought experiments of this theme, entirely because this is also set in its own exaggerated world. This forces one to experience Bella's journey personally without necessarily the danger of a realistic historical depiction of the past possible to use as a distancing tool to how this still connects to the current world. It becomes more hypothetical, with its incredibly luscious set designs and fictional worlds, Lisbon turned into a fantasy land with cable cars in the air, but still dealing with the problems which Bella starts to pick up from around herself, all whilst growing awareness from her impulsive interest in the outer world to awareness of others and empathy. I have heard of readings of her as well in terms of the autistic spectrum which, as someone with autism myself, should have been obvious but does consider how much nuisance needs to be considered, from a female viewer with autism, to give a proper reading on this. Certainly, with Bella, though she is initially set up as the child-woman who gains weight to her life as she matures, I do see something I have come to develop as I become older as an autistic person, seeing normalised behaviours meant to be rational as more increasingly subjective and even questionable in their acceptable in behaviour ticks. This is reflect especially here with the taboos Bella casually cuts down as pointless as she learns basic pleasures, learns about her sexuality and her liberation, and all with eventual self awareness. Even if her own perspective separate from others, which is bolstered by the profane sense of humour, hers is a progress towards to better.

It is a great performance by Emma Stone. Committed certainly and willing to work with a sense of complete trust and skill to pull it off, as was the case for the likes of Angeliki Papoulia in his earlier made films, it is not for the obvious aspects like the numerous scenes of nudity which makes this a difficult role, but the initial version of her as a child-woman which she documented was insanely challenging to accomplish without some emotional strain¹. With the help of the script by Tony McNamara, hers like everyone's dialogue is full of idiosyncratic language alongside her own idiosyncratic movements, really needed together to make Bella succeed as a character. Wordplay to her distinct turns of phrase filter through the many subjects she has to deal with, such as her befuddlement of not behaving as she is supposed to be to men, or the wrongs of sex work as a credible method of liberation for her and for pay. This is alongside that idea earlier mentioned, as an autistic viewer, that you can see her finding the negatively weird and irrational behaviour which is supposed to be "normal" with the curiosity I and likely others on the spectrum have felt.

At one point in Lisbon, especially with the distinct costume designs by Holly Waddington, I could not help but think of Frank Henenlotter's Frankenhooker (1990), a deliberately tasteless title for a ridiculous premise he literally had to create within seconds in a pitch meeting but made into a memorable horror-comedy, but this becomes the logical progression of what that film hinted at but could not get to. That being how male figures built the perfect woman literally and metaphorically, a daughter surrogate here for Godwin and a perfect lover Duncan, only for her to become fully of her free will, a force of energy stomping around whilst the men are the exasperated ones who cannot comprehend she will not just be their idealised template for them to own. Ruffalo, who got a Best Supporting Actor nomination alongside Stone for Best Actress at the Academy Awards, is the perfect figure for this, the erudite git who gets the funniest lines when he cannot control and dictate what Bella is as a person, finding her way in her own logic and prodding his contradictory mood swings.

You tend to forget, when multiplexes are a place of usually teen friendly films, that we still can have very adult films in violence and sexually explicit themes once in a while, but normally not screened in the middle of a pleasant afternoon, especially when this gets to Bella eventually learning the complex realities of life and how to be empowered whilst working in a brothel in France. The deadpan nature depicting this type of content, even moments of extreme violence, however has been with Yorgos Lanthimos since his earlier films. What I did not expect him, whilst his cinematographer Robbie Ryan was inspired by Francis Ford Coppola's 1992 adaptation of Dracula², was to also have gone from a template for the New Greek Weird Wave of films of stark minimalism to possibly being inspired by Tim Burton all whilst retaining his own maximalist style.

The first act, Bella's childhood before she leaves her father's home, is almost entirely monochrome with a fish eyed lens to distort the world around her. A part of this helps lead the viewer gently into this world, as much as a film with prominent CGI effects alongside the practical ones as Godwin's home is populated with incredibly strange and well done animal hybrids never explained but he clearly created, like bulldog chicken hybrids or the duck dog. Burton is apt a comparison as, whilst sexual desire only occasionally crept into his films, Burton liked played with the macabre and sickly humorous, and with some of his films being as gory as this occasionally gets into, there is unexpected bedfellows with this film even if we get into themes of its own creators. Lanthimos is not that different in the morbid humour here, barring that he adds as well his own touches, his own influences in the artistic style of the film and his interest the viewing humanity like a scientist watches bacteria under a microscope, examining their weird behaviours since Kinetta (2005).

The more explicit politics is different to Burton too, at least in how they are treated here openly, really cemented when we get to Bella being on a ship between oceans and beginning to learn the harsh realities of life through a legitimate cynic played by Jerrod Carmichael. It never becomes heavy handed here due to the sense of humour this introduces between these moments, be it Mark Ruffalo having a meltdown learning his money has been donated to charity, to the brothel Madame in France played by Kathryn Hunter, covered in tattoos, having a frank and thoughtful attitude to her profession, open to Bella's inquisitiveness and for all her female employees whilst with a habit of playful love bites for her young female employees. The one moment where this gets close to heavy handedness to a detriment is addressing Bella's origins, needed to close her arch and introduce Alfie Blessington (Christopher Abbott), who is arguably a stereotype due to the little time we get to fully flesh out his true evil. Of her past, he represents what is evil, the colonial soldier who says Jesus would beat her up with a baseball bat, as her husband from the past, for her sins, and yet abuses his staff for fun and believes in female circumcision. He is still worth having as he presents the last example of masculinity needed to be castrated in the film, the toxic patriarch, and the one closest to the period setting whose form still sadly permeates Western culture, the colonialist who with his home full of weapons and appropriate African icons distort the likes of the Christ's teachings to be pure white male empowerment fantasies, that of dictating the world to everyone not Anglo-Saxon or male. He is the true villain, as even Godwin for his crimes, including trying to create a new Bella, becomes in a nuisance to the film's virtue the father to her daughter she accepts and loves even for all his mistakes. In contrast, Blessington is the figure you need to see who makes even Ruffalo's Duncan just misguided. He argues, for a film already close to two and a half hours, that it needed to be three hours, to deal with the real challenge that enforces Bella's full growth as a figure, particularly as we could have gotten into more explicit issues of class conflict and colonial attitudes, and without losing the resolution we get, [Spoilers] involving goat's brains [Spoilers End].

In context to mainstream cinema, the stereotype rather than the reality including the image perceived of Best Picture Oscar nominees in the past, Poor Things is magnificently bonkers, transgressive and visually resplendent cinema that is to be appreciated. It is a delightfully expressive film, dealing with grim subjects still of the director's cinema but at a point he was able to escape being stereotyped to one form of cinema only. He fully emphasises the true meaning of the auteur theory, that this is his film but where we have to rightly credit as well the differences that came from the figures who contributed to this specific film - great performances, great scriptwriting, great production design from the sets to the model shot work, and a great score from Jerskin Fendrix, making his debut here in composing for a film, who at times evokes the scores Michael Nyman enriched the films of Peter Greenaway with, a huge compliment from my part to nod to. With knowledge Lanthimos tracked down Alasdair Gray before his 2019 passing to adapt the novel, only to learn of Gray's admiration of Dogtooth the film itself¹, adds a wonderful emotional bow to the work, which this was clearly a labour of love for Yorgos Lanthimos. He was able to clearly make a film without compromise, and Lanthimos and everyone in the production of this should pat themselves on the back, on the image onscreen or behind them, for the accomplishment.

Abstract Spectrum: Eccentric

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None

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1) Exclusive: Emma Stone and Yorgos Lanthimos on Creating a Woman Free of Shame in Poor Things, written by Emma Specter and published by Vogue for May 31th 2023.

2) Poor Things’ cinematographer on lighting a sex comedy, being inspired by Francis Ford Coppola, written by Jason Struss and published by Digital Trends on December 9th 2023.

Psycho II (1983)

 

Director: Richard Franklin

Screenplay: Tom Holland

Cast: Anthony Perkins as Norman Bates, Vera Miles as Lila Loomis, Meg Tilly as Mary, Robert Loggia as Dr. Bill Raymond, Dennis Franz as Warren Toomey, Hugh Gillin as Sheriff John Hunt, Robert Alan Browne as Ralph Statler, and Claudia Bryar as Emma Spool

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

How do you follow up a legacy defining film? After Alfred Hitchcock passed in 1980, thus screenwriter Tom Holland, future director of Fright Night (1985), and Richard Franklin, director of Roadgames (1981) in Australia and openly an admirer of Hitchcock, had this challenge ahead of them when they collaborated on a Universal Studio’s follow up of Psycho (1960), with Anthony Perkins two decades on returning as Norman Bates. The opening reuses the legendary shower scene from the first film in the opening, but the Jerry Goldsmith score sums up the tone perfectly for a different film.

This does a good job in avoiding a poor rehash, with a plot to its credit playing to an idea, gas lighting someone, Hitchcock did use. Norman Bates is still a sympathetic figure, despite being a murderer, now with the context he has been rehabilitated, back at Bates Motel with all the repressed memories, those which caused his psychosis, and the potential vilification by the outside world as likely to prevent him ever atoning for his sins. Neither is it helping someone is trying to torment him, even with notes said to be left by his mother. With Dean Cundey as the director of photography, this feels like a grand film, when sequels existed but were not inherently expected for every title which were huge successes, and could be disasters regardless of genre and especially if the expectations of the original’s acclaim were at stake, something which can be attest to with the response to Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977). As an attempt to credibly follow up the original Psycho, presenting its own drama even if with awareness and influence of the slasher film boom Psycho itself helped inspired, the sequel does well. It is strange seeing Norman Bates near a Pac Man arcade cabinet, but that is as much the point, a man out of time from a film that hit like a lightning bolt, even among the heavy hitters of Hitckcock’s filmography, and returning in the midst of horror movies inspired by it.

What Psycho II is a horror film with the emphasis on a strong cast, provided with a weight for its thriller plot and having some gruesome scenes in the wake of Friday the 13^th films. No one is giving a bad performance, Perkins about to return for a surge of recognition in this role that would lead to films like Crimes of Passion (1984), matched by the likes of Robert Loggia as his therapist, to Meg Tilly as a diner waitress who ends up at the old Bates home as a friend, subverting the original film in a willing guest of the hotel alongside both a shadow of doubt there for her and additional context that will pull the rug out of their relationship. The slasher influence is there – one scene befits the era, of a young guy and girl making the unfortunate decision to get high and heavy pet in the Bates home cellar – but what this becomes is closer to something you would find in an Italian giallo, the kind of storytelling influenced by Hitchcock too, especially as you have to factor in Vera Miles, in an inspired choice, returning as Lila Crane/Loomis, the sister of Janet Leigh’s character switching roles with the irony of hindsight, now the concerned person who wants Bates to stay in jail even if it leads her to doing something legitimately evil morally to punish him.

The film does recreate images from the first film, even the psychoanalyst explaining the plot at the end of the prequel, so there is the real sense of this being a film made by fans of the source returning to it. They have a Herculean challenge in a way – Hitchcock is a sacred figure, and barring one or two exceptions, a TV movie The Birds II: Land's End (1994), or Christopher Reeve post his tragic accident starring in a 1998 TV remake of Rear Window, readapting his work has not happen a great deal unless entirely out of coincidence. Psycho was an exception, and the sequels and re-adaptations are their own universe, where Anthony Perkins would direct one of the films, and there was a cancelled attempt to turn the series into an anthology series, by way of an unsuccessful 1987 TV movie, with a young Lori Petty. Barring one aspect which may be very controversial, a final twist about Bates’ family which I will not spoil, Psycho II does not take huge risks but does an admirable job in being a retrospective on Norman Bates himself, whether it would be possible to ever live a normal life, and succeeds when making a sequel to the Alfred Hitchcock film could have been an ill-advised mishap.

Le Portrait de Petit Cossette (2004)

 

Director: Akiyuki Simbo

Screenplay: Mayori Sekijima

Voice Cast: Marina Inoue as Cossette d'Auvergne; Mitsuki Saiga as Eiri Kurahashi; Kumiko Yokote as Hatsumi Mataki; Megumi Toyoguchi as Shouko Mataki; Rei Igarashi as Zenshinni of Shakado; Ikumi Fujiwara as Michiru Yajiri; Isao Yamagishi as Hiroshi Hakuta; Junpei Morita as Yukata Enokido; Mamiko Noto as Yuu Saiga; Masashi Ebara as Marchello Orlando; Shinnosuke Furumoto as Michio Hisamoto; Susumu Chiba as Naoki Katou; Yukari Tamura as Kaori Nishimoto

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Shows)/A 1000 Anime Crossover

 

As covered in the review linked to below, view Le Portrait de Petit Cossette as an interpretation of a troupe of Gothic horror, of a figure obsessed with a figure they are romantically linked to from beyond the dead, if interpreted through a hyper stylised three-part anime from a director with a career before and especially after with an elaborate eye for stylisation. Think of this as the pulpier, more bombastic take on Rebecca (1940) with genre tropes of Japanese animation and interpreting horror through action beats.

 

For the full review, follow the link HERE.

Pet Shop of Horrors (1999)

 

Director: Toshio Hirata

Screenplay: Yasuhiro Imagawa

Based on the manga by Matsuri Akino

(Voice) Cast: Masaya Onosaka as Leon Orcot; Toshihiko Seki as Count D; Hiroshi Yanaka as Mr. Hayward; Kouji Tsujitani as Robin Hendrix; Miho Yamada as Q-Chan; Miki Itō as Louise; Mitsuaki Madono as Roger Stanford; Mitsuru Miyamoto as Kelly Vincent; Narumi Hidaka as Nancy; Ryūzaburō Ōtomo as the Kirin; Satsuki Yukino as Jill; Sayuri Yoshida as Alice; Sho Hayami as Jason Grey

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Shows)/A 1000 Anime Crossover

 

Among the many anime adaptations of horror manga I wish had lasted longer, as a one off four episode television production, Pet Shop of Horrors is a good example. An anthology series all centered around a supernatural pet shop, these four tales of “be careful what you wish for” fully commit to bleak endings and introspection as the choices made by the customers with their pets, always breaking the contracts, cause pause for thought as much as means Count D, our ethereal (and cake loving) androgynous anti-hero, is technically not culpable if anyone dies for breaking the rules that Gremlins also warned of in not feeding the mogwai after midnight. This original manga still continued over multiple series, but sadly the anime did not, in real need of another adaptation down the line to expand these tales.

For the full review, follow the link here.

Psycho Pike (1992)

 

Director: Chris Poschun

Screenplay: Chris Poschun

Cast: Douglas Kidd as Reg; Wayne McNamara as Tim; Sarah Campbell as Dara; Dawn Kelly as Rhonda; Cliff Makinson as Willy T; Red Fisher as Himself; Michael K. Panton as Sheriff of Shippagew; John Alexis as Uncle Slats

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

You want a picture of my shithouse?

Just when you thought it was safe to go fishing, there is a psycho pike in the water. Credit to director-writer Chris Poschun's sole film however, mostly a melodrama about environmental pollution conspiracy, former lovers stuck together on vacation and a rubber pike monster attacking people occasionally, this is the kind of film I can get behind, falling onto plot tropes but with punches of charisma.

Certainly of the nineties, as its now alternative rock than hair metal on the soundtrack, over images of cows baffled as to why they are being filmed, the film takes its time to get more personality, set up as students out on vacation in the countryside, including Rhonda (Dawn Kelly), concerned about her student work, and the uncomfortable relationship she has with one of her male friends who, dating the other people on the vacation, used to be in a relationship themselves but decided to stay friends. There is unintentional humour - do pikes eat ducks as the male lead suggests - but where Psycho Pike gets interesting is when its eccentricities are deliberate and the plot strands are bolstered by the characters. Melodrama is apt, with our leads' conflicted relationship, and the additional issue that his friend/her boyfriend is part of his uncle's local business behind the pollution in the region's water, causing the psycho pike and killing fish, which they will try to cover up. It is hard to make a horror film where your cast (including extras) spend their time sat down fishin', but the resulting movie has a deadpan sense of humour to its advantage.

There are the line of women sat by the one telephone booth in the area after using it for multiple scenes, to two Hong Kong businessmen - one practicing Tai Chi at one point on a pier whilst the other, still in suit, reflects the sun on his head and neck for a suntan - which leads to a martial arts fight between man and fish. Then there is the best character, Willy the one eyed gas station attendant (Cliff Makinson) who, alongside the unexpected and progressive touch for a nineties film of being romantically involved with another man, is played with a wit even when revealing he lost the eye through a pike in his introduction, fitting the tone. Even a broad joke, like the Austrian photographer who takes photos of bathrooms around the world, stays the right side of goofy, that joke funnier as, reflecting on how people keep reading material in the John and wanting to create a coffee table book on Johns themselves, I would not be surprised if it exists.

An obscure film, it is also not micro-budget with some production value behind it, even able to blow up an entire building for a set piece when the evil corporation will kill to hide their pollution track record. Psycho Pike is still a silly film, but as it took its time, it caught me off-guard by its charm. Plus this does live up to actors being threatened, with gore effects, by a rubber pike monster, so everyone wins by watching this.

La Poison (1951)

Director: Sacha Guitry

Screenplay: Sacha Guitry

Cast: Michel Simon as Paul Louis Victor Braconnier, Germaine Reuver as Blandine Braconnier, Jean Debucourt as Maître Aubanel, Louis de Funès as André Chevillard, Marcelle Arnold as Germaine Chevillard, Georges Bever as Mr Gaillard

Ephemeral Waves

 

He has something of a chimera and of a clown.

A twee French comedy...about wanting to bump your spouse off their mortal coil. Even the opening credits have a whimsical politeness to them in contrast to this central premise, and that does not include the sweet natured tribute to the production team and lead actor Michel Simon from director-writer Sacha Guitry himself, letting everyone on staff out of character and job say hello to the audience before turning it into an admiration for Simon's talents. This is all in context of an incredibly misanthropic premise which makes this pleasant opening more striking with hindsight. This is pre-French New Wave cinema, a quietly spoken work from a time when the directors would be lambasted by this incoming wave as antiquated, or in the case of Guitry, gaining admiration by the likes of Francois Truffaut in his work and in his position as a director-writer with his own voice. The quaintness from the get-go is perfect for the premise, where in a quiet French village a man named Paul Braconnier (Simon) cannot stand his wife, and at fifty three, is contemplating murdering her, even consoling the local vicar on his hatred for her.

Telling the small town chemist's is busy with selling aspirin, products to help customers who cannot sleep, and seventy percent of the locals being constipated, presenting a bleak view of "harmonic" community life, especially as Blandine Braconnier (Germaine Reuver), the wife, is not an innocent either, wanting to buy rat poison in consideration to murder him too. Not a good look at "wholesomeness" in the slightest, and in context, when Guitry would pass in 1957, this belies the idea of how a director as they got older is stigmatised for getting "softer" in their attitudes and themes. Moving away from adapting his plays as he was in the early part of his career, and branching out into modern set works between historical pieces, the plays its content with a light grace, but you find yourself at a deeply miserable dinner between the central couple contrasted ironically by a love song on the radio making comparisons to being pigeons mating together despite the absurd contrast it has in the scene.

The film itself is quiet, clear filmmaking with no elaborate editing or camera set-ups. Documented is how Guitry, who admired Michel Simon, went out of his way to explicitly request the crew on the production were as efficient as possible, to only to one takes for scenes is possible, making this a short shot¹. Clear and precise in filmmaking, it is itself still loaded, its light hearted presentation bringing a barb like a beautiful spring flower which turns out to have thorns within it, like a scene where the shopkeepers, believing that having a spectacular event like someone giving birth to quadruplets would bring attention to a town from curious tourists and more customers, ask the vicar to his horror if he can perform a miracle on the spot if they bring someone's daughter to be healed by him. This constant undercutting of the tone is still, in context to a film plus fifty years old, incredible in its gleeful subversion.

The plot itself concerns when Paul, contemplating his plan, learns of a lawyer through his radio with an idiosyncratic take on murder and searches him out, even lying about having already murdered his wife to plan one which can be defended in the defendant box at court, a twisted idea of being able to reconstruct a fake murder to be innocent of self-defence. Here there is a historical context which likely influenced the content, where Sacha Guitry was accused of collaborating with the Nazis and imprisoned, which more than likely emphasised contempt for the French law system. A prolific stage actor and playwright as well, Guitry was still able to perform in the German occupation of France during World War II and, with his reputation as an artist even of interest to German soldiers, he was seen as a collaborator despite friends of his being imprisoned by the Nazis and one scenario, taking advantage of an officer's admiration of his work, to get prisoners of wars releases¹. Even without this personal context, there is a legitimate contempt, witnessed in the final scenes when even the kids ask and try to rationalise what murder and justice is, playing mock murders and trials with even a homemade guillotine stand-in built.

It is still transgressive in the modern day, and it reflects in its own way the contradictory and inadequate problems one could have with crimes being deal with legally. Trials are meant to rationalise and stick to logistical facts, something I can attest to having done jury service at least once in my life like so many readers of this potentially have, but when it comes to thinking about the reason why people would commit a crime, law as a concept has to struggle against the existentialism, alongside the fact you can bend and distort the way a trial works to win your case as this deals with. Even if in this case the justifications by Paul eventually are all extreme, not meant to be justifiable to let him get scot free but in context of a fabricated story, meant to fantasise about this taboo subject safely, let one cheer him on as he thumbs his nose at the institution. The only thing which has not aged well, or is going to be understandably challenged, is that his wife is an alcoholic shrew stereotype playing off to wife jokes. Not to defend the interpretation of the character here, but also factoring in how this broad stereotype found itself through pop culture for a long time, not just in one French film, so many are to be challenged for these stereotypes, it is also clearly part of the misanthropic edge to this entire work.

Sacha Guitry here does present how, with older films, you find works whose style and production do feel of an entirely different time in attitude, but where their content regardless of age remind one how these films were written as far as they could, as now, to shock and strike against what they felt needed mocking. The term "don't judge a book by its cover" is a cliché that is beneath the auteur, but I did come to La Poison with a sense of it being a film playfully whimsy with the subject of murder, but was not expecting how its gentle nature has a very wicked grin I also shared by its end credits.

 

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1) From On Life on Screen: Miseries and Splendor of a Monarch, a documentary by Dominique Maillet focusing on the film and its director-writer's life in connection to it which was included in the Masters of Cinema Blu-Ray release for La Poison.

The Pillow Book (1996)

Director: Peter Greenaway

Screenplay: Peter Greenaway

Cast: Vivian Wu as Nagiko; Yoshi Oida as The Publisher; Ken Ogata as The Father; Hideko Yoshida as The Aunt / The Maid; Ewan McGregor as Jerome; Judy Ongg as The Mother; Ken Mitsuishi as The Husband; Yutaka Honda as Hoki

An Abstract List Candidate

 

Treat me like the pages of a book.

Prospero's Book (1991) can be seen as a turning point for the Welsh filmmaker Peter Greenaway. During the nineteen eighties, the former ephemeral and documentary filmmaker developed a reputation of very idiosyncratic films which got him attention and culminated in The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (1989), his most well known film and a success. Prospero's Book, his very experimental take on William Shakespeare's The Tempest, was a push in the limits of the cinematic form - his last film with composer Michael Nyman, who would add to Greenaway's  trademarks, and arguably into the nineties when his films would eventually become more obscurer again, especially as they could be difficult.

Interestingly The Pillow Book was a Film4 production, which helps in terms of visibility; what was also common however by now was Greenaway was acquiring Dutch financing for his films, into the Millennium the country of Netherlands being a huge supporter of him both in being able to still make films but also inspiration for his stories. To those who do not know him, it is befitting to know he was once working for the Central Office of Information (COI) on public information films, only to move onto his own film making, even with fictional tales. Obsessed with combining his admiration with high art (a filmmaker who looks to painting and literature constantly with great knowledge) against the crudeness corporal nature of human life and the body, he was an equal opportunity person for showing male and female nudity in-between his fixed obsessions with sex and death, alongside showing a take on lists and order which even an autistic viewer like myself has not leaned into as he has. Prospero's Book for example is structured, retelling The Tempest, around the exiled wizard's library of books and Greenaway letting his imagination run wild.

The Pillow Book, based on the ancient Japanese text by author and court lady Sei Shōnagon, is like many films of his structured on a story but obsessing over these interests of his. Nagiko (Vivian Wu) is a daughter of an author who, frankly, has developed an eroticised obsession with having calligraphy written on her own body due to her father, each of her birthdays, having a ritual recreating how a God created humankind from clay by writing their facial features and gender on his daughter's face. Her travels lead to a chance encounter with a publisher (Yoshi Oida) who forced her father into sexual favours, encountering his lover Jerome (Ewan McGregor) as she, pushed to now writing onto men's bodies as an authoress, is encouraged to publish her own work only to be angered when the publisher rejects her first attempt.

This plot gets more ghoulish, as this eventually leads to a pillow book being made of human flesh, but the most prominent aspect about production is its technical craft and form. Experimenting with the visual frame, Greenaway was a huge critic of the narrative form of cinema ushered in by the likes of D.W. Griffith, considering that it had not evolved. Greenaway became an early adopter of digital editing even when still using celluloid; here in The Pillow Book, whilst not as extreme as Prospero's Book, he takes advantage of it, having multiple screens at points in the images.

Contrasting monochrome flashbacks with current day coloured ones, including the original version of the film using calligraphy for subtitles¹, there can be multiples sequences playing at one, a scene likely to have the events for that character layered for each other as much as different events in different time zones transpiring together. One such example is the frantic love sick suicide of a character being layered together as a collage of screens. It is, still to this day, incredibly innovative especially as experiments like this would lead to Greenaway's cinema managing to evolve further by the time he started using more built, artificial sets into the late 2000s and 2010s for the Dutch co-productions. Before then as well, this would be the second-to-last film with cinematographer Sacha Vierny; Greenaway for all his issues with cinema, is a huge fan of films he admires, such as Alain Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad (1961), rightly proclaimed by him as unique and managing to hire his hero, its cinematographer Vierny, to work with him decades after in the eighties to the end of the nineties, Vierny suited his striking visual look alongside always hiring great production designers, and clearly thinking in composition to match his interest in painting and illustration.

He also here also rode a bit of mainstream culture for once, just from the music choices which can vary between U2 to French pop, the later played with onscreen French subtitles like a karaoke bar video. Brian Eno as the composer does not hurt either, nor casting Ewan McGregor, just around the time of Danny Boyle's Trainspotting (1996), Greenaway even into his later obscurer years hiring some unlikely big names who clearly wanted to work with him. The one detail, the one that I do question, is that for a Japanese protagonist The Pillow Book does cast Chinese actress Vivian Wu, a choice which would be much more difficult to defend into the ongoing decades. I do wonder personally, even though there are actresses he could cast from Japanese cult cinema, even hiring Kirina Mano from Shinja Tsukamoto's Bullet Ballet (1998) for his follow up 8 ½ Women (1999), that there were a lot of issues which lead to this central lead choice. The character does speak fluent Mandarin from childhood, and Cantonese is spoken too as this is set partially in Hong Kong, but there is a sense of someone wanting to hire a higher profile lead willing to do full frontal nudity and that is why Wu was chosen. It is an odd casting choice, like when infamously Memoirs of a Geisha (2005), an American adaptation of a film about geisha culture, hired Chinese actresses to play Japanese women even if a Japanese-owned company produced it. It is the one thing which, over time, does cause one to scratch your head, and I say this knowing Vivian Wu does commit to the role brilliantly. Hers is one of those careers, eventually staying mostly within the Chinese film industry from the 2010s onwards, which is a head scratcher of pop culture just around one person. Bernardo Bertolucci's The Last Emperor (1987) is one of her first prominent films, but it leads to one of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle live action films; The Guyver (1991), a Japanese manga adaptation where she is cast as Japanese as well; the Tales from the Crypt TV series; an full motion video game oddity Supreme Warrior (1994), a first person fighting game from Digital Pictures, a company who tried and burnt themselves out (just in cash) by suggesting video games of the future had real actors and real interactive footage; the Highlander TV spin-off series, and various television show appearances from Murder, She Wrote, Millennium and ER, let alone a Peter Greenaway film where she takes admirable risk here in a sexually explicit and incredibly idiosyncratic narrative. She deserves a nod of respect for how idiosyncratic this CV I have barely covered is.

Beyond this, The Pillow Book is a thing of beauty nonetheless. Greenaway's career is full of films I could unpick a lot of detail from, enough in themselves to be big (or at least idiosyncratic) productions if someone else suddenly made them, and I have not even gotten to how distinct his voice is entirely, as Peter Greenaway is a director-writer and stamps his ideas into the material. Eventually his obsession with lists comes into play when, to torment the publisher, Nagiko starts creating books to send to him written on male bodies. That in itself is strange, as eventually you can have men with the calligraphy even hidden on their bodies or an existential text on another wondering if books have parents. The film is a grower. Once you adapt to its style, Greenaway becomes rewarding for a man who pushes the medium but, for all his criticisms of narrative cinema, always has very ornate plots with a lot of black humour and even emotion to them. Here, with one of the only ones with a female lead, it can be seen as a cliché her story is that of love, but even then this is an erotic drama about a strongly independent figure who, by the end, is proudly her own figure still, a peculiar tale to lead to this conclusion that is fascinating to watch.

Abstract Spectrum: Ghoulish/Meticulous/Playful

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Low

 

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1) Restored, prominently for a 2020 Indicator Blu Ray release in Britain, this subtitling whilst it does not translate everything has a distinct tone that adds to the aesthetic.

PVT CHAT (2020)

 

Director: Ben Hozie

Screenplay: Ben Hozie

Cast: Julia Fox as Scarlett; Peter Vack as Jack; Buddy Duress as Larry; Keith Poulson as Duke; Dasha Nekrasova as QT4U; Heather Allison as Gorgeous_357; Nikki Belfiglio as Emma; Austin Brown as Himself; Atticus Cain as Henry the Landlord

Ephemeral Waves

 

Hey, can I borrow your copy of Ulysses?

A woman, named Scarlet (Julia Fox), is an online camera girl who has a dominatrix persona and gets male clients to masturbate and pretend to have cigarettes stubbed into their tongues, all whilst donating to her for requests as we seen in the first scene. The thing is, whilst a pretty adult set-up, with a sexually explicit opening in terms of the male client we see, there is a surprising comparison to be made with PVT CHAT, the first film by director-writer Ben Hozie, not being that different from a classic Hollywood melodrama in what the premise actually is. It still connects to the type of classic Hollywood films about romances involving mistaken identities, cons and/or idealised images of women which are not real, specifically for me Preston Sturges' The Lady Eve (1941), which might be an odd comparison to make to this erotic drama. They are different films, Sturges' about Barbara Stanwyck playing a con woman trying to seduce a rich and gullible Henry Fonda but alongside this involving a con in its end, PVT CHAT is not really different except in tone and context. It exists in a different time, and with a different mindset to a premise you could work into the forties studio system, but the premise itself has a timelessness to it. That of an internet gambler named Jack (Peter Vack) who becomes obsessed with an ideal of a woman, in this case Scarlet, whose persona is entirely artificial for money, even if being paid in credit cards and credits for this performance in this modern film.

The image of the perfect woman to a heterosexual man, and the real woman herself, is a timeless theme, only here Jack comes to this conundrum having tried to talk to female cam girl workers, trying to get them to be the real person underneath, only to become physically attracted to Scarlet as an act. Even if, as they continue, she does open up about details like being a painter, he has fallen into the trap of mistaking the image to the real woman, which will show his follies among many. An indie dialogue driven production, this envisions this tale through streaming communication, as he hypothesises (lies) to her about envisioning "C-streaming", being able to directly from the brain communicate, all themes of connection intermingled around the fact he is hiding that he barely collecting money to live. In reality, he is "Blackjack" Jack, as he plays online blackjack to keep the bank account healthy, all whilst living in an apartment, being redecorated around him, that the landlord will want him to leave from eventually.

This timeless cycle of tropes and themes meet the influence of sixties and seventies work by the likes of John Cassavetes - literally, dropping in an anecdote from a minor character from the seventies itself, about talking to a Willie Nelson-like figure offering work only to take his nose off and place it on his desk - on past through the American independent boom of later decades. The past now includes the "Mumblecore" and indie films from the 2000s and 2010s, which have likely shown their influences. Looking here, there is also the greater reach for sexuality and depicting it, but with the touch that, whilst lead Julia Fox does nudity, early on and prominently director Ben Hozie depicts the male body first and more prominently, including Peter Vack as Jack, comfortable onscreen with male erections explicitly depicted throughout from Vack and others even if we do see Fox's Scarlet in intimate moments. The film is not pornographic too, and the matter-of-factness of this or depicting masturbation is a neutralising of any concern of the male gaze alongside the fact this is trying to depict this in a grounded reality with all the baggage in-between.

As mentioned, The Lady Eye reference is not out of place, as this does become a story out of a forties Hollywood film transposed into this new context, about an eventual con, stealing money, only for two unlikely people to fall in love, even if Jack's fixation on Scarlet is as much a sin he must overcome too. They will accidentally cross paths, or with someone who looks like her, in New York City's Chinatown district, which is not different from if it was depicted in a melodrama in the forties, only here is shot on the street and in a real grocery store in verisimilitude. This as well, in mind to this, reflects the world this story now exists in, about "inane art work" in a satirical moment halfway through, looking back with bleak humour at the "failed" Occupy Wall Street movement of September 2011, beginning that day when a protest movement started in Zuccotti Park, located in New York City's Wall Street financial district. It is now turned into a female artist's mouth, in close-up, talking about "my check", eventually turning into covering a fully nude man in flour as a crowd ritually chant "my check" as they watch.

The fact I can see a melodrama here is not a discredit to either side, as the tropes are found in even Scarlet already dating someone else, Duke (Keith Poulson), a realisation Jack's love is initially a facsimile something you would see in a studio system film, as is he needs to see her as the real person she is. Her boyfriend, eventually, is also revealed to not be right person in her life. Whilst she seemingly gets over it, considering their plan to run a theatre company starts off sourly, as without her permission he dramatises a narrative about a female sex worker with some male dialogue dangerously veering to his own unspoken thoughts, Duke does play the trope of the original male love interest from many films, including very mainstream ones, not viewing her as herself and a poor choice for Scarlet to stay with.

Hopefully the review has offered a positive view of PVT CHAT. It is playful if a profane comedy, where the universal and the awkward co-exist, like secretly masturbating in a friend's room, using their laptop, not just an apt metaphor for this tone, but also an actual scene in the film. It is funny, and it shows that, for a work whose sexual explicitness and lo-fi look are put up front, shot on location and dialogue heavy, it also shows no real different between this or a Hollywood film from the past in terms of they all tackle these timeless questions we still have on our minds. This has the difference to be more flexible in tackling this question, the idealised version of someone you are attracted to and the real person, to be more sincere and more unpredictable. It is not a spoiler that this has a happy ending, even if from both sides having transgressed against each other, but it is how this comes together which is of the greater concern.