HOT PRESS 12/11/24: 2024’s Best Performances, Bushido & Darkest Miriam @ Whistler Film Festival
DoomRocket returns to its favorite Canadian film festival.
Braving the gauntlet of tentpole events, off-the-radar releases, and a non-stop avalanche of movies, TV, comics, and other stuff that's bad for you is DoomRocket's HOT PRESS. This week: Our first dispatch from the Whistler Film Festival, and a list of this year’s best performances.
Last week, I took a moment to crawl out from under work, life, and the labyrinth of pre-holiday events and familial obligations, only to realize that I’d missed the window to this year’s Whistler Film Festival, that wonderful bastion of Canadian motion picture curation based in Whistler, BC. Luckily, I could still procure some of their choicest selections courtesy of their incredibly helpful press contact (hello, Chris!), which made my month, let me tell you.
This week, I wanted to single out two selections from Whistler that caught my eye, Darkest Miriam by Naomi Jaye and Bushido by Kazuya Shiraishi, if only to fleetingly enjoy those unique curatorial vibes before the long wait for its 2025 fest begins in earnest. I hope to catch a few more titles from the festival over the next week, so keep an eye out for future reviews.
As we close in on the end of the year and our annual YEAR IN REVIEW feature, where I take stock of the best movies I saw and DoomRocket contributor Arpad Okay shares the best comics he read, I’m thinking about bests. In this case, the best performances I saw this year, even if (or especially if) they happened to take place in movies I didn’t necessarily love.
A great performance will compel me (and probably you!) to sit through anything, as demonstrated by David Jonsson’s contributions to Fede Alvarez’s odious Disney “interquel” to the Alien franchise, Alien: Romulus. James McAvoy made my heart soar (and shudder; I should probably get that looked at) even as James Watkins’ doddering remake of Speak No Evil bored me to tears. Naturally, talking about performances is fun, and this week, I want to share some of the finest I saw this year with you. I hope you enjoy the list and maybe share with me a few of yours.
Okay, let’s get to work. What’s this about movies, now?
Darkest Miriam is a study of grief disguised as a mystery, and while I didn't find its revelations entirely satisfying, it's a film I won't forget any time soon. In her second feature, director Naomi Jaye adapts Martha Baillie's 2009 novel The Incident Report with the chilly aspect of a thriller, which puts some distance between the viewer and the headspace of Miriam (Britt Lower), the lonely librarian whose interior thoughts guide us through this strange, knotty melodrama. Coupled with Jaye's knack for sustaining unease even when the human drama of her story should pull us closer, the distance furthers as the film goes on. Yet, I found myself leaning in; if I wasn't riveted by what I was watching, I was, at least, captivated by it.
Darkest Miriam boasts Charlie Kaufman as its executive producer, which might give you a clearer idea of what kind of movie we're dealing with, a cerebral mood piece about the many imperfect ways we compartmentalize loss and loneliness in a world that seems to spin along just fine without us. In this regard, Miriam almost becomes a cipher in her story, pushed around by forces seemingly beyond her control, and I was nearly tempted to write her off as such until she took the fateful step of meeting Janko (Tom Mercier), a Slovenian cab driver whose artistic curiosity intrigues her and whose freedom to express himself compels her to fall in love with him.
When these two get together, Darkest Miriam wriggles out of the fog of its mysteries to a clearer path. Lower is phenomenal as Miriam; it's a warm, gently rendered performance that feels comforting. With his quizzical gaze and poetic speech patterns, Mercier is a terrific romantic foil for her. I wanted things to work out for these two because, as Jaye does an excellent job of establishing their isolation (surprisingly, their relationship reminded me of Aki Kaurismäki's Fallen Leaves), I could palpably feel gravity pulling them together, a cosmic sense of longing that made a soppy romantic out of me.
What bums me out about Darkest Miriam is the mystery that made its terrific first third so engrossing ultimately doesn't amount to much. We see Miriam flit through her tidy, uncomplicated life working in a library, deftly engaging with its lost regulars when strange, oddly threatening letters that seem to be addressed to her begin to turn up on the shelves, which in some peculiar way compels Miriam to confront the loss of her father. What these sinister letters say about Miriam seems at odds with the story's themes of acceptance and anguish, and it saps the film's romantic soul. Its questions and dark insinuations make Miriam's story feel more elusive and dangerous than it is. Maybe I just read it wrong, and the film's grim resolution requires another viewing. Considering how thoroughly I was mesmerized by these characters, I'd sit through one happily.
6.5 / 10
Darkest Miriam made its British Columbia premiere on December 6 at the Whistler Film Festival.
Written and directed by Naomi Jaye.
Cinematography by Michael LeBlanc.
Starring Britt Lower, Tom Mercier, Sook-Yin Lee, and Jean Yoon.
Produced by Charlie Kaufman, Julie Baldassi, and Brian Robertson.
Unrated. Complicated emotions are stripped bare.
Bushido is a handsome film by director Kazuya Shiraishi that makes unusual choices. This samurai period piece, set sometime in Edo-era Japan, is naturally low-lit, often by candlelight, yet the cinematographer didn’t seem to adjust the light balance of his cameras for the day shots, so the sunshine blows everything out. There are flashback sequences that begin with a clanging noise and a wild flash of light and end by feeding us information that could easily be delivered through dialogue or clever editing. These flashbacks serve two purposes: reminding us of something we already know but the director fears we’ve forgotten or showing us something that happened long ago. One long-ago flashback is of a character’s death and is shot in 16mm. It’s the only part of the film shot this way, which distracted me from the tragedy of the moment.
Luckily, if you can maneuver around Shiraishi’s tendency to draw attention to himself, the story he’s telling, written by collaborator Masato Katō, is damned engrossing. Despite a few other unusual decisions, this time made by Kakunoshin Yanagida (Tsuyoshi Kusanagi), the film’s penniless but honorable samurai who struggles to support his daughter (Kaya Kiyohara), Bushido is a compelling and, at times, thrilling throwback to a genre that has sadly fallen out of favor in Japan.
One of the aspects I admire most about the film is how Shiraishi and Katō marry their story’s internal conflict with the Chinese game Go, which happens to be all the rage in Edo during the days of Bushido and Yanagida’s favorite pastime. The director’s more appealing creative choices come from how he shoots these games, which Yanagida plays with local pawnbroker Genbei (Jun Kunimura). It’s the way these two men, who form an unlikely but enduring friendship, speak to each other through play: contentment, nervousness, anger, fear, doubt, it’s all conveyed through hand movements and how the pieces (called “stones”) are set on the board.
We know Yanagida’s assertion that he plays as he lives — fair, square, and honest — is true because of how he acquits himself during Go. Naturally, when his samurai past comes back to haunt him, the shame he’s been carrying around for years comes to the fore and affects his game. When he embarks on his inevitable revenge quest, I was disappointed because I felt the real fight should be fought on the Go board. Thankfully, Shiraishi puts the board back into play before the end, and Bushido improves dramatically.
6.5 / 10
Bushido made its Canadian premiere on December 7 at the Whistler Film Festival.
Directed by Kazuya Shiraishi.
Written by Masato Katō.
Cinematography by Jun Fukumoto.
Starring Tsuyoshi Kusanagi, Kaya Kiyohara, Taishi Nakagawa, Eita Okuno, and Takuma Otoo.
Produced by Satoshi Akagi and Yukiko Tanigawa.
Unrated. Yanagida’s sword gets put to use, and there’s some rough stuff at a local brothel.
Let's get it out of the way: any serious conversation about the best performances in 2024 will include Denzel Washington's sly turn as Macrinus in Ridley Scott's Gladiator II, so I'm putting him right here in this intro. He's so conspicuously great in that movie (while also kind of slumming it) that it should go without saying that Washington's is among the very best performances this year had to offer. That said, here's everyone else who impressed me just as much this year, if not more so.
Ilinca Manolache, Do Not Expect Too Much From The End Of The World. Who better to guide us through a nearly three-hour labyrinth of capitalistic and infrastructural doom than the half-awake and sanguine production assistant Angela, played with dry, sardonic edge by Manolache? For my money, her character's "going through it/getting to it" attitude made Manolache the patron saint of the emotionally exhausted in 2024.
Aaron Pierre, Rebel Ridge. With a striking performance of steel, nerves, and piercing determination, Pierre sauntered through Jeremy Saulnier's latest thriller like the full-wattage movie star he seems fated to become. The second Rebel Ridge ended, I said, "Next, Warner Bros. will nab him for Green Lantern," which is exactly what happened. I'm no prophet; Pierre is simply that good.
Juliette Gariépy, Red Rooms. Putting it mildly, the things we discover in Red Rooms are appalling, the stuff of August Underground and Ed Piskor, which makes the placid, implacable responses of Kelly-Anne, the model turned voyeur in Pascal Plante's Red Rooms, all the more disturbing. As she absorbs the details in the trial of Canada's most notorious serial killer, Gariépy slowly begins to let her character's urbane mask slip. What we discover beneath her calm exterior is, to the actor's credit, the strangest and most unnerving thing I've seen all year. In short, she'll make you wary about wigs.
Joshua Burge, Vulcanizadora. When an actor can convey emotional multitudes by doing something as insignificant as sniffing, blinking, or gazing into the thousand-yard distance, a wise director will stand back and let their face tell the story. Joel Potrykus, the director and co-star of Vulcanizadora, trusted Burge and his terrific face to carry his film's gnarly dramatic elements to its emotionally stirring finale. It's a hefty task, but Burge nailed it, conveying a sense of determination and, later, acquiescence that made Vucanizadora one of the more haunting and terrific finds of 2024.
Katy O'Brian, Love Lies Bleeding. Sometimes, you encounter an actor of such startling charisma that the movie they're in feels empty when they're not around. Rose Glass's Love Lies Bleeding is one such film, a bog-standard revenge thriller powered by its vividly contrasting visual motifs and a towering performance by bodybuilder Katy O'Brian. When she flexes, you feel the tectonic plates holding Glass's film aloft shift, changing its scorched-earth nightmares into an exhilarating dream of escape.
Nicolas Cage, Longlegs. Whatever Cage is doing in Oz Perkin's whacked-out serial killer horror movie Longlegs is, without question, insane, distracting, and cartoonish. Just imagine being in the same room as the man as he let this white-haired Marc Bolan freak-out performance fly, feeling his spit hit your face as Maika Monroe likely did during that wild interrogation scene. I don't know about you, but the idea of any proximity to Cage when he's free to experiment with his darker impulses scares the hell out of me. Yet, in Longlegs' better moments, he somehow manages to be frightening and funny, a feat of frenzy that nestles somewhere between mania and art.
Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Hard Truths. I've read people describe Pansy, the matriarch at the center of Mike Leigh's devastating kitchen sink drama, as "difficult," "caustic," and "exhausting." All correct. For those who recognize grief in its rawest form, Jean-Baptiste's performance resonates because the emotions she's unearthed come from knowable places where anguish and despair fester into anger. It's an emotionally demanding, precarious role, and it might have been unwatchable in the hands of a lesser actor. Instead, Jean-Baptiste, a consummate artist, made a meal of it, remembering the glimmers of love and good humor that can still exist in a heart that grew cold years ago. If one performance turned me into a sobbing mess this year, it was hers.
Demi Moore, Margaret Qualley, and Dennis Quaid, The Substance. If you're looking for my hot take on one of this year's most divisive films, here you go. I'm pro-Coralie Fargeat, and I'm pro-Substance, an equally flawed and gonzo fable about impossible beauty standards bolstered by career-redefining performances from its three leads. Moore is devastating and ferocious, Qualley is almost irrepressibly alien, Quaid is disgustingly manic — here's a trifecta of terror who made me squirm in so many terrific ways.
Hugh Grant, Heretic. We're eons from Hugh Grant's days as that adorable dandy of period romance and comedy romps, yet it's through that narrow prism that his performance in Scott Beck and Bryan Woods's slippery nice-visit thriller must be viewed to appreciate the subversion at play here. Why else would we believe that two young Mormon women would stay in this maniac's home if he weren't so damned charming? Grant perverts his famous persona further into the movie in shocking ways that somehow, even more shockingly, can't diminish his floppy-haired charisma.
James McAvoy, Speak No Evil. McAvoy is a leading man with character actor talent. When he eschews his rugged good looks to become a leering figure of toxicity, fury, and malice, as he does so adeptly in James Watkins's remake of Speak No Evil, McAvoy is transcendent. The movie wasn't my favorite, but when his violent, disturbing character broke out in an impromptu, veins-popping rendition of "Eternal Flame," I melted like so many others who've seen the movie. I'm neither made of stone nor have healthy self-preservation instincts.
Honorable Mentions: Nell Tiger Free, The First Omen; David Jonsson, Alien: Romulus; Michele Austin, Hard Truths; Zoe Ziegler, Janet Planet; John Lithgow, The Rule of Jenny Pen; Elín Hall, When the Light Breaks; Channing Tatum, Deadpool & Wolverine; Cory Michael Smith, Saturday Night, that cat from A Quiet Place: Day One.
That's all I got for this week. Read any good comics lately? See any movies? Drop your new favorites, recommendations, and questions (any at all!) in the comments or The Chat. Or, heck, just shoot me a line: jarrod@doomrocket.com.