July 2010 ¦¦ -5- ¦¦ ‘The Disappearance of Alice Creed’ [8/10]; ‘Splice’ [7/10]‘; ‘Dogtooth’ [4/10]

Published on: July 27th, 2010

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.   The Disappearance of Alice Creed .
Leaving aside the pretentious affectation of his preferred billing, writer-director Jonathan Blakeson (aka ‘J Blakeson’) explodes onto the British film scene from nowhere (a.k.a. Harrogate) with his cracking little thriller debut, The Disappearance of Alice Creed. Paul Andrew Williams’ London to Brighton is perhaps the closest recent parallel, but at times this engrossingly twisty kidnap three-hander recalls the brutally pared-down efficiency and sardonic X-doesn’t-know-what-Y-knows wit of the Coens’ Blood Simple.
   Twentysomething black-sheep-of-rich-family Alice (Gemma Arterton, a revelation) is bundled into the back of a truck by balaclava’d-up heavies Vic (Eddie Marsan, predictably superb) and Danny (Martin Compston, weakest link of the trio but coping OK with the trickiest role). Complications rapidly ensue - and while the resolution is guessable for anyone reasonably versed in the genre, Blakeson gets us from A to B to Z in impressively controlled, confident fashion. Gratifying proof that, even in 2010, outstanding pictures can be made sans gimmicky concepts, pricey effects or flashy technique. This, aspiring film-makers, is how you do it.

.   Dogtooth .
Oh, dear. File this one alongside Vincere, Wild Grass, The Headless Woman and The Killer Inside Me in the category of 2010′s most bafflingly and egregiously overrated/overhyped limited releases.
   The subject of frothingly ecstatic critical hype since premiering in the Un Certain Regard sidebar at Cannes, Dogtooth is a prime example of 21st century International Art Cinema : slow pace, mannered dialogue, impeccable cinematography, gloomily negative view of Humanity In General, gnomic allegorical aspects, a thuddingly predictable coy non-ending, plus generous helpings of sex (passionless, mechanical, incestuous, reportedly unsimulated) and violence (bloody, sudden, shocking…)
   Story takes place in the house and grounds of a middle-class, middle-aged couple – he works in management at some kind of heavy-industry factory, she’s a housewife – who have raised their three (now adult) children in a state of total ignorance about the outside world. The kids aren’t allowed to leave the “compound”, and are fed erroneous vocabulary (“zombie” = a small flower); “the sea” = an armchair) and endless rules dictating every aspect of their lives.
   The film’s clinical atmosphere comes across like a combination of Michael Haneke and Ulrich Seidl, as if writer-director Lanthimos has made a careful study of what currently floats the boat of critics and programmers. An ostentatiously “harrowing” journey into a vicious closed circuit of warped Fritzl-esque psychology, Dogtooth is half-baked at best in terms of its ideas (the linguistic angle goes pretty much nowhere), though - as with Antonio Campos’ similarly over-worked Afterschool - it’s never less than striking to look at, thanks to Thimios Bakatatis’s cinematography.
   A small compensation as the screenplay trundles dispiritingly along from one scene to another, displaying little in the way of development, structure or point – unless the goal was to make the audience feel just as trapped and helpless as the family’s hapless kids. Overall – an arid, pretentious intellectual exercise in cine-masochism by numbers.

.   Splice .
It’s been far too long since Vincenzo Natali’s last movie, 2003′s relatively little-seen Nowhere, but it’s evident from imaginative sci-fi chiller Splice that he’s still the inventive, creative chap who gave us Cube in 1997 and Cypher four years later. Seemingly crafted as a deliberate homage to David Cronenberg – specifically his 1980s output – as well as a knowing update of Frankenstein tropes, this Canadian-shot flesh-crawler examines what goes wrong when a scientist couple (Sarah Polley, Adrien Brody) create an entirely new life-form using animal and human DNA (exactly whose human DNA being a key element in the second half). Working some way beyond the law, the childless pair raise the resulting, increasingly humanoid-looking organism – named Dren (and played by a CGI-enhanced Stephanie Chaneac as an ‘adult’) – in secret, relocating from a city-centre lab to a spooky, remote farm to elude detection.
   Dren’s accelerated development (‘she’ reaches full maturity in a matter of months) results in all manner of moral and sexual problems for both Polley and Brody in what morphs from a parable of child-rearing to a probing examination of a relationship collapsing under the stress of extraordinary circumstances. ‘Dren’ distractingly resembles a cross between Bjork and Star Trek : The Motion Picture‘s Persis Khambatta, but for much of its running-time Splice is a commendably serious-minded navigation of exponentially spiralling emotional and ethical issues.
   Several sequences (most notably a bloody episode involving prototype creations known as ‘Fred’ and ‘Ginger’) achieve Cronenbergian combinations of icky horror and deadpan gross-out humour, while Polley engagingly channels Julianne Moore as a woman struggling with maternal issues of various stripes. Such a shame, then, that the horror strands in the picture’s DNA go so haywire in the final reel, proceedings tipping near-disastrously into daft sub-Jeepers Creepers territory as the human protagonists are menaced by a swooping, winged critter – especially considering the tight screenplay structures that distinguished both Cube and Cypher.

Neil Young
27th/28th July 2010

:    THE DISAPPEARANCE OF ALICE CREED : [8/10] : UK (IoM) 2009 : J BLAKESON : 100m (BBFC) : The Tyneside Cinema, Newcastle, 25th July (£7.50) with thanks to Paul Callaghan : {22/28}
:    DOGTOOTH : [4/10] : Kynodontas : Greece 2009 : Yorgos LANTHIMOS : 97m (BBFC) : Gala, Durham, 26th July (£4.50) : {10/28}
:    SPLICE : [7/10] : Canada (/Fr/USA) 2009 : Vincenzo NATALI : 104m (BBFC) : Empire, Sunderland, 24th July (£6.00) : {18/28}