Smile (Prime - purchase)
Have to admit this and the next film been a little looking forward to for a while, with a bit of expectation tampering to try and minimise possible disappointment. Here, we have nice and simple elevator pitch: invisible demon posses human and make human kill self while smiling creepily at other human to transfer possession curse. I feel like this should be easy to recommend, as it hovers quite comfortably in the "above average" catagory of psychological horror (Tho don't check how low that bar is!) So consider this a hesitant recommend, with an asterisk or two.
However, something ain't right here and it's bugging the shit out of me, questioning the last few scraps of sanity I got left. The actors are all acting great, if I was on a casting table I'd be convinced by them too. It's just, never once did they fool me they weren't actors reading a script as they appeared on screen. Could it be the direction? A different camera angle could provide a more believable interpretation? The doctor seemed more natural at least. Plus, I don't think the main character was convincing as a crisis mental health worker, and I been bouncing around a lot of these professionals in my life due to mental health fuckery so I'd like to think I earned some meagre hint of useful experience in this very specific niché. She was acting like an actor would, yet came off as cold and detached at the start, before the evils began. And the rest of the film kinda carried on holding onto that ball. In the end I did come out disappointed from this, just because of the emotional detachment from not perceiving these characters on screen as real. Though I tell you what is a truly effective film at putting you in the mind of an isolated suffering woman losing her mind but may still be dangerous...St Maud. Learn from St Maud plz.
Barbarian - (Disney plus, wtf?)
Was wondering what streaming service would pick this surprise indie hit up first. Assumed Shudder would've been a likely culprit, but nooo, for some reason Disney sought to sink its' teeth into this innocent baby first. Am surprised how easy it was to avoid spoilers for this too, everyone been pretty great at mass coyness. All I knew before going in was 'woman go to place and meet dude who were penny-wise clown (who, btw, is infinitely more creepier here as a normal-ish human than any of that cliché clown shit),' and an interview with the director saying how he made it look like night at the end "Showdown" on "water tower"...which was so devoid of any other reference it meant nothing anyway.
So this is definitely a film that benefits with minimal knowledge going in, I can see why that was the case. And it was pleasant to see actors having their characters look like natural and believable humans after the previous film's awkwardness. The direction is fantastic. Only issue is a specific design of a thing was something I thought a bit trite and visually uninteresting, though contextually intriguing. There's some metaphorical shit to be found if you're the type to go looking, which can be jarring at a point near the end that I can see catching some people off guard. There's also this weird meta possibility to the narrative I'm wondering if is intentional: to do with a particular actor in this film who I've recently learnt of going through a scary, uncomfortable experience with a few unanswerable questions left in their past. Not sure if it's even a spoiler to attach any specifics to that mysterious sentence though, hah!