Trappings

Der Spatz im Kamin/The Sparrow in the Chimney (2024) - Zürcher The Zürcher Brothers' 'animal trilogy' concludes with The Sparrow in the Chimney, another chamber piece that takes place in a summer Swiss lakeside house bathed in golden sunlight, where a simmering tension builds in a confined space as the family plans for a birthday celebration. Ramon, wearing director and writer's hat (and Silvan taking producer's role), concocts a wordy, ensemble piece around the always great Maren Eggert (a great German actress and the lead in many of Angela Schanellec’s films) as Karen, an unloved and unappreciated mother of three trying to plan a birthday party for her unfaithful husband, Markus.

The film starts with typical Zürcher fashion with static portraiture of two daughters: Johanna (Lea Zöe Voss) in her school, and Christina (Paula Schindler), the one who got away, on a plane coming home to attend her dad's birthday party. We see them behind the glass window from outside. This inside/outside theme is repeated throughout, with a sparrow flying out of the fireplace inside the house, leaving the trail of ash and leaving through the window early in the film, while the lake and its surroundings are taken over by the giant black commorants, ominously circling the sky- which beckon's the question: is outside any better?

Leon, the youngest of Karen's children, is seen prepping dinner for the whole extended family as they arrive, while Karen sleeps. Jule, Karen's sister and her husband and their baby daughter arrive. It is slowly revealed that the house Karen's family lives in belongs to Karen and Jule's deceased mother - the house the sisters grew up in, and the mother's shadow still looms large. It is also revealed that Karen's decision to move into the house after mother's death was not a favorable one for everyone else in the family.

Things are definitely not ok in Karen's household: the kids resent her. Leon is bullied in school and gets beat up a lot. Johanna, always an attention seeker, is testing her budding sexuality on any male figure around her. Christina has her reasons to be withdrawn. Markus is having an affair with Liv (Luise Heyer), a mentally unstable woman who took up residence in a cabin across from the house (used by the deceased mother and her lesbian lover) and has been watching over the family's dog.

The Sparrow in the Chimney is a densely scripted film where many things are said, yet nothing is said directly - the family dynamics here are not straightforward affairs and their feelings and thoughts are not communicated. Their cruelty to animals shows their frustrations with one another. We get the glimpse of their lives and past histories, but there's no big eureka moment until the end.

As with their last two films, Strange Little Cat and The Girl with the Spider, The Sparrow presents Zürcher's unique visual style - a blocking to create a claustrophobic atmosphere where everyone's cramped in the kitchen corridors, squeaking by each other and going in and out of static frames, and in and out of windows. The difference of The Sparrow here is that Zürcher's scope of visual filmmaking has grown and much more expansive. Karen's elaborate nightmare/hallucination sequence is something to watch, as it provides the inner workings of her fears, desires and secret wishes being manifested.

The Sparrow in the Chimney examines the familial trappings and yearning for freedom which might not be as ideal as it appears to be. Beautifully realized with sensuous visual details of inanimate objects to animals alike, the film cements the unique storytelling talents of the Zürchers.

Goes Up and Down Again

28 Years Later (2025) - Boyle Not quite 28 years have passed since the first of 28 series, 28 Days later (which came out in 2002), Danny Boyle, Alex Garland and DP Anthony Dod Mantle reteam for the 3rd, and the first installment of a planned trilogy, 28 Years Later. While stylistically similar to the first one- shot with iPhone 15, instead of Mini DV of the first one, to keep up with times, and frenetic editing, there is no coherent narrative thread carrying over from the previous ones in the new one. It is stated in title cards that Continental Europe has eradicated the rage virus but the islands of England and Ireland are permanently quarantined and monitored by NATO patrol boats.

28 Years Later's setting is a self sufficient community in a small northern island off of the mainland, accessible only by a walkway that only opens in low tide. It is an ideal situation after the apocalyptic events: communal living where everyone is taught to have a role and contribute and share resources. These are all shown in Boyle's fast paced montage sequences. The meat of the plot is kind of a coming-of-age story of Spike, a 12 year old boy going to the mainland to hunt the infected, along with his father. It is a ritual of sorts for the surviving villagers. He has a terminally ill mother and there is no doctor on the island. The legend has it, there is a mad doctor who lives on the mainland.

Spike and his father's first outing introduces the bloated, slow moving, crawling zombies and scary, fast zombies alike, all naked and very cavemen-like. The chase sequences provide some good adrenalin rush. Disillusioned by his father's deception, Spike sneaks out to the mainland with his mother in order to find the mad doctor, Dr. Kelson (Ralph Fiennes). He and his mother run into a Swedish Nato soldier mired in the mainland alone after his boat sank. Then there is zombie birth - how? Zombies have sex? The baby is not infected? Negates all the gene mutation theories of 28 Weeks Later? Then he finds Kelson, who wears iodine all over his body (that wards off the infected - according to him), and lives among the pile of human skulls and bones. He has crematorium and pyre burning day and night and has a very Buddhist view on birth and death.

Boyle and Garland is not really up to making a blockbuster here, even though 28 Years Later is extremely Spielbergian- full of sentimentality with half-assed philosophizing. The super tight trailer with Rudyard Kipling's creepy WW1 poem promised an exciting summer blockbuster ride. But Garland's fuzzy writing in this - referencing unintentionally hilarious medieval war footage that looks like a skit from Monty Python and equates that to surviving zombie wars and isolationism while saying very little about either, zombie baby birth and track suit wearing "I kick ass for Jesus!" religious cultist, is too scattered and lacks cohesion, as usual, just like the icky third act of the original.

As it clumsily sets up for the sequel by the end of the film, I am hoping that Nia DaCosta, who is slated to direct the next one, will take us into another direction and leave this silliness behind.

Deep Time

Underland (2025) - Petit Caves, underground waterways, mines, catacombs, scientific labs are some of the locations featured in Robert Macfarlane's bestselling non-fiction book, Underland. His prose, at once scientific, lyrical and philosophical, has been an open invitation and demystification of 'the awful darkness inside the world'. Traveling through the dizzying expanse of geologic time, the book is a revelatory dive into deep time, a contemplation of our fear of the dark void, reflection of a paralleled world underneath, the myths and memories and our deep connections to the unseen environment.

Underland happens to be one of my all-time favorite books. So, when it was announced that Robert Petit, a visual collaborator of MacFarlane - they did a short film, Upstream together, which features an aerial view of the Cairngorms Mountains and River Dee of Scotland, is directing it, it became one of my most anticipated films to see this year.

Narrated by actress Sandra Hüller whose clear and calm voice is a great match for the material, and voiced by archeologists, urban explorers and scientists, the film takes liberty from the book and sets this visual poem in 3 different locations in 5 chapters: a cenote and its labyrinthine cave systems in Mexico, Underground storm drains in Las Vegas and a science laboratory 2 kilometers underneath Canadian Rockies, each invoking heady metaphors, myth and human connection with our surroundings.

It starts in a black and white grainy pictures of an ancient ash tree, just like how the book starts. The ash tree is located in Mendip Hills of Somerset, where Macfarlane's childhood was spent. Beneath the tree presents the subterraneous passage into the underworld cavern.

Following Fatima Tec Pool, a Mexican archeologist and her team, into the 'entrance to the underworld', - an elaborate cave system where her Mayan ancestors congregated, Petit and his team - cinematographer Ruben Woodin Dechamps and producer Lauren Greenwood, crawl through the rocky, slimy, dark limestone caverns. With all their modern equipment, the archeologists wonder aloud how it must have been with Mayan explorers with only torches some thousands of years ago. For Pool, it's a personal journey to connect with her Mayan ancestors who treated the caves as a sacred place.

We are introduced to an urban explorer Bradley Garrett, who descends into the storm drain system under Vegas Strip. He explains the smell and texture of the system, a distinct sensory experience in an Anthropocene age. All these will be future caves, the remnants from our current civilization, he muses. There's a cryptic note on the concrete wall, warning the rise of water level when it rains.

Garrett witnesses the remnants of life in the drain system. People live down there: the undesirable, unseen people above ground making their way down to escape from the elements, even if that means risking drowning when flooded. It's not only humans, but underland is also filled with discarded materials - cars, washing machines, everything our modern world want to get rid of and make it out of sight.

Then there is Mariangela Lisanti, a theoretical physicist who is in search for Dark Matter, an unseen material that consists of 65 percent of all of our universe. It was her musings as a child looking up at the starry sky, wondering what we are made of. She and her colleagues find the suitable space to test, in which dark-matter particles bump into target material and scatter off atomic nuclei, resulting in a measurable nuclear recoil, 2 kilometers down in an underground laboratory, away from elements and noises. She knows well that her experiments might not result in finding the existence of Dark Matter in her lifetime. Nevertheless, she perseveres, with her childlike curiosity and wonder intact.

Petit and his team capture some glorious images of the subterranean world, conjuring not only physical but spiritual side of our understanding of the hidden world. The past, present and future mingle seamlessly as a sensory experience. As Pool's team reaches the end of the cave, they discover the ancient palm prints left on the wall by Maya people thousands of years ago. She stretches her hand to meet the old palm prints and, in that stillness and silence, deep down underground, we experience deep time.

Underland might be short on the political urgency in nature preservation of Macfarlane's book, but it is at once sensorial, philosophical experience to be had, preferably in a darkened theater.

Underland had its world premiere at Tribeca Film Festival and will also play at DC/Dox on 6/12.

Dispicable in the Making

The Apprentice (2023) - Abbasi Unlike the all the drama and embellishment of political biopics - aka. Oliver Stone style filmmaking, Ali Abbasi's The Apprentice is just as brutal and succinct as the subject it is depicting in its lean, two-hour running time. At their early meeting the mentor Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong) tells the young, ambitious New York real estate heir Donald Trump (Sebastian Stan), the three rules to live by - ATTACK, ATTACK, ATTACK, DENY EVERYTHING, ADMIT NOTHING, AND NEVER ADMIT DEFEAT, ALWAYS WIN NO MATTER WHAT THE COST. Roy Cohn, the prosecutor of the Rosenberg Trial and later became a notorious lawyer/fixer of all the shady and powerful people in New York, shaped Trump's world view, whether Trump admits it or not - the pattern has been quite clear now for everyone to see.

Much of the criticism of the film comes from the dislike of its subject. Why do we need to see this piece of shit on screen and give him even more attention than he deserves? - which is understandable. But if anything, The Apprentice is the reaffirmation of our hatred of this callous, disgusting man. The film just gives more insights on how Trump has become what he has become - a homophobe, germaphobe, sexist, cruel and vindictive, cheap human trash. And Cohn and Trump deserved each other.

Sebastian Stan is outstanding in portraying Trump with his mannerisms and facial expressions, but not as a caricature. But it's Jeremy Strong's Roy Cohn who steals the show. A ruthless, closeted gay man with the McCarthy era patriotism, who later died of AIDS. His ghostly stares and monotonous delivery depict a truly ghoulish man. Maria Bakalova plays Ivana Trump, giving the Trump's first wife a little bit of humanity, who supposedly fell down the stairs and died, and buried in a Trump golf course. It shows the pattern of Trump's disgusting views on women over the years.

The Apprentice doesn't explain how we got here. As we are experiencing the second term of this human garbage in the White House. The thorough reexamination on the validity of The American Dream, manifest destiny, just when America was great, and to whom? should be in order.