Every month, Establishing Shot brings you a selection of films from our group of regular bloggers. Even though these films aren’t currently being screened at the IU Cinema, this series reflects the varied programming that can be found at the Cinema and demonstrates the eclectic tastes of the bloggers. Each contributor has picked one film that they saw this month that they couldn’t wait to share with others. Keep reading to find out what discoveries these cinephiles have made, as well as some of the old friends they’ve revisited.
Jesse Pasternack, contributor | The Lobster (2015)
The Lobster belongs to a subgenre I like to call the “depressing comedy.” Those films feature events that are objectively depressing but have so much dark and/or weird humor that they’re frequently funny. The Lobster is a great example of a “depressing comedy” because it is simultaneously one of the funniest films I have ever seen as well as one of the most bleak.
This movie is about David (Colin Farrell), an architect who goes to a hotel for single people. If he cannot find a woman to be in a relationship with him in 45 days, then he will get turned into an animal of his choosing (he picks a lobster). David eventually flees the hotel after trying to have a relationship with someone known only as the Heartless Woman (Angeliki Papoulia). Outside the hotel, David falls in with a band of people known as the Loners who forbid each other from having relationships. However, complications ensue when David falls in love with one of them (Rachel Weisz).
Much of the humor in The Lobster comes from its wild situations and witty dialogue, both of which were created by director Yorgos Lanthimos and his co-writer Efthimis Filippou. It frequently reminds me of the works of playwrights who were a part of the movement known as the Theater of the Absurd, like Samuel Beckett or Eugène Ionesco. Like those plays, this movie has so many bizarre things happening that you cannot help but laugh at them.
In addition, they share a desire to use humor to attack conformity. Many of the sequences in this film, whether they’re major sequences or a brief scene where a man named John (Ben Whishaw) wears the same clothes as his new wife (Jessica Barden) and daughter, satirize the human desire to fit in with other people. They remind me of Ionesco’s play Rhinoceros, in which a group of people start to become rhinoceroses due to an increasing desire to conform. The vicious satire of both this film and that play work in large part because of all their writers’ great use of humor.
But at the same time, the narrative events of The Lobster are very sad. They include but are not limited to heartbreak, loneliness, as well as many acts of violence against animals and people. Sometimes you have to stop and think, “Wow, this is depressing,” before laughing at another strange scene or joke. This combination of absurd humor and somber commentary on the difficulty of finding a suitable romantic partner and being human is a potent mixture. There are other films which fall into the subgenre of “depressing comedy,” like Burn After Reading (2008) or Lanthimos’s earlier film Dogtooth (2009). But few of them are as memorable as The Lobster. The way it marries a razor-sharp wit with an ice-cold view of humanity is something I will never forget and look forward to experiencing again on many rewatches.
Chris Forrester, contributor | The Beast (2023)
The film I’ve had on my mind all month (and likely will next month and the next and so on…) is Bertrand Bonello’s The Beast, in which Léa Seydoux (in the performance of a lifetime) courts romantic despair across three timelines. A Henry James adaptation that nestles heartrending existential melodrama within a cleverly assembled genre pastiche that traverses doomed-affair period drama, incel stalker-thriller, and bleak inhuman future dystopia, it reverberates with a sadness that extends deep beneath its slippery surfaces.
Much of the discourse around the film has concerned the particulars of Bonello’s genre pastiche — expertly assembled and thrilling, to be sure — and Lynch inspirations — it reminds one of Twin Peaks: The Return in its patient, deliberate, and ultimately spiritually unsettling construction, and some of the director’s individual hallmarks crop up (perhaps a bit too often). Not enough has yet emphasized the incredible feeling built across these strangely intersecting parts. The frame story is that in the year 2044, Seydoux’s Gabrielle has chosen to undergo a DNA “purification” process that will purge her of the emotional baggage of past lives and leave her a better worker (less tainted by emotional bias, one character notes). The particulars of how, exactly, this brings Gabrielle’s other two lives — in the former, she is an acclaimed pianist who develops an intimate, forbidden relationship with a man (George MacKay) after telling him of a private fear of something awful and imminent (a beast!) coming for her; in the second, she is an actress living alone in an architect’s home (she’s housesitting) and stalked by a violently insecure misogynist (also MacKay) who at one point recites Elliot Rodger’s YouTube manifesto — into the film’s purview are deliberately opaque. Is our experience of her past lives an omniscient view of her soul’s history or are we experiencing them as memories within the purification process?
The result is sublime — a transfixing experience in genre mish-mashing that mines all the aesthetic and stylistic pleasures of each of its subsumed modes (in an interview with Film Comment, Bonello notes When a Stranger Calls as an influence, one whose chilling prologue he lives up to in creeping unease) and leverages their combined impact to shattering ends. Streaming on the Criterion Channel.
Michaela Owens, Editor | Grosse Pointe Blank (1997)
We don’t talk about John Cusack enough. That’s the thought that kept running through my head when I watched Grosse Pointe Blank this month. An offbeat romantic comedy that also operates in the action genre, the film follows hit man Martin Blank (Cusack) as he returns to his hometown of Grosse Pointe, MI, for his 10-year high school reunion after running away on the night of his senior prom, leaving behind the love of his life, Debbie (a perfect Minnie Driver). Still angry, Debbie reluctantly lets Martin earn back her trust, unaware of his profession and that he has been tailed to Grosse Pointe by a pair of federal agents (Hank Azaria and K. Todd Freeman) and two rival assassins, one of whom is Dan Aykroyd in an absolutely unhinged performance.
Hearing the premise of this film, my immediate reaction was, “John Cusack as a hit man?” Considering Serendipity is one of my favorite rom-coms, I had no doubts about Cusack’s abilities as a romantic leading man — there is something so affably charming and thoroughly breezy about his presence onscreen, it’s truly like he isn’t even acting — but a gun-toting, sunglasses-wearing, black suit-clad killer-for-hire? With his trademark calm assurance and effortless cool, though, Cusack, who also co-wrote the film, had me convinced Martin Blank is actually out there, shooting up a convenience store, trading hand-to-hand combat in a high school hallway, trying his best to start a new life but getting pulled back in at every turn.
Accompanied by a fantastic soundtrack (including a sublime use of the Violent Femmes’ “Blister in the Sun”), a terrific supporting cast led by Joan Cusack and Alan Arkin, off-the-charts chemistry between its leads, and an eccentric, incredibly memorable script, Grosse Pointe Blank is the type of cozy ’90s flick that gives me false memories of watching it on VHS at a friend’s house growing up. It felt so familiar and warm — despite, you know, the murders — and yet groundbreaking and weird. I immediately had to watch it again the next night, and I gotta tell you, it just made me even more excited for our upcoming screening of High Fidelity in October.