Black Gate

“She and the Darkness” (“Ella y la Oscuridad”) is a 13-minute Spanish film from director Daniel Romero, who co-wrote it with Rubin Stein. A janitor (Beatriz Arjona) suffering from extreme depression sees something unexpected during a stress-driven walk one night, a girl who should not be alive. Which discovery leads her into some strange and violent situations. This is another short that’s heavy on atmosphere and shadows, but has minimal dialogue. Often, as here, the attempt to tell a story purely visually results in points of incomprehension; we understand the girl means something to the woman, but not exactly what. In turn, again as here, this insistence on the visual at the expense of the verbal ends up with a well-crafted but frustrating film, as the audience is left to imagine possibilities never paid off by the movie as it actually is.

Bundled with the short came All The Moons (Todas las Lunas), a Franco-Spanish co-production directed by Igor Legarreta and written by Legarreta with Jon Sagala. In Spain in 1876, the violence of the Third Carlist War leaves a young girl (Haizea Carneros) alone and wounded. A woman (Itziar Ituño) offers to cure her pain, and does, but what she does to the girl causes other issues — including flesh burning when exposed to sunlight, and a sudden aversion to garlic soup. The girl ends up separated from the woman, but finds another surrogate parent; and then risks losing him as well.

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“Ghost Dogs” is an animated short film from Joe Cappa, who directed and co-wrote the script with J.W. Hallford. It’s a fine 11-minute piece about a dog exploring his new home and finding more than he understands. There’s no dialogue, being entirely from the perspective of the dog wandering about the not-quite empty house, and the movie gets some fine effects by having him uncover things that mean nothing to him but tell human viewers quite a bit. The 2D animation has a style that gets across both weird humour and moments of horror. It’s a strange movie, and a very good one, macabre and satisfying.

With the short was bundled the feature film Strawberry Mansions. It is a deeply weird work from the writer-director team of Kentucker Audley and Albert Birney, in which Audley also stars as James Prebble. Prebble works for the government auditing dreams, and one day he wakes from a dream filled with suspicious friends and product placement and goes to audit the long-unlooked-at dreams of an old lady named Arabella Isadora (Penny Fuller). He sets to work, reviewing dreams as far back as the 1980s, and finds himself falling in love. Complications ensue, including time loops, objects falling out of the sky, an unexpected death, a plot to manipulate dreams, and an endless trove of metamorphoses.

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Interesting movie on Netflix last night, which I hadn’t heard about and enjoyed very much.

The Forgotten Battle centers around the Allied attempt to push a shipping lane through to Antwerp at the same time as Operation Marketgarden (Arnhem, much further inland), and which led to heavy, island-to-island fighting with the SS, much of it hand-to-hand. The tale is told via an ensemble cast, mostly unknowns (though Tom Felton of Harry Potter fame is in it), primarily British, Canadian, Dutch and German.

It’s grey, grim and gritty, with intense combat sequences, which fully capture the horror of war. If the Battle of the Scheldt, as it became called, has genuinely been forgotten, I suspect that’s mainly by Hollywood because there was no American involvement.

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“The Horse Guessing Game” is a 9-minute short by Xia Leilei. It’s a beautiful piece of work made of stop-motion paper dolls and shadowplay, mostly black-and-white, with colour used briefly and well to heighten the significance of one sequence. I can’t claim to understand it entirely, but it opens with a woman or girl isolated from those around her, and appears to show her entering into a shadow-world with great potential and great danger where she might gain a voice and learn to speak to those around her, or else might be swallowed up and lost. As I read the film, it’s about imagination, a bit like Plato’s cave. But there is a lot of ambiguity to the story, and it took a second viewing for me to properly follow it. The movie takes a bit of effort, in other words, but is worth it. You can judge for yourself, as the film’s online here.

Next came Cryptozoo, written and directed by Dash Shaw. It’s an animated story set in the late 60s, about a woman named Lauren Gray (voice of Lake Bell) who rescues mythological creatures, cryptids, from around the world. She’s part of a team under the direction of an older woman named Joan (Grace Zabriskie) who plans to open Cryptozoo — a place where the creatures of myth can live and work with regular humans. But the American government has nefarious plans to use the Japanese dream-eating creature called the Baku (AKA the Tapir, also seen at Fantasia this year in Hello! Tapir) to eat the dreams of the counterculture. A violent chase to find the Baku ensues, and at its core are the questions of whether the zoo is the best future for the cryptids, and whether they really can integrate into human society.

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One Second Champion is a feature film from Hong Kong directed by Sin Hang Chiu and written by Ashley Cheung, Siu Hong Ho, Ho Tin Li, and Wai Chun Ling. Chow (Endy Chow) was born brain dead for one second, and somehow this gave him the power to see one second into the future — but only one second. As a kid he had a brief period of fame for his oddball talent, but he was never able to find a way to turn it into a lasting career. Then, as an adult, fallen on hard times and with a son to support, he breaks up a fight at the bar where he works, and his ability to see a second ahead turns out to be incredibly useful in a fight. A boxing promoter with a failing gym, Yip Chi-shun (director Chiu, who also contributed to the soundtrack with his band ToNick), happens to see him in the brawl and, struck by his skill, offers to train him and make a career for him in the ring.

And so the movie becomes a sports film, in which Chow rises through the ranks of the local boxing federation while Yip’s family-owned gym starts to make money. There are complications and reversals, and it all builds to a final boxing match. There’s some comedy here, but the film chooses to become more of a drama the further along it goes. In general the fantasy aspect of the one-second precognition becomes de-emphasised, too, a way into the boxing scene rather than an element to be explored on its own. The precognition’s a means to the end of finding a new spin on the form of the boxing movie.

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