Undertone is creepy enough without needing to knit its haunting into its main character’s background so clunkily; ironically, its most effective moments are ones of stylistic indifference.
Like Shelley’s much-adapted creature, The Bride! is a creation of enormous ambition. It’s also an incoherent disaster — and not of the noble folly variety. It leaves you with the sinking feeling of watching someone fight their way to the front of a crowd to speak, only to realize when the spotlight is finally on them that they’re not actually sure what to say.
For all the personal hardship each of the main characters has encountered, they’ve also lived lives of unquestioned security, such that they’re able to pass through a country in an apparent state of emergency without believing such a thing would affect them. Sirāt brilliantly depicts that bubble breaking, its characters confronted with what it really means to be a citizen of the world, rather than gliding above it, with the music turned up loud enough to not have to listen.
The gap between Melania’s insistently anodyne tone and what’s happened in the year since it was filmed can become downright vertiginous, especially when Melania intones observations about her immigrant journey and how “everyone should do what they can to protect our individual rights.”
Raimi indulges Send Help’s gore and gross-out moments with the zest of someone returning to his cult-favorite roots. But when it tries to cast Linda as a figure who, in her own way, is just as uneasy as Bradley, the movie loses its nerve.
The result is scruffily endearing, though it teeters on the verge of collapse at times, as the pretense that what’s unfolding onscreen is all a serendipitous journey gets stretched to the breaking point.
The movie is all concept and, well, not quite no execution, but such confusing, conflicted execution that it makes the entire exercise feel like it was messed with after the fact.
In The Secret Agent, there’s no line between a refugee and being part of a resistance movement — there’s only the state and the people who’ve been designated its enemies.
