Beatrice Loayza

Newton and Condor have enough personality to make their characters more than just floating appetizers — though their power struggle doesn’t sharpen the stakes so much as it merely pads the running time.

It’s a gloriously deviant oddity, best suited to niche audiences drawn to atmosphere over plot, as Bernstein’s script achieves more as a woozy dreamspace than a neat crime story.

It’s a bit corny and cute, but the film balances out these feel-good elements with harder truths that contrast the heroine’s silliness and sincerity to create a weirdly dark and touching sense of humor.

Against Lee Cronin’s finely calibrated joyride, Vanicek’s version, for all the tricks up its sleeve, never feels in control of its chaos. Individual face-offs in which the violence is contained in cramped quarters — such as the inside of a car and a bathroom — stand out, whereas more sprawling set pieces often feel like we’re in a haunted house playing Whac-a-Mole.

The slowly-building drama between Marina and her extended family plays with lovely (if somewhat generic) naturalism. But as these tensions subtly reveal the enduring stigma of her parents’ disease — with Marina representing an uncomfortable reminder of that past — a separate, thrilling experiment plays out that eventually dives into spectral fantasy.

We know from innumerable slashers that when a character is alone, trouble is around the corner. But “Leviticus,” with its gloomy, isolated setting and dogmatic parents, manages to turn this vulnerability into an existential issue, too. To make matters worse, the only glimmers of human warmth our boys receive are from each other — and that opens yet another can of worms.

These delicate mood-shifts are the film’s strength, sanding over (to an extent) the clunkiness of its themes to achieve a special balance: Honeyjoon is both a mourning movie, and a horny one.

Like an acoustic ballad — say, Jason Isbell’s “Cover Me Up” that receives an auspicious needle drop — Carolina Caroline doesn’t seem all that remarkable until you hush and take in the lyrics. Suddenly, you’re swept up in big feelings.

Ambiguity is key to this style of horror, where space and atmosphere do most of the heavy lifting, and though the story isn’t over-explained, mind you, it’s filled out enough to break its own uncanny spell.

The overlap of the two households, which offers an exciting narrative possibility, peters out with predictable cynicisms, while the climax is borderline comedic in its forced symbolism about family bonds.