Shelter (2010) – Multiple Personalities Or Just A Hill Witch Curse? (Yes, You Read That Right.)

Article first published as Movie Review: Shelter(2010) on Blogcritics.

Shelter opens on the forensic psychiatrist Cara Harding (Julianne Moore) who seems to have a special interest in multiple personality disorder.. Her evaluation of a criminal who has obviously pleaded insanity sends the gentleman in question to the electric chair. Subsequent conversations between her and her father Dr. Harding (Jeffrey DeMunn) quickly reveal that debunking presumed sufferers from multiple personality disorder is something of a speciality of Cara’s. She is yet to be proven wrong in her estimations. That’s where David (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) comes into the equation.

Dr Harding presents Cara with this interesting patient, a young man in a wheelchair who has been found on the street, lost and without any recollection as to how he wound up where he was. What starts as an interesting battle of intellects between Cara and her father quickly turns into something else when David starts switching personalities. His alters, Adam and Wesley, make appearances and Cara is starting to have to question her iron-clad beliefs and assumptions.

So far so good. I am actually with the story up to this point. Multiple personality disorder is a very much discussed phenomena and it’s been pretty thoroughly debunked, but it makes for great entertainment in this kind of setting. The problem here is that this is where this story veers off into the supernatural. People start dying in gruesome, horrendous and very specific ways while Cara investigates the various alters of David only to find that they all existed, and that the young man is not so much disturbed, as possessed.

Okay, fine. I’ll roll with it. So he is possessed and not disturbed. It isn’t until we wind up in the mountains with a bunch of shaggy-looking mountain people and an old hag with the ability to suck a persons soul out and then put it back in that the atmospheric scenery and all-in-all pretty solid performances no longer outweigh the frank silliness of the basic plot. I can’t put my finger on exactly what it is that makes this too hard to swallow, but I think it’s in part the fact that we started out on fairly solid ground with sharp-witted dialogue and an intriguing concept and suddenly find ourselves in a stereotypical back-water village in the hills that seems to belong in a Tales from the Crypt episode.

David turns out to be a priest whom the mountain witch “Granny” (Joyce Feurring) has put a curse on so that he now has to provide “shelter” for all those souls that have lost their faith in god. That’s the reason why so many different personalities are living in that one body. Then, for whatever reason, David starts going after the various members of Cara’s family and some of her acquaintances as well. It ends up becoming a battle for the souls, with Cara’s daughter, Sammy (Brooklynn Proulx) as the main damsel-in-distress.

There’s a definite risk with making a movie that has a slight case of multiple personality disorder itself. It’s a mystery and a crime story and a thriller and a horror flick all in one, and it switches between these different language codes in a way that could have worked, could have been clever. The performances are strong throughout, Julianne Moore delivers, as does Jeffrey DeMunn as her father and Jonathan Rhys Meyers in the various incarnations of whoever is in David’s body at the moment. The problem is more that this devolves into a fairly trite horror movie, nothing particularly original about it, and the twist at the very end isn’t surprising, or even mildly upsetting, at least not to this viewer who saw it coming a mile away.

It fails at going into some of the basic archetypal fears that could have made it truly frightening, like the inherent instability of the human psyche, something we rely no being more writ in stone than it really is, and opt s instead for a vague kind of religious gloss of the old fire-and-brimstone variety, which, again, would have been fine, if it had any kind of lead-in other than the gruesome deaths of the people occupying the preacher’s body. Even the Witch Of The Hills is an archetype that could have been unsettling, but here she isn’t even set up in opposition with the basic Christian morality she is supposed to act in contrast to. Instead it all comes down to having faith in a standard issue Christian god, especially when the chips are down, because if you don’t a rogue damned and hill-witch cursed preacher is going to come and kill you. See what I mean? It doesn’t make sense and it doesn’t keep any of the promises it made in the opening. This movie is quite simply not as clever as it would like to be. I wouldn’t waste my time with this one.

Shelter (2010) directed by Måns Mårlind, Björn Stein stars Julianne Moore (Cara Harding), Jonathen Rhys Meyers (David/Adam/Wesley), Jeffrey DeMunn (Dr. Harding), Frances Conroy (Mrs. Bernburg), Nathan Corddry (Stephen Harding), Brooklynn Proulx (Sammy), Brian Anthony Wilson (Virgil), Joyce Feurring (Granny Holler Witch), Steven Rishard (Detective Danton), Charles Techman (Monty Hughes) and John Peakes (Dr. Charles Foster).

Legion – Angels Are Watching Over You… Sort Of

Article first published as Movie Review Legion – Angels Are Watching Over You…Sort Of on Blogcritics.

Legion (2010) is a horror flick with some pretensions. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, mind you, it generally ensures that you can forgive minor grains of sand that could otherwise be irritating. In a truck stop in the Mohave desert a mismatched group of people seem to be gathering by coincidence. There’s the reluctantly pregnant girl Charlie (Adrianne Palicki), Bob Hanson (Dennis Quaid) and his son Jeep (Lucas Black) who own the place, Kyle Williams (Tyrese Gibson) who only stops for directions and the use of a phone, Percy Walker (Charles S. Dutton) the short order cook and the Anderson family, Howard (Jon Tenney) and Sandra (Kate Walsh) and their slightly rebellious daughter Audrey (Willa Holland).

When the television stops working and the phones die any seasoned horror movie watcher knows that something bad is coming. The first sign of how bad the bad thing that’s coming really is becomes obvious when the little old lady Gladys (Jeanette Miller) comes though the door with her walker and proceeds to smile beneficently at the gathering before she suddenly takes a bite out of Howard’s neck and then scales the wall like an insect.
Seconds later the extremely soft spoken and together Michael (Paul Bettany) shows up in a stolen police car with an armoury in the trunk and proceeds to proclaim that the end is nigh. Literally.

It turns out that Charlie’s unborn child is the only hope of all of mankind and that Michael is there to make sure that the child survives. The bad things that are coming are sent by God himself to wipe humanity out, a sort of etch-a-sketch approach to what ails the world. The archangel has actually gone against orders and come to our aid. Wave after wave of people possessed by angels attack the diner and decimate the survivors within until finally Michael’s equal, Gabriel (Kevin Durand) comes to put an end to the disobedience. By then Charlie has had the baby, so the morality of the whole thing has changed.

There are many little moments in this movie that really shine. Most of them have Paul Bettany in them. He speaks so softly and so convincingly, and he kicks some righteous behind in a way I, for one, really enjoyed. I’ve not seen him do action like this before, but he certainly has the physical presence for it. Adrianne Palicki gives a very good performance as the big-bellied Charlie, still smoking when she’s nine months pregnant, which is upsetting enough to watch in and of itself. Lucas Black does a very good job of portraying the steadfast Jeep who is actually good enough in his own way that he has managed to help Michael retain his faith in mankind as a whole, and Dennis Quaid is really a spectacularly good down-on-his-luck loser with something like a heart of gold, even when he falls asleep on the job.

All that being said, there is grit in the stew here. The director Scott Charles Stewart started his career in special effect and you can tell. There is a certain emphasis on the effects side of things, a certain love for some of the bad guys, like The Ice Cream Man (Doug Jones), and explosions and weapons and spectacular fight scenes, not that I don’t enjoy that, I do. The problem is, some things feel much too familiar, like the final scene of the movie that any fan of The Terminator will instantly clock on to. You can call that a homage, if you like, it’s certainly too explicit to be incidental. There is also hints and allusions to other general lore, of course, but for some reason the end result is just not more than the sum total of its parts, which is unfortunate. There is a lot of exposition, which allows the actors to shine, each in their own little moment, but which does not add anything to the overall story. It feels disjointed in an odd, rambling way. It also feels like the director/script writer doesn’t trust the audience to believe the motivation driving the characters to act the way they do.

The problem is that too much explanation is just as bad as not enough. The pacing is awkward, to say the least. Building suspense is not an easy thing and you really have to keep your finger on the button to be able to create the kind of unease that the waiting between attacks needs to have in order for the viewer to feel unsettled. That never really works here.

There is also the fine line between horror and splatter, one inducing the kind of creeping dread that has you on the edge of your seat and the latter just making you go “eeew” and there are a few instances of that here too, where horror would have been preferable.

It’s not a bad first effort, but it feels squandered when it could have been so much more considering the cast and the general idea.

Legion (2010) directed by Scott Charles Stewart stars Paul Bettany (Michael), Lucas Black (Jeep Hanson), Tyrese Gibson (Kyle Williams), Adrianne Palicki (Charlie), Charles S. Dutton (Percy Walker), Jon Tenney (Howard Anderson), Kate Walsh (Sandra Anderson), Willa Holland (Audrey Anderson), Dennis Quaid (Bob Hanson), Kevin Durand (Gabriel), Doug Jones (Ice Cream Man) and Jeanette Miller (Gladys).

Frailty (2001) – Dad In The Shed With An Ax

Article first published as Movie Review: Frailty (2001) – Dad With An Ax In The Shed on Blogcritics.

Frailty (2001) starts when a young man (Matthew McConaughey) walks into the offices of the FBI and starts telling Agent Doyle (Powers Boothe) about a recent rash of murders. That is the start of a long and twisted tale of the childhood of two young boys and their father (Bill Paxton).

Some of the story is told by the young man who introduces himself as Fenton Meiks. He claims to know the identity of a serial killer who calls himself “God’s Hand”. He says it is his brother Adam (Levi Kreis). When the agent asks him why he would think such a thing he starts telling the agent of his father and brother and his disturbing childhood.

The young Fenton (Matt O’Leary) grows up taking care of his kid brother Adam (Jeremy Sumpter) after the death of their mother. His father (Bill Paxton) is just another regular Joe working dad trying to take care of his two sons and he seems to be an honestly good father, hard working and normal. That is until one night when he wakes his two sons up saying he’s just had a visitation from an angel and he has been instructed that they are supposed to be demon killers, God’s Hand in retribution. This is very much an old testament God, one of fire and vengeance and flaming swords.

The angel delivers a list of demons to be slain and leads the father to the weapons they are supposed to use – an ax, a length of pipe and a pair of worker’s gloves. Young Fenton thinks his dad’s going nuts. Adam, on the other hand, takes to the new work with enthusiasm, supporting their father and telling his brother that he can see the demons when his father puts hands on them to reveal their sins.

Fenton resists with everything he has. He tells his father to get help, to stop killing people, but the dad just blithely keeps on reassuring him that they’re not really people at all, they are demons, and they are doing the Lord’s work. The more Fenton resists, the more dad tries to make him see the light.

Most of this is told from young Fenton’s perspective. The two young actors, and Matt O’Leary particularly, does a very good job of it. His defiance, the moral core, his fear and his loss of faith are pitch perfect and you really feel for him. He is caught in an impossible situation and he can’t get out. When he finally breaks down and goes to get the sheriff, dad kills the lawman and they bury him in the rose garden where they bury all their victims. All the while dad cries and tells Fenton it’s his fault he’s had to actually kill a human. Fenton spits at him that he’s killed plenty.

After that dad winds up locking the Fenton in a basement they’ve dug under their shed to have somewhere to take the demons when they are about to be slain. Dad keeps Fenton there until he’s weak from fatigue and starvation and that makes him see the light. When he comes out of the basement he’s completely with the plan.

Things are, however, not what they seem. When are they ever?

This is really low key, up close and personal horror, told in the tradition of Stephen King centering on the loss of innocence of the very young, Fenton is ten and Adam seven when all this starts. The long flashbacks show corruption at the very central core of these boys’ lives when their father goes completely bananas and drags them in to his delusion. Or so it might seem.

Bill Paxton plays the dad with the kind of finesse that actually keeps him from becoming and out-and-out monster. He believes in what he’s doing, all the way down to the particulars of using the ax the angel led him too. He is unwavering and he keeps saying “it’s for your own good” to Fenton when he punishes him for not believing.

The ending has a major twist that I don’t think I should reveal for those interested in watching this movie. It’s one of those things that either work on a viewer, or completely miss the mark. It’s mostly a question of how much you can go along with the narrative. I think it works well within the premise of the story, but for me personally, the flashback scenes are stronger.

This is Bill Paxton’s directorial debut and he does a good job of it, the tendency for actor-cum-directors to focus on the actors performances is always rewarding to watch, because invariably there is a certain depth of character portrayal that makes a movie like this, which is basically Southern Gothic, better than they would have been in the hands of someone focusing on the gore.

Frailty (2001) directed by Bill Paxton who also stars as Dad Meiks. Matthew McConaughey (Fenton/Adam Meiks), Powers Boothe (FBI Agent Wesley Doyle), Matt O’Leary (Young Fenton), Jeremy Sumpter (Young Adam), Luke Askew (Sheriff Smalls), Levi Kreis (Fenton Meiks), Alan Davidson (Brad White), Cynthia Ettinger (Cynthia Harbridge), Vincent Chase (Edward March) and Gwen McGee (Operator).

Mule

Daybreakers – It’s a vampire’s world

Article first published as Movie Review: Daybreakers – It’s A Vampire’s World on Blogcritics.

Most vampire movies try to find a new approach to the subject, with varying results. Some keep to the old traditional view of the vampire as a supernatural monster and some incorporate more modern medical theory. Daybreakers falls in the second category. Sort of.

In a not too distant future a pandemic has hit the planet, turning most regular citizens into vampires. You still get infected through blood and biting, but the vampiric condition has become the norm rather than the exception. This means blood is rapidly becoming a commodity that is in short supply. Some humans are kept like cattle in large facilities and their blood is ”harvested”. It’s all done reasonably humanely, the humans aren’t awake for any of this.

Scientists are working on a blood substitute that is supposed to help with the supply and demand problems. The main blood supplier is the Bromley Marks company run by Charles Bromley (Sam Neill). Our main protagonist Edward Dalton (Ethan Hawke) is a haematologist hard at work on the task of finding a cure. He is also a reluctant vampire, having been turned by his brother Frankie (Michael Dorman). Frankie works as a human hunter, trying to round up any strays that may still be running around in the daytime.

There are some humans fighting the disease, trying to stay ahead of what is rapidly becoming the rule. These are led by Audrey (Claudia Karvan) and Elvis (Willem Dafoe). Elvis has managed to cure himself from vampirism through an extraordinary set of circumstance that involve a car crash, sunlight and water.

The vampires are starving, which is why the clock is ticking for Edward to find a cure’ as well as for the whole vampire population in terms of survival. If they feed on other vampires, on themselves or on animal blood for too long they turn into a more primal, bat-like creature with a much higher level of aggression. They lose any remnants of humanity through the starvation process and are therefore summarily executed by the government.

There are things about this movie that are really appealing, like the way the world has adapted to night time living and what kind of technological solutions have been worked out to allow the vampires to go about their business during the day. The heavy noir feeling you get from the grey monochromatic life of false daylight and night time life is contrasted by a richly suffused palette for the daytime scenes, which makes it easier to understand why Edward fights his vampire condition so hard.

Evil here is represented by Sam Neill’s character, the large corporation incorporate. He just wants to make money, same as always, and weather he does that by exploiting the last remaining humans or not makes no difference to him. Finding a substitute, or a cure, is never really on his agenda.

There are all kinds of family drama going on as well, Charles’ human daughter Alison (Isabel Lucas) refuses to let herself be turned, and once it’s done forcibly she feeds on herself rather than accepting her ration of blood, which quickly turns her into a monster. Edward and his brother have all kinds of issues to work out, concerning the nature of humanity and which is better – vampire or humankind.

There is however a crux. It may be stylish, and pretty and have aspirations of making comments about society and humanity and inter-human relationships, and it’s even got Willem Defoe and Sam Neill, but it still isn’t a very good movie, even in its genre. It tries to do too much, it works too hard at being cool. It delivers broody shots of Edward’s struggle to remain human one moment and explodes a vampire body in an orgy of blood and splatter the next.

The cure for the vampire disease turns out to be the blood of a vampire who has been turned back into a human. This results in what can best be described as a messy bloodbath at the very end of the movie when starving vampires fall on the re-humanized vampires and tear them apart, only to be turned back themselves and so on and so forth. The disease eats the cure eats the disease and maybe the cure will be pandemic as well, but at a very high price.

I have a thing about vampire movies and could easily draw out all the implications of using blood disease and sickness as a metaphor or a synecdoche, but I never really get involved enough in this particular telling of an old familiar story to think it worth the bother. For all its gore this is a bland and anaemic specimen of the genre. Sadly.

Written and directed by Michael Spierig & Peter Spierig, starring Ethan Hawke (Edward Dalton), Willem Dafofe (Lionel ‘Elvis’ Cormac), Sam Neill (Charles Bromley), Claudia Karvan (Audrey Bennett), Michael Dorman (Frankie Dalton), Isabel Lucas (Alison Bromley), Vince Colosimo (Christopher Caruso).

Day Watch – chalk it up to choice

Article first published as Movie Review: Day Watch – Chalk It Up to Choice on Blogcritics.

There is a fight going on between the forces of light and the forces of darkness. The Others, as they call themselves, are immersed in this battle and it takes place in modern-day Moscow in and around everyday life. There are vampires and witches and all manner of shape shifters and seers amongst the Others. The tenuous balance between light and dark is policed by a higher authority reminiscent of the inquisition, making sure that they don’t randomly gun each other down. The Great Truce is broken if one side deliberately kills one from the other side.

Our hero Anton (Konstantin Khabenskiy), a seer, is teamed up with the novice Svetlana (Mariya Poroshina) to patrol the streets and when we come into the action the two of them are chasing after a Dark One who has just stuck a needle in an old woman and is literally sucking the life out of her as if she was a juice box. They give chase and follow the Dark One into the Gloom, an alternate dimension where time and space are subtly different, but obviously parallel to our own reality. It turns out that Sveta is more powerful than Anton, and subsequently able to reach deeper into the Gloom and chase the Dark One further. She manages to tear off the mask the Dark One is wearing, revealing Anton’s son Yegor (Dmitriy Martynov).

All this ties in with a piece of chalk, the Chalk of Fate, used by Tamerlane to change destiny. The McGuffin of the movie is which side will come into possession of the chalk, the Dark or the Light. But, because this is that kind of story, even the light is … well, let’s just say there’s a healthy dose of grey in the mix. Anton means well, but he has to get his hands dirty to get to where he needs to be. He drinks too much and smokes too much and occasionally makes decisions that are not necessarily in his own best interest.

There’s a definite sense that both sides, Light and Dark, are necessary, that eradicating the Dark is not an option. The mayor moral difference between the two sides seems to be how they view power. The Light sees it as something to be handled carefully and responsibly and the Dark side sees power as mainly just that – power. Power for it’s own sake, used selfishly to gain you whatever you wish for, is a dangerous thing. It is a case of every tool being a weapon if you hold it right.

Zavulon (Viktor Verzhbitskiy) is the leader of the Darks and his wife Alisa (Zhanna Friske) is the leading dark witch. They have seduced over Anton’s son Yegor to their side and the big showdown between the two sides is to take place during Yegor’s fourteenth birthday party. On the side of light we have the leader Geser (Vladimir Menshov ), Anton, Sveta, Olga (Galina Tyunina) and sundry other shapeshifters and witches.

They are all aware of each other, know each other and sometimes even live next door to each other, like Anton and Kostya, the vampire (Aleksey Chadov). They sometimes even help each other, but that doesn’t mean they are friends, exactly.

The entire cast is back from Night Watch, which makes this all the more enjoyable. It means you recognize the main players and you have a report with them, the viewer can see where we are now, a few years down the road. Anton is still the main focal point, caught in the middle of a struggle and the victim of circumstance in a way that makes all the difference. It turns out that this movie also hinges on choice, but in a slightly different way. It is about undoing wrongs in the past, paying attention to the details of the things you wish for. That’s where the Chalk of Destiny comes into play.

The first movie was enough of a success that the director obviously got handed a big bag of money for the sequel. To my endless delight he didn’t make the mistake of losing sight of what the world he created is supposed to be. The car chases look better, the fantastical aspects of the action get more room to come out and play, but the visceral quality of the violence and the organic nature of the effects remain, as well as the main focus of the action still being about the characters.

I’ll give an example of how slick this can be. Anton’s co-worker at the light company, where the Night Watch have their headquarters, asks him if he’s had a rough night. Anton mumbles a yes and asks why he wants to know. His co-worker tells him “your eyes are red” and for a flicker of a second a red shimmer appears in Anton’s eyes. It’s a here-and-gone thing, an aside, but it’s little things like that that make me like this so much. It also reminds the viewer that Anton has drunk blood when hunting vampires and that there is more to him than meets the eye.

There is also a body switch involving Anton and Olga (Galina Tyunina) that gives rise to some really funny scenes and that is mostly just done by the actors giving good performances. You never doubt that you are looking at Anton in Olga’s body, and that’s not something that needs any special effects at all. It’s all in the body language.

Many sundry other little character quirks and oddities essentially enrich the story as a whole. The end is fittingly apocalyptic in a sense, once the balance has been disrupted between the Light and the Dark. The One Dark Other, Yegor, that turns out to be more powerful than all the others has not gotten a handle on his powers yet and in a stand-off with Sveta he lays waste to most of Moscow. It turns out that Anton is the only one who can set it right.

I like everything about this movie, its length, its look and feel and pacing and the different sensibility to it, its very Otherness. I like the fact that it takes place in Moscow and that there are layers of cultural heritage built in to the very backdrop along with shameless product placement and a little in-house joke on the expense of the movie 9th Company (2005). It’s smart and modern and timeless at the same time, and that’s a difficult trick to pull off.

Day Watch (2006) directed by Timur Bekmambetov stars Konstantine Khabenskiy (Anton), Mariya Poroshina (Svetlana), Vladimir Menshov (Geser), Galina Tyunina (Olga), Viktor Verzhbitskiy (Zavulon), Zhanna Friske (Alisa), Dmitriy Martynov (Yegor), Valeriy Zolotukhin (Kostya’s father), Aleksey Chadov (Kostya), Nurzhuman Ikhtymbayev (Zoar), Aleksandr Samolenko (Bear/Medved), Yuriy Kutsenko (Ignat), Irina Yakovleva (Galina Rogova) and Georgiy Dronov (Tolik).

Night Watch – Urban Russian Fantasy

Article first published as Movie Review: Night Watch – A Russian Urban Fantasy on Blogcritics.

This city fantasy starts with a legend. There was a virgin in ancient Byzantium who became cursed. Wherever she went, bad things were sure to follow. The curse opened a vortex of damnation around her and the first forces of darkness were born into the world. Forces of light rose to fight them. Geser ( Vladimir Menshov) is the boss of the forces of light and Zavulon (Viktor Verzhbitski) is the General of the dark forces.

The battle that raged was bloody and violent and the forces were so equally matched that a truce had to be negotiated unless everyone was to perish. The truce basically says no one gets to pick a fight and each person has to choose for themselves if they go to the light or dark side. And that is what it all comes down to, really, choice.

The protagonist Anton (Konstantin Khabenskiy) goes to a woman who he believes to be a witch of sorts in order to get his philandering wife back. She tells him that his wife is with another man, carrying this other man’s child and offers to make the child go away and the wife come back, if Anton is willing to take the sin on his own conscience. Anton doesn’t really seem to understand how serious this is, so he says yes. The problem is that the woman, Darya (Rimma Markova) is the real deal. She is an Other, a Dark Other, even, and she actually can make all this come to pass.

At the exact moment the curse is about to take effect the Night Watch show up, travelling in the Gloom, the other dimension, where they are supposed to be invisible to regular humans. The problem is that Anton can see them. They restrain the witch and once they realize that Anton can see them they take him in.

Next time we meet Anton he is drinking blood and hunting vampires who have broken their particular set of laws. Vampires need licenses to be allowed to bite humans and Anton, who is a seer, is hunting one that has gotten in over his head.

The victim being stalked by this particular vampire is a young boy called Yegor (Dmitriy Martynov). Anton follows the boy and they wind up in the Metro where Anton catches sight of a woman who sets off one of his visions, premonitions, whatever you might like to call them. The woman is Svetlana (Mariya Poroshina) who will come to play a mayor role later in this tale. Anton manages to help Yegor escape and the male vampire gets killed by the Night Watch, and somewhere in all this mess the problems now begin to converge.

Anton has killed one of the Dark Others, breaking the peace. The young boy Yegor, could see more than he should have been able to, thus making him an Other. Svetlana is definitely also something more than meets the eye. The forces of light and dark are doing battle, but for the moment it is subtle, a chess game, a series of events that may, or may not, have been engineered, in part, by Geser and Zavulon.

I am not going to give away the entire action here, that would spoil the fun, but it’s safe to say that it is pretty complicated and intricate and there is a reason for everything, from the first confusing scene in Darya’s kitchen, to the very last battle in the Gloom on a rooftop where Zavulon makes a sword out of his backbone. Yes, you read that right.

At the same time this movie is stylish and brutal, the violence is visceral and colourful and not the least bit shy, and there is no doubt that once you get killed here, you die. Horribly, and sometimes, in bits. We are in modern-day Moscow for most of the action and there are things that make me snigger, like the blatant product placement and the dry, Russian humour.

The effects are really organic and once you accept the basic premise that there is more to this reality than the mundane you don’t really have to work at suspending your disbelief. Some things are done old school, like the car chases where the Others drive about eight times as fast as is humanly possible and that may be the only time that I winced a little, since it’s done by speeding up the camera. On the other hand, Olga-the-Owls (Galina Tyunina) transformation from beast to woman is done old school too, but that works really, really well and is sufficiently physical and a big disgusting for it to feel real.

Underscoring all this fantasy and Otherness there is actually a good storyline that focuses on the characters and their very human choices and desires. Anton is trying to make up for past transgressions and Svetlana is trying to make sense of her life, which isn’t easy, considering that she does not really know what she is. Yegor is also more than meets the eye, and he does not know what he really is either. It makes their everyday lives complicated when their actions have a bigger impact than they themselves can predict.

All in all this is a really cool and smart urban fantasy, and that’s not a genre that I delve into with any real enthusiasm all that often, with the possible exception of Blade Runner. It is also really nice to see something like this come out of Russia, giving the viewer a different set of legends and myths and a different skyline as a backdrop.

Night Watch (2004) directed by Timur Bekmambetov stars Konstantin Khabenskiy (Anton), Vladimir Menshov (Geser), Valeriy Zolotukhin (Kostya’s father), Mariya Poroshina (Svetlana), Galina Tyunina (Olga), Yuriy Kutsenko (Ignat), Aleksey Chadov (Kostya), Zhanna Friske (Alice), Viktor Verzhbitskiy (Zavulon), Rimma Markova (Darya, the witch), Aleksey Maklakov (Simeon) Aleksandr Samoylenko (Ilya/Bear), Dmitriy Martynov (Yegor).

Mule