The Woman in Black; Carnage; Safe House; House of Tolerance
After scaring the jeepers out of parents who couldn't believe their Harry Potter-loving offspring were allowed to watch this kind of thing, The Woman in Black (2012, Momentum, 12) ships up on DVD in the same slightly trimmed version that avoided a 15 certificate through judicious shortening. Having co-written the supremely nasty My Little Eye and gone for the jugular in the viscerally satirical Eden Lake, director James Watkins here foregrounds atmosphere over shocks, looking toward the templates of The Orphanage and The Others with impressively shiversome results.
Deftly adapted by Kick-Ass screenwriter Jane Goldman from Susan Hill's novel (which itself owed a debt to Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House), this gas-lit period creeper sees Daniel Radcliffe's dowdy lawyer Arthur Kipps sent to close the affairs of an abandoned house whose grounds are separated from the world by a foggy causeway. Disturbing the titular wraith, whose appearances habitually foreshadow the death of a child, Kipps swiftly makes enemies among the locals, retreating into the madness of the house where things go bump in the night, with sanity-threatening consequences.
Swathed in mist and melancholia, and punctuated by some effectively jumpy scares, this very well-crafted fireside tale boasts a sterling supporting cast (Ciarán Hinds, Roger Allam, Janet McTeer) and handsome production design, all of which provide a solid safety cushion for Radcliffe's first foray into "adult" lead roles. It's a particularly well-chosen project for him, continuing the Hammer homages that echoed throughout the Potter movies (this carries the Hammer imprimatur) while simultaneously breaking away from his boy wizard past.
As for Watkins, he breathes new and occasionally inspired life into a hardy perennial story which has already been acclaimed in book, TV, film and theatrical form – no mean feat.
Having seen the English translation of Yasmina Reza's play Le Dieu du carnage on stage in London, where it was a scabrous hoot, I can testify that the drab failings of Roman Polanski's clunky-as-hell screen adaptation are almost entirely the film-makers' fault. A stinging social satire about two sets of bourgeois parents bickering about whose kids are worse before throwing up all over the soft furnishings, this works best as a claustrophobic farce that perfectly understands the conventions of theatre. On screen, however, Carnage (2011, Studio Canal, 15) becomes an inert exercise in trundling camera moves, over-choreographed thesping and squirm-inducing dramatic conceit, notably mainly for its painful lack of the very cinematic qualities with which Polanski made his name.
Presumably he was so dazzled by the Tony award-winning play that he simply lost sight of the movie, for despite the best efforts of the A-list cast (Jodie Foster, Christoph Waltz, Kate Winslet, John C Reilly), this creaks and groans and moans its way around the screen in a manner that is every bit as annoying as the characters it portrays. The cover artwork sells it as a comedy, but the overall effect tends more toward the tragic.
After the character-driven action of Training Day, for which Denzel Washington won a best actor Oscar, you could be forgiven for having similarly high expectations of Safe House (2012, Universal, 15), another upmarket genre two-hander that promises conspiracies, double-crosses and enigmatically unreadable antiheroes. All of which you get in the first act, during which Ryan Reynolds is called upon to manage Washington's super-intelligent rogue CIA agent in an apparently top-secret location, presenting plenty of opportunity for games of psychological cat and mouse.
When the men with big guns burst in attempting to spring the prisoner, the scene seems set for an odd-couple-on-the-run yarn powered by the smart interplay of two conflicted personalities. What you actually get is a load of running, jumping and shooting, followed by some things going bang, some more running, some more jumping, then back to the shooting, before embarking on even more running and jumping.
While this may be noisy fun for a while, you soon find yourself wondering why Swedish director Daniel Espinosa bothered to rope in two such accomplished actors (stop sniggering, Reynolds may be a plank but he was brilliant in Buried) only to throw things at them and watch them fall out of windows for two hours. After a while, the whole thing becomes a bit like a low-level headache: tolerable but increasingly irritating, and cured ultimately by sleep.
And so to House of Tolerance (2011, Universal, 18), in which French auteur Bertrand Bonello mourns the passing of the grand old days of exotic brothel culture, when clients brought panthers with them when stepping out for a shag, hand jobs were administered in candlelight by people wearing masks, and woman wore garters while being occasionally mutilated in bizarrely fetishised fashion. Bonello may have a moody visual style, but his typically overwrought fantasias about the sex industry (see The Pornographer) veer from the pompous to the facile via the flatulent.
The fact that the panther actually conforms to the age-old movie law that states that anyone who flashes a gun in the first act is going to use it in the third merely emphasises the emptiness of the movie's lofty pretensions.
If you thought the orgy scene from Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut was toe-curling, then be assured, this is worse and has fewer jokes. As for social commentary, the final shots – for which the director deserves to be slapped with a wet fish – are particularly spurious.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2012/jun/17/mark-kermode-dvd-roundup
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