CAPSULE MOVIE REVIEWS: 10-2-26
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My Film Critic pants are quite fetching; they are on, pressed, and ironed. I'm ready to review five new movies in this week's capsule (short) movie reviews for Friday, October 2nd, 2026.
Digger is a very difficult movie to review.
Not because I don't know what I think about it. I know exactly what I think about it. I think it is extraordinary. The problem is that about a half-hour into the movie, Alejandro G. Iñárritu pulls the rug completely out from under the audience with a massive twist that changes everything you think you have been watching. And I don't want to tell you what it is.
There are other secrets and turns after that, and my reaction to the movie is deeply connected to those revelations. So I am going to dance around them as much as possible, because even the basic plot description of Digger isn't entirely what it appears to be. The characters may not be exactly who you think they are.
The situation may not be exactly what you think it is. And once Iñárritu reveals another layer to the story, you are forced to reevaluate almost everything you have already seen.
What I can tell you is that Digger is brazen, ballsy, crude, hilarious, incredibly dark, deliberately obnoxious and completely frigging crazy.
Tom Cruise plays Digger Rockwell, an obscenely wealthy Texas oil tycoon whose aggressive drilling operations have helped unleash an environmental catastrophe. A gigantic ice shelf has broken away from Greenland and is heading toward Europe, potentially causing massive destruction.
Digger, naturally, does not see this primarily as a disaster. He sees it as an opportunity to become the man who saves the world from the disaster he helped create.
John Goodman plays Compson, the ailing and spectacularly ineffective President of the United States, while Riz Ahmed plays Ganesh, the scientist who desperately attempts to inject something resembling reality into rooms filled with powerful people who have absolutely no interest in it.
Sandra Hüller plays Digger's half-sister and business partner Emma, and Michael Stuhlbarg, Jesse Plemons and a terrific ensemble fill out a world populated almost entirely by people behaving at approximately 175 percent of normal human capacity.
This is intentional.
Iñárritu is making a bleak political and environmental black comedy that is clearly indebted to Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove. There is no attempt to disguise that influence. This is a movie about powerful people facing potential annihilation while worrying about ego, optics, money, control and their own ridiculous personal obsessions.
Eventually, though, Digger begins to resemble Iñárritu's own Birdman almost as much as it resembles Dr. Strangelove, particularly in its obsession with theatricality and performance.
That becomes one of the central ideas of the entire movie. These people are always performing. Politicians perform. Billionaires perform. Leaders perform. Men with enormous power perform versions of themselves until the performance becomes indistinguishable from the person. They make speeches, create spectacles, lie with confidence and turn catastrophes into theater.
So Iñárritu makes the movie itself theatrical. The performances are enormous because the characters are enormous. The dialogue is vulgar and ridiculous. The situations are intentionally absurd. There is nothing remotely subtle about Digger, and I don't think there is supposed to be.
Tom Cruise understands this completely.
He disappears under sagging jowls, thinning white hair, a gigantic fake belly, bizarre costumes and this wonderfully strange voice. His physical work is remarkable. The way he walks, stands, gestures and occupies a room, it's all incredible.
Digger is grotesque, arrogant and cartoonish, and Cruise plays him with the commitment of an actor who has apparently decided there is no such thing as going too far.
There is an extraordinary sequence in which Digger addresses a room filled with political figures and representatives from around the world about the catastrophe he helped create.
Iñárritu stages much of it in one extended take, and Cruise just explodes. He gives this enormous, ridiculous speech, strutting around the room and selling himself as humanity's savior until somebody throws a shoe at his head.
Watching him, I immediately thought about Frank T.J. Mackey in Magnolia, particularly those seminar scenes where Cruise weaponized all of his natural charisma and movie-star confidence and turned them into something funny, disturbing and pathetic.
Cruise hasn't had many opportunities lately to remind audiences just how fearless an actor he can be because so much of his career has become associated with gigantic action movies and increasingly insane physical stunts.
Digger reminds you that this guy can act his ass off. And because of the twist I refuse to discuss, there is another entire dimension to what Cruise is doing here that makes the performance considerably more impressive than it initially appears.
I think this is one of the best performances of his career.
There is also a terrific scene between Cruise and Ahmed aboard a private jet. Ganesh is attempting to explain the environmental consequences of what Digger has done while Digger is more interested in getting him to eat some tuna sushi. It is absurd, funny and perfectly representative of the movie's worldview: science is desperately trying to explain reality while money and power are busy serving lunch.
Ahmed is fantastic because Ganesh initially seems like the closest thing the movie has to a rational human being. He is essentially trying to survive inside a world where insanity has become policy. I don't think Ahmed has ever been this funny, and like everybody else in the film, there are aspects of what he is doing that take on a different meaning after the story reveals its hand.
The first half-hour is particularly hilarious because of Digger's relationship with his nearly 30-year-old cat, who is very obviously dying while Digger refuses to acknowledge reality. He lies in bed feeding the cat tuna from his pinky. He interrupts important matters because he is worried about the cat's pajamas.
The animal becomes another extension of Digger's inability to accept anything he cannot control, and Cruise plays these scenes with gigantic comedic intensity. He treats putting pajamas on a dying cat with the seriousness of Ethan Hunt trying to prevent nuclear war.
That tone is going to drive some people absolutely insane.
Iñárritu has always been a filmmaker willing to take enormous stylistic swings. He won back-to-back directing Oscars for Birdman and The Revenant, and his movies frequently play with fractured narratives, long takes and extreme visual choices.
Birdman famously creates the illusion of unfolding in one continuous shot. His deeply personal Bardo, which I adored and plenty of people hated, is filled with surreal imagery and audacious stylistic choices. Digger may be even more confrontational.
Working again with the great cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, Iñárritu creates a world that can look gray, ugly and drained in one section and then suddenly become bright and almost aggressively colorful somewhere else. Those visual changes are connected to things I can't discuss without ruining the movie.
There are long takes, elaborate camera movements and huge set pieces, but what I especially love is how much of the movie's visual trickery is accomplished practically. The theatricality isn't simply thematic; it is built into how the film has been constructed, using physical sets, in-camera techniques and old-fashioned cinematic illusion instead of turning everything over to computers.
That matters because Digger is ultimately fascinated by the difference between performance and reality. The world of the movie is a stage filled with powerful people desperately acting out the roles they have invented for themselves.
And Iñárritu goes for the jugular with it.
There is incredibly crude dialogue. There are childish jokes. There are moments of almost Kabuki-style exaggeration. Goodman is outrageously over the top. Cruise is outrageously over the top.
Everybody is operating on the same enormous wavelength, and Iñárritu has absolutely no shame about any of it. Within 15 or 20 minutes, you will probably know whether you are willing to go where this movie is taking you.
Then the twist happens.
And suddenly Dr. Strangelove starts colliding with Birdman, the theatricality takes on another meaning, and the entire movie becomes something stranger and more complicated than the apocalyptic political satire you thought you were watching.
Iñárritu risks losing the audience again right there. I think he is going to lose a lot of people with this movie, period. At the screening I attended, the reaction among critics was all over the place. Several people hated it. A few of us loved it.
I was all in.
At a time when so many expensive movies feel manufactured, recycled and terrified of alienating anybody, I love watching a major filmmaker take a gigantic swing like this. And yes, this is where I will once again get myself in trouble with Christopher Nolan fans, but I don't care.
I find it maddening that Nolan can recycle The Odyssey, surround it with his usual self-important cinematic machinery, and people immediately line up to proclaim him a visionary, while a filmmaker like Iñárritu can make something this genuinely bizarre, personal and formally audacious and people complain that it is too much.
Give me too much. Give me the crazy swing. Give me a filmmaker risking complete disaster instead of another polished version of something I've already seen.
Digger absolutely owes a debt to Dr. Strangelove, but it knows it, embraces it and then uses that foundation to go somewhere very different. It combines political satire, environmental anxiety, theatrical farce, surrealism and some genuinely moving material that I can't describe without destroying the surprises.
It is timely without pretending to be restrained, and its ideas about ego, power, political theater and people performing versions of themselves feel completely embedded in its deliberately outrageous style.
This is not going to be for everybody. I would be shocked if it were. It may be one of the most divisive major releases of the year, and I can easily imagine audiences absolutely hating it. The movie is too crude, too strange, too theatrical and too aggressive to play safely down the middle.
Good. I don't want Digger safely down the middle.
I want exactly what Iñárritu and Cruise have made here: a huge, messy, audacious, hilarious, bleak and completely original piece of filmmaking built around one of the most fearless performances Tom Cruise has ever given.
I think Cruise deserves an Oscar nomination for this. Whether a movie this strange will get him one is another question entirely.
But I loved the performance, I loved the gigantic swing, and I loved that the movie kept surprising me.
Digger is big, bold, ballsy and batshit crazy. I'm all in. - ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
I'll just say this right up front. Verity is trash. Absolute trash.
But you know what? It's fun trash. And sometimes there is nothing wrong with sitting in a theater and watching a bunch of extremely talented people wallow around in beautifully photographed, sexually charged, blood-spattered, completely ridiculous trash for a couple of hours.
Verity is based on the enormously popular novel by Colleen Hoover, who has developed one of the most devoted readerships in contemporary publishing.
Her books have already inspired movies like It Ends with Us, Regretting You and Reminders of Him, and although I have not read Verity, people familiar with the book tell me this adaptation is remarkably faithful, with only a handful of changes.
So if you love the novel, apparently most of what you love (or hate) has made it onto the screen.
The movie is directed by Michael Showalter, which immediately made it more interesting to me. I've been a fan of Showalter since his days with MTV's great comedy troupe The State, and his career has taken some fascinating turns.
He helped create Wet Hot American Summer, directed the wonderful The Big Sick, which remains one of the loveliest romantic comedies of recent years, and moved into very different territory with The Eyes of Tammy Faye, The Idea of You and Oh. What. Fun.
Now he is directing an erotic psychological thriller based on a Colleen Hoover novel. Why the hell not?
Dakota Johnson plays Lowen Ashleigh, a struggling novelist who begins the movie by witnessing a gruesome accident on a New York street. A person gets smashed by a vehicle, Lowen gets sprayed with an enormous amount of blood, and a handsome stranger named Jeremy Crawford (Josh Hartnett) helps her clean herself up.
It is a wonderfully absurd meet-cute, if your definition of “cute” involves being covered in somebody else's blood.
Hours later, Lowen walks into a publishing meeting and discovers that Jeremy is the husband of Verity Crawford (Anne Hathaway), an enormously successful author who has been left seemingly incapacitated and unable to communicate following a terrible car accident. Jeremy has read Lowen's books and wants her to finish Verity's bestselling series. It is a potentially life-changing job, and Lowen accepts.
She travels to the Crawford family's enormous lakeside estate, where Verity lies upstairs in a near-vegetative state while Jeremy, their surviving young son Crew and a live-in nurse attempt to carry on around her. Lowen starts digging through Verity's files looking for outlines and research and instead discovers a hidden autobiographical manuscript called So Be It.
And this is where things get really trashy.
The manuscript contains Verity's alleged confessions about her relationship with Jeremy, her jealousy, her disturbing feelings toward her children and some very dark details involving the tragedies that have destroyed this family.
Meanwhile, Lowen begins to suspect that the supposedly helpless Verity may not be quite as helpless as everyone thinks. She sees things. Verity appears to move. There are noises, glances and the required jump scares.
Is Verity really incapacitated? Is Lowen becoming paranoid? Is the manuscript true? Is everybody in this gigantic house completely insane?
I will not give away the answers, although if you have ever seen an erotic thriller in your life, you will probably figure out a significant percentage of them.
The twists in Verity are not exactly difficult to see coming. By the final third, the movie starts piling revelation on top of revelation, and I was usually several steps ahead of it. But strangely, that didn't bother me very much because Showalter doesn't seem particularly interested in convincing us that he is making some profound Hitchcockian psychological masterpiece.
He knows he's making trash. More importantly, everybody in the cast seems to know it too.
Dakota Johnson is perfectly suited to this material because she has that wonderfully dry, slightly detached quality that can make even ridiculous situations funny without destroying them. Lowen begins as the struggling writer entering Verity's world, but gradually her motivations become considerably more complicated.
She doesn't simply want to finish Verity's books. She wants the career. She wants the success. She becomes attracted to Jeremy. She starts imagining herself occupying Verity's place in virtually every part of this woman's life.
The writer. The house. The husband. The child.
There is something wonderfully creepy underneath all of that, because Lowen is simultaneously investigating Verity and slowly becoming her replacement.
Naturally, she also starts fantasizing about having sex with Jeremy, and one of those fantasy sequences contains my favorite little movie-geek joke in the film. Lowen imagines seducing Jeremy away from the television, and the movie he is watching is Brian De Palma's Dressed to Kill.
That is a terrific choice. Dressed to Kill is exactly the kind of stylish, sexy, lurid thriller whose DNA is all over something like Verity.
But Michael Showalter missed an even better joke. Jeremy should have been watching De Palma's Body Double. Why? Because Body Double stars Melanie Griffith. Dakota Johnson's mother. Come on, Michael. It was sitting right there.
Anne Hathaway, meanwhile, gets to have an enormous amount of fun playing Verity because much of what we learn about her comes through these heightened flashbacks generated by the manuscript.
We see the early days of Verity and Jeremy's relationship, including a very funny sequence in which they meet at a party, wander off and start fooling around inside a limousine, only to discover that the limousine isn't theirs and get thrown out.
Hathaway knows exactly how far to push the material. She can be glamorous, sinister, vulnerable, ridiculous and potentially psychotic, sometimes within the same sequence. This is not restrained material, and thank God she doesn't treat it like it is.
There is even a running Hot Ones gag involving Verity appearing on the Sean Evans show and eating increasingly spicy wings while being interviewed about her books. It is such a bizarre contemporary detail to keep returning to in the middle of this lurid gothic soap opera that it eventually becomes hilarious.
And then there is Josh Hartnett, who may actually give the best performance in the movie. It has been fun watching Hartnett reemerge over the past several years. After stepping away from the Hollywood machinery for a while, he came back with memorable work in Oppenheimer and then got to have an enormous amount of fun as the lead in M. Night Shyamalan's otherwise terrible Trap.
Here he has the tricky job of playing Jeremy as both the grieving husband at the center of this horrible family tragedy and the impossibly attractive object of Lowen's increasingly inappropriate desires.
Hartnett plays the ambiguity nicely. Jeremy has to remain just mysterious enough that we keep wondering how much he knows, what he believes and exactly what kind of man he really is. In a movie where almost everybody gets an opportunity to chew on the scenery, Hartnett frequently provides the center.
Showalter makes the whole thing look considerably classier than it deserves. The Crawford estate is gorgeous and sinister at the same time, the photography gives the movie a slick gothic atmosphere, and Volker Bertelmann's score treats all of this nonsense with exactly the level of seriousness required to make it even more entertaining.
There is blood, sex, murder, fantasy, jealousy, betrayal, terrible parenting, literary ambition and enough psychological manipulation to fill about six Lifetime movies. And I mean that affectionately.
Because Verity works best when you stop asking whether any of this is remotely plausible and simply surrender to the pulp. This is a story about one woman entering another woman's life, reading her most horrifying secrets, wanting her career, sleeping with her husband and gradually imagining herself taking over virtually everything she has.
Then you add the possibility that the woman lying motionless upstairs may be watching the entire thing happen. That's trash. Glorious trash.
There are twists I won't reveal, and eventually the movie asks you to reconsider some of what you have been told. Truth, fiction and manipulation become intertwined, which is appropriate for a story about writers whose entire profession involves inventing convincing lies.
But I don't think the psychological games are nearly as clever as the movie occasionally wants them to be. The surprises are too predictable, the psychology is pretty silly, and if you start seriously interrogating the behavior of these characters, the entire thing could collapse in about five minutes. So don't.
Have a drink. Eat some popcorn. Watch Anne Hathaway and Dakota Johnson circle each other. Watch Josh Hartnett be handsome and mysterious. Enjoy the gorgeous house, the sex, the blood, the ridiculous revelations and the inevitable moments when somebody who supposedly can't move suddenly seems to have moved.
Verity is stupid. It is pulpy. It is shameless. It is predictable. It is trash.
But Michael Showalter knows how to make trash entertaining, and he has three extremely talented movie stars who understand the assignment and seem to be having a great time doing it.
If you want a sophisticated psychological examination of obsession, identity and literary ambition, you should probably look somewhere else.
If you want Anne Hathaway, Dakota Johnson and Josh Hartnett trapped inside a beautifully photographed, sexed-up, blood-soaked airport novel brought to life?
You could do a hell of a lot worse than Verity. - ⭐️⭐️⭐️
If you're a hip-hop fan, you probably know about Rolling Loud. It has become one of the biggest hip-hop festivals in the world, with enormous crowds and performers ranging from Sexyy Red and Ty Dolla $ign to Ski Mask the Slump God and Travis Scott.
Apparently somebody decided that wasn't enough.
Rolling Loud needed a movie.
And I don't mean a documentary about the festival, its history, the artists or the culture surrounding it. I mean an actual narrative comedy called Rolling Loud: The Movie, starring Owen Wilson as an uptight father who sneaks his 13-year-old son into the festival because he desperately wants to prove that he can still be a cool dad.
It is about as substantial as that description makes it sound.
Wilson plays the overprotective father, Christian Convery plays his son, and the two head to Rolling Loud in Miami, where Travis Scott is the headliner.
Dad loses the kid somewhere among the thousands of people at the festival, and the rest of the movie basically consists of Owen Wilson wandering around trying to find him while encountering various wacky characters, getting into trouble and bumping into hip-hop stars.
That's pretty much the movie.
Christine Ko shows up. Henry Winkler has a weird cameo. Sexyy Red, Ty Dolla $ign, Ski Mask the Slump God and others appear. Travis Scott has a larger role, and his presence inevitably carries some uncomfortable baggage because of the 2021 Astroworld crowd-crush tragedy in Houston.
The movie doesn't really engage with any of that, nor does it particularly want to. It wants Rolling Loud to look exciting, chaotic, hip and incredibly fun.
Which gets to the biggest problem with Rolling Loud: The Movie: this doesn't really feel like a movie.
It feels like an advertisement for Rolling Loud.
The filmmakers shot extensively during an actual Rolling Loud festival, and there are plenty of crowds, musical performances, cameos and shots designed to make the event look like the coolest place in the world.
The message is basically: look at this incredible festival. Look at these stars. Look at these crowds. You can even bond with your son here!
We saw something vaguely similar earlier this year with Nimrods, which used Green Day and the idea of a huge musical event as the backdrop for a coming-of-age comedy. But at least there was an attempt to build a movie around that idea.
Rolling Loud feels more like somebody took a giant promotional campaign for the festival and wrapped the thinnest possible father-son story around it.
There is technically an emotional arc. Dad is overprotective. Dad wants to connect with his son. Dad needs to loosen up. Son needs Dad. They get separated. Lessons are learned. None if it means anything.
And unfortunately, the whole thing is anchored by Owen Wilson giving one of those performances where everything I normally find charming about Owen Wilson becomes annoying.
I hate saying that because I love Owen Wilson. I think he is a terrific actor, and people sometimes forget what a talented writer he is. His early collaborations with Wes Anderson were wonderful, and when Wilson has the right material, that strange laid-back rhythm of his can be hilarious, touching and completely unique.
This is not the right material.
He spends most of Rolling Loud running around doing the Owen Wilson thing at maximum volume without having an actual character to play. He was similarly irritating in Runner, and now we have another movie asking him to substitute his familiar personality for a screenplay that hasn't given him anything interesting to do.
Then Matt Rife shows up, which doesn't help.
I know Rife is enormously popular, particularly because of social media and the endless clips of his crowd work. I don't get it. I've never found his material particularly funny, and he's not funny here either.
But he fits the movie's basic philosophy perfectly: throw recognizable people onto the screen, surround them with thousands of screaming festivalgoers and hope that sheer energy will somehow become comedy.
It doesn't.
I'm sure Owen Wilson had a terrific time making this. The weather looks nice. He got to hang around a huge music festival. He met a bunch of hip-hop stars. Everybody probably had fun. Unfortunately, I didn't.
Rolling Loud: The Movie is flimsy, disposable and barely substantial enough to qualify as a narrative feature. It is essentially a feature-length commercial for the Rolling Loud brand with a father-son comedy awkwardly attached to it.
If you're a huge Rolling Loud fan, maybe seeing the festival and all those performers on a giant movie screen will be enough. Otherwise, save your money.
I'm pretty sure Rolling Loud would rather you spend it on a festival ticket anyway. - ⭐️1/2
If there is one thing I have always said about giant snake movies (and apparently this is something I have strong feelings about) it is this: if you are going to make a giant snake movie, make a giant snake movie.
Show me the snake.
Beware Boiúna is definitely a giant snake movie. Unfortunately, it makes the rather significant mistake of spending an awful lot of time trying not to show us the giant snake.
Directed by Mike P. Nelson and written by Alan B. McElroy, Beware Boiúna is set deep in the Amazon rainforest, where a humanitarian medical mission traveling along the Curuçá River encounters a group of ruthless illegal loggers who are busy exploiting the land.
Their presence (and eventually the violence between the two groups) awakens the Boiúna, a gigantic serpent from indigenous mythology that apparently has had enough of everybody screwing around with its territory.
So now you have medical workers, bad guys, environmental destruction, indigenous mythology, people running through the jungle and an enormous pissed-off snake. That should be enough.
We have a long and extremely distinguished (or undistinguished, depending on how you look at it) history of giant snake movies. Obviously the one everybody immediately thinks of is 1997’s Anaconda, with Jennifer Lopez, Ice Cube, Eric Stoltz and Jon Voight giving one of the most gloriously ridiculous performances of his career.
That movie understood exactly what it was. It was trash, and it embraced the trash. It spawned sequels and eventually the bizarre meta version with Jack Black and Paul Rudd, because apparently the world will never completely run out of reasons to make another Anaconda movie.
Personally, I also have great affection for Spasms, the wonderfully trashy 1983 drive-in creature feature with Peter Fonda and the great Oliver Reed. That is one of my favorite giant-serpent movies because, again, it understands the assignment.
And there have been plenty of others: Boa, King Cobra, Boa vs. Python, The Snake King, Mega Snake, Lockjaw. This is an entire little subgenre built around one very basic promise. There will be a giant snake, and eventually that giant snake will eat somebody.
I am not asking for Chekhov here.
The frustrating thing about Beware Boiúna is that Nelson seems slightly embarrassed by the kind of movie he is making. This is clearly a lower-budget production, and instead of embracing those limitations and getting creative with them, the movie spends much of its running time trying to hide them.
The snake attacks are frequently shot with shaky cameras, rapid editing, loud musical stings and frantic movement. You hear things. You see flashes of things. The camera gets tossed around. Everybody screams.
But where is my goddamn snake?
Kiana Madeira plays Lena, whose father is also part of the expedition, while Jessica Rothe is one of the leaders of the medical mission. Rothe has become a terrific presence in genre movies and something of a modern scream queen, and she brings exactly the kind of energy you want in a movie like this.
Then there is Logan Marshall-Green, who gets to be wonderfully slimy as Brennan Malloy, essentially filling the Jon Voight slot if we are going to use Anaconda as the obvious reference point.
The actors understand what they are doing, but the movie around them keeps insisting that all of this should mean something more. Nelson and McElroy layer in material about illegal logging, environmental destruction, exploitation of the rainforest and the Boiúna functioning as an ancient guardian reclaiming its territory.
There is absolutely a movie to be made using this mythology to explore those ideas, but Beware Boiúna never develops them with enough complexity to justify how seriously it takes them.
The environmental message is simplistic, the villains are basically villains because the movie needs villains, and the ecological themes eventually feel less like ideas than explanations for why the giant snake is angry.
And I don't need a lengthy explanation for why the giant snake is angry. It's a giant snake. Let it be angry.
This is where the movie really loses me, because there is nothing wrong with making a ridiculous creature feature. In fact, there is something wonderful about filmmakers who understand that ridiculousness can be the entire point. Anaconda understood that.
Spasms sure as hell understood it. You can have themes underneath the carnage, but the themes cannot become an excuse for forgetting why everybody bought a ticket in the first place. If your movie is about a gigantic mythical serpent hunting people through the Amazon, I want suspense, I want inventive attacks, I want crazy deaths, and most importantly, I want to see the creature.
There is one sequence in Beware Boiúna where everything finally comes together, and for several minutes I thought, “Okay, now this is the movie I came to see.”
Lena becomes trapped in this horrible black mud, almost like a giant tar pit or quicksand, and she slowly sinks until she is nearly submerged. She can barely move, she is struggling to breathe, and meanwhile the Boiúna is slithering around her.
Suddenly Nelson stops hiding the creature and allows the situation itself to generate the suspense. Madeira sells the panic beautifully, the snake effects actually look pretty good, and the whole sequence has a wonderfully nasty simplicity: a woman is stuck, she cannot move, and there is a gigantic snake nearby that would very much like to eat her.
Perfect.
It is easily the centerpiece of the movie and proof that this material could have worked. For that sequence, the filmmakers stop shaking the camera around and assaulting us with editing tricks long enough to let us experience the threat.
We understand where Lena is, where the creature is, what could happen and why she cannot simply run away. That is how suspense works. You establish geography, create a seemingly impossible situation and then make us wonder how the hell somebody is going to get out of it.
Unfortunately, once that sequence is over, the movie goes right back to its old habits.
The later attacks become another collection of quick cuts, shaky camerawork, noise and chaos. Instead of making the Boiúna the star of the movie, Nelson repeatedly uses filmmaking tricks to disguise it. Maybe that is because the production did not have enough money to put a convincing giant CGI snake onscreen for extended periods.
Fine. I understand that. Low-budget horror filmmakers have been solving that problem for about a hundred years. But hiding your monster can only work when what you are not showing is scarier than what you could show. Eventually, a creature feature has to deliver the creature.
Beware Boiúna never delivers enough.
There are talented people involved here. Madeira is good, Rothe continues to be a welcome presence in genre movies, Marshall-Green makes an effectively sleazy human antagonist, and that mud-pit sequence is legitimately suspenseful.
The Amazon setting should have been perfect for this kind of movie, and the mythology of the Boiúna gives the filmmakers something more interesting to work with than simply “big snake.”
But somewhere along the way, everybody decided they were making a serious environmental survival thriller instead of a big, stupid, entertaining monster movie. The result is a film that is too self-important to be much fun and too simplistic to work as the meaningful ecological horror story it apparently wants to be.
I cannot recommend Beware Boiúna. And if you are the particular kind of moviegoer who sees the words “colossal mythical serpent” in a plot description and immediately thinks, “Oh, I am absolutely seeing that,” I suspect you are going to be frustrated too.
Because I will repeat the rule one last time.
If you're going to make a giant snake movie, show me the giant snake. - ⭐️1/2
For decades, Indonesian cinema has given us some of the most gloriously insane genre movies on the planet. These are movies that frequently refuse to choose between horror, martial arts, comedy, melodrama, action and buckets of blood when they can simply throw all of those things together and see what happens.
The Raid, The Raid 2, The Night Comes for Us, Macabre, The Queen of Black Magic...there is an exuberance and a willingness to go completely over the top in some of the best Indonesian genre cinema that I absolutely love.
And now we have Ghost in the Cell, which is one of the strangest, funniest, bloodiest and most unexpectedly positive prison movies I have seen in a long time.
The title itself is a joke, obviously riffing on Ghost in the Shell, and that should give you some indication of what writer-director Joko Anwar is up to here. Anwar is one of the major figures in contemporary Indonesian genre filmmaking, responsible for movies like The Forbidden Door, A Copy of My Mind and Satan’s Slaves, as well as the Netflix series Nightmares and Daydreams.
He also wrote the wonderfully nasty The Queen of Black Magic. The guy understands horror, but more importantly, he understands how to mix horror with other genres without asking permission.
And Ghost in the Cell mixes everything.
The movie begins with Dimas (Endy Arfian), a journalist investigating an illegal nickel mining operation in Borneo where workers have been dying under mysterious circumstances.
His boss wants nothing to do with the story, partly because the newspaper is struggling financially and partly because serious investigative journalism apparently isn't great for business.
After angrily ordering Dimas to rewrite the piece, the boss is brutally murdered in his office. By the time someone arrives, Dimas is standing there horrified while his boss' mutilated body is hanging from the ceiling fan.
This is approximately when you realize Joko Anwar is not going to be subtle.
Dimas is convicted of the murder and sent to Labuhan Angsana prison, where we meet the real ensemble of the movie: Anggoro (Abimana Aryasatya), who continually gets time added to his sentence because he stands up to abusive guards; Six (Yoga Pratama), a guy who may or may not be able to see ghosts; the deeply religious Wildan (Mike Lucock); former professor Pendi (Lukman Sardi); and Irfan (Danang Suryonegoro).
The prisoners live under constant pressure from violent inmates and corrupt authority figures, and one of the great reversals in the movie is that the prisoners are essentially the good guys. The institutions and many of the people running them are considerably worse.
Then people start getting ripped apart.
One particularly nasty prisoner encounters a grotesque version of himself in the shower (a figure whose face is covered with disturbing black holes or dots) and gets horribly mutilated.
Another inmate dies after discovering his wife has betrayed him. Six, who begins the movie suffering from headaches, discovers that he can suddenly see people's auras, and he notices something important: shortly before somebody gets slaughtered by the ghost, that person's aura turns red.
Red means anger. Negativity. Rage.
So the prisoners arrive at an absolutely wonderful conclusion: if you don't want the demon to rip you into several pieces and turn your corpse into an art installation, you have to stay positive.
Good luck doing that in prison.
This is where Ghost in the Cell becomes something truly special, because Anwar takes this absurd premise and keeps finding hilarious variations on it. Maintaining a positive aura apparently requires either prayer or art.
Some of these guys are religious. Some aren't. At one point they start discussing how long it would take to read the Quran because they are desperately trying to figure out exactly how much religion they need in order to avoid being murdered by a ghost.
There are discussions about different kinds of faith, superstition, philosophy and what an aura actually means. And then they take dancing lessons.
This leads to the glorious spectacle of hardened prisoners realizing that when everybody starts getting angry, maybe they should stop fighting and dance. There are entire sequences involving prisoners learning choreography because art may literally save their lives.
There is also a terrific extended fight sequence done in that wonderful Indonesian hand-to-hand combat style, except the characters have to keep balancing their aggression against the possibility that becoming too angry will turn them into the demon's next victim.
The sequence involves a dirty toilet brush, a pot lid and other objects that I am pretty sure Bruce Lee never had to worry about.
This movie is nuts.
But the remarkable thing is that underneath all of this insanity, Anwar is actually talking about something. Ghost in the Cell is a political satire about class, corruption and authority.
It is also about religion, faith, mental health, friendship, art and the ways people survive environments specifically designed to strip them of their humanity.
There is a recurring joke in which somebody explains the brutal reality of a situation by essentially saying, “You're in Indonesia, not Norway,” as though Norway represents some mythical land where everything is peaceful and nobody has to worry about being disemboweled by an aura demon.
The class satire becomes particularly sharp when the prisoners discover that corrupt politicians have their own section of the prison, where incarceration apparently looks more like a luxury hotel stay.
Eventually everything connects back to Dimas' investigation in Borneo and the government official involved with the illegal mining operation. The ghost has followed Dimas into prison, but the murdered inmates are not necessarily its ultimate targets. They are almost fuel for something that has unfinished business.
The prisoners eventually realize that if the spirit is attracted to negativity, they can use that against the corrupt politician. Pendi calls him and reminds him of the idealistic young politician he used to be, forcing him to confront just how completely he has betrayed those ideals.
His aura darkens, and suddenly the very supernatural force that has been terrorizing the prisoners becomes a weapon against the corruption that helped create it.
That is a lot to pack into a movie that also contains dance lessons, toilet-brush martial arts and people being torn apart.
And make no mistake: Ghost in the Cell is incredibly violent. When the demon kills somebody, it does not simply kill them. It rearranges them.
Bodies are mutilated and displayed almost like grotesque pieces of art, reminding me of that unforgettable image in The Silence of the Lambs when Hannibal Lecter transforms one of the murdered guards into this horrifying bloody tableau.
There is a kitchen sequence involving a cook that is especially nasty, and almost every imaginable form of bodily mutilation eventually makes an appearance.
I should also issue a very specific warning for anybody who suffers from trypophobia, because I have a little of this myself and it freaks me out. Trypophobia is that intense discomfort some people experience when they see clusters of little holes or dots grouped together.
The supernatural figures in this movie have faces covered in exactly those kinds of patterns. So if that particular thing gets under your skin, congratulations: Joko Anwar has personally designed a monster for you.
The cast is terrific because everybody understands the bizarre tonal balancing act. The movie can move from grotesque horror to broad comedy to martial arts to a serious conversation about faith and political corruption, sometimes within a matter of minutes, and somehow the actors keep it together.
There are even references to Søren Kierkegaard, and other philosophers and poets floating around amid all the insanity. On paper, this thing should be a disaster. Instead, the collision of tones becomes the movie's personality.
What surprised me most, though, is how genuinely positive Ghost in the Cell ultimately becomes. For a movie filled with corrupt politicians, abusive authority figures, violent criminals, ghosts, demons and spectacular bodily mutilation, it has a remarkably optimistic view of humanity.
These prisoners survive by looking out for each other. They talk about faith. They make art. They dance. They find ways to control their anger in a place that gives them every possible reason to be angry.
Basically, the philosophy of Ghost in the Cell is: keep your aura bright, try to be a decent human being, pray if that works for you, make some art if it doesn't, and maybe the demon won't rip your intestines out.
I can get behind that.
Ghost in the Cell is manic, bloody, hilarious, political, philosophical, ridiculous and occasionally completely out of its mind. It takes prison-movie clichés (including, yes, the inevitable dropping-the-soap gag) and turns them inside out while simultaneously functioning as a supernatural horror movie, a martial-arts picture, a political satire and a surprisingly thoughtful story about friendship and maintaining your humanity under impossible circumstances.
It is also a terrific example of why I wish American audiences had more opportunities to see Indonesian genre movies theatrically. There is a fearlessness to movies like this, a willingness to mash together tones and genres that American studio filmmaking would probably spend six development meetings trying to eliminate.
I had a great time with Ghost in the Cell. It is unique, weird, ridiculously violent, unexpectedly thoughtful and outrageously entertaining. Joko Anwar knows exactly how crazy his movie is, and instead of apologizing for it, he keeps making it crazier.
Highly recommended.
And remember: when the demon shows up, don't get angry...Dance. - ⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2
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