THE CAST – Judy Greer, Paul Sparks, Alison Pill, Tracy Letts, Annie Parisse & Alexander Skarsgård

THE TEAM – Michael Shannon (Director) & Brett Neveu (Writer)

THE RUNNING TIME – 119 Minutes

There’s a famous t-shirt aimed directly at film nerds that says, “Judy Greer should’ve been the lead.” I’m not sure if Michael Shannon saw someone wearing that shirt while walking the streets of Chicago, or like many of us, he’s been impressed with her talents for years and wanted to give her an opportunity worthy of her abilities. Either way, Shannon made the right decision in choosing her to play Janice, the troubled, grieving mother at the center of his directorial debut. Unfortunately, she’s the best thing about the film by a significant margin. Brett Neveu’s screenplay presents a difficult task to the actors as it’s a tonal mess, and no one involved seems to know how best to tame it. Greer is mostly successful in rising above the writing’s shortcomings, but she’s alone in being able to make the screenplay feel anything but awkward.

Janice is in mourning for her son, Eric; however, he’s very much alive but confined to a maximum security prison. As we learn through context clues, Eric procured a pair of guns, brought them to his high school, and killed three of his fellow students. This violent tragedy has put a strain on the relationship between Janice and her husband, Ron (Alexander Skarsgård). Specifically, Ron has started to lean hard into religion as a coping mechanism, whereas Janice has increasingly retreated into herself, taking a leave from her retail job and generally avoiding people.

Shannon’s film primarily focuses on Janice as she slowly attempts to reenter the world. She starts working again and, begrudgingly, begins seeing a local pastor named Steve (Paul Sparks), who wants to have Janice meet with the three mothers of the slain children to obtain some sort of group healing or absolution. Janice trudges through her days, approaching situations with the energy of someone doing what they think they should rather than what they want to be doing – and Greer is extraordinary in her portrayal. It would be easy for the character to feel monotonous, especially given the screenplay’s repetitive nature; she and her husband have a habit of getting into the same arguments multiple times throughout the film, which isn’t necessarily unrealistic but does feel dramatically tiring. Greer finds a shocking amount of variation in her character’s actions and reactions. During one of the many fights between her and Skarsgård, where she clearly wants her husband to say something different than the regurgitated Jesus-focused platitudes he’s become fond of, Greer adopts a heart-stopping expression of desperate, silent longing that says much more about their relationship than any of the couple’s dialogue. The film is filled with similar moments of unbelievably expressive acting from Greer. She even manages to make the climactic conversation between herself and her on-screen son work, conveyed through Janice’s dialogue, despite the odd conclusions that the screenplay presents at this point.

Neveu intends to tell a difficult story filled with challenging ideas; it wants to be the type of film that will force viewers to have revelatory post-film conversations about the topics it presents. But it’s more likely to inspire discussions about the shortcomings of the movie itself. Most notably, the characters habitually blur out every intrusive thought that passes through their minds. Sometimes, this is used for comedic purposes, such as with Janice’s tactless co-workers. But confusingly, this is also presented as a quirk of Ron’s that’s supposed to set him apart from the other characters. In particular, he has a penchant for offering people neck massages in moments of distress. This peculiar character trait would more effectively show how lost and disoriented Ron is if everyone else in town didn’t have similar off-putting conversational tendencies.

Shannon doesn’t help this tonal perplexity with his strange pacing. The film is generally deliberate in this respect, appropriately mirroring Janice’s depression. At its best, the cold cinematography, patient editing, and Jonathan Mastro’s sparse, spooky score work in harmony to efficiently emphasize the intended haunted tone. Some of the instances of comedic relief (if that’s actually what they’re supposed to be) are spliced up in a way that’s dizzying and distracting; however, it’s hard to blame Shannon when the screenplay is such a mess of conflicting moods and bursts of bizarreness.

Although Greer miraculously finds a way to navigate through it, the rest of the cast is largely unsuccessful at conquering the screenplay’s difficulties. One exception is Annie Parisse, who plays Stephanie, the mother of one of the victims. She’s firmly entrenched in the “anger” part of the Kübler-Ross model, and Parisse fully gives into this painful energy. Although she’s undoubtedly a sympathetic character, Parisse doesn’t shy away from emphasizing the nastiness of the things Stephanie says to Janice. She gives a perfect depiction of the fury that’s entirely justified but still hard to watch. And Sparks plays the well-meaning but obnoxious pastor with a realistically dopey energy, but he’s unable to overcome the frustratingly clueless way he’s written. Skarsgård and Alison Pill (who plays Lisa, a loyal churchgoer) – both typically reliable actors – struggle to find the humanity in the passionate evangelicals they portray. They’re unable to push through the screenplay’s surface-level, borderline parody characterizations.

In the way it approaches hot-button topics and painful conversations, Shannon’s debut feature attempts to take la rue less traveled with a story built around a surprising subject – the complicated mother of a school shooter. But “Eric LaRue” doesn’t have the grace or profundity required to make it through the labyrinth of tricky ideas that it wishes to traverse. And it’s the actors who most take on this unenviable burden of a screenplay, and nearly all crumble under its weight – all except the supremely talented Judy Greer.

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THE CAST – Douglas Booth, Alison Pill, Iris Apatow & Patrick J. Adams

THE TEAM – José Lourenço (Director/Writer)

THE RUNNING TIME – 101 Minutes

In its own words, José Lourenço’s “Young Werther” is “based on the smash hit 1774 novel of tragic romance that drove the entirety of Europe into a full-on literary tizzy.” It’s true – Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s “The Sorrows of Young Werther” was a bona fide literary sensation in its time, catapulting the young Goethe to fame and inspiring a “Werther fever” that manifested in a fashion craze among young men, among other things. The novel’s tremendous staying power has inspired numerous adaptations, parodies, and sequels over the past two and a half centuries, so you might expect a film version to be full of big-studio prestige. Lourenço’s version, however, is decidedly modest in its presentation (if not its ambition), taking a cast of Hollywood B-Listers and letting them shine on the streets of Toronto in an amiably comic spin on the material. While it may not be the grand cinematic pleasure one might envision for such classic source material, this “Young Werther” is not without its pleasures.

Young hedonist Werther (Douglas Booth) is in Toronto on a mission to fetch a family heirloom for his mother. While there, he sees Charlotte (Alison Pill) witheringly dressing down a would-be suitor for her sister, Sissy (Iris Apatow), and falls in love on the spot. He introduces himself and ingratiates himself enough to get an invite to a party they’re hosting that evening, where he and Charlotte drink and flirt. Unfortunately, Charlotte is engaged to be married to lawyer Albert (Patrick J. Adams), a perfect man who recurrently seems more devoted to his work than to Charlotte. In order to win Charlotte’s hand, Werther decides to simply befriend her for the summer and show her how much better of a man he is than Albert.

Naturally, none of this goes the way Werther expects. The charismatic Booth barrels through every scene with the carefree abandon of the young, beautiful, and wealthy. Good thing, too, because Werther can be insufferable, especially in Lourenço’s hyper-literate, hyper-speedy dialogue. While often incredibly funny, the screenplay has a very arch tone that exhausts as much as it invigorates. This leaves it up to the cast to compensate, which they do in spades. Everyone with a speaking role is full of personality, and they all light up the screen with good vibes and positive energy. Pill’s feistiness shines through in early scenes, but the way she lets the walls she’s built up slowly crumble in Werther’s presence really draws you to her. She’s a perfect foil for Booth, and their exceptionally sweet chemistry makes every beat of their romance land, even (and perhaps especially) when they protest it. They somehow manage to make the act of washing dishes seem like the height of romance.

Lourenço films “Young Werther” with plenty of color, washing scenes in vibrant colors that always come directly from the environment, and thus never feel like a heavy-handed aesthetic choice. Make no mistake, though, there are plenty of heavy-handed aesthetic choices in the film, mostly surrounding comic moments of editing or scoring (a choir singing Charlotte’s name on the soundtrack earns one of the film’s biggest laughs). The blurry backgrounds and slightly overexposed lighting often betray the film’s low budget, but Lourenço gives the film enough visual style and verbal wit to compensate for that.

The film’s plot, which hews remarkably closely to the original novel until the last act, can’t help but feel episodic and even a bit thin. While each individual scene is smartly written with plenty of deliciously tart dialogue for the actors to sink their teeth into, they also feel like archetypal scenes we’ve seen countless times before, with little to elevate them. A scene where Charlotte has Werther help her unzip a dress at a sample sale has been shot, edited, and performed for maximum romanticism, and yet something about it still feels a little chintzy, a little like a first draft. Still, Lourenço does a decent job updating the story in a way that feels plausibly of this century, which is no easy feat. Hopefully, the industry takes note of what he was able to do with such limited resources because while he never fully overcomes them, the extent to which he does is impressive enough to make him a filmmaker to watch.

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THE CAST – Josh Hartnett, Ariel Donoghue, Saleka Shyamalan, Hayley Mills & Alison Pill

THE TEAM – M. Night Shyamalan (Director/Writer)

THE RUNNING TIME – 105 Minutes

At this point in M. Night Shyamalan’s 30-plus-year-long career, you’re either someone tuned into his one-of-a-kind filmmaking frequency, or you aren’t. There seems to be almost no middle ground between staunch supporters of his work and dismissive skeptics who can’t quite wrap their heads around his style. I, for one, have been a lifelong Shyamalan defender, at least as long as I’ve been aware of his oeuvre in the time between now and when I first saw “Signs” and “The Sixth Sense” on cable. On the other hand, the general public has a weird obsession with treating M Night’s movies—especially those released after “Unbreakable“—as if they are unintentionally hilarious or so bad that they come around to being enjoyable. In reality, his films during this ongoing period are, to varying degrees, often quite intentionally comedic—”Trap” might just be his funniest movie yet—and they always, always provide some of the best movie-going experiences of the year.

What makes Shyamalan’s movies tick isn’t just his acute attention to detail, his mind-boggling twists, or even his persistent willingness to experiment with the cinematic form (although these three characteristics are some of his biggest strengths as a certified auteur). Rather, Shyamalan’s devout commitment to the power of family and the belief that there is at least a little bit of good in everyone are the cruxes of his cinematic ventures. And even more so than any of his previous outings, “Trap” is a real Shyamalan family affair as his daughter, Saleka (a real-life RNB artist), plays Lady Raven, the central pop star in the movie. Saleka also wrote and performed all of the songs used by her fictional persona. Though she is noticeably more comfortable acting on stage than off, her presence in the movie is quite welcome, and her pop star character contemporises the film in ways sure to resonate with moviegoers.

Pitched as “What if ‘The Silence of the Lambs‘ happened at a Taylor Swift Concert,” “Trap” is a non-stop thrill ride, though rarely scary, that follows Cooper (Josh Hartnett) as he takes his teenage daughter Riley (Ariel Donoghue) to an arena pop concert, only to find out that the entire concert is actually a trap set up to catch The Butcher, a notorious serial killer who also just so happens to be Cooper’s secret identity. The movie wastes no time getting to the point as it takes us through a rapid-fire first 15 minutes that dually functions to reveal the nature of Cooper’s hidden second life and to situate the viewer in the physical space of the concert venue. The spatial mapping of the venue is achieved through masterful cinematography from Sayombhu Mukdeeprom that makes extensive use of tracking shots, slow push-ins towards static subjects within the frame, and breathtaking shot composition that perfectly delineates between the metaphysical space of Cooper’s mind and the tangible space of the arena. Hartnett’s indelible performance, oozing with lovable dad charisma, is equally important in allowing the film to straddle those two arenas and pairs wonderfully with the cinematography, whether he’s center frame or his face is split right down the middle.

The story that ensues after the movie’s mesmerizing hook is part concert film, part cat & mouse thriller between Cooper and the profiler (Hayley Mills) leading the manhunt, all riotous good time. “Trap” boasts what is easily M. Night Shyamalan’s funniest script, deftly weaving together everyday situational humor with more out-there comedy built around the absurdity of the film’s premise but still leaving space for more serious moments. One of the most effective instances of this comedic mash-up comes when Cooper, in his patented paradoxical style of laid-back panicking, gets roped into an unwanted conversation with a fellow parent (Marnie McPhail) at the concert while he is trying to sow chaos in order to delay his discovery by the authorities. Anyone can relate to the mundane misfortune of being stuck in an unsolicited interaction. Still, the way Shyamalan writes the scene with a sense of comedic urgency plays so well that it feels fresh and new. The performance best suited to the comedic tilt of the script comes from Jonathan Langdon in his scene-stealing portrayal of an over-eager merch vendor whose true crime mania unwittingly leads him to assist Cooper. Shyamalan’s script, especially in scenes between the vendor and Cooper, is always telegraphing possible scenarios that Cooper could face but, much like the character of Cooper himself, exercises immense restraint in actually confronting these situations, keeping the viewer on their toes. The movie is shot almost entirely from Cooper’s perspective and works wonders in elevating the already rock-solid material. It does a great job of allowing the audience to understand who Cooper is as a person without seeing his actions as wholly predictable.

Aside from the aforementioned strengths that the cinematography and script bring to “Trap,” the movie is also helped immensely by its production design. Debbie DeVilla’s rendering of the concert venue, which encompasses everything from multiple different stage designs for the concert to merch stands in the outer hallways to storage closets to green rooms, lays the foundation for the larger atmosphere-building brought about through the culmination of the technical components of the movie.

Where “Trap” separates itself from a typical Shyamalan experience, however, is in the structure of its twists. What would be the central surprise in any other M. Night movie is revealed in “Trap’s” trailer. The film instead opts for multiple surprise turns throughout its 105-minute runtime that lead away from the concert setting and are much more subtle than what moviegoers have come to expect from the director. While this is certain to divide fans due to the lack of an explosive ending, these tamer choices primarily work to the film’s benefit by simultaneously deepening our understanding of the characters and subverting expectations in exciting ways to drive the plot. “Trap” never loses grip of its distinctly Shyamalanian charm thanks to the power of the director’s craftsmanship—there are some shots of Cooper at the concert that are incredible in how they reveal the character’s inner workings through the juxtaposition of Cooper with his surroundings—and the presence of themes that are constantly woven throughout his work. Most notably effused in Cooper’s commitment to his family, which is central to the drive of “Trap” and paints a picture of a father whose secret life has, up to a breaking point, no diminishing effect on his devotion to his family. “Trap” is sure to test the limits of audiences’ patience with Shyamalan’s belief in the inherent goodness of man.

Ultimately, “Trap” asks what happens to someone and the people around them when it becomes impossible to separate the two diametrically opposed facets of their personality despite all efforts to keep them apart. It is a movie wildly sympathetic to its main character, even in the face of his ultra-violent tendencies (almost all of which occur off-screen). It’s another high-quality entry into the fascinating filmography of one of the best and most polarizing American filmmakers working today.

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