Thriller
The Infernal Machine (15)
Review: It’s one of cinema’s great ironies that portraits of the writing process seldom find the right words to convey the anguish and exhilaration of committing thoughts to paper or a laptop screen. Based on The Hilly Earth Society podcast penned by Louis Kornfeld, The Infernal Machine is a slow-burning psychological thriller about a reclusive writer’s emergence from solitude to face the threat of an obsessive fan, who may be connected to the deadly campus shooting that sent the author into self-imposed exile. Anyone who has seen the Oscar-winning 1990 adaptation of Misery starring Kathy Bates and James Caan knows how badly a relationship between a creative and their fervent admirer can end.
Writer-director Andrew Hunt has fun placing his beleaguered protagonist in jeopardy and slowly tightening thumbscrews with one disorienting twist after another. The house of cards collapses in a messy second half that echoes one of the lead character’s tirades about story structure: nobody cares about an inspired second act if the denouement fall flat. Guy Pearce adopts a wandering Lancashire accent as the guilt-riddled wordsmith, who seeks absolution in a bottle and is too inebriated to spot the warning signs of his impending downfall until it is almost too late.
He plays writer Bruce Cogburn, who lives in booze-soaked seclusion on the outskirts of Almas Perdidas in California. It has been 25 years since the publication of his controversial debut The Infernal Machine, which won numerous awards and was infamously pulled from shelves following a shooting at Knoxville university which left 13 dead and 26 critically injured. The 17-year-old culprit, Dwight Tufford (Alex Pettyfer), claimed the book compelled him to pull the trigger. Bruce communicates with his agent Jerry by pay phone and she forwards mail to a PO box, including a barrage of handwritten letters from diehard fan William DuKent in Aspen, Colorado.
This ardent disciple is a fledgling wordsmith and hopes to speak with his idol. “I don’t do interviews. Never have, never will,” Bruce growls into William’s voicemail inbox. Fanaticism moulders into a dangerous fixation and Bruce grows increasingly paranoid, acquiring a guard dog for protection. Local police officer Laura Higgins (Alice Eve) kindly listens to Bruce’s concerns and when the situation deteriorates, the jittery author seeks an audience with Dwight in a maximum-security prison. “The right combination of words will make a man do just about anything…” icily observes the convict.
The combination of writer-director Hunt’s words won’t make me consider The Infernal Machine as anything more than a ruthlessly efficient potboiler that stumbles at the final hurdle. Pearce puts his character through the wringer while co-stars effectively play against type to sustain tension. Pieces of the elaborate puzzle are more satisfying than the completed picture.
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Comedy
Violent Night (15)
Review: According to the lyrics of Santa Claus Is Comin’ To Town, “He knows if you’ve been bad or good/So be good for goodness sake”. That plea certainly doesn’t apply to the figurehead of Christmas in director Tommy Wirkola’s giddily irreverent home invasion thriller. The ample-bellied man in the red suit is drunk and disorderly in charge of reindeer, unapologetically profane and deeply disrespectful of homeowners and their property (especially liquor cabinets). He is also the hammer-wielding hero of Violent Night, the illegitimate love child of Bad Santa and Die Hard, which compels a hungover and disillusioned Saint Nick to dole out season’s beatings when he should be delivering presents to sweetly slumbering children.
The naughty list is extensive in Wirkola’s gratuitously gory picture, which boasts John Wick director David Leitch as a producer. His influence is pronounced in two, stunt-heavy fight sequences: a young girl replicating Home Alone-style booby traps to fend off thugs and a showdown between Santa and gun-toting assailants, which choreographs jaw-dropping carnage while Bryan Adams croons “Christmas Time”. Screenwriters Pat Casey and Josh Miller, who turbo-charged the recent Sonic The Hedgehog films, pay tongue-in-cheek homage to seasonal favourites including Miracle On 34th Street for a subversive Christmas caper that salves a deeply sadistic streak (a wooden nutcracker is abused as an instrument of torture) with heart-warming sentimentality. It’s a potent and heady brew like homemade egg nog with overly generous sloshes of bourbon, rum and brandy.
Santa Claus (David Harbour) enjoys a couple of beers at a pub in Bristol on Christmas Eve before he takes flight in his reindeer-pulled sleigh. He materialises down the chimney of greedy matriarch Gertrude Lightstone (Beverly D’Angelo) just as criminal mastermind Mr Scrooge (John Leguizamo) storms the mansion with an army of goons led by right-hand man Gingerbread (Andre Eriksen). The intruders are targeting 300 million US dollars in the Lightstone family vault.
They take hostages including Gertrude’s son Jason (Alex Hassell), his wife Linda (Alexis Louder) and their young daughter Trudy (Leah Brady). Gertrude’s money-grabbing daughter Alva (Edi Patterson) is also collateral with her buffoonish action movie star husband Morgan (Cam Gigandet) and their bratty, social-media obsessed son Bert (Alexander Elliot). “When he was small, I begged you to beat him,” despairs grandmother Gertrude. Santa discovers innocent believer Trudy is in peril and he reluctantly takes matters into his white-gloved hands.
Violent Night gleefully desecrates Yuletide iconography, spraying bodily fluids in all directions for groans and ghoulish giggles. Harbour embraces his character’s Viking past to perform physically demanding brawls without losing sight of the touching emotional connection to Brady’s moppet. On-screen bloodletting is copious including a close encounter with a wood chipper but the tone is stylised and predominantly comical. Santa sleighs and slays again.
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