Film Review of the Week

Drama

I'm Still Here (15)

Review: During decades of military dictatorship in Brazil, thousands of people, who were deemed opposition to the ruling regime, were victimised, threatened, tortured or murdered. Hundreds vanished and never returned. Their remains have never been unearthed. Award-winning Brazilian filmmaker Walter Salles returns home for his first dramatic feature in more than a decade to relive the 1971 forced disappearance of Rubens Paiva as documented in the autobiography of the former Brazilian Labour Party congressman’s son, Marcelo Rubens Paiva.

Screenwriters Murilo Hauser and Heitor Lorega choose the raid by armed men as a nerve-racking centrepiece of their slow-burning but riveting portrait of a liberal, middle-class Rio de Janeiro family in crisis. As the camera loiters in rooms of the Paiva family home, invaded by figures with guns tucked into trouser waistbands, Rubens calmly changes into a suit before he is taken away for questioning while his wife Eunice protects their clueless children from chilling reality by serving breakfast. It’s an impeccably staged sequence of benign domesticity under siege from silent, simmering menace.

Oscar nominee Fernanda Torres delivers a magnificent central performance as the terrified matriarch, who collides with various bureaucratic brick walls as she seeks to learn her husband’s whereabouts from military forces that stubbornly refuse to acknowledge his detainment. I’m Still Here lingers unbearably close to Eunice, her children and friends as a decades-long search for conclusive answers and an admission of culpability yields silence.

We first meet the Paivas in 1970 on the beach where Eunice (Torres) drifts calmly in the sea while nine-year-old Marcelo (Guilherme Silveira) plays football and sisters, 13-year-old Nalu (Barbara Luz) and 15-year-old Eliana (Luiza Kosovski), top up their tans. Back home, housemaid Zeze (Pri Helena) looks after eight-year-old Babiu (Cora Mora) while father Rubens (Selton Mello) conducts a business meeting in his office.

The family are reunited when 17-year-old Veroca (Valentina Herszage) returns home from the cinema after she and friends are roughly interrogated by armed forces looking for suspects responsible for the kidnapping of a Swiss diplomat. Shortly after Veroca travels to London to study, parapsychologist Dr Schneider (Luiz Bertazzo) and armed men storm the house and Rubens is led away. Eunice and Eliana are forcefully questioned and the family’s suffering begins.

Nominated as Best Picture at next month’s Oscars, I’m Still Here is emotionally devastating for the opening 90 minutes but loses dramatic momentum with sequences set in 1996 and 2014 including a brief appearance by Fernanda Montenegro (Torres’s real-life mother) as the older incarnation of Eunice in the vice-like grip of Alzheimer’s. Torres is sensational, especially during Eunice’s confinement in military barracks where her body visibly thrums with exhaustion and terror. Impressive young co-stars navigate dark subject matter with aplomb and Salles’s unfussy direction captures the oppressive mood of an era that many can and will never forget.

Horror

The Monkey (15)

Review: The mechanical monkey is nuts in writer-director Osgood Perkins’ knockabout follow-up to the atmospheric serial killer thriller, Longlegs. Adapted from one of horror maestro Stephen King’s short stories, this bloodthirsty tale of a wind-up simian with a rictus grin, who heralds the graphic demise of a randomly selected victim by rhythmically banging its drum, spares no expense with viscera and gore.

The gleeful desecration of human bodies begins in a hilariously twisted prologue and continues at pace with severed appendages, a stomach-churning encounter with winged insects and the obliteration of more than one human face by fast-moving or falling projectiles. “Everybody dies. That’s life,” casually explains a doomed character shortly before the Grim Reaper RSVPs to their going-away party, underlining the matter-of-factness with which Perkins – son of Psycho star Anthony Perkins – dispatches most of his highly expendable cast. Elaborate and satisfyingly gooey death sequences are worthy of an instalment of the Final Destination franchise.

Christian Convery and Theo James have a blast playing adolescent and adult incarnations of feuding identical twins, who take their sibling rivalry to the murderous extreme with heavy-handed help from a toy that never misses an unsuspecting target. Perkins’ script drip feeds demented giggles to garnish the glistening entrails including a set piece with an inexperienced priest (Nicco Del Rio), who blunders through a sermon at an open casket funeral, and some sly Stephen King in-jokes (listen for the name of the twins’ babysitter).

Hal Shelburn (Convery) was born three minutes after brother Bill (Convery again), who the younger child claims is more confident and assertive because he “ate most of my mum’s placenta”. Single parent Lois (Tatiana Maslany) raises the boys in the absence of their father, Captain Petey (Adam Scott). When the siblings sift through the old man’s belongings, they stumble upon a large box containing a mechanical organ grinder monkey and foolishly turn the key in the plaything’s back.

Soon after, a victim chosen by the automata becomes a 1 in 44 million medical statistic. The pair try to destroy the hand-operated menace before relocating to the home of uncle Chip (Osgood Perkins) and aunt Ida (Sarah Levy), who make few promises: “We’re going to do our very best with you boys… it’s just our very best might be pretty bad.” Twenty-five years later, adult Hal (James) and his son Petey (Colin O’Brien) confront vengeful ghosts of the past.

The Monkey serves up a scare-free smorgasbord of splatter, which clearly telegraphs the next victim. Gallows humour necessitates hair-pin tonal shifts that elicit the only jolts of surprise. The eponymous mechanism is relentless and seemingly unstoppable, suggesting limitless sequels if audiences respond favourably to the wanton bloodshed. It may be some years until we get this monkey off our backs.