OUT NOW: Heart Eyes (Josh Ruben, 2025)

Ally (Olivia Holt) is in a rut.

She is still climbing out of the wreckage of a past relationship, and her job is in jeopardy from a failed project.

Complicating matters further, a handsome stranger (Mason Gooding) has joined her company and seems to have eyes for her.

Is he after her job? Or her heart?

This confusion might prove fatal:

There is a serial killer called Heart Eyes on the loose, and they seem to think these two have something…

A mix of romantic comedy and slasher horror movie, Heart Eyes benefits from one thing too many movies fail to find: chemistry.

 

Not in terms of the way it mashed up the genres, but the central romance.

Frankly, I wanted to like it more. 

It jiggles both genres rather efficiently, but it feels a shade rushed as a romance.

However what the movie gets right is the casting of the leads.

Whatever issues the film has in terms of pacing, the chemistry between the main actors - the way they handle the stakes of the situation, and the dynamics of their growing attraction - helps the movie.

I am not that familiar with either Olivia Holt nor Mason Gooding, but I spent the first half of the movie enjoying the way they ran through the opening moves of a romantic comedy.

What was appealing about the movie is how straightforward it is. It is not trying to reinvent the wheel.

Holt is the working woman still hung up on her ex. Gooding is the potential work rival who might be a new chance at love.

It is so familiar yet these early scenes (including a makeover montage and an eccentric best friend, played delightfully by Gigi Zumbado) made me nostalgic for the romantic comedies of old.

The film is unapologetic and plays these scenes without irony. It feels like the people making the movie actually care about making this part of the movie work.

It was almost frustrating when the movie became more of a chase movie.

As a slasher movie, it is also pretty familiar - the infusion of another genre feels like a new coat of paint rather than something more de-constructive.

That is the movie in a nutshell.

There is no magic X factor unlocked by the combination, but it is also not a disaster.

It is just a fairly functional slasher with a little more attention to the shared leads.

It could have been more, but as is, it is solid - if a bit forgettable.

Hopefully it gives someone the bright idea to cast these actors in an actual romantic movie.

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OUT NOW: Presence (Steven Soderbergh, 2024)

A family moves into a new house, unaware that the residence is already home to an invisible entity.

Already dealing with the death of her best friend, daughter Chloe (Callina Liang) begins to suspect something is off about this new environment…

I have been looking forward to Presence for awhile. I may not love every Soderbergh movie but by god is he interesting. 

And I find a lot of his movies have a long tail - I did not like The Informant! when I first watched it.

By complete coincidence, this viewing coincided with a binge watch of some other haunted house movies, 2/3 of the Amityville and Poltergeist movies beforehand.

Presence takes the basic premise of those movies and repositions the story from the point of view of the Entity (no, not that one).  

The hook of the movie is that the film plays out from the entity’s point of view. The characterisation of the entity is entirely contextual.

We have some familiar tropes - like a clairvoyant who attempts to figure out who the entity is, and why it is attached to the house - but no concrete answers. 

The entity seems to be more curious about its new co-inhabitants than adversarial. 

And while the film suggests some level of sensitivity in Liang’s Chloe, there is no attempt to bring any kind of more defined (or generic) religious component.  

While the film is shot entirely in the first-person perspective, the filmmakers do not attempt long takes. For a movie that requires a lot of moving camera-work, it does not draw attention to itself.

 

We watch the characters at a remove, with a lot of scenes that play out from distant stationary shots.

The family at the centre of the story seem to be disconnected, not just from this environment, but each other.

There is a lot of potential to the film, but I found the script to be a bit of a drag.

While Liang is empathetic and makes her role interesting, the characters are all fairly standard types. 

The film I would compare this the most to is Kimi. That film is similarly small-scale, but the characters and the situation feel more fleshed out.

I would be keen to re-watch Presence, but on this viewing I left slightly underwhelmed.

It racks up the tension slightly towards the end, but it feels like a proof of concept for something else.

Related

The Underneath

Out of Sight

The Informant!

Magic Mike

Logan Lucky

Unsane

Kimi

Magic Mike’s Last Dance

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The Amityville Horror (Stuart Rosenberg, 1979)

Following a gruesome series of murders, the home at 112 Ocean Avenue in Amityville, New York is bought by George and Kathy Lutz (James Brolin and Margot Kidder, respectively).

As the family tries to settle into their new home, a series of bizarre disturbances destroy whatever domestic bliss they are seeking...

Time for another deep-dive into a horror franchise I have never seen!

It is hard to write about this movie without falling into the footprints of Stephen King’s review from Danse Macabre.

The least scary parts of the movie are the overtly supernatural shenanigans (the big exception is Margot Kidder catching a look of her daughter’s imaginary friend ‘Jody’s’ glowing eyes at the window).

The film has the most juice when it is just James Brolin worrying about how he is going to pay his bills.

That scene where he finds the empty money band and screams is terrifying. 

Speaking of James Brolin, he is not an actor I have thought much of. 

I am happy to eat crow now.

This is the first movie I have seen where he is not just good, but he is the movie’s standout.

He is a powder keg from the beginning.

There is one scene where he goes for histrionics and it is laughable, but that is one moment. 

Brolin’s default seems to be amiability.

Here he is constantly on edge. Right from the beginning, when he is snapping at the realtor, there is a rage to Brolin that I have never seen before - an impatience that radiates through every interaction.

For most of the film, he is the film's sole source of threat, a loaded gun waiting to go off.

Watching this movie after The Shining and Poltergeist does it no favours.

It lacks the latter’s sense of narrative momentum, and it is not aiming to burrow into the characters’ psychology like Kubrick’s masterpiece. There is nothing elliptical about Amityville - this house is haunted by a satanic presence.

But unlike Poltergeist, we never grow close enough to the family to really care about their plight. Brolin's financial troubles are closest thing these people get to any kind of specificity.

Rod Steiger’s subplot as the priest is so superfluous it felt like the role was beefed up because of the casting. I do not think the priest ever actually interacts with the family, except over the phone.

The priest scenes are the most obvious culprit but this is a movie that feels too shaggy to build or sustain any real sense of claustrophobia or tension. While the family are not that developed, every time we cut away from the house, the movie completely deflates.

Aside from Brolin's hair-trigger performance, there is nothing particularly horrific about Amityville. 

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OUT NOW: Companion (Drew Hancock, 2025)

When Iris (Sophie Thatcher) and Josh (Jack Quaid) join their friends for a weekend getaway in the woods, the young couple find themselves thrown into a situation that throws the future of their relationship into question:

Can our lovebirds save their love?

Maybe I have seen too many movies like this. 

Maybe I am just getting old.

Companion is a fun movie.

It takes a set-up that could be the starting point for a film noir or a thriller:

Our protagonist learns their lover has betrayed them as part of a scheme to make money.

In this case (spoilers) the patsy is a robot.

 

And unlike noir, the homme fatal is an idiot who manages to make the situation worse.

Despite some pitch-black laughs, this is a straight ahead thriller.

Sophie Thatcher is effective in the lead role, and the rest of the cast are having a good time puncturing their archetypes (Megan Suri is hilarious). 

While Jack Quaid played a similar role in Scream, he has more space here as the villain. Initially it appears his amiable presentation appears to be a schtick, a facade he uses to get what he wants.

As the movie progresses, it becomes clear that he is so good at appearing to be a ‘nice guy’ because he believes he is one.

There is some interesting thematic meat here. The film is trying to be a metaphor for an abusive relationship, and what makes this aspect effective is both Quaid’s casting, and the way he plays the character as a self-pitying narcissist - he is enough of an asshole to use his robot companion as a murder weapon, but he is so self-involved that he feels the need to confess all and try to rehabilitate how she perceives him.

I am not that familiar with Quaid’s work, but on the basis of this performance, I could not help but think of how effective his father Dennis is at puncturing archetypes of masculinity (Far From Heaven is the easy pull, but even in a straightforward allegory like Enemy Mine, he is sending up the idea of the ‘ugly American’).

Here Quaid is playing a shade of toxic masculinity that is distinct from the kind Dennis plays.

Jack Quaid cannot project that kind of brash machismo. Instead he is playing up vulnerability and assumed empathy, a perception of non-threat.

Thankfully, this movie is not some weighty treatise. It is a fun little thriller, nothing more and nothing less.

I wish it found a few more ways to put our heroine in jeopardy. And while there are some clever uses of the machine’s functionality, the film feels like it could be a little smarter.

That last word kind of sums up the movie: it is a solid genre picture that gets the job done, but it does feel like it leaves meat on the table.

It is not nearly as funny or weird as the premise makes it out to be.

But still, on its own terms, Companion is a good time.

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OUT NOW: Harbin (Woo Min-ho, 2024)

The story of resistance fighter Ahn Jung-geun (Hyun Bin), and his plan to assassinate Resident-General Itō Hirobumi (Lily Franky), the Japanese governor of occupied Korea. 

Set against the Korean resistance to Japanese occupation, Harbin was mMade before the recent impeachment, but feels charged with a nationalistic pride in the indefatigability of the Korean people against oppression.

While elements of the film play with genre, particularly the thriller, its focus is not what you would expect.

The film’s most unique feature is that it is centred around a central character who is faulted for his empathy.

That embrace of empathy and belief in people is the film’s guiding star.

There are only a few action sequences, but the film is less concerned with using these scenes to create a sense of excitement.  

The opening sequence foregrounds the inhumanity and horror of combat. The battle turns into bodies writhing about in mud, their uniforms completely obscured, rendering them indistinguishable from each other. There is no sense of glory here.

That scene is the only time our protagonists are shown in victory. The later setpieces (the fight on the train, the ambush at the safehouse) are essentially escapes from danger. 

Our hero’s greatest strength - his belief in people - is framed as a weakness. In a world where anyone can turn out to be a traitor he is a liability.

That theme of radical empathy is an interesting idea for what is basically a war movie, but it is somewhat less cathartic in execution. 

The film makes a lot of use of flashbacks in its third act, to reveal character motivation, and build a sense of empathy and moral ambiguity, but their inclusion does come off a little clunky, if not a little deflating in terms of maintaining tension.

An enjoyable film, although it feels like its themes are teasing a more interesting one.

Related

Phantom

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