The Seattle International Film Festival is a beast of a festival. From opening gala to closing party, it runs for 25 days spread out across 8 theaters on most days. Technically, that’s a cheat as the primary festival is only spread out over 6 screens in 3 districts of Seattle, and the remaining 2 are satellite theaters in various nearby cities. Still, that leaves 263 new feature-length and documentary films aired throughout the course of the festival, with most highlights being given by word of mouth or “programmer’s picks.” To contrast, Tribeca is 14 theaters but only over 10 days. Tribeca is a high intensity sprint, but SIFF is an endurance run.
On Friday, my SIFF started with a bang. I didn’t make it to a film proper until the 9:30pm screening of Goodnight Mommy, an Austrian film that attracted my attention because it met two qualifications: a) I hadn’t seen a press screening of it yet, and b) it was near to the midnight film theater. Sometimes your standards have to be low to survive without having to hike 3 miles across town every 2 hours.
The festival guidebook compared Goodnight Mommy to Michael Haneke, describing it as an “an atmospheric battle of wills” that “is psychologically terrifying.” This is playing it a bit coy. Goodnight Mommy, the fictional directorial debuts of Veronika Franz (screenwriter of 2013’s Paradise trilogy) and Severin Fiala, resembles Michael Haneke’s films about psychological warfare until it begins to look more like a sibling of Martyrs.
After coming home from the hospital with her face covered in bandages, a mom finds that her twin 9-year-old sons, Lukas and Elias, have started to distrust her. They begin to play macabre games to test her love while she grows increasingly strict and distant. Franz and Fiala ratchet up the tension while keeping us at enough of a distance to not know who to fully empathize with. On the mom’s side, Franz and Fiala are exploring themes of hellion children along the lines of The Babadook. But, if we empathize with the kids, suddenly we’re exploring themes of identity and image in an era where faces can constantly change. A last minute twist feels almost as cheap as it is throwaway, but that doesn’t negate the previous 90 minutes of pure intense insanity. This movie also had a seizure without having a strobe effect, and there were 3 walkouts I personally knew of.
Which brings us to the premiere feature of SIFF’s Midnight Adrenaline series. DEATHGASM (“all caps, lower case is for pussies”) is a 10th grade metalhead fantasy. After his mom was committed to a sanitarium, Brodie is sent to live with his Christian conservative aunt and uncle, and their bullying jock son. Brodie befriends two D&D-playing nerds and Zakk to form the titular metal band. After Brodie and Zakk stumble upon pages for a black hymn, they summon the King of Demons and all hell breaks loose.
The best way to describe DEATHGASM is to take the cult Canadian television show Todd and the Book of Pure Evil, restyle it as Joseph Kahn’s Detention, and replace the director with Dead Alive-era Peter Jackson. In the vein of high school metalheads, DEATHGASM is cheap, sexist, delightfully perverse, gratuitously violent, and uproariously immature. It has enough blood and guts to delight any fan of horror comedy. Originally, SIFF was going to open the movie with a live metal band, but they cancelled. Instead, programmer Clinton McClung came out in face paint and tights to be shot with darts in the crotch for film vouchers. This cemented why the Midnight Adrenaline series sometimes has the best midnight experiences one could hope for.
In lighter fare across town, Ciudad Delirio is the antithesis to Goodnight Mommy. It’s a light and fluffy Colombian film about a salsa teacher fielding a separation with her ex-husband, a budding romance with a stiff doctor from Madrid, and trying to get her dance school in to a nightclub variety show. The film actually puts the focus on the stiff doctor from Madrid with the simplistic How Stefano Got His Groove Back plot, but doesn’t make the salsa teacher a passive trophy to be won. Director Chuz Gutierrez keeps Ciudad Delirio running smoothly and sweetly, with secure direction and fantastic pacing.
Last year, when I discussed Alex of Venice, I said that making a movie to give yourself a highlight reel is possibly unnecessary in this day of movie glut. This year, Guidance is the first to fill that hole. Writer-director-star Pat Mills was a child star on You Can’t Do That on Television, and then proceeded to become an alcoholic. His vanity vehicle, Guidance, follows David Gold, a former child television star who is now an out of work alcoholic who is also in denial of his sexuality. I guess if you don’t have anything to play, just play yourself. Gold proceeds to act his way into a high school as a guidance counselor, where he makes “bad” decisions like giving an uptight girl shots of alcohol to loosen her up.
Guidance is a prime example of needing a second set of eyes on something. It never goes DARK, and the tone always seems more sassy than anything. For a film that is about questionable decisions, it never really commits to any of its various premises. It’s cute and kind of chuckle funny, and the premise seems to be relatively original. It’s acceptable, destined to be forgotten among many worse films but never being good.
Next Entry: Animation, Ghosts, mumblecore, and my first walkout.