[TrueFaith77]

67.Unhuman (Marcus Dunstan); grade: F
68.See How They Run (Tom George); grade: F
69.Grande Jete (Isabelle Stever); grade: C
71.The Menu (Mark Mylod); grade: F

The year’s brutalizing movies exploit real-world brutality, while the rare film attempts to explore the human dimensions of abuse. Both Knives Out wannabes Mark Mylod’s The Menu and Tom George’s See How They Run (also ripping off Wes Anderson) reveal the motivations of their respective murderers as founded in the child abuse they suffered. Upon this moral horror, the films hang the year’s most incompetent big-movie screenplay and display of film technique, respectively. Such indulgence of spiritual darkness proves enough to make audiences feel smart—these films use child abuse for cred. (Such a fall after Mylod made the definitive satire of the Washington closet in What’s Your Number?) The Tik-Tok style of Scream wannabe Unhuman means to congratulate the sophistication of young audiences, but is itself a form of abuse. More depressing than its twist (ripped off from the great Detention by Joseph Kahn), is its incapacity to highlight the talent of the underutilized Uriah Shelton (iconic in Rodrigo Garcia’s Blue, audacious in Christopher Landon’s Freaky). In international cinema, Grand Jete takes a stultifyingly dispassionate view of incest. Set in German drudgery in and outside of Berlin, it concerns a woman ballet instructor, whose physical demands she makes of her young charges she, too, probably suffered including giving up her son to pursue dance. “You have no maternal feelings,” her own mother drones. Returning home, she commences a sexual affair with her son after he invites her to an underground physique competition in which he participates. Their shared interest in pushing physical limits meets a desire to push social boundaries. The style of the film, handheld camera with characters moving in and out of shallow focus, keeps all prurience at a distance—but also empathy. The dulling emphasis on the mundane and punishing duration culminates in the scene where the mother gives birth to the child she shares with her son. The endless physical strain engenders within her, finally, maternal feelings. Somebody better cast Uriah Shelton in the American remake before it’s too late, but it better not be hacks Mylod or George!