FILM REVIEWS
Gone Girl Director: David Fincher Starring: Ben Affleck, Rosamund Pike, Neil Patrick Harris, Tyler Perry It’s easy to spot a David Fincher film: they’re sleek, unnerving, and clinically shot. Fincher’s latest, Gone Girl, an adaptation of Gillian Flynn’s bestselling novel, is very much in the same vein - and may very well be the darkest, most cynical movie I’ve seen in a long time. Ben Affleck plays Nick Dunne, who is (un)happily married to Amy, played by Rosamund Pike. After blissful beginnings
The Little Death Director: Josh Lawson Starring: Josh Lawson, Bojana Novakovic, Lisa McCune, Kate Box, TJ. Power, Erin James and Kim Gyngell Lawson, who has had some success in America but never really truly shined overseas (he was the Rupert Murdoch proxy in Anchorman 2), returns to Australia for his feature directorial debut (he also writes and stars in the film) The Little Death. Whilst some elements of the film are problematic, it also demonstrates that Lawson has a ton of talent behind the camera.
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their marriage is becoming increasingly difficult when, on the day of their 5th anniversary, Amy disappears. Nick is shown to be prone to bursts of anger, while Amy confides to her diary that she fears her husband more and more with each passing day. Nick’s suspicious behaviour, along with a series of unfortunate media gaffes, places him as the prime suspect. Ostensibly, Amy is an all-American sweetheart and the national media gleefully hoists Nick up as a pariah. It’s not too much of a spoiler to say that both Nick and Amy are terribly unreliable narrators, and that Gone Girl isn’t so much a murder mystery as it is a surgical dissection of married life. For the most part Gone Girl is excellent. The casting is spot on; Affleck and Pike are perfect for their respective roles, and Tyler Perry is a scene-stealer as Nick’s hot shot defence attorney. Pike herself recently said that it “was just a joy to play a woman who doesn’t have to be palatable all of the time,” injecting the sociopathic Amy with empathy. Fincher and Flynn, who wrote the screenplay, are quietly damning of the
The Little Death is structured like Love, Actually, focused on a selection of various couples living in the same neighbourhood, all experiencing some level of sexual dysfunction. Each segment of the film focuses on a different couple serving as the representative of Australian suburbia discovering sexual fetishism. As with any anthology film, the strength of the various segments varies. Considering the subject matter, it is probably unsurprising that there’s some creepy shit, and that the creepy shit at times overtakes the comic element. Case in point: the storyline between Lawson’s Paul and Bojana Novakovic’s Maeve. They’re the typical yuppie couple; however Maeve has a rape fantasy that she wants Paul to fulfil. The bungled simulated rape scenes descend into farce but are still confronting and leave a bitter taste. Furthermore, all the jokes are about Paul’s uncomfortableness with the fantasy; we never find out anything about why Maeve has the fantasy, something which I thought the film needed more of. That’s not actually the cruellest story in the film, which would be Rowena’s (Kate Box), who discovers she can only get off when she’s making her
24-hour news cycle (it’s no coincidence that the Nancy Grace-style host who vilifies Nick is named Ellen), and the tone is extremely dark throughout. Fincher regulars Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross provide their best film score yet. It’s definitely not for the fainthearted; one scene in particular stands out as the most intense, shockingly violent act I’ve ever seen in a movie. I actually gasped. It’s not perfect, though, it has to be said. At 149 minutes it’s a very long film, and the pacing is a little jarring at the beginning, while there is an abrupt adjustment in tone (from thriller to satire) roughly halfway through that some might find implausible. Also, I know Fincher’s movies are supposed to be unsettling, but this is really dark, even for him. Whenever the audience laughed I felt seriously uncomfortable – after all, this is a movie about a potential homicide, and things only get bleaker from there. 4/5 Matt Green
husband cry. The story is the film’s blackest comic material, going close to being too cruel to be funny. However, the last segment is brilliant. As a short film by itself, it would be 4.5 stars. Focused on Monica (Erin James), who works as a Skype-translator for phone calls, translating what the signing person on the screen wants to say to a person on the phone, the segment is about a caller who wants her to translate phone-sex. Sweet, funny and very human; it is far and away the film’s highlight. It’s worth seeing The Little Death just for this bit. The film is handsomely photographed, and it is actually funny. Something that puts it far above the recent trend of Australian television dramadies, which seemingly forget to put in jokes (looking at you, Josh Thomas and Marieke Hardy.). If Josh Lawson can put together a full feature with the strength of The Little Death’s closing segment; then he’ll prove that he’s one of Australia’s top filmic talents. 3.5/5 Kevin Chiat