Film REVIEWS
DRAMA IN DARKNESS (15) 145min ●●●●●
Poland’s entry for the 2012 Academy Awards is a compelling tale, a technical tour-de-force and altogether an impressive showcase for the talents of a veteran director who recently helmed episodes of The Wire and The Killing (as well as films such as Europa, Europa, for which she was also Oscar- nominated, and The Secret Garden). Drawn from a book, based on real-life events, by Robert
Marshall, In Darkness tells of Polish Catholic sewer worker Leopold Socha (Robert Wieckiewicz), who for more than a year during World War II hid a group of Jewish refugees in the sewers of Nazi-occupied Lvov (formerly Poland, now part of the Ukraine). Despite the technical headaches of shooting largely in cramped and ill-lit spaces – and the aesthetic challenge of making them look interesting – Holland and her cinematographer Jolanta Dylewska create a persuasive and sometimes even darkly beautiful visual environment. Holland is equally nimble at avoiding sentimentality or heavy-handed moralism: her characters are flawed and complex, their actions ambiguous and their motivation always survival rather than goodness or glory. Plot similarities mean that comparisons to Schindler’s List are inevitable, and In Darkness has some similarly harrowing moments; but Holland is a tougher and a cooler-headed witness than Spielberg – more interested in the scratchy little betrayals and intimacies of human interaction than in sentimental button-pushing or grandiose statements regarding the triumph of the human spirit. In Darkness is a slick piece of filmmaking – indeed, with its multiple criss-crossing storylines, its tense action sequences and its nippy camera style, it’s a bit like sitting down to glut on one of those high-end TV shows on which Holland has been honing her skills. But slick doesn’t have to mean shallow, and In Darkness has depth, wit and complexity to back up its beauty. (Hannah McGill) ■ Selected release from Fri 16 Mar.
THRILLER THE RAVEN (15) 111min ●●●●● DRAMA TRISHNA (15) 113min ●●●●●
ACTION THRILLER CONTRABAND (15) 109min ●●●●●
As the opening titles to The Raven tell us, until he was found near death on a park bench in October 1849, Edgar Allan Poe’s final days remain a mystery. Spinning a macabre tale that might feel at home in one of Poe’s stories, this thriller from James McTeigue (V For Vendetta) offers up a (very) fictional hypothesis of what might have happened.
Like Se7en minus the biblical references, the film depicts Poe (John Cusack) getting sucked into a game of cat and mouse when a deranged fan starts slaying people, inspired by the grisly deaths in the writer’s fiction. One particularly luckless victim even gets sliced up by a swinging blade (à la The Pit and the Pendulum). Cusack offers up a vibrant performance, accompanied by a credible Alice Eve (the obligatory love interest) and Luke Evans (the Inspector on the case). But the story drags in the second half, with one too many chases down cobbled streets as the killer gets away in the nick of time. Hardly a fitting epitaph, you might think, to a writer of Poe’s stature. (James Mottram) ■ General release from Fri 9 Mar.
68 THE LIST 1–29 Mar 2012
Michael Winterbottom, previously inspired by Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure and The Mayor of Casterbridge (the source for The Claim), imaginatively transposes the author’s tragic novel Tess of the d'Urbervilles to modern day India. Freida Pinto plays peasant daughter Trishna, who
is swept off her feet by the British-raised Jay (Riz Ahmed), the son of a wealthy Indian hotelier (Roshan Seth). Having arranged a job for Trishna in one of his father’s luxury establishments, Jay eventually persuades her to move with him to Mumbai, where their affair no longer has to remain undisclosed. The revelation of a secret to her partner, however, sends their relationship into a downwards spiral. Aided by Marcel Zyskind’s agile cinematography
and In the Mood for Love composer Shigeru Umebayashi’s fine score, Winterbottom establishes a vivid sense of place. However the dramatic weight that Kate Winslet and Christopher Eccleston brought to the director’s Jude is certainly missing in the film’s melodramatic finale and Trishna ultimately lacks the requisite emotional force. (Tom Dawson) ■ Selected release from Fri 9 Mar.
‘This is world-class smuggling!’ enthuses a member of Mark Wahlberg’s crew in Contraband, a terse US remake of 2008 Icelandic thriller Reykjavik- Rotterdam.
Wahlberg plays Chris Farraday, an ex-smuggler whose attempts to go straight are threatened when brother-in-law Andy (Caleb Landry Jones) dumps a shipment of cocaine belonging to drug lord Briggs (Giovanni Ribisi). Farraday is reluctantly pulled back in to do one last smuggling job, bringing millions of dollars of counterfeit bills from Panama to New Orleans on board a freighter commanded by suspicious Captain Camp (J.K. Simmons).
Directed by actor Baltasar Kormákur, who played Wahlberg’s role in the original film, Contraband is a bland but solid action film, offering detail about how smugglers defy the authorities positioned within a crowd-pleasingly moral framework. Despite his limited range, Wahlberg excels playing such salty, blue-collar characters and, although Farraday never lifts a gun, his professional way of playing a cat and mouse game makes Contraband watchable if hardly world-class entertainment. (Eddie Harrison) ■ General release from Fri 16 Mar.