Vincenzo Natali

  • In the Tall Grass (2019)

    In the Tall Grass (2019)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Netflix Streaming, December 2020) In horror, hooking an audience is easy – but getting them to an appropriate conclusion is the hard part. In the Tall Grass, based on a novella by Stephen King and his son Joe Hill, at least gets the first part right, as a brother and sister hear cries for help from a tall field of grass and head in… only to find themselves unable to get out. From that point on, the film becomes far less successful: strange and disturbing elements accumulate, but when it comes time to wrap it all up, the film can’t quite make sense of everything it has smashed together. It certainly looks great – director Vincenzo Natali has enough experience to be able to make us believe in a sinister field of grass trapping its victims. But it’s on a narrative level that In the Tall Grass is either incoherent or facile. Considering that the film messes with unreliable geography and time travel and hallucinations, you’d be forgiven for thinking that nothing in this film makes sense longer than the images it features. What could have been a clean, solid plotline ends up overcomplicated beyond belief to no clear purpose. By the time some characters do make it out of the grass field, we’re just happy it’s over.

  • Haunter (2013)

    Haunter (2013)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, October 2020) Canadian writer-director Vincenzo Natali hasn’t directed enough movies. His output isn’t flawless, his endings are not ideal, and it’s not as if he hasn’t been productively employed directing prestige TV shows—but films like Haunter show how interesting he can be on a longer leash. It’s a time-loop film crossed with teenage horror, as a young woman (a baby-faced Abigail Beslin, quite good) and her family endlessly relive the day before their murder. Fortunately, she gets to realize the loop, and then the plot moves into much weirder territory. The best thing about Haunter is the atmosphere—the house in which this is all taking place is isolated in the middle of a foggy nowhere, and Natali can portray even an ordinary house with considerable foreboding. The second-best asset of Haunter is its initial mystery—but that soon dissipates as explanations crowd out the enigma. As it goes along, Haunted does lose quite a bit of interest—silliness and convention replace mystery, and the narrative becomes more contrived to accommodate all of its disparate elements. But for a while, it’s promising and even effective. At some point, Natali may eventually produce something great.

  • Splice (2009)

    Splice (2009)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theatres, June 2010) This may be a horror movie featuring a monster, but it’s not just a monster movie.  Taking the well-worn science-fiction and horror clichés of scientists creating artificial life and then seeing it do horrible things, Splice is noteworthy for the thematic weight it manages to carry around, and how rarely it succumbs to cliché, starting by a delicate inversion of movies premises where scientists engage in mad science to substitute for parenthood.  While Adrian Brody is fine as the male half of the protagonist couple, it’s Sarah Polley who gets most of the attention as his girlfriend/lab partner: Few actresses can play smart in a convincing fashion, but Polley can just act as her own bright self.  Neither of the protagonists comes out particularly heroic during the events of the film, but it’s interesting to see how each one alternates in the “who’s acting most despicably” derby.  That, added to how Splice delves decisively into unpleasant plot developments, make it both a good horror film and one that many won’t want to watch a second time.  The grimy depressing Toronto snowy outdoors won’t help either.  It all amounts to a film that sounds like just about every single other straight-to-DVD monster movie ever released, but really isn’t: Splice isn’t quite as cheaply anti-science as you’d think (there’s a montage that actually makes bioengineering look hip and fun), it goes places that lesser scripts wouldn’t dare touch, it incorporates some really good special effects, and does quite a bit with a small cast.  While it can’t escape a few predictable sequences (including an ending that is telegraphed well in advance), the result amounts to an unpleasantly good little surprise, and another small success for Toronto-based writer/director Vincenzo Natali after a fairly lengthy absence from the big screen.  Hopefully, this will pave the way for more films from him.