Bows for Holly
“Awesome” is a much-abused word. Strictly speaking, it applies to the eye of the beholder, the beholder being someone who feels awe. In modern American usage, it is popularly used to describe things that invoke awe, and for our purposes characters who rightly prompt awe. This is an incorrect usage, but in the face of public resistance us persnickety purists have lost the argument. We surrender.
Holly
Stephen King
Hardcover / Ebook
ISBN: 978-1668016138
Scribner, September 2023, 464 pages
Holly Gibney, the odd investigator who first appeared as a supporting character in the Stephen King novel Mr. Mercedes, was first a strange little withdrawn eccentric who did not seem like she would contribute much, revealed midway through that book that she was, yes, awesome, a seemingly unformidable woman who revealed unsuspected toughness when confronting evil. The pattern was set: when it was Holly vs. Evil, evil was doomed. So she continued to demonstrate this in three other novels and one novella, before here appearing in the volume that bears her name.
Here she investigates a series of disappearances in her small town, and for most of the book she is merely a fascinating private investigator. But in the last few pages she confronts the monsters responsible, who get the drop on her and subject her to the treatment that has doomed a number of people—and it is inevitable that she reminds us, forcibly, she is awesome (which here manifests as unexpectedly deadly force in the face of overwhelming odds). The showdown is refreshingly brief. To which I will say: Jesus. Don’t mess with Holly.
Unseen
Directed by Yoko Okumura
Distributed by Paramount Home Entertainment, March 7, 2023
The popular definition of unexpected awesomeness applies to the two women at the heart of the low-budget film thriller, Unseen, about two women who do not meet at any point in the film. One is a vision-impaired doctor who can see almost nothing without her corrective lenses, the other a downtrodden convenience store clerk who picks up her cell phone and finds herself connected by wrong number. The doctor is fleeing through dark woods she can barely see, with a killer on her trail; the clerk must function as her eyes through the cell’s camera. It is not surprising that the woman in jeopardy turns out to be awesome; it is surprising that her reluctant ally turns out the same, staying on the line for hours and proving just as resourceful as she must defend the lifeline the connection represents from connection problems and her own monstrous tormentor, an upper-class Karen who wants only to cause trouble. It ain’t a staggering work of art, but its cleverness gets us through.
El Conde
Directed by Pablo Larraín
Distributed by Netflix, August 2023
El Conde is a black-and-white Chilean film about the twilight of a murderous vampire who happens to be Augusto Pinochet, the monstrous dictator whose blood-soaked reign terrorized the country starting in 1970. The movie holds that Pinochet was born a vampire and that he commenced his crimes in part to hide his ravenous consumption of blood; also that in this version of vampire lore the species can reproduce with humans, creating young who are taxonomically human, but given a sufficiently sociopathic upbringing, as apt to develop the same corrupt outlook. Hence his awful family. It must be absolute glee, for a Chilean capable of tolerating the mining of their national history (in particular their national tragedy) as grist for fantastic fiction, but hell, this kind of thing has justified any number of portrayals of Hitler, even in Germany, for decades. If it is acceptable for Hitler, it is acceptable for that other dirtbag, Pinochet, and I would have genuinely appreciated a reaction video from some native Chilean, hysterically taking in the spectacle of their national monster flying high above a night cityscape, with a cloak that makes him look like a bat. Alas, in my view the movie has a strong start and then loses momentum for long stretches. But I will say this much: it is very much a good thing that this satire even exists.
A Haunting in Venice
Directed by Kenneth Branagh
Produced by 20th Century Studios, September 2023
Kenneth Branagh’s latest foray into the adventures of Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot is A Haunting in Venice, which, unlike his prior outings, is played as an out-and-out horror film, hinting at the supernatural and set in a shadowy old house where no room, anywhere, has adequate lighting. (I guess that nobody who lives there likes to read at night.) Poirot, who takes murder seriously, is in many prior adaptations a fussy and comical little man whose eccentricities render him a fine target for comedy. Here he is a melancholy and traumatized figure who has turned his back to the world, and who, threatened by what may be ghosts, seems likely to shatter from interior and exterior pressures. Tina Fey plays Ariadne Oliver, the mystery novelist who appears in a number of Poirot novels and is a stand-in for her creator Agatha; Michelle Yeoh is the medium who Poirot is determined to expose from the start. The atmosphere is shadowy and oppressive, exactly as it needs to be, and while I confess to missing the glossy atmosphere of those Poirot films where mayhem arrives at tourist destinations where everybody is bitchy and immaculately addressed, I am also delighted by this one which takes place in the late 1940s and hinges in part on the psychic wounds left behind by the war crimes committed during the recent decade of spilled blood. It is the best film of Branagh’s tenure.
