THE WITCH - Review By Greg Klymkiw at "Electric Sheep - a deviant view of cinema" - TIFF 2015: Decent Cinematography not enough to save pretentious, dull, bargain-basement late-career Terence Malick rip-off crossed with Roman Polanski aspirations and dollops of half-baked Bergman. Worse yet, pic is not unlike lower-drawer M. Night Shyamalan. That's truly chilling!

Read Greg Klymkiw's ** TIFF 2015 review of THE WITCH at "Electric Sheep - a deviant view of cinema" by clicking HERE.

DEMON - Review By Greg Klymkiw at "ELECTRIC SHEEP - a deviant view of cinema" TIFF 2015: Chilling Polish Dybbuk Horror Thriller by 42-year-old Director who died one week after World Premiere at TIFF

Marcin Wrona, the brilliant young Polish filmmaker presented the World Premiere of his chilling horror film DEMON in the Vanguard Series at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF 2015) one week before his sudden death in Poland on September 18, 2015. My **** 4-Star review can be read at Electric Sheep by clicking HERE.

GOODNIGHT MOMMY (Ich seh Ich seh) - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Creepy Austrian Twins

Goodnight Mommy (AKA Ich seh Ich se (2014)
Dir. Veronika Franz, Severin Fiala
Prd. Ulrich Seidl
Starring: Susanne Wuest, Elias Schwarz, Lukas Schwarz

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Here's a Pop Quiz as administered by Austrian filmmaker Ulrich Seidl:

1. If Mommy's distinctive mole is missing after reconstructive surgery, is it best to burn a hole in her face with the sun's rays blasting through a magnifying glass?

2. If you are angry with Mommy, is it best to place an icky beetle on her face and watch it slither into her open mouth as she sleeps?

3. If Mommy's tummy is full of beetles, is it best to slice said tummy open to release said bugs?

4. If you're tired of listening to Mommy, is it best to Krazy Glue her mouth shut?

5. If Mommy is hungry and needs pizza, is it best to slice through her Krazy-glued mouth with an Exacto Blade?

The answers to these and other questions can be found in the new Ulrich Seidl production of Goodnight Mommy, the directorial debut of his longtime collaborator Veronika Franz and her life partner Severin Fiala.

To say the film is creepy is, at the very least, an understatement, but creepy it is and scarier than most anything you'll set your eyeballs upon this year. Oh, and yes, the movie provides plenty of chuckles of the most malevolent kind to catch you off guard and relieve (somewhat) the unbearable tension.

It also helps that for most of its running time, the picture is stylishly directed and gorgeously shot on REAL FILM - yes, REAL 35MM film.

Goodnight Mommy is a deceptively simple tale about a pair of identical twins (Elias Schwarz, Lukas Schwarz) who welcome Mommy (Susanne Wuest) home after a stay in the hospital for extreme reconstructive surgery. Mom is covered in Mummy-like bandages, barely hiding the puffy, swelling bruises and pus-oozing scars, so even she can forgive the boys if they don't immediately recognize her as their mother.

Alas, Mommy's become both addled and stern - reasonable enough to anyone who can understand the extreme pain she's in which must be quelled by oodles of happy drugs, but to the boys, it's cause for alarm, especially since Mom is being extra-cruel and downright dismissive of one of the twin brothers. It also doesn't hurt matters that Mom has poisoned a stray cat the lads have brought into the home after rescuing it from an ancient crypt beneath a forgotten graveyard just outside the deep woods surrounding the stately modern country home.

Not only does Mommy not look like Mommy, she's not even behaving like Mommy. If she's an imposter, the lads needs answers and they'll stop at nothing to get the truth.

Nothing!

This is an incredibly well made film on virtually every level. Mr. Seidl, one of the world's greatest living filmmakers proves to be an ideal producer and mentor for this project. In both documentary (Animal Love) and drama (Dog Days), he's demonstrated an uncanny ability to uproot and expose humanity in the most abominably extreme human behaviour. Such is the case here and it's no surprise that half of the directorial team, Veronika Franz, has been Seidl's chief screenwriter and collaborator on so many of his greatest works.

The pace is stately, but never dull. The chills and weirdness are stretched to expertly rendered degrees which feel almost unendurable, but endure we do. It's simply impossible to take one's eyes off the screen. When the visceral horrors begin to ramp up, you might even require an upchuck receptacle.

There's one unfortunate detail to the whole affair which does indeed disappoint. The story is saddled with a rather obvious red herring which you occasionally hope won't bear fruit in the expected manner. When the BIG REVEAL happens, it's everything you've been praying against. It works on an almost satisfactorily and rudimentary level, but is a huge comedown from a film that you feel is taking turns you'd never expect. For the most part, you don't expect any direction it goes in, except for this one thing. When a trope is meant to throw you off the scent and becomes the very stench wafting across your nostrils, you can't help but leave the cinema a tiny bit dejected.

All that said, though, it's a terrific feature debut which, at the very least points to eventual work that will live up to the promise displayed and might, if Franz plays her cards right, match that of her magnificent mentor.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: *** 3-Stars

Goodnight Mommy played in both the TIFF 2014 Vanguard series and the 2015 Fantasia Film Festival.

SEX, DRUGS & TAXATION (aka SPIES & GLISTRUP) - Review By Greg Klymkiw - TIFF 2013 - Fear & Loathing in Copenhagen

Michael Shannon lookalike Pilou Asbæk as real-life Danish Billionaire playboy Simon Spies

Sex, Drugs & Taxation (2013) *****
Dir. Christoffer Boe
Starring: Nicolas Bro, Pilou Asbæk

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Fear and Loathing in Denmark is certainly one way to pitch Christoffer Boe's perverse, manic, absurdly hilarious and sometimes dangerous (but absolutely gratifying) belly flop into this fact-based tale charting a 20-year-long unlikely friendship that began during Copenhagen's swinging 60s. Generating its own parallel universe to the drug-and-booze-fuelled delirium, which Terry Gilliam accomplished so tremendously in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, the 1998 adaptation of Hunter S. Thompson's 1971 semi-autobiographical novel, director Boe tosses us aboard his very own hallucinogenic roller-coaster ride which comprises the properties of both the English title of his film, Sex, Drugs & Taxation, and the very appropriate Danish title Spies & Glistrup.

Hunter S. Thompson's addled satirical literary meanderings were pointedly subtitled "A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream" - meanderings rendered even more satirically addled (delightfully so) by Gilliam. First serialized in Rolling Stone magazine, then published a year later in standalone hard copy form, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas celebrated a debauchery that, during the 70s, could be the only possible way to view an America that was well on the trajectory of a slow crash and burn. Boe, however, aims his satirical eye at a very specific dream that initially was not part of any sort of collective nationalistic hopes, wishes or dreams, but instead belonged to two men - their grand, mad dream which eventually became a national dream and like Thompson's American Dream, took its own fork in the road - choosing instead an eventual boulevard of broken dreams.

Just as Thompson's novel and Gilliam's film were rooted in mediated reality, so too is Boe's film - maybe even more so. Ripped from Danish headlines, Sex, Drugs & Taxation turns out to be a worthy fantasia of the strangest corporate dynasty in Denmark's history. In fact, the dreams of two men were really only one man's dream - its mastermind. The other, in retrospect and within the context of Roe's film, is a dim-bulb-ish recipient of perks born from the practical realization of the dream, his hedonistic enlightenment so to speak (and not as big an oxymoron as one might think).

The aforementioned dreamer is corporate tax lawyer Mogens Glistrup (Nicolas Bro), a paunchy, balding, bucktoothed family man with a cockeyed visage who lives vicariously through the antics of his boozing, whore-mongering chief client, best friend and crazed vacation travel magnate Simon Spies (Pilou Asbaek). Glistrup took a back-room position while Spies was the public face to all of his friend's legal chicanery. Glistrup wanted to make his best friend Spies filthy rich, but in so doing, his real desire was to crack intricate Danish tax law and find a legal way to keep Spies at a zero tax base which, he hoped, would extend to all of Denmark.

Glistrup, you see, was both a genius and most probably insane.

He believed that paying taxes was not only wrong, but that for a country to collect taxes was immoral. To be sure, Boe's film is a complete miasma of back-room business world and government bureaucracy back-stabbing and the details of this world of high finances, law and government are never simplified - they're laid out in all their complexity.

None of this, though, is ever dull since every single story beat involving corporate shenanigans and the malleability of jurisprudence is indelibly tied to some of the most outlandishly grotesque and hilarious indulgences in sex and drugs.

There are moments in the film so gloriously absurd, so sex-drenched, booze flooded and drug charged that one can do little more than soar along with a movie that dazzles us with stylistic flourishes, compelling storytelling and characters as engaging as they are reprehensible. Though one can credit director Boe and his co-writer Simon Pasternak for creating a delectably dense and intelligent screenplay, it would be remiss of me not to mention the tremendous efforts of a perfect cast. Its two leads are especially stunning. There is never a false moment rendered by either of them. What's astounding is that they must infuse their roles with bigger-than-life attributes and push certain thespian boundaries to levels that are ever-so dangerously bordering on over-the-top. They simply MUST do this or the film would NEVER work.

Pilou Asbæk as Spies drives his performance with a Mephistophelean charm that is as malevolent as it is strangely sexy and Nicholas Bro must slowly and creepily infuse his role with the mounting fervour of an anarchist crossed with a fundamentalist fascist. That we BELIEVE these men are friends, as we further believe the development of their friendship and its almost inevitable erosion and even deeper yet, that we sense love, sadness and loyalty amidst betrayal, is a testament to the genius of these two actors and to director Boe for creating an atmosphere allowing these men to take the kind of chances which, as actors, could have threatened to plunge either or both of them into an abyss they might otherwise have never fully recovered from. This kind of bravery displayed by a director and his lead actors is so rare in contemporary cinema that to see it here - so raw and dazzling, is not only sheer joy, but feels almost privileged.

Sex, Drugs & Taxation sometimes makes us feel as if it is a film that's not only set during another age, but one that might actually have been made at a time when cinema knew no boundaries and as such, proved both immortal and universal. It's a great picture, and like all great pictures, it's got shelf life branded deep into its cinematic flesh. After a lifetime of almost insanely devoting myself to cinema, I've gotten to a point where "good" is no longer "good enough". Even "excellence" sometimes bores me. I demand greatness and when I find it I feel like I've been given more than ample reason to keep expecting it (as is the case with this film), the vicious circle begins all over again for me. I continue to see one movie after another, looking, ever-searching and hoping, like that junkie who needs bigger and bigger fixes - I keep digging ever deeper, like some palaeontologist or archeologist, hoping to unearth some discovery of cultural and historical importance. I crave for pictures to instil the gooseflesh I first felt over half a century ago and that continued for quite some time then started, in the 80s (when the hapless Glistrup was at the tail end of his incarceration), when cinema felt like it was in the throes of a slow, painful death. What keeps saving me, what keeps giving mne faith are films like Sex, Drugs & Taxation.

This is a movie that'll stay with you, grow with you and be around long after you're gone from this Earth. Now THAT'S entertainment!

"Sex, Drugs & Taxation" is part of the TIFF Vanguard Series at the Toronto International Film Festival 2013. Visit the TIFF Website HERE.