Horror | www.jaredmobarak.com

REVIEW: The Addams Family [2019]

2021/09/252021/09/25 Jared Mobarak

The day is becoming most wonderfully disruptive. What exactly the “old country” is in context with the latest iteration of Charles Addams‘ beloved The Addams Family is unknown. Are we to infer Transylvania? Maybe. Does the film itself pretty much just show Gomez (Oscar Isaac) and Morticia (Charlize Theron) driving until they hit a straight-jacketed inmate (Lurch) escaped from an abandoned asylum up on a hill? Yes. Does a patient escaping a building with no occupants seem strange? Sure, but that’s kind of par for the course. Asking questions about…

TIFF21 REVIEW: Zalava [2021]

2021/09/182021/09/19 Jared Mobarak

Below the waist. The inhabitants of Zalava were never meant to stay in one place. Their ancestors were nomads and now they’ve become farmers. So where then did the demons come from? Were they always here waiting for settlers? Did their relatives bring the evil with them? Or has the restlessness in their bones from staying in one place for so long simply made them stir crazy to the point of needing those spirits to provide context for their anxieties? They admit to the sergeant (Navid Pourfaraj‘s Massoud) from the…

TIFF21 REVIEW: Saloum [2022]

2021/09/172022/07/14 Jared Mobarak

You’ll be sick to death of us by the end. The infamous “Hyenas”—three mercenaries running amok throughout Africa—are caught in the air with gold bars, the drug lord (Renaud Farah‘s Felix) they’ve been hired to extract, and a failed fuel tank leaving them with bad and worse options for an emergency landing. The Guinea-Bissau authorities won’t let them leave without a fight on the ground and they’ve surely alerted their Senegalese counterparts already, but Chaka (Yann Gael) knows of a secret beach from his past where they might be able…

TIFF21 REVIEW: Medusa [2021]

2021/09/152021/09/16 Jared Mobarak

What did she do to you? Writer/director Anita Rocha da Silveira has created an evangelical town of purity in her Brazilian-set sophomore film Medusa. It’s the type of place all Christians wish they could send their children because they know they will be carried into God’s light. The young men form a militia group to honor His will against deviants that dare to embrace sin. The young women form a gang in the likeness of their heroine angel, donning white masks to confront and assault the so-called “sluts” and “whores”…

TIFF21 REVIEW: Mlungu Wam [Good Madam] [2021]

2021/09/082021/09/10 Jared Mobarak

It seems this house doesn’t like Mama. A matriarch passes and the family swarms to poach whatever they can in the aftermath. Tsidi (Chumisa Cosa) tells herself it won’t matter—she’s been the one taking care of her grandmother and thus has a claim over that which she has called her home for years, but “fair” doesn’t factor in where tradition is concerned. Her uncle (as the eldest) allows Tsidi’s cousins to put her in her place as new construction plans made while the recently departed was still alive become colored…

TIFF21 REVIEW: You Are Not My Mother [2021]

2021/09/072021/09/14 Jared Mobarak

I can’t do this anymore. Despite leaving writer/director Kate Dolan‘s feature debut You Are Not My Mother with a lot more questions than answers, I don’t think that reality is necessarily a bad thing. Maybe if I was better versed in Irish lore, I’d be more familiar with the supernatural elements at play and therefore less in the dark about the unspoken details the film doesn’t seem to realize it might need to share for better understanding. But it’s not as though knowing would add too much beyond context. And…

REVIEW: The Nowhere Inn [2021]

2021/09/042021/09/13 Jared Mobarak

We’re in this together. Much like their fictional counterparts on-screen, Annie Clark (aka St. Vincent) and Carrie Brownstein did plan on crafting a documentary about the former’s music career. Along the way, however, they found themselves diving deeper and deeper into conversations about what form it might take. They didn’t want to fall prey to conventions or artifice. Nor did they condone pretending life off-stage was some wild, hedonistic experience simply because that’s what the audience expected (or wanted). Ideas to prevent cliché ultimately skewed towards mockumentary and they didn’t…

REVIEW: Martyrs Lane [2021]

2021/09/012021/09/09 Jared Mobarak

I have bad things in my head too. Ten-year old Leah (Kiera Thompson) is caught watching her family like an outsider looking in. Her much older sister (Hannah Rae‘s Bex) is about to leave for college and the milestone has seemingly thrown a wrench into their otherwise simple lives. While their father Thomas (Steven Cree) treats it like a celebration thanks to his faith as the pastor of their local church, their mother Sarah (Denise Gough) appears distracted and perhaps even angry. She begins having nightmares, retreats from the others,…

REVIEW: Prisoners of the Ghostland [2021]

2021/08/312021/09/13 Jared Mobarak

Time for us all to be free. How can someone who just escaped still not be free? It’s a question Bernice (Sofia Boutella) must ask at the beginning of Sion Sono‘s English-language debut Prisoners of the Ghostland without knowing if she’ll ever discover an answer. She and two others fled Samurai Town the night before, shuffling off to the cheers of other abused and oppressed women once the men all turned in. Not knowing what to do next, they get in a car and drive off only for Sono to…

REVIEW: The Night House [2021]

2021/08/252021/08/29 Jared Mobarak

You’re safe now. Beth (Rebecca Hall) is left a widow without warning the day her husband Owen (Evan Jonigkeit) decided to take his own life with a gun she didn’t even know he owned. The boat has been cleaned (he covered it in plastic and took off his clothes before pulling the trigger), but it’s hard not to look at it and think about the horror it witnessed. That’s why their neighbor Mel (Vondie Curtis-Hall) decided to cover it “for the season” and why Beth can’t help lingering by the…

REVIEW: Candyman [2021]

2021/08/242021/08/25 Jared Mobarak

He found me. Despite its earned cult classic status, Bernard Rose‘s Candyman isn’t without fault. His decision to move Clive Barker‘s short story “The Forbidden” from a British neighborhood to Chicago’s Cabrini–Green projects to deal with the racial divide as well as the economical one in the text was as inspired as casting Tony Todd for his titular bee-infested boogeyman running on the fuel of a hive mind’s fear. Yet he still centered it all on a white savior’s shoulders in Helen Lyle (Virginia Madsen). Rose flirts with the complexity…