Suspense/Thriller | www.jaredmobarak.com

REVIEW: Antebellum [2020]

2020/09/022020/09/11 Jared Mobarak

Another bad dream? If you’ve been paying attention to what’s happening these past four years, you’ve certainly seen your share of open racism spewed with an angry sense of entitlement only a white person believing him/herself to be a descendant of God and inheritor of earth could possess. If you’ve been keeping tabs more recently on the subject of Kenosha, Wisconsin (or watch “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver”), you’ll know the county’s Sheriff is one such man. David Beth spoke back in 2018 without even the thinnest of veils…

FANTASIA20 REVIEW: 返校 [Fanxiao] [Detention] [2019]

2020/09/012020/09/02 Jared Mobarak

I don’t remember anything. As a subversive poem (according to the Chinese Nationalist Party that ruled Taiwan under martial law during the period known as the White Terror from 1947 until 1987) read by Miss Yin (Cecilia Choi) to the members of her and Mr. Chang’s (Meng-Po Fu) underground high school book club relates: a tree’s roots never ask to be repaid by the fruit that blooms as a result of their effort. It’s a succinctly beautiful metaphor for the education system and its liberal teachers doing all they can…

REVIEW: Unhinged [2020]

2020/08/252020/08/25 Jared Mobarak

I am wide-awake. **Potential Spoilers** There’s a big difference between getting cut-off white driving and finding yourself stuck behind a distracted driver at a green light. The former could have killed you. The latter is at most a frustrating inconvenience. There should therefore be a big difference in how you respond to both scenarios too. While a courtesy tap is all you need to wake someone up to the fact it’s time to go, the jerk in violation of traffic laws demands something more robust if for no other reason…

FANTASIA20 REVIEW: Freies Land [Free Country] [2020]

2020/08/192020/08/21 Jared Mobarak

My dream killed them. From post-Francoist State Spain to post-reunified Germany, director Christian Alvart moves Alberto Rodríguez and Rafael Cobos‘ Goya Award-winning thriller Marshland to a newly democratized remote village outside of Berlin via Freies Land [Free Country]. Considering detectives Patrick Stein (Trystan Pütter) and Markus Bach (Felix Kramer) are thrust together despite building their careers in the West and East respectively, Alvart and co-writer Siegfried Kamml have ample room with which to retool things through a prism of their own nation’s potential for dark political secrets and guilt-ridden pasts.…

FANTASIA20 REVIEW: The Oak Room [2020]

2020/08/112020/08/25 Jared Mobarak

Goose the truth. It starts with a bottle of beer hitting a bar before an off-screen fight gets that glass bouncing along to the impact of bodies we never see. And it finishes with a similar still life that may or may not be the exact same beverage—a question left in limbo considering bottles are hitting bars past closing time throughout the entirety of director Cody Calahan and screenwriter Peter Genoway‘s film The Oak Room. There are a lot of these almost cyclical moments during its brisk, dialogue-heavy ninety-minutes: drifters…

REVIEW: She Dies Tomorrow [2020]

2020/07/302020/12/30 Jared Mobarak

I want to be useful in death. Do you feel that? The despair in and anxiety for a future as uncertain as it has ever been with civil unrest, genocide, climate disasters, global pandemics, and the ability to inject each of those horrors into our veins via technological progress that’s systematically hijacked by propagandists, charlatans, and malicious operators with no ambition other than sowing animosity and confusion? The futility in a present torn asunder by rich white men screaming at each other across a political divide while leveraging the lives…

REVIEW: Sun Don’t Shine [2013]

2020/07/292020/07/29 Jared Mobarak

We’ve got to take a route that don’t make sense. This is what it’s like to be in over your head. The incessant talking to distract from what you’ve done and are doing. The rising frustrations as you try to reconcile your actions, justifying how you got here and where you must still go. You think love is enough—that a desire to protect someone might cleanse your soul of what that protection entails—but it will ultimately become another excuse to keep you traveling towards a conclusion without any escape. Maybe…

REVIEW: 1BR [2020]

2020/07/282020/07/28 Jared Mobarak

Do you want to be a part of this community? It’s been said many times throughout the COVID-19 lockdown (and subsequently too-early re-opening that threatens an even worse lockdown because Americans are entitled brats who can’t be bothered to do what’s right if it inconveniences them): We must stick together. The only way we’re going to survive this, protect innocent lives, and save the economy is by working in tandem. Wear a mask. Social distance. Stay home. Believe that you—yes you—are Patient Zero because, unless you’re showing symptoms right now,…

REVIEW: The Rental [2020]

2020/07/212020/07/21 Jared Mobarak

Abs-bro-lutely. There’s something to be said about a lack of sentimentality in a horror film. That doesn’t mean we can’t still have sympathy for the victims’ plight—the fact that they’re human beings provides the space for it regardless of who they are or what we know about them. We care because we see ourselves in their shoes. They embody our fear rather than provide an object for us to fear for. Whether or not they suffer when fate’s hand comes down is therefore quite often a moot point. Our sympathy…

REVIEW: Ghosts of War [2020]

2020/07/142020/07/16 Jared Mobarak

If you leave, you die. Sometimes the memories of our inaction haunt us more than the actions we have committed. This can be especially true at war once you return home to realize the blood on your hands goes far beyond the lives you were directly responsible for extinguishing. Whether you found yourself helpless to act because of a direct order from your superior or you simply froze out of justifiable fear, the screams of those lost will remind you of your complicity either way and haunt your dreams like…

REVIEW: Mr. Jones [2019]

2020/06/172020/06/17 Jared Mobarak

I’ve woken up screaming in Barry myself. It’s not a bad thing to be insane in an insane world. In fact, it’s comfortable. So it’s unsurprising that a room full of old white British men would simply laugh when Gareth Jones (James Norton) tells them a truth their privileged naiveté refuses to let be taken seriously at the start of Agnieszka Holland‘s Mr. Jones. He’s a Foreign Service employee under Lloyd George (Kenneth Cranham) who found himself on a plane with Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels, interviewing the two to…