Never Mind The Kaiju: Anne Hathaway & Jason Sudeikis Are The Real Monsters Of 'Colossal'

COLOSSAL

Colossal is a kaiju movie in its giant monsters only. A Godzilla-esque lizard and Megatron-esque robot periodically materialise from the ether to terrify the citizens of Seoul, but, in Nacho Vigalondo’s film, these popcorn-movie moments are kept distant, mostly watched on television from half a world away. As with his super-fun romp Extraterrestrial — where an alien-invasion set-up is used to stage a comedy of sexual manners — the staples of genre are used only as hook, their familiar tropes giving way to something unfamiliar, unexpected, idiosyncratic. The high-concept set-up, here, is these giant monster are intimately connected to Anne Hathaway and Jason Sudeikis, a pair of hopeless drunks in small-town America.

Hathaway plays a charismatic trainwreck in Cat Power fringe: a rambunctious NYC party girl whose daily cycle of late-night blowouts, blackout pass-outs, and grim hangovers lead to her losing her job, and being ditched by her prissy English boyfriend (Dan Stevens, currently on screens as the Beast). At rock bottom, she heads back to her hometown, tail between her legs, to live in her empty, leaf-strewn, dust-filled old family home. She runs into Sudeikis, an old buddy, local bar owner, and fellow boozehound. Rather than cleaning up her ways, she finds herself enabled, falling in with a new crew (the blandly handsome Austin Stowell and ever-awesome Tim Blake Nelson) who drink every night away.

One night, Hathaway wakes from a drunken stupor to discover that a giant monster has just appeared in the Han River. Through a series of cute coincidences, she intuits that she controls this giant lizard, or is it, or something. It’s never quite explained, but serves as simple metaphor: there’s no monster in the world quite like a rampaging drunk. When — in classic kaiju-movie fashion — the monsters multiply from one to two, they become avatars for toxic behaviour and toxic relationships, showing how self-destructiveness can turn into destructiveness.

Where the marriage between dark theme and daffy concept seems unlikely, [Vigalondo] rolls it out in style.

In doing so, it’s an examination of an abusive relationship, ran through the prism of the grotesque tropes of romantic comedies. The black-sheep-returns-home-to-repair-their-ways set-up is as old as the sun, with such a protagonist normally aided by a new flame, a reliable standby who can help them out of their old ways. Initially, you might expect Sudeikis — especially after rom-com leading-man turns in Sleeping With Other People and Tumbledown — will fill this role, but Vigalondo subverts those expectations in trenchant fashion.

Sudeikis wears the façade of ‘nice guy’, happy to help out Hathaway with furniture, a job, a drinking buddy; with the expectation that, eventually, he’ll get to graduate from the friendzone. A normal rom-com wouldn’t call his male possessiveness into question, would instead make him Mr. Right, the devoted dude who was there all along. Colossal, however, explores the terror of the Nice Guy in all its horror, with the grandeur of a grand-scale monster movie.

When Hathaway dares fuck Stowell, Sudeikis grows pissy, caustic, confrontational; faced with losing what he assumed was his, he turns to emotional blackmail and threats. And when Stevens shows up, hoping to win back the girl he regrets dumping, Sudeikis takes the full troll heel-turn: he’s the kind of ‘nice guy’ who, it turns out, just wants to watch the world burn.

It’s to Vigalondo’s credit that he manages not only to make this mish-mash — monster-movie as abusive-relationship allegory — work, but work well. Where the marriage between dark theme and daffy concept seems unlikely, he rolls it out in style: the director sure of himself, and of the film’s themes. The monsters in monster movies are familiar as symbols of the grand failings of society: the product of war, environmental degradation, colonialism. Here, the symbolism is seemingly smaller, but no less telling: Colossal is not about the toxic fallout of nuclear weapons, but the toxic residue of alcoholism, and the toxicity of male sexual entitlement.

PERSONAL SHOPPER

In Personal Shopper, Olivier Assayas creates cinema’s first masterful sequence of texting. Midway into his 15th film, this singular form of communication — one whose brevity can feel brutal, whose lack of greater context and signifiers can create mystery and confusion, whose emotional stakes are inflated far beyond what their handful of characters can convey — is depicted in all its drama. The scene, through precision editing, plays up the pregnancy of anticipation before receiving a reply, and the possibilities of what can be waiting with the dopamine-releasing arrival of an incoming message. With every vibrate-on-silent buzz, the stakes are raised, and the tension builds.

'Personal Shopper' is ... billed as a ghost story, and there are stretches where it plays with being a horror film, an action movie, a paranoia thriller.

It builds because Kristen Stewart — reunited with Assayas after the utterly brilliant Clouds Of Sils Maria — may or may not be texting with a ghost. “R U real? R U alive or dead?” may look ridiculous typed here, but in Personal Shopper it marks the moment of daring, in which Stewart goes out on a limb, dares to say aloud what she probably shouldn’t.

Here, as in her last Assayas collaboration, she plays another assistant-to-a-famous-person living an expat life in Europe. Dwelling in Paris, she’s the personal shopper for Nora von Waldstätten’s rarely seen, but forever-looming starlet (“I hear she’s a monster,” we hear, before she ever shows up). For Stewart, it’s an entry-level job whose proximity to fashion, celebrity, fame, and wealth aren’t draws, but drawbacks.

She’s disinterested in the gauche totems of the physical world, drawn more to the ineffable, having come to Paris to commune with the ghost of her late brother. Each twin experienced psychic phenomena — Stewart a medium who’s not religious; who’s in touch with the spirit world but uncomfortable with the language around it — and, in their childhood, pledged that whoever died first would send the surviving sibling a recognisable sign from beyond the veil.

Personal Shopper is, duly, billed as a ghost story, and there are stretches where it plays with being a horror film, an action movie, a paranoia thriller. But Assayas has a long, impressive history — Demonlover, Boarding Gate, Carlos — of being able to employ genre tropes in movies that never feel like genre films. Personal Shopper may be his most distinct, singular, idiosyncratic film; well, at least since 1996’s bonkers, brilliant Irma Vep.

It’s a film about digital identity, celebrity currency, hauntings both literal and figurative, and the weight of texts, be they received in back-and-forth banter or as a sinister, slowly encroaching batch upon turning a phone back on. It’s as likely to be remembered for Stewart’s amazing, anxious leading turn as it is its unlikely air of odd menace. That feeling persists right until the open-ended end, where the film’s questions are left lingering, unanswered, uneasy.

FRANTZ

Frantz begins in small-town Germany in 1919, where the streets are cobblestone, the suitable bachelors few, the cinematography black-and-white. Paula Beers, still mourning the wartime death of her fiancée, takes daily trips to his grave; and, one day, she sees a mysterious man placing flowers there. Small-town gossip soon offers that there’s a “Frenchman” in town, locals still filled with spite and resentment for their wartime foes. When Pierre Niney shows up in the lives of her and her would-be parents-in-law (Ernst Stötzner and Marie Gruber), we discover that Niney was an old friend of her beau’s.

Ozon uses his past baggage only as a misdirection …instead fashioning a resolutely old-fashioned drama.

And, with that, we shift in the luxuriant colour of fanciful memories: Niney and the titular Frantz (Anton von Lucke) carousing back in some Renoirist Paris. At first, the colour scheme seems binary: before the war, a time full of colour; after, leeched of life, grey with grief. But when the colour switches start coming in other moments — when Beers and Niney walk to a hilltop, when they play a violin/piano duet — this initial, simple reading stalls; even less so when we find out that Niney hasn’t been particularly truthful in his reasons for coming to pay his respects to this fallen German soldier. Are the moments of colour for the warmth of memory? The seductiveness of storytelling? The sweet delusion of fantasy? Or the flowering of love?

These colours are the most definitive device of Frantz, but the shift between — and the playfulness and misdirection thereof — are the only moments that, really, betray this as a work of François Ozon. Since leaving his queer-provocateur days behind in the new century, Ozon has remained daring, throwing himself into his material, even when its wackiness made that not the greatest idea (as in the comedies-of-kitsch 8 Women and Potiche, the dreadful soap-opera Angel, and the FLYING FUCKING BABY movie Ricky). With Frantz, Ozon uses his past baggage only as a misdirection — you assume Niney and the dead German were more than pals in pre-war Paris — instead fashioning a resolutely old-fashioned drama, of grand dramatic revelation and tragic romance.

Frantz comes ‘freely adapted’ from a mildly regarded Ernst Lubitsch film, Broken Lullaby, from 1932. Made between the wars, it was an early exemplar of an anti-war film, critiquing patriotism and xenophobia in a time when few did. This still percolates through Frantz: there are mirroring scenes when old-timey Germans, then French counterparts, stand in a bar and break out in national/ist-anthem song, with palpable violence and resentment simmering in every holler. These themes — of demonising outsiders and making war, of atonement and forgiveness — should feel alive and vital; remain contemporaneous. Yet, instead, they seem somewhat quaint, Ozon’s insistence on playing things period-piecey and tasteful leaving the results tame, mannered. This makes Frantz an accomplished, interesting film, but one utterly lacking its auteur’s usual audacity and vitality.

DENIAL

In production, story, and theme, Denial takes an All-American genre — the courtroom drama — and makes it British. Rachel Weisz, in a not-great Jewish-New-Yorker accent, plays an American historian sued for libel for calling Timothy Spall’s holocaust denier a holocaust denier. It’s a true story, of course: a 1991 court case that made tabloid headlines in the UK.

For a film that spends so much time talking about ... the job of fashioning history into narrative, 'Denial' is seemingly unaware of its own simplification.

Here, it’s brought to screen by screenwriter Sir David Hare and the long-forgotten Mick Jackson (last seen, for real, with 1997’s dire disaster movie Volcano); and, given that both men were born in the 1940s, it’s unsurprising that Denial lands somewhere between old-fashioned and stodgy, feeling much more like an overly earnest and endlessly expository telemovie than a piece of cinema. Any contemporary resonance to an era of fake-news and flat-Earth truthers is incidental; Denial not concerned with now, only then.

The narrative is, essentially, an ongoing case of how-we-do-things-in-England. Weisz arrives as angry, loudmouth American, but she needs to learn sit down, be quiet, and let her lawyers — Andrew Scott and Tom Wilkinson — handle things. They convince her to remain silent, whilst Spall, serving as his own counsel, gets to be garrulous, theatrical, and soundbite-peddling. As American, Weisz is concerned with winning the press coverage, but that’s just another lesson she has to learn: England may be the home of tabloids, but it’s not a land of trial-by-media.

So, learn she does, and succeed she must. In a film about being sued by a neo-Nazi, there’s not much drama as to who will win and lose in court. And when the inspiring verdict duly comes down, everything is wrapped up in a neat little package. For a film that spends so much time talking about the world of historians and the job of fashioning history into narrative, Denial is seemingly unaware of its own simplification, playing like the simplest of history lessons.