Let's Just Call It Now: This Is The Best Film Of 2018

Custody

Without hyperbole, Custody is one of the greatest first features ever made. Debutante director Xavier Legrand shows an astonishing sense of command in his film, its composition, montage, and sustained mood of a quality normally associated with grand auteurs operating at the peak of their powers. It’s a magnificently-photographed, meticulously-mounted portrait of two parents —and their two luckless children— engaged in a bitter custody battle.

The narrative opens, without music and with little preamble, at a mediation hearing, where we meet these opposing parties: Denis Ménochet, as ever a glowering, bear-like screen presence; and Léa Drucker, who looks worn down, defeated, by a history only we can only guess. The audience is instantly forced to assume a position of adjudication: not just finding our bearings via what’s presented in statements, by their absent son and respective lawyers, but invited to cast judgement. There’s few hard truths to be gleaned from the sitdown, each side having their own side to the story, no black-and-white facts found in the grey area of competing, self-serving opinions. Ménochet is, depending on the party, either “a hurt father reaching out to his kids”, or a violent menace. “Which of you is the bigger liar?” the judge dares wonder, aloud.

This hearing proceeds in 15 minutes of essential ‘real time’, but, from there, the narrative clicks into gear, Legrand winding things ever-tauter with each passing moment. Custody is only 93 minutes long, a movie without an ounce of fat on it. It starts as a dark family drama, exploring the deleterious fall-out from a fractured marriage and custody battle, but turns, deliberately, towards a thriller of such tension that, by its end, it feels genuinely suffocating.

It’s bracing, brilliant, exhilarating filmmaking. And exacting, too: Legrand using framing to capture power dynamics, to ‘wall in’ characters, to keep the audience at a distance then drag them into its deadly emotional minefield. When we sit with Thomas Gioria, the young son caught in the parental crossfire, the direction conveys —and makes palpable— the fear he feels towards his angry, defiant, increasingly-desperate dad. When he runs away from his father, the shaky tracking-shots, kept low at a boy’s height, show that fear turning towards terror.

Custody’s most astonishing sequence that plays out in effective ‘silence’, at a birthday party for the couple’s 18-year-old daughter (Mathilde Auneveux). It begins with an unbroken single shot, where the birthday girl moves through the party, dialogue drowned out by the incredibly loud music. Clearly unnerved upon receiving a text, she’s suddenly involved in agitated conversations with her boyfriend and mother; conversations we can’t hear. As the rowdy party rages on, her anxiety and terror is communicated through behaviour, gesture, body language; revellers therein unaware of the drama, and danger, playing out around them. The sequence crests when Auneveux steps on stage to sing, fronting a live-band as they play Proud Mary. Cover-band cheese is turned profound study in depicting conflicting, complex emotional layers, her ‘brave face’ never concealing the undercurrents of fear, distress, worry palpable beneath every sung word.

Watching this scene — dark and unsettling, both scary and somehow funny, terror laced with irony, trenchant theme growing deeper with each passing instant — feels like witnessing the arrival of an astonishing new cinematic voice. From there, things only get darker, more harrowing, more unforgiving; Custody’s 13-minute final sequence not just gripping, but squeezing tight as a vice. It’s virtuoso filmmaking, unrelenting to the last. And not just one of the greatest first features ever made, but the year’s best film.

American Animals

Years ago, Werner Herzog famously declared that, as filmmaker working in both fiction and non-fiction, he wasn’t into the accountant’s truth, only the ecstatic truth. It was a fancy way of saying, really, to never let facts get in the way of a good story, no matter how you’re telling it. Over time, the demarcation between these supposedly-separate modes of screen storytelling has dissipated: more documentaries shining a light on their own subjectivity, more dramas inserted into recognisable reality.

American Animals is a grandstanding example of a film forcibly confronting audiences with their own acceptance of supposed cinematic truths. It recounts a real-life 2004 heist of a host of rare books from a Kentucky library, both as dramatisation starring hot young actors (Barry Keoghan, Evan Peters, Blake Jenner, Jared Abrahamson), and as documentary finding the real-life participants remembering their experiences. Years later, these talking-heads are the most unreliable of narrators, but, then again, so is a filmmaker, whose dramatisation reshapes the real into whatever works best, cinematically. In its most incisive moments, the players —be they interview subjects or acted characterisations— call the whole thing into question; disputing not just facts, events, or others’ recollections, but the filmmaking decisions, and the way the tricks of cinema manipulate an audience.

It’s the work of Bart Layton, and furthers the ideas the British director put into play in his debut, 2012’s The Imposter. That film was essentially a documentary, exploring a stranger-than-fiction tale in which a French con-artist posed as the long-lost son of a Texan family. Having used dramatic recreation, filmmaker interventions, and unreliable narrators last time around, here Layton makes all of these themes, and all of this meta-text, overt. By laying it on the table, so plainly, he makes audiences question their usual consumption of on-screen ‘reality’. In such, American Animals evokes a different maxim by a great European auteur: Michael Haneke’s assertion that “film is 24 lies per second at the service of truth”.

Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far On Foot

In making both his lost-in-the-desert opus Gerry and school-shooting riff Elephant, Gus Van Sant shot his actors in long tracking shots from behind. At first, he claimed the influence of Hungarian endurance-cinema titan Béla Tarr, but later revealed that the visual inspiration came from playing Tomb Raider. In Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far On Foot, Van Sant introduces another cinematic device obviously inspired by playing with a digital device: in a ‘melancholy memories of things we’ve already seen in the film’ montage, Van Sant has the images scroll upwards, evoking the infinite scroll of swiping down a phone browser, like the reaction gifs of a comment section. It’s a shot that speaks at the greater goal of the film: hoping to deliver all the regular biopic clichés in a vaguely-fresh format.

In his seventeenth feature, Van Sant works from the memoir of John Callahan, who was left quadriplegic by a car accident at 21, but ended up becoming a cartoonist, one whose blackly-comic newspaper panels often spoke —and joked— about disability. As always, there are the standard limits of making a film that spans decades in its subject’s life: Don’t Worry inevitably becoming a parade of varying wigs plopped atop the heads of Joaquin Phoenix and Rooney Mara; the passage of time forever turned into artless montages (no matter which way they scroll).

But Van Sant’s screenplay goes out of its way to avoid linearity: its chronology forever shuffled; timelines nesting within others; moments paused, then returned to. There’s no simple framing narrative, either; even though, in its opening reel, we see Phoenix both settling in to ‘tell his story’ in front of an AA group, and accepting an award for his career work at another gathering, years later. Each could be a vessel for us to dissolve into flashback, but Don’t Worry never does, existing forever in a cinematic ‘now’, no matter which way it moves through time.

Combined with the saltiness of the source text —Callahan long agitating for a conversation on disability stripped off pity and condescension— it makes for Van Sant’s most meaningful movie in a moment (since 2008’s Milk, probably). With its Portland setting, skateboarders, queer themes, and rock’n’roll connections (Carrie Brownstein, Beth Ditto, and Kim Gordon are all in the cast), it’s clearly a Van Sant film. Especially given that its battles-with-alcoholism narrative leads into American evangelical rebirth, a favoured theme for a filmmaker so fond of reinvention.

The Seagull

Doing Chekhov is a rite-of-passage —and a blessing— for any theatre actor. But any director staging a production of the Russian master’s plays needs ask themselves a simple question: why? Why bring to stage yet another version of a classic? What reason beyond tradition, name-recognition, the canon? It’s a fundamental question that totally applies to Michael Mayer’s to-screen adaptation of Chekhov’s classic play The Seagull. And one that the film fails to answer.

As expected, it’s an actor’s vehicle, blessed by great performances from Annette Bening, Corey Stoll, and Saoirse Ronan. For those who want to see great actors acting, in period wardrobe at a picturesque country estate, delivering lines loaded with mischief and wit and playing out grand dramas of the heart, The Seagull is non-threatening, Sunday-afternoon type entertainment.

But, there’s never a moment where this production seems necessary, that there’s a sense of urgency in the depiction. Mayer —a theatre director with only a couple minor prior films to his name— fails to give his Seagull a cinematic sense; manages to use the camera’s fluid viewpoint to look at the text from a new vantage. Despite its top-shelf cast (Elisabeth Moss in the house!), the use of some amazing Nico Muhly music, and the eternal lure of Chekhov’s drama, The Seagull, this Seagull, is a film that simply just is.

A Prayer Before Dawn

There’s a particular strain of ‘horror stories from 3rd-world prison’ dramas that A Prayer Before Dawn belongs to. But it’s also a boxing movie and an inspirational out-of-adversity memoir. This all makes it sound, frankly, pretty terrible, but Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire’s adaptation of Billy Moore’s functionally-titled book, A Prayer Before Dawn: My Nightmare In Thailand’s Prisons, strips the more florid elements of the narrative down, working with a general sense of downplayed realism.

This tone manages to keep the film from feeling too much like a hero-mongering sports-movie, with its against-all-odds set-up and this-time-it’s-personal gin-up. Joe Cole plays the book’s real-life memoirist, an expat Brit who landed in Thailand, falling into both black-market fights and heroin dependency. He ends up in prison, having to learn new codes-of-conduct in its sweaty, ultraviolent hellscape.

The only way out? To fight! Fight for his freedom, for his life, and for the sweet love of a “ladyboy”. And, just to lay it on even thicker: like Homer Simpson facing a cannonball, our pugilist is one unlucky blow away from possible death. That looks melodramatic in print, but Sauvaire quells those concerns with a lean, mean mise-en-scène; all sweat and shadows, careful tracking shots and cautious deployment of score.

Jirga

Jirga, about an Australian expat in Afghanistan, seems, initially, as if it may be peddling a similar overseas-horror-story narrative, especially when our lead character ends up captured by the Taliban. But local director Benjamin Gilmour isn’t out to stoke the terrors of the unknown; even though, for much of the film, he declines using subtitles, so that a local audience will feel its anti-hero’s sense of disorientation.

Instead, it turns out that are Australian abroad, a not-particularly-great Sam Smith, is a former soldier who’s returned to his former battle-grounds. He’s not seeking retribution or vengeance, only reconciliation and virtue. His goal, it turns out, is to visit the village where he shot a man, to offer money, apology, amends.

It’s a simple narrative stripped down to the bone; we learn little about our (anti?) hero beyond his desire to make amends, the great cultural-exchange coming through the playing of music, not the telling of stories or making of jokes. At times, it feels like a meta-text: an Australian journey to the wilds of Afghanistan for cross-cultural rehabilitation echoing the film production, shot guerrilla style in Afghanistan, finding collaborations from locals.

Wajib

The title of Annemarie Jacir’s simple, uncluttered father-son flick translates as ‘Duty’, something that gets at both the text and the sub-text of her film. Wajib is set in Nazareth, where tradition dictates that, in advance of Christian Palestinian weddings, invitations must be delivered by hand. And, so, real-life father-and-son pair Mohammad and Saleh Bakri head out on a low-mileage roadtrip: making their way around local neighbourhoods, getting stuck in traffic and oft-comic situations, meeting a cast of characters to whom they’re handing invites.

The drama comes from the generation gap between the two. Mohammad, the father, is all about upholding traditions, treasuring culture, maintaining face, and being an active participant in the local Palestinian community. His son, Saleh, has been living an expat’s life; working as an architect in Italy, where he lives, unmarried, with his girlfriend. It’s a film about traditions being lost on younger generations; a narrative as old as time. But there’s added thematic grist, here, given this isn’t just a standard tale of generations leaving home and the diaspora. It’s a film about what Palestinian identity means, and the weight of preserving it.