Movie Nation

Ryan Gosling & Co. have given Amazon/MGM its best opening weekend ever, as “Project Hail Mary” is already a blockbuster. It did $12 million Thursday night and added another $19 Friday for a sizzling $33 million “opening day.” That projects to a $71 million “Sinners” sized debut, the best of 2026 so far, per Deadline.com.

It’s been hyped to the heavens, reviews have been more appreciative than enthusiastic and apparently the public is in the mood for a cute, quasi-hopeful bit of sci-fi starring one of the most popular and accomplished leading men of his era.

I found it a real teeth-grinder, two and a half hours of “cutesie” masquerading as an essay on loneliness and sloppy, fantasy “science. But that’s just me. Still, note that the gap between Metacritic and the less experienced, studio-cheerleading RT review crew is rather pronounced on this one.

On the subject of the weekend’s other wide opening, “Ready of Not 2: Here I Come,” that review consensus gap is a chasm. A modest budget-to-box-office ratio “hit” of 2019 ($28 million, all in) would hardly seem like a sure box office thing. But here it is, a repetitive sequel that Searchlight wishfully put out to indifferent reviews (like mine), a middling opening day and maybe a $10 million opening weekend.

Considering the original earned $8 million pre-Trumpflation, that’s not “progress” or any sort of sign of pent-up demand. Still, Samara Weaving returns to her most successful role and Sarah Michelle Gellar is here for the Gen X fans. That’s $10 million is only good enough for fourth place.

“Hoppers” is on its way to a $21 million weekend, climbing over $120 million, all-in by midnight Sunday. That’s good enough for second place, with families starved for fresher animated fare than “Zootopia 2” and “GOAT,” winding up their runs.

An Indian action sequel,  “Dhurandhar: The Revenge,” will clear $11-14 and keep “Ready or Not 2” in fourth place. It did almost $4 million Thursday night and unless ticket sales are totally front-loaded, that portends a very good take.

“Reminders of Him,” “Scream 7,” “GOAT,” “Undertone,” “Wuthering Heights” and “The Bride!” will be shuffled in the fifth-through-tenth-place tallies, with none of them clearing $ingle digits.

“I Can Only Imagine 2” is on track to drop out of the top ten, along with “Crime 101.” But we’ll know more later Sat. and certainly by Sunday. I’ll update these figures then.

And now for something for those who like their comic horror thrillers to deliver “more of the same, please.”

“Ready or Not 2: Here I Come” takes us deeper into the worst “marry money” mistake of a young blonde’s life. Sequel to an also-ran hit of 2019, it’s more violent, with double the blondes — sisters, this time — in bloody peril, more Satanic, less inventive and a lot more repetitive.

Tossing Sarah Michelle Gellar into the villainous mix, along with veteran heavy Kevin Durand and Elijah Wood as the biggest villain of all — the lawyer — is what passes for “fresh.” But after a while, the shooting-and-miss, shooting-and-hitting, stabbing, strangling, bludgeoning and body-exploding (Satan punishes his own) gets to be a drag.

“Here I Come” zooms in on Grace (Samara Weaving), covered in blood, battered and punctured, in front of the burning manor house full of dead in-laws and her new husband. “Ready or Not,” she survived their murderous game of “Hide and Seek,” and now the cops want to know what happened.

Her next of kin — estranged sister Faith (Kathryn Newton of the “Ant-Man” franchise) visits her handcuffed in the hospital, recovering just for a few hours before all hell breaks out all over again.

The High Council which “runs everything” has a leadership vacancy to fill. Their lawyer (Wood) is getting the word out. The aged head of the Danforth clan (horror director David Cronenberg) summons his remaining offspring (Sarah Michell Gellar and Shawn Hatosy), but others in Spain (including character actor Nestor Carbonell), China (Olivia Cheng) and the Desi diaspora in North America (Varun Saranga of TV’s “Wynonna Earp”) will be vying for that seat as well.

The stakes?

“The world will go to hell faster than it already is.”

Hey, when Satanists already run the show, it’s not like a new gilded age is underway.

The two-feuding sisters will have to put aside their differences and team up if they want to dodge the sniper rifle rounds, kanda swords, bazooka shells, daggers and the like wielded by this playing-for-keeps crew of almost a dozen would-be murderers, whose skills range from seasoned to inept.

One thing that bogs the picture down is the constant presentation of “rules,” which are basically exposition delivered in heaping helpings start-to-finish. Competing families can’t kill each other, only the quarry. Blood-oaths have to be taken by each succeeding family member as they step up to replace “hunters” who have fallen before them.

The junky jumble of a narrative limits the location to an ancient Rhode Island mansion/casino-resort with a golf course as a killing field and golf carts as getaway/pursuit vehicles, with lots of laughably convenient weapons turning up at just the right time for hunters and the hunted.

Peripheral characters serve a momentary function and then are dispatched or simply vanish from the story or worse, hang around for the underwhelming over-the-top finale.

Weaving’s character has barely had time to catch her breath from the last trauma when she’s hurled into the new one. She’s learned “the game,” but can’t get her sister to respect her newly-acquired survival skills and can’t cadge a smoke off anybody.

I kept waiting for punchy, profane one-liners that four credited screenwriters never deliver. There is no “I’m here to smoke Virginia Slims and kick ass,” and more’s the pity.

Because while there are a couple of laughs and comical come-uppances, the picture drowns in its own gore. And there’s little satisfying about dispatching villains who fail in their family’s quest to kill Grace and collect the coveted “seat” by simply having them explode.

Rating: R, strong bloody violence, gore, profanity, drug abuse and smoking.

Cast: Samara Weaving, Kathryn Newton, Elijah Wood, Olivia Cheng, Varun Saranga, Nestor Carbonell, Shawn Hatosy, Kevin Durand and Sarah Michelle Gellar

Credits: Directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, scripted by Guy Busick, R. Christopher Murphy, Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett. A Searchlight release.

Running time: 1:48

His misses are so rare between his many hits that we don’t think of Ryan Gosling as ever taking an errant step on his rise ro stardom. But a “Gangster Squad,” “Song to Song” or “The Gray Man” turns up just often enough to remind us he’s human.

I am mystified about his need to dabble in “cutesie” with the sci-fi misfire “Project Hail Mary.” Yes, he’s got kids, and an alien stone-crab (literally stone) FX sidekick in a “Silent Running/The Martian” mashup from two filmmakers best known for getting their start as an animation directing team (“Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs”) seems almost understandable.

But I went out of my way to avoid adding “adorable” to the “alien sidekick” description. It’s not, no matter how many times the critter’s translated “Fist me bump” or “You are dumb” or “Do puppet show” burblings — James Ortiz provides the nondescript voice — aim for laughs.

I see a lot of lightweights and critic-come-latelys are endorsing this, and maybe I’m too reluctant to let go of my reactions to the first trailers for it. But “cloying” is a hard sell at 156 often interminable minutes.

Gosling plays a middle school science teacher who runs a fun and delightfully encouraging class. That’s not quite a running thread through the movie, but it has or had promise.

One day, the ex-college researcher/professor Dr. Ryland Grace (a tad on the nose, that name) is challenged by his students to talk about the “red dots” that scientists have announced seem to be eating the sun in a giant arc of a solar system buffet table that ends on Venus.

Even Grace isn’t convinced when he insists “They’re gonna figure this out,” “they” meaning the world’s best and brightest astrophysicists, biologists and the like.

Then he’s confronted by “they” in the form of scientist/project leader Eva Stratt (Sandra Hüller of “Anatomy of a Fall” and “Toni Erdmann”). Her bluntness gets right to the point of his one-time expertise. She will accept no argument from a teacher and onetime researcher who lost his career over his theory that “water is not necessary for life” in the universe.” She needs him and that’s that.

Her humorless is her humor. Yes, those black SUVs are full of guys who will kidnap him.

And as we learn about that class, that school and this now-renewed research through flashbacks Grace experiences after waking up from cryo-sleep on a spaceship, we can guess how he ended up there, too, a turn of events as ludicrous and unlikely as a vacuum-of-space virus that is eating stars all over the galaxy.

Grace is all alone on a ship traveling over eleven light years to study a star that isn’t being eaten, or so everybody thought when he took off. That’s where he runs into an alien vessel also studying this star. And that’s how he meets just-as-lonely “Rocky.”

The science in this “sun is being eaten” story — such as it is — is a word salad of chemical elements grasped just long enough to let it slip into “fantasy,” with energy sources that seem more Tony Stark and “Avatar” “Unobtainium” than Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

The “learn to communicate” scenes involving a vacuum tube passed between spaceships, DIY models and yes, “puppet shows,” and are grossly inferior to earlier takes on that trope — “Close Encounters,” “Contact” and “The Martian.” Sci-fi films are readily referenced with “Shields’ UP!” the only joke that works.

The narrative’s “work the problem” business is flat-out gobbledegook, as the movie feels more production designed than Phd-in-chemistry approved.

And the pathos derived from the Big Themes of loneliness, sacrifice and fighting through fatalism left me cold –deep space cold. When even “Am I expendable?” is played for laughs, and lands with a thud, it’s not just gravity that’s to blame.

Gosling can be forgiven for taking the Bezos bucks, and he has earned such goodwill that he’s almost become bad-review-proof, especially since “Barbie.” But “Project Hail Mary” doesn’t make the pass, much less complete it in the end zone when time FINALLY expires.

Rating: PG-13, “thematic meterial” and “suggestive references.

Cast: Ryan Gosling, Sandra Hüller, Lionel Boyce, Ken Yeoung and the voice of James Ortiz as “Rocky”

Credits: Directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, scripted by Drew Goddard and Andy Weir An Amazon MGM release.

Running time: 2:36

I am at a loss when trying to come up with an Oscar nominated short film that I’ve ever felt was unworthy of being in the field.

Something about the process of submission, how seriously those who vote to winnow the possible nominees down to an elite few via film festivals and the like always makes this the March Madness category of the Academy Awards. Winners, working within the confines of a short running time, limited story, set-up, plot complications and punch line, polish their pictures to a fine gleem.

Sometimes, as with “Sling Blade” or “Before I Disappear,” these jewels become feature films. Before music videos, commercials, “Reels” and Youtube, short films were the pathway to feature film careers.

I can’t imagine “The Singers,” based on a short story by Ivan Turgenev, being expanded to anything longer than the 18 nearly-perfect minutes Arizona State U. alum Sam A. Davis put on screen. But it’s a minor marvel — atmospheric, dark, forlorn, funny and joyous. You’ll laugh and you’ll cry at the simple humanity of it all.

It’s about a bar where almost everybody got old. It’s still packed, with old men, smokers and a geezer on a ventillator, a passed-out priest, the homeless, the helpless and the hopeless.

It’s the sort of gathering place for alcoholics that only exists in the movies these days, right down to the disused piano in a corner. Serious drunks often drink alone, buying cheaper liquor at the convenience store.

But here, a grizzled owner, a broke barfly cadging drinks, the sad and the sullen, gather and are goaded into a singing contest.

There’s really nothing more to say than “WATCH this.” There’s more humanity in it than most of the Best Picture contenders, and less embarrassment in its honors than in that disastrously artless sell-out-to-undiscriminating fankids Best Animated Feature “winner.”

Rating: TV-MA, alcohol abuse, smoking, profanity

Cast: Will Harrington, Chris Smither, Mike Young, Judah Kelly, Leroy Griffith, Muffin and Matt Corcoran.

Credits: Scriptd and directed by Sam A. Davis, based on a short story by Ivan Turgenev. A Netflix release.

Running time: :18

The brawls have to do most of the heavy lifting in your typical martial arts genre picture, even the ones in a scenic setting. That’s doubly true in “The Forbidden City,” a stumbling and generally indifferent kung fu thriller with comic touches set in The Enternal City — Rome.

“Rome” is limited to an out-of-place one night motorbike ride past the historical landmarks. And the tale of two sisters, raised to be martial artists in the “Only One Child Per Family” era China but separated by human trafficking in adulthood, misses as many plot points as it hits.

When they were little, Yun and Mei trained together with their dojo master daddy, with Yun forced into hiding every time a neighborhood spy dropped by to catch the family raising two daughters instead of the requisite one.

Adulthood sees tough-as-nails Mei (Yaxi Liu) pursue “always there for me” sister Yun (Haijin Ye) through the Chinese mob’s global human trafficking pipeline.

Imagine the dragon lady in charge’s surprise when she walks down a line of trafficked young women whom she assigns to “brothel,” “massage” work and the like, and that one furious immigrant who demands to know “Where is YUN?” and proceeds to kick the ass of everybody who fails to give her a quick answer.

Mei is focused and furious. If she has to bust up every Chinese mafia crew and Italian mobster in Rome, where Yun has ended up, she’s going to fetch that missing sister. Where most cities label their Chinese district “Chinatown,” in Rome they prefer “La città proibita,” aka “The Forbidden City.” Or so this Gabriele Mainetti movie asserts.

Mei is never scarier than when she yanks out her phone, barks a threat (in Chinese with English subtitles) into it and has it translated into Chinese-accented Italian (with English subtitles). Because most of the people she’s going to have to punch, kick, stab and slice (a CD broken in half makes a nasty weapon) are locals.

Annibale (Marco Giallini, flinty) is the neighborhood mafioso, 60something, with two bearded goons nicknamed “Chip n Dale” always by his side. He’s big on putting the squeeze on immigrants. He’s got an interest in Ristorante Alfredo. Alfredo’s son Marcello (Enrico Borello) is the star chef there. But the ever-philandering Alfredo (Luca Zingaretti) is where everybody is led to believe that the sex-trafficked sibling Yun wound up.

That puts Mei in conflict with hapless Marcello and on the warpath for Wang (Shanshin Chunyu), the new Chinese muscle in town, running his growing empire through Chinese restaurants, brothels and massage parlors.

As Mei makes mayhem, everybody keeps an eye out for “the Chinese girl,” who kidnaps Marcello at one point and sets out to rescue or avenge her sister, no matter who’s involved.

The cultures in collision plot mean that the Stefano Bises, director Mainetti and Davide Serino script is cluttered with filler. Subplots involving Marcello’s cheat-customers-on-their-bill mother (Sabrina Ferelli), Wang’s Sino-Italian hip hop star son (Roberto He) are side alleys that reach an instant dead-end.

Yun is transformed from a child trained to defend herself into a passive character in love or merely in the clutches of a much older man.

The “filler” stops the movie’s forward momentum every few minutes as we’re treated to chatty interludes meant to prolong how long it takes us to reason out the plot — which takes no time at all as long as you remember “reason” has little to do with it.

But stuntwoman (“Mulan”) turned star Liu is a formidable lead, selling much of the impossible Bugs Bunny physics of the fights as she and everybody else hopes that we don’t notice her quick recovery from gaping knife wounds and the like.

Borello can’t quite make the sale of sister-of-his-father’s-paramore-turned-love interest. But who could? The finale to “The Forbidden City” is the sort of reality only a trio of screenwriters could irrationally cook up, with nary an Italian Chef Academy alumnus in the lot.

Rating: unrated, graphic violence, sex, nudity, profanity

Cast: Yaxi Liu, Enrico Borello, Marco Giallini, Shanshun Chunyu,
Sabrina Ferilli, Luca Zingaretti and Haijin Ye

Credits: Directed by Gabriele Mainetti, scripted by Stefano Bises, Gabriele Mainetti and Davide Serino. A Well Go USA release.

Running time: 2:19

The ’70s are widely regarded as the cinema’s second gilded age, and with good reason.

As the audience shrank to date movie kids, action and genre addicts who thought drive-ins were the best way to watch a movie or discerning, sophisticated filmgoers, as the studios changed hands and new ownership abandoned old genres and formulas in search of something that might draw a crowd, a new generation of filmmakers announced itself with daring films, and later in the decade, the invention of the modern blockbuster.

But before “Jaws” and “Star Wars” changed everything, “Five Easy Pieces,” “The Godfather,” “Harold and Maude,” “Chinatown,” “The Conversation” and “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” were mulled over and debated by the major magazine critics of the era, and their readers. “All the President’s Men” was history illuminated and summed up just as it happened. And “Shampoo” and “Network” reminded us that comedy could be social commentary and satire.

And then “Heaven’s Gate” all but killed off risky and smart cinema. “Raiders of the Lost Ark” chiseled the popcorn blockbuster business model in stone, and it was all over.

But “Being There” ended a great cinema decade with a glorious, witty and wry flourish. It’s no surprise that it took years of effort and many potential stars turning it down before Jerzy Kosinski’s mirror-on-America novel could finally reach the screen. After Watergate, we were ready. As we prepared to put a dotty, myopic commie-hating movie star in the White House, we needed a movie that could explain how that might happen.

Peter Sellers, director Hal Ashby and Kosinski created a mythic satire of the attention span of a culture than embraces the new and the unknown as “fresh,” even when it isn’t fresh or profound or even smart, a timeless film that pokes at race, skewers clueless media, conservatism and the oligarchs who control it to rule over The Masses, a masterpiece that would come out just in time for The Reagan Era.

It’s all in the perception — the posturing and media gullibility in celebrating the surface gloss and polls of people who don’t pay a lot of attention to details but who find something or someone “new” to be “refreshing,” especially when the media spins inanities and ignorance into profundity.

With its illiterate, dim, confused and TV-obsessed “hero,” more than one wag has revived “Being There” in recent years as a predictor of The Trump Era. Cultures don’t degrade or revive themselves overnight. And great films have a timelessness that keeps them relevant through the ages.

Chance (Sellers) has grown up in the servants’ quarters of a posh city townhouse gone to seed, so we gather. He watches TV obsessively, changing the channel compulsively. He polishes “the old man’s” car — a 1938 Packard Eight whose whitewalls have long been flat — and tends his garden. Chance, the gardener, has been doing this and only this for all of his 50some years.

Then housekeeper Louise (Ruth Attaway, brilliantly tactless and furious), who has prepared his meals for most of his life, announces “The old man’s dead.” Chance says “I see” so inscrutably that we might confuse his confusion for solemnity and gravitas. Throughout the movie, everybody else does.

When Chance says “I understand,” he does nothing of the sort. When he notes “I’ve never been allowed out of the house,” or “I don’t read” or “I can’t sign” his name when a lawyer (the redoubtable David Clennon) shows up and questions Chance in classic legal CYA speak, he’s being literal. Not to worry, “I have no claim” Chance assures our litigation-shy lawyer. Chance is unsure of what the word means.

Eviction puts Chance on the street without even the most basic skills of survival. But his very expensive but dated tailored double-breasted suit, coat and hat speaks volumes. And “Being There” truly announces itself as one of the greatest films ever the minute Chance walks out that door and into a D.C. neighborhood that this mansion/townhouse has slowly gone to ruin within.

For eight minutes, this innocent abroad strolls the streets with their empty storefronts and litter. He stares past the urban decay to fuss over the state of the flora, asks Black female strangers he meets if they could make him his lunch and meets Black street punks who have a message for the “honky” to deliver to their rival, Raphael, with this entire odyssey set to the electronic jazz version of “Also Sprach Zarathustra” by Deodato.

No, this isn’t “2001.” It’s America in the late ’70s — as vivid a montage of struggling cities, the disadvantaged Black and Hispanic generations who prompted racist White Flight from those cities — and the power elite who cluelessly and heartlessly presided over it all.

“It’s for sure that it’s a white man’s world in America!” Louise fumes in the rundown boarding house where she and other Black domestic labor are fated to spend their retirement. Because she sees Chance on TV.

The simpleton who can’t discern reality from television, to the extent he uses his TV remote to try and change the channel from his unpleasant encounter with gang-bangers, stumbles into an accident, is rescued by the trophy wife (Shirley MacLaine) of aged, rich D.C. power broker Benjamin Rand (Melvyn Douglas). Chance the Gardener is confused for “Chauncey Gardiner,” with his every word misinterpreted and every coincidence that puts him in the orbit of Rand and the rest of the aged, white D.C. elite allowing one and all to mistake him for a behind-the-scenes shaker and mover, an inscrutable sage of the age with the ear of the powerful and their president (Jack Warden).

“Shortchanged by the Lord, and dumb as a jackass,” Louise preaches. “Look at him now!”

A $30 million second weekend, coming after a $45 million opening weekend and $58 million opening week, means Disney/Pixar’s “Hoppers” could flirt with the $100 million mark by midnight Sunday, and that it owns the box office all the way through the Oscars.

But the big news this weekend is the $20 million that the Colleen Hoover romance novel adaptation “Reminders of Him” might hit. Mixed reviews aside, its engaging leads sell it and Maika Monroe and Tyriq Withers have their first certified smash outside of the horror genre. So good on them.

But any way you shake it, that doesn’t measure up to the opening of the abuse-and-its-blowback Hoover adapation “This Ends with Us,” which did a whopping $50 million on its opening weekend. It had Blake Lively as its star, which was a huge boost.

“Reminders” did decent Thursday and Friday business — just under $8 million. And depending on how Sat. shakes out, could clear $20 by midnight Sunday, with $18 million the floor of what it could manage.

“Undertone” is also an over-performer, a sinister and sonic (sound is EVERYthing) single-hander starring “Handmaid’s Tale” handmaid Nina Kiri, it’s on track to clear $10. For a wide but not huge release horror tale that isn’t a franchise installment, that’s impressive. The discerning horror fans are finding this A24 outing, as they should.

That should push the fading and weary “Scream 7” to fourth place, as it’s on course to clear $7.

“GOAT,” the other animated choice for parents with cartoon-craving-kids, will enjoy one last weekend in the top five with a $5 million weekend, according to Deadline.com.

“The Bride!” (dying a mercifully quick death — it may barely clear $20 million before vanishing) and “Wuthering Heights” (over $80 thus far, a Margot Robbie blockbuster) exit the top five.

That “EPIC” Elvis doc, playing in the provinces to a much older crowd, should exit the top ten, with either “I Can Only Imagine 2” ($17 million+) or “Send Help” ($63 million and counting) leaving with it.

I’ll update these figures as more data is shared on Sat. and Sunday.

A little old-fashioned movie star charisma and sex appeal spice up the latest from romance novelist Colleen Hoover, “Reminders of Him.”

An overwrought and only slightly less far fetched romantic melodrama than her edgier and abusive “This Ends with Us,” “Reminder” is the beneficiary of nicely nuanced turns by two attractive and engaging leads — horror icon Maika Monroe of “It Follows” and “Don’t Breathe,” and Tyriq Withers of “I Know What You Did Last Summer” and TV’s “The Game.”

They make a story of guilt and responsibility, starting over after a tragedy and overcoming legal, ethical and personal misjudgements and oh, intense sexual attraction and extreme affluence tolerable if not wholly palatable.

It’s the kind of romance that measures up to “This isn’t half bad” despite some eye-rolling or just too-obvious plot twists.

Monroe is Kenna, fresh out of prison and on her way back into Laramie when she has the cabbie stop by a roadside memorial. She yanks up the cross with Scotty Landry’s name on it. He’s the guy she writes “letters” to in her journals, letters she relates in voice-over narration.

“Dear Scotty, I know you hated memorials” and the like.

She’s got her pre-prison Daisy Dukes and cowgirl boots on as she rents an efficiency in the Paradise Apartments, a dump that used to be a motel. The owner arm-twists her into taking a kitten in the bargain. Kenna will have to get used to the special needs girl who goes by Princess Diana (Monika Myers) who’s in the habit of barging in wherever, looking in the fridge and taking whatever suits her fancy.

“We can’t hire folks with a record, hon,” is what Kenna hears from one and all as she job hunts. There’s no “starting over” without a job. A sympathetic grocery store assistant manager bails her out.

And the hunky ex-Denver Bronco tavern owner Ledger (Withers) will serve up day-old coffee if that’s all she’s drinking.

Kenna’s past, her big mistake, involved alcohol, a car accident and a tragedy none of those closest to it will ever get over. She’s come here to see her child.

“I just wanna meet the human being that Scotty and I made.”

His parents (Lauren Graham and Bradley Whitford) aren’t hearing that. And Ledger, once he figures out who she is, won’t allow her in their sight.

But as the hunk and the hottie gently collide and flashbacks flesh out their pasts with Scotty, big mistakes and whatnot, we see where this is going and have to decide just how plausible it all is.

Hoover’s edge — the book was adapted by Lauren Levine — comes from the R-rated language and sexuality of her entries in a genre that often has a faith-based or at least a Nicholas Sparks soft and squishy feel.

There’s no prison brutality, but we see Kenna advised by a wisened, butch inmate in the bluntest terms.

“They took your baby from you.” She has to decide, are “You gonna live in your sadness, or die in it?”

The narrative is littered with cute-bordering-on-cloying touches — Princess Diana’s running gag/nickname for Ledger — “Jerk” — jokes about hating music because all the songs are riven with heartbreak (Air Supply as a punchline).

Little Zoe Kosovic is the teeth-achingly-adorable five-year-old, improbably named Diem, at the heart of this tug of war. Ledger’s devoted to his best friend’s child. Can he forgive the woman who took Scotty from him?

The plot is messy, but built on romance-novel tidiness — coincidences and twists that point towards “It’ll all work out.”

But director Vanessa Caswill (Netflix’s “Love at First Sight”) knows where the money is here. Monroe and Withers are showcased to beautiful effect and her stars reward her attentions with inviting performances.

Withers, a former Florida State football player, is Wheaties box-handsome and effortlessly credible as an NFL vet building a mansion in his home town and Monroe has a working class earthiness that serves the role well.

“Why are you so poor?” Princess Diana wonders. Monroe’s Kenna suggests the growing-up mistakes that limited the prettiest girl in school’s horizons.

The picture dawdles. Granny Graham (“Gilmore Girls”) rubs the sharpest edges off her still-grieving mother, Whitford seems out of place in this milieu and little touches like having an alcoholic partner (Nicholas Duvernay, Withers’ real brother) in the bar are just precious.

But the picture plays and Monroe and Withers make us invest in the characters and “This isn’t half bad” makes this a date movie that comes off, romance novel origins be damned.

Rating: PG-13, sexual content, drugs, partial nudity, profanity

Cast: Maika Monroe, Tyriq Withers, Zoe Kosvic, Bradley Whitford, Rudy Panko, Nicholas Duvernay, Monika Myers and Lauren Graham.

Credits: Directed by Vanessa Caswill, scripted by Lauren Levine, based on a novel by Colleen Hoover. A Universal release.

Running time: 1:50

The scary possibilities of a spooky story told and acted-out with simple sound recordings and timely sound effects are stretched to their limit in “Undertone,” a myopic and creepy thriller that messes with everything between your headphones.

Basically it’s a radio drama for the podcast era, a two-hander with only our heroine and her comatose bedridden mother seen on screen. It’s about two podcast storytellers who stumble into a variation of the watch it/hear it/say it and you’re haunted by it trope — “Candyman,” every “Bloody Mary,” “The Ring,” etc. — and wonder if what they’re experiencing is real and a threat to their lives.

After 40-plus years of reviewing movies, it’s very rare that I hit on one that raises the hair on the back of my neck any more. But something about the intimacy and isolation of our headponed heroine, Evy (“Handmaid’s Tale” alumna Nina Kiri) and sound’s power to play with your imagination got to me.

Then again, I think the scariest Stephen King adaptations I’ve ever experienced were adaptations aired in binaural (3D radio) productions on NPR back in the ’80s.

Evy is sitting through the last days of a death watch with her aged mother (Michèle Duquet), a devout Catholic who has stopped eating and slipped into a coma. Evy gets instructions from an unseen hospice nurse and knows the “death rattle” she’s supposed to listen for at the end — after all the bedclothes and diaper changing that leads up to that in the American Way of Death. She is moved to re-listen to the last voice mail she saved from her mother, with Mom promising to “pray for you.”

But once a week, Evy co-hosts “The Undertone,” a podcast of “real” and passed-down stories of “all things creepy.” She plays the “in house skeptic” Scully to her old friend Justin’s (Adam DiMarco) more credulous Mulder in this audio-only “X-Files” team.

As she logs in and headphones-up with the distant Justin, he pitches this anonymous emailed set of audio files as their next show. They’re home recordings by a couple named Jessa (Keana Lyn Bastidas), who is talking in her sleep, and her mate Mike (Jeff Yung) who records her to convince her this is happening.

The ten audio files grow more dread-filled the further Evy and Justin go along. And as they split the episode into a multi-part series, true-believer Justin gets a lot of “bad feeling about this” vibes as they mess with the sounds emanating from Jessa, the words they make out from her voice played backwards and how that fits into the backstories of nursery rhymes of the “Bloody Mary/Lond Bridge is Falling Down” era.

“All childrens song are about children dying,” is one thread they wander off on. Skeptic Evy hears “hoax” at every turn, and throws around an understanding of audio apophenia and the way the mind plays trick on what your ears — especially those isolated by high-end headphones — discern.

Is that really “Mike kill all” they’re hearing from Jessa’s late night mumblings played backwards?

The podcast may go down the rabbit hole of songs played backwards, the mythology behind such nursery rhymes as the bizarre results of hearing a couple’s “talking in your sleep” recordings take horrific turns. But Evy’s got real life problems, starting with her dying mother, extending to her less than wholly supportive unseen beau and the two possible outcomes of her peeing on a stick.

The soundscape may be the vivid selling point of writer-director Ian Tuason’s gimmicky debut feature. But Kiri does a swell job of selling the rising threat level and Evy’s growing sense of peril with it.

The voice-acting all is all around fine. And when the narrative pulls out all the stops — abandoning just a whiff of its isolated-Evy-against-evil structure — that hair on the back of the neck thing returns with a vengeance.

No, there’s not much to this thin plot and the monotonous visual limitations don’t deliver the claustrophobia you might expect to heighten the growing dread. But for horror that’s alarming in the most primal, aural and piloerection ways, “Undertone” hits enough right notes to recommend.

Rating: R, profanity

Cast: Nina Kiri and
Michèle Duquet, with the voices of Adam DiMarco, Jeff Yung and Keana Lyn Bastidas

Credits: Scripted and directed by Ian Tuason. An A24 release.

Running time: 1:33

The Grateful Dead may be dead, but Deadheadism lives on in the global “Let’s try Ayahuasca, ‘shrooms, (hallucinogenic) sage and toads” set — the “consciousness” pathfinders among us.

Well, the idle, entitled and easily bored among us, anyway.

“Wetiko” is a short, strange trip into the land of the Maya and the toads that you’re just supposed to lick, man. It’s about a young man of Mayan ancestry lured into delivering toads to an “Empire of Love” commune founded by a South African cult leader in the mountainous, cavernous back country of Mexico.

It’s “inspired by a true story,” but really, what is “truth?” In the cinema, that’s a slippery concept. In cults, it’s whatever Dear Leader says it is.

Aapo (Juan Daniel García Treviño) doesn’t wrestle with deep thoughts like that. He works in his mother’s pet store and patiently listens to her explain the restrictions on toad sales and toad “use” to the slim, sexy customer (Dalia Xiuhcoatl) who flashes a lot of cash in an effort to “rent” toads when buying some is out of the question.

Her local shamanka’s name is all Mom needs to hear to agree to the cash deal. But our customer uses her feminine wiles to talk Aapo into “delivering” the toads. He, like his mother, knows how to “milk” them? Right?

Next thing we know Aapo’s ripped-off some yankee tourist’s Honda 250 and screwdriver-started his way into the back country. He figures he’ll deliver the toads, making sure Yavetzi the shamanka is around to handle them, collect the cash and maybe ogle — and more — the female acolytes of the Empire of Love.

The bearded Afrikaans, English and Spanish speaking Zake (Neil Sandilands) is a dictionary of New Age doublespeak, psychobabble and gobbledegook. He talks up the “portals of remembrance” and “the interfade” to his “star being” acolytes — with some new paying customer “Tiktok shaman” influencers on board for a special “Moon” ceremony.

He doesn’t want to hear Aapo is “just the delivery boy, not the medicine man.” He wants the kid to milk the toads. And maybe “listen for the sound of our ancestors, calling us home.”

The Maya’s ancestors? Zake’s South African. Patronizing contempt for “native” people is in his DNA.

“They don’t know they’re special. That’s exactly what MAKES them special!”

Zake, his bait Luz (Xihcoatl), Ms. “perfect abs” muscle Sasha (Bárbara de Regil) and “climatologist turned influencer” Frankie (Jordan Barrett) and assorted Mayans named Maria or Felipe seem determined to pull this ceremony off. As Aapo is drugged, threatened, robbed and injured, we wonder about his role in this “ritual” and if he told Mom he wouldn’t be home for dinner.

Writer-director Kerry Mondragón maintains a sinister tone through much of “Wetiko,” and we fear for Aapo the moment he gets on that bike that he steals. These cultists have heat-vision goggles for chasing escapees through their caves and firearms along with a lot of airy-fairy sales pitches in their “free yourself” mantras.

Mondragón’s script strains to deliver anything particularly surprising — a bug in the ear calamity, the repeated suggestions of “We have no secrets here” and what might happen to one’s tongue if the wrong secret is exposed.

I liked the ironic needle-drop of The Tremeloes’ one-hit in the opening and finale. But the odd bit of distorted lens tripping or heat-vision chasing doesn’t pay off, and there’s no attempted visualization of the “whiteout” nature of toad toxin drug trips.

The logic of it all — Mayans repeatedly warn Aapo not to “stay for the ceremony — works. And Sandilands makes a decent enough archetypal cult king.

“It’s OK, Luz. I talk to God!“

But sinister as this often feels, the pedestrian direction, sloppy confusion of “frogs” and “toads” and the third act’s parade of perfunctory script beats bogs the film down. “Wetiko” never quite escapes the feel of genre pic that doesn’t quite come off.

Rating: unrated, violence, drug abuse, nudity, profanity

Cast: Juan Daniel García Treviño, Neil Sandilands, Dalia Xiuhcoatl, Jordan Barrett and
Bárbara de Regil

Credits: Scripted and directed by Kerry Mondragón. A Dekanalog release.

Running time: 1:31