Movie Nation

Taking the “Transformers” franchise back to the kiddie cartoon it always was turns out to be the safest bet Paramount could make with its creaking, clunky sci-fi/toys franchise.

No more Michael Bay, just family audiences turning up to the tune of $26+ million for “Transformers One,” an origin story the adults in the room never asked for.

Deadline.com says that will edge out Tim Burton’s return to the “Beetlejuice” universe, with “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” adding $25 million to Warners’ coffers by midnight Sunday. That’s a genuine September blockbuster, probably ending the month with over $250-260 million in the domestic box office bank.

The James McAvoy vs. Mackenzie Davis thriller “Speak No Evil” is doing well enough to justify remaking the Danish/Dutch film it’s based on, adding as much as $6 million $5.8?) to its take this weekend. It should clear $30 by the time it’s finished its run.

I went to a late afternoon rural America matinee of “Never Let Go” and was an audience of one for this Halle Berry star vehicle (not really) directed by Alexandre Aja. It spun its wheels on the screen, and that’s proving to be the case with ticket sales as well, with only a $3.5-$4+ million or so opening weekend to brag about.

“Deadpool & Wolverine” is chasing it for that fourth place spot, also headed towards $4 million. Funny thing, I have ducked into this midsummer release while waiting for another movie to start once or twice, and audiences catching it this late in the game appear to be either laughed-out repeat visitors, or folks who don’t get any of the jokes. They’re wondering “Why did I bother?” Well, Ryan Reynolds can’t support a family on Aviation Gin cash, and Hugh Jackman, as Deadpool jokes in the movie, just “went through a divorce.”

Mubi opened “The Substance” on a lot of screens, got a collection of LA-mostly reviews pre-release, most o them enthusiastic. But as Deadline notes, they didn’t spend much promoting it. I asked for a screener link (Mubi, like Tubi, is mostly a streaming distributor) and couldn’t get one, and I wasn’t alone. Effort on that end is not as expensive as buying TV ads or booking Demi on all the late night chat shows, and it makes more impact.

“Substance” is not for all audiences, but it’s ambitious and biting and edgy and “out there” with terrific performances by Demi and Margaret Qualley and Dennis Quaid. They may clear $3 million with it on nearly 2000 screens. Maybe $. Maybe, but unlikely to hit $3.5. They left a lot of money on the table by cheaping-out on promoting it. Serve up screener links to critics, kids. Ask similar small distributors Roadside, Bleecker Street and A24. They’ll tell you lots of reviews equals more cheap attention and that pays off.

The rhetorical question “Am I Racist” is still drawing the racists, etc., but there aren’t enough of them to make it a “thing.” Maybe $2.6-$3 million in its second weekend, dropping to 7th place.

“Reagan” is more of a comfort food for conservatives hit, closing in on $30 million with another $2 million or just shy of that this weekend. Not a blockbuster, but its hanging around long enough to rub “bomb” off its bottom line. And that’s all that matters to its distributor and its audience, not veracity or morality. Quaid makes a decent enough version of Ronald Reagan, although he’s a lot more fun in “The Substance.”

The soulless reboot/sequel “Alien: Romulus” just cleared the $100 million mark on its last weekend in the top ten. Yay for whoever saw to that.

“Twelve Years a Slave” filmmaker Steve McQueen, a Brit, saw a photo of a Black child on London’s streets during the darkest days of World War II and was inspired to make this film.

Saoirse Ronan is the big name in the cast of this Nov. 1 (theatrical) Apple Films release, Nov. 22. Benjamin Clémentine, Stephen Graham and Elliott Heffernan also star.

Life and life and life and life prolonged,and cloned a sci-fi comedy about “multiples” and how they’re dealt with, even when they look like Robert Pattinson. Naomi Ackie also stars.

Dino makes every “Edge of Tomorrow” death amusing in the trailer. for this ilm, based on an Edward Ashton novel.

Jan 31.

Fitfully amusing and unfailingly sweet, “All Happy Families” is a rom-com that pleasantly passes the time to a sitcom beat. It’s also topical — sexual harassment and gender dysphoria come up — and it’s sensitive, which reflects the baggage of its star.

Josh Radnor’s “How I Met Your Mother” may have uneasily walked the line between romantic and cringey between its mostly unsubtle laughs, a series that felt instantly-dated. But Radnor came through it largely unscathed, easily cast to this day as a guy too much in his head, uncertain and “blocked,” but a true romantic at heart.

Here, he’s Graham, a failed Chicago actor well in his ’40s, still going on auditions, still living rent-free in the house where he grew up, a place that could very well fall to ruin on his watch.

Graham’s more successful actor-brother Will (Rob Huebel, dryly self-absorbed and contemptible) bought the house from their parents and lets Graham run it and insists he “use my name” when trying to rent the bottom floor, “because people LOVE my show.” That would be his soapy family drama “Winsome Falls.”

Will’s the kind of sibling who drops in for an unannounced visit, let’s slip that his son has come out as his daughter (Will’s divorced) and still tries to make his whole visit about himself.

Even taking Graham and their parents (Becky Ann Baker and John Ashton) on a Chicago River tour boat ride becomes another place to showboat his TV fame.

But the house has a basement that floods and needs all new plumbing. The rentable half is a mess. An old college classmate (Chandra Russell), now a chef who makes Graham’s heart skip a beat, wants to lease it.

Mom just retired, and her sleazy employer groped her at her retirement party. Dad’s still working with a bad back, a drinking problem and an even worse gambling one.

And that Stephen Collins vibe we got from Will’s scenes in “Winsome Falls” comes home to roost as he’s publicly-accused. VERY publicly.

A sitcom season’s worth of “drama” befalls the Landry clan, with Graham bearing the brunt of too much of it, not all of it with good humor.

What plays here is how easy this family is to buy into. They bicker like real siblings, a real married couple and a real family

“I hate you!” “I love you!”

Dad’s an out-of-step Neanderthal who uses phrases like “Don’t get your panties in a twist” and clings to notions like the missing “father figure” contributed to Will’s kid’s gender confusion. Mom’s put up with a lot from all of them, and is living with the frustration of her own performing arts dreams. We see and hear her duet with Rodney Crowell in a pub scene, at one point.

There’s a lot that feels incomplete here, introduced and abandoned or at least never wrestled with. And much of what transpires after the assorted ingredients are introduced is utterly predictable.

But Radnor is in his wheelhouse with this character, and the supporting cast sparkles. Colleen Camp plays Graham’s long-suffering agent, Natalija Nogulich the stereotypical Russian neighbor, Antoine McKay a pushy plumber and Ivy O’Brien the classically brassy barmaid.

So what if it’s a more than a little sitcommy, if the big “twist” is too on-the-nose and left hanging, along with the troubled parental marriage and the unresolved #MeToo cancellation? “All Happy Families” plays. And Rodney Crowell and Broadway’s Becky Ann Baker sing. That’ll do. That’ll do nicely.

Rating: unrated, fisticuffs, drug use, sexual harassment, profanity

Cast: Josh Radnor, Chandra Russell, Becky Ann Baker, Rob Huebel, Colleen Camp and John Ashton, with Rodney Crowell.

Credits: Haroula Rose, scripted by Coburn Goss and Haroula Rose. A Freestyle release.

Running time: 1:30

As the sun rises over Hollywood today, there are creeps who look like Harvey Weinstein, D.J. Qualls and Steve Buscemi passing judgment on the appearance, sexual allure and filmic “fertility” of young women from all over the world who come there, aspiring to careers in show business.

And when the suitably talented, driven and most importantly gorgeous few get their big break, there are guys, young and very old, who look like Roger Ebert, Jeffrey Wells and me who pass judgment on their work, sometimes even mentioning their beauty or relative lack of it (a matter of preference) as they review films, pop records and TV shows.

French filmmaker Coralie Fargeat eviscerates that whole unsavory-to-the-point-of-sinister ecosystem with “The Substance,” a brutal, savage and savagely-funny satire that cuts to the chase and beats it to death.

It’s so on-target and “out there” and knowing that you figure our writer-director — best known for “Revenge” — must have had dashed acting stardom in her dreams at some point. There are traces of “The Player” in its warped values and view of the homely preying on the gorgeous. The production design and almost inhuman dissection of human failings bring to mind the pull-no-punches about humanity films of Stanley Kubrick.

And there are two actresses, rightly celebrated for “putting it all out there” by critics (mostly male) in performances that start out naked — Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley are often unclothed — and venture into “stripped bare” in their versions of the frailty and insecurities of being famously beautiful but growing old, and the pitiless arrogance of the young, the “hot,” the “It girl” of the moment.

Demi Moore, over 60 and at the stage of the Hollywood game where Nicole Kidman appearance “refreshings” no longer have the desired effect, goes full Jamie Lee Curtis here. It’s a performance built on the insecurities of ageing in a business that has no mercy for women who do, and Moore, playing a former actress turned exercise show queen named Elisabeth Sparkle, lets us see the natural ravages of time.

Not at first. Sparkle, whose star we see placed on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, followed by the cracking and wear and tear that the years have on that star in an opening credit montage, keeps up appearances on camera.

Makeup and hair dye hide much. She’s still wearing the leotard, leading a younger crew of pretty women in dancersizes, a morning show “queen” to the vile network boss, played by Dennis Quaid, in his wildest, ugliest performance in decades.

There’s talk of “an Oscar” in her past, which we hear him laughingly dismiss as happening “in the ’30s” in a shockingly cruel phone call he takes at the urinal in unflattering extreme closeup. Elisabeth hears it, too.

All those posters promoting her show over the years, her “Sparkle your life” brand and her ratings mean nothing. “Young” is what matters the most, Mr. “I have to give the people what they want” insists. A horrific no-injury car-accident (stunningly created here) merely hastens the inevitable for her.

Elisabeth is out. But a secret tip is passed onto her in the emergency room. An almost AI-polished looking young man examines her, says she’d be a “good candidate,” and lets her go.

She finds a memory stick in her coat when she gets home. A video with vague promises of “rebirth” doesn’t impress her, until the network’s farewell bouquet of roses arrives.

Getting to “The Substance” distribution point requires a cryptic phone call, a back-alley entrance and a pass key. The script and the drug maker — illustrating its rebirth by showing chicken egg yolks replicating themselves after injection — leaves the “science” and everything about it sketchy, underground and beautifully under-explained.

The box with the syringes and the drug is similarly lacking in detailed instructions. But Elisabeth shoots up like the Hollywood veteran she is, and as her nude body collapses onto her pristine, “2001” inspired bathroom floor, the promised “another version of yourself” tears through her spine, with all the blood and ickiness that entails.

Elisabeth has a fresh start, with a new body (Qualley) and a chance to do it all over again, this time with the wisdom of decades in Hollywood to guide her.

Sure, it’s deliciously apt in a screenwriterly sense that young “Sue” as she calls herself will audition for and land the job as her own replacement, doing a younger, stripper-pole sexy version of Elisabeth’s exercise show. But is that the limit of her ambition?

Then we remember the solitude, the loneliness of fading stardom over 60 that we’ve seen. We can sense what Elisabeth went through to get here, the humiliations and moral compromises. And we can see the emptiness of “fame” even if she never does. In the dark recesses of her monomaniacal soul, getting “back” is more important than getting whole or rebuilding a film career.

All she has to do is follow the “rules” — be the “matrix” version of herself for seven days, then switch to the “better version” via an exchange of fluids — and follow them to the letter.

“Remember, there is no ‘she’ and ‘me.’ You are one.”

We can guess how that works out, and what’s coming. “Sue,” the new “you,” gets all the attention and wants more of the time. No “seven days” off. And so on.

Every science fiction story about any version of “The Fountain of Youth” dwells on the regrets, the loneliness of losing some of yourself as you lose loved ones and abandon the physical manifestations of “life experience.” Fargeat seriously shortchanges that, but gets at it in a single scene where Elisabeth’s resentment at the invisibility of old age has her trying to summon up the courage to meet with an old high school classmate for drinks.

She hasn’t the guts. She’s all-in on the value system that abused her and tossed her aside.

Moore’s performance is unfiltered and fierce, manic at times, a tour de force turn and maybe even her career best. Qualley is similarly invested if not quite as showy. Quaid’s delicious villainy is like icing on the cake, Every Overdressed Exec who ever aged way beyond the point where he has any business commenting on anyone else’s appearance.

The satire is aimed at the youth-obsession and narrow parameters of beauty in Hollywood, but by extension we see the cruelty of the process — trolls and gargoyles, sitting at a table in an empty audition room, making snap judgments about sex appeal on actors at their most vulnerable.

This is the darkest takedown of Hollywood since “The Player” or “Swimming with Sharks.”

“The Substance” can be a bit much, at times. The violence is horrific, the nudity — each “version” of our heroine is left on the bathroom floor, naked, while the other one takes over — gratuitous, at times.

And the film rather outstays its welcome, stumbling on past a legitimate climax or two.

But Fargeat found something worth saying and she says it, in unblinking close-ups and uncensored “This is how we look when we age” bluntness. It’s seriously sick to spend all this cultural bandwidth on embracing the “fresh,” the “new” and the “young” as our yardstick for beauty and relevence. It’s even sicker to think how most of us buy into that and the extremes we make women go through to prolong it.

Rating: R, graphic, gory violence, nudity

Cast: Demi Moore, Margaret Qualley and Dennis Quaid

Credits: Scripted and directed by Coralie Fargeat. A Mubi release.

Running time: 2:21

Maybe “Never Let Go” looked good on paper.

Take your typical self-isolated “keep the kids safe from the world” thriller, people afraid of societal breakdown, the zombie apocalypse or an outbreak of “evil,” and jump to the part where we start to wonder if the protectors aren’t paranoid and off their rocker, and hurdle past it to see what awful things lie beyond for those raised in fear and sure of the limits of their “world” when they’re forced to confront it.

That’s like M. Night Shyamalan’s “Twilight Zone” ish “The Village,” and several other “because Dad/Mom/The Captain said so” stories with that “What’re we afraid of?” twist.

But even though this thriller has Alejandre Aja (“High Tension” was his best) behind the camera and Oscar winner Halle Berry in front of it, with its big conceit borrowed (Coincidence?) from an indie drama a few years back — “Tethered” — “Never Let Go” drifts from barely interesting to less interesting to a cop-out ending without making the viewer so much as break a sweat.

Berry’s the protective mother who guards her little boys Sam (Anthony B. Jenkins) and Nolan (Percy Daggs VI) and drills in them the rituals of their safety from the “evil” that stalks them and brought the outside world, she says, to ruin.

The youngest narrates that they’re in grandpa’s house, and it has magical powers. There’s an incantation they recite whenever they go outside.

“Oh blessed house of ancient wood, shelter to the pure and good,” it begins. They know it by heatd. There are prayers and spells carved into the doorjamb of this rustic cabin deep in the woods, and a root cellar door with ornate carvings grandpa gave it.

Something happened to grandpa. Something happened to grandma. Something happened to their dad (William Catlett), too. They see visions of them sometimes, when they’re sleeping, when they’re wandering the woods hunting rabbits and squirrels by crossbow and slingshot and harvesting slugs and popping live frogs in their mouthes for the protein.

Mom makes them wear a rope around their waists to keep them connected to the evil-repelling righteousness of grandpa’s “house of ancient wood” so that no harm will come from them from the zombies and other threats implicit in this “evil” threat Mom describes.

We have just enough time to wonder if Koda their faithful dog knows what’s up regarding those “something happeneds” when we and he get an answer, he flees and events turn dire and even more paranoid.

“There’s nobody else out there, baby,” Mom purrs, trying to keep them in line.

Because whatever happened out in the world, they’re starving to death. Listening to a 78rpm disc of
“Big Rock Candy Mountains” every time the moon is full won’t sustain them.

The brothers question each other, and they start to question their mom. And as they do, the screenplay seems to lose its point or back away from ever having had one.

“Never Let Go” is one of those movies that someone felt compelled to break into “chapters” with titles stating the obvious — “How Will I Feed My Children?”

The setting has possibilities, seeing as how 673 other horror tales have clung to a “cabin in the woods.” Berry generally gives fair value in thrillers, even supernatural ones. Not so much here.

But the sibling relationship is what resonates here, more than Mom’s paranoia or the monstrous visions or “real” manifestations the kids cope with. They bicker, collaborate and differ on what they think might really be going on here.

Is this a parable about the limits of blind faith, or the importance of clinging to it? It’s hard to tell because I’m not sure screenwriters made up their minds about that, especially after (just guessing) they were told to tag this thing with a clunky “Wait, what WERE we just looking at?” cop-out finale.

Rating: R, graphic violence

Cast: Halle Berry, Anthony B. Jenkins, Percy Daggs IV

Credits: Directed by Alejandre Aja, scripted by KC Coughlin and Ryan Grassby. A Lionsgate release.

Running time: 1:41

Sheer curiosity might be enough to lure the adventurous into “The Universal Theory,” a mysterious German-Swiss film noir that dabbles in alternate history and a confluence of events that might have triggered timeline shifts among those who were in its proximity.

Are black and white subtitled period pieces about alternate versions of people in jumbled-up differing realities are your thing?

But a jarring line of narration late in the film hints at the more ambitious, or at least coherent, movie this might have been. Our protagonist/author is said to have been unstirred by the student protests of the ’60s, and merely a spectator like the rest of us to “the Soviet moon landings.”

Our framework is the memory of a would-be physicist’s (Jan Bülow), jarred by an abortive 1974 German TV interview about his new “science fiction novel.” It’s not a “story,” not “science fiction,” Johannes Leinart insists. He stalks off the set without elaborating.

A dozen years earlier, Leinart was a physics student working on his dissertation with his grumpy, disapproving academic advisor (Hanns Zischler), traveling with him to an alpine physics summit where an Iranian researcher is set to announce a “universal theory.”

Leinart’s dissertation is dismissed by Dr. Strathen as “purely speculative” “esoteric nonsense” (in German and French with English subtitles). But a boorish rival of the grump’s, Professor Blumberg (Gottfried Breitfuss) sees this “parallel eigen status” multiverse speculation as possibly “ground-breaking,” “a Nobel Prize,” something that could upend and “wreck (famed physicist Niels) Bohr’s life’s work” in one fell swoop.

Or maybe Blumberg’s just having one over on his old rival. Whatever you do, don’t ask Blumberg what he did in “the war.” And try not to notice the ten year-old Swiss bellboy who hears German spoken and snaps off a salute and a “Heil Hitler!”

It turns out that this Swiss boy and a little girl stumbled into secret tunnels underneath this corner of the Alps. There’s talk of radiation and uranium mining. Leinart notices queer formations in the clouds.

But he also notices the pianist in the hotel bar. Karin (Olivia Ross) mesmerizes him, and hints at a long past association with perhaps a bit of childhood trauma. Leinart tries to have a conversation or at least slow her down as she briskly walks away from him. She’s also looking at the clouds, and in the company of Professor Blumberg and others in overcoats and hats. What’s up with that?

People die. Or disappear. Or age mysteriously. Two chain-smoking cops (Philippe Graber and David Bennent) try to get answers, or answers that they understand.

Are they even asking the right questions? Because Johannes Leinart and his “purely speculative” theories make him the one person there who might be able to figure out what’s going on. And it’ll take him years and a publisher who insists on putting out his book as “science fiction” for him to work what he say and believes transpired there.

He’s the one person to hear an existential edge in the query, “Where were you in ’62?”

“The Universal Theory” is too obscurant for most tastes, with the slow-to-unravel thread of the story as difficult to follow as the entirety of the “Spiderverse” timelines and the mad blur of “Everything Everywhere All at Once.” That goes for the performances, too — opaque.

It’s a modest but immersive film more interested in cryptic characters and plot lines and in period detail — minimal effects, mostly in the third act — and the idea that some sort of rift in reality might be possible, that it could happen, and why not in the Swiss Alps in 1962?

If only those Soviet moon landing cosmonauts could weigh in. I’m sure Buzz Aldrin has questions, too.

Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: Jan Bülow, Olivia Ross, Hanns Zischler, Gottfried Breitfuss,
Philippe Graber and David Bennent

Credits: Directed by Timm Kröger, scripted by Roderick Warich and Timm Kröger. An Oscilloscope Labs release.

Running time: 1:58

“Uglies” is another cut-and-paste dystopia-masquerading as-utopia-YA sci-fi thriller about youth imperiled and in revolt.

It borrows from “Logan’s Run” and every book series/film series it inspired and a famous “Twilight Zone” episode — “Eye of the Beholder” — in creating a future where being “pretty” is not just the goal, it’s the great social equalizer and a way to narcotize the populace of the gorgeous and the forever young.

Packed with explanations, future tech and a big fat sensitive “uglies” vs. insensate “pretties” parable, it’s a standard-issue franchise-starter (based on a novel by Scott Westerfeld) and a stunning bore to anyone old enough to look at the PG-13 rating in their life experience’s rear view mirror.

“Kissing Booth” to “Family Affair” and “The Princess” streaming queen Joey King is our heroine, Tally, an ugly awaiting her surgery in “the dorms,” the high school where all pre-pretty kids are groomed for their gorgeous, carefree future, focusing on that one transformative moment that will take all their cares away.

Pretty Tally is thus merely “Squint,” her nickname taken from her least attractive physical trait. She is a parkour practicing rebel who hopes she and her bestie Peris (Chase Stokes), a pretty boy save for his “Nose,” are bonded forever with a connection that will endure past their surgeries.

But he gets operated on first, and drops right into the never-ending revel of life as a “pretty.” The shock of his brush-off has Squint more than open to friendship with classmate Shay, aka “Skinny” (Brianne Tju) and her hoverboarding hooliganism.

Shay has no interest in the surgery and is all about “escape” to “The Smoke,” a rumored counter culture beyond the reach of the pretties, their autocracy and their hi-tech “scouts.” The mythical “David” and his fight-with-fire followers in “The Smoke” are part of that lure.

Merely dabbling in breaking curfew and talking-up this alternate lifestyle could get one’s surgery “canceled.” Shay is fleeing, so she doesn’t care. But when that happens to her, Squint is shocked, and when confronted by the scientist leader of their Future Culture, Dr. Cable (Laverne Cox of “Orange is the New Black”) Tally agrees to follow Shay and report her whereabouts, just for the chance to be “pretty.”

The characters are a pretty and pretty bland lot, with David (Keith Powers) just as runway model-ready as everybody else. King is nobody’s idea of “ugly,” and at 25, should probably stop accepting Netflix money to play “high school” characters.

The dialogue is so burdened with exposition, background and “That’s how we’ll change the world” plans that the predictable narrative never shows any potential.

Veteran director McG is a long way from “Charlie’s Angels” and “We Are Marshall,” and makes no impression on this effects (cool) and stunts (dull) dominated production, a YA adaptation as sexless as any “Hunger Games,” “Ender’s Game,” “Maze Runner” or “Divergent” installment.

Without romance there’s no warmth and no stakes. And while that’s understandable as every “pretty” looks as AI-polished as Squint’s idealizing “mirror” mirror on the wall, it makes “Uglies” a singularly heartless outing in the YA sci-fi genre, one with an obvious and obviously-botched “moral.” By the time the credits roll, it’s succeeded in creating zero interest in investing any more time in this universe or this story.

Rating: PG-13, violence

Cast: Joey King, Laverne Cox, Brianne Tju, Keith Powers, Chase Stokes and Charmin Lee.

Credits: Directed by McG, scripted by Jacob Forman, Vanessa Taylor and Whit Anderson, based on a Scott Westerfeld novel. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:42

F. Javier Gutiérrez’s “The Wait” is a supernatural parable of powerless poverty and callous wealth, the ancient class divide that endured in Spain under the Franco dictatorship.

It’s a grim, well-acted vengeance thriller with moral underpinnings that would have worked, with or without the supernatural “judgement” folded into its unraveling grief, guilt and madness.

Victor Clavijo is Eladio, a poor, illiterate caretaker of an arid estate high in the mountains in the South of Spain. His arrangement with the absentee hidalgo, Don Francisco, is that he’ll put in a few years here with his wife Marcia (Ruth Díaz) raising their little boy Floren, who will soon be old enough to hunt someday. That’s important in country too dry to grow much or keep livestock

“He’ll be shooting in three years,” Eladio assures Don Francisco (Pedro Casablanc), who seems keenly interested in the lad’s potential and progress.

Those three years pass, and sure enough, Floren (Moisés Ruiz) has learned to shoot at 13. With the help of an uncle (Antonio Estrada), he’s even bagged his first buck.

But another wealthy don, Don Carlos (Manuel Morón) has booked an excess of hunting parties onto the estate. He wants “13 stands” for deer hunters laid out on the land instead of the maximum of ten, when Eladio knows that would be “too dangerous,” crowding careless amateur shooters in each other’s line of fire.

A bribe is offered. Then Don Carlos visits Marcia to ensure that she wants that money. Hemmed-in, Eladio has no choice. And everyone’s fate is sealed, starting with the boy of 13.

Gutiérrez and his “Before the Fall” collaborator Clavijo paint a portrait of cascading tragedy that overhwelms Eladio, who crawls into the bottle, and which shatters the guilt-ridden Marcia. They grapple with “blame,” with the slow-to-catch-on Eladio finally deciding to do something about the callous Don Carlos, who set all this horror in motion.

But the revenge story turns back in on itself as we and Eladio are left to ponder how merely wanting more money, a better life and future makes this all his and Marcia’s fault in the eyes of the various dons. In a fascist Catholic theocracy stuck in the 19th century — save for Range Rovers and TV for the better off — that assault on conscience is enough to keep the poor in line.

“Testing” them with temptation just underscores the cruelty of the social order.

A stark, rundown setting is captured in arresting screen compositions and images fraught with meaning. Someone goes missing. Closeups of clothespins on the ground where the clothesline used to hold the laundry is the only clue we need to see.

The simple, primal thriller is the beating heart of this story. I found the third act turn towards the supernatural unnecessary in scoring its allegorical points, but if you need to make your movie a horror film in order for it to have a chance to travel, so be it.

The ethereal judgements characters endure in “The Wait” imply the consequences of defiance of a natural order long imposed by everybody’s favorite eat-fish-on-Friday whipping boy dogma, the key to keeping peasants in their place and Spain trapped in time before its aged strongman finally dropped dead.

Gutiérrez’s film suggests there is no escape from the guilt of greed and its repercussions, and that the trap of “the way things are and are always supposed to be” might be mental, moral and even supernatural. Or so we’re forced to believe.

Rating: unrated, graphic violence, alcohol abuse

Cast: Víctor Clavijo, Ruth Díaz, Manuel Morón, Moisés Ruiz and
Pedro Casablanc

Credits: Scripted and directed by F. Javier Gutiérrez. A Film Movement release.

Running time: 1:42

Ron Perlman’s a heavy in this “The only way for me to do something right is by doing something bad” redemption thriller.