Movie Nation

“The Visitor” is a Southern Gothic horror tale of modest ambitions and equally modest frights and delights. A polished production from Blumhouse TV for Paramount, with Epix TV its ultimate destination (in Dec.), it’s a film that delights in quaint Tennessee Williamsisms applied to a horror formula that treats “Rosemary’s Baby” as its Ur text.

Finn Jones, a “Game of Thrones” alumnus (like every other Brit) and one of the stars of the new “Swimming with Sharks” TV series is Robert Burroughs, a Londoner who moves with his wife back to her ancestral home in the drawling, Spanish moss-bedecked Deep South after the death of her father. The place seems welcoming enough, until Robert starts noticing old paintings and Civil War era photographs with his face in them.

Wife Maya (Australian Jessica McNamee, who was Margaret Court in “The Battle of the Sexes”) is “the prodigal daughter” who returns to sleepy Briar Glen, welcomed by one and all — especially the florid, MO-lasses-accented preacher, Rev. Otis Ellis. He’s played with a growling, tipsy twinkle by Dane Rhodes, who seems to be having more fun than anybody else in this picture.

Maya is settling back in, but Robert is poking around and having nightmares. When a local slips him a note, he starts finding folks — an antiques dealer (Donna Briscoe), a wild-eyed local character (Thomas Francis Murphy) who urge him to “Run back to London and don’t EVER come back!”

He wants “the truth,” but as you might guess, he can’t HANDLE the truth.

As a native Southerner who lost his accent long ago, I always get a kick out of thespians who get off their Delta flight from wherever and start extemporizing like Foghorn Leghorn the moment the assistant director bellows “ACTION.”

“In the town of Briar Glen, suh, you ahhh NEVAH alone!”

Aside from that, there’s not much to grab hold of, here. “The Visitor” fights a losing battle with over-familiarity, sauntering through horror tropes that predate 24 frames-per-second era celluloid.

I’d love to see a five year ban of horrific occurrences punctuated with “It’s only a dream,” “You were just having a nightmare” if the screenwriter’s particularly lazy.

At least no one states anything that obvious in “The Visitor.” That’s small consolation for a movie that has little for genre fans, little star power and not nearly enough drawling drowned in moonshine to turn camp, I do declare.

Rating: unrated, violence, profanity

Cast: Finn Jones, Jessica McNamee, Donna Briscoe, Thomas Francis Murphy and Dane Rhodes.

Credits: Directed by Justin P. Lange, scripted Simon Boyes and Adam Mason. A Blumhouse production, a Paramount release.

Running time: 1:29

A hint of the supernatural washes over the trailer to this chilly film from Sebastian Lillo.

Nov. 16, on Netflix.

“Masking Threshold” a fascinating experiment in intimate, minimalist horror, showing just how far a filmmaker can go with an idea, a camera, a single setting and a simple premise — showing a man’s psychological collapse documented via an online video diary.

Filmmaker and star Johannes Grenzfurthner gives us mere sections of his face and parts of his body, only seen full-on from behind as his unnamed character “experiments” on his maddening tinnitus and takes us along for his “research” in a self-narrated descent into madness.

In a montage of extreme closeups of what our stricken, misanthropic and gay University of Central Florida alum and miserable Apopka, Florida recluse sees, reads, dissects, eats (jam toast) and trims (his toenails), we see how his world has closed in around him.

Grenzfurthner hired actor Ethan Haslam to ramble, criticize, fume and fuss over his efforts to “cure” the hearing condition that has utterly consumed him and is turning him into a misanthropic loner.

“Tinnitus,” he reminds us, is “the hearing of sound that has no external source.” Something happened to this one time physics student at school that put a noise in his head that will not go away.

And as “the miserable have no medicine but hope (slightly misquoting Shakespeare),” he decides to do his “own research” — questioning, reading, dabbling in chemicals and bizarre bursts of sadism in search of some means of curing himself.

“Masking Threshold” is a term from auditory research about relative sounds, the louder one being that which the ear can discern and concentrate on.

Our anti-hero rages at “ignoramuses,” his boss (“leadership skills of a squirrel”), his work, his mother and even at his new neighbor (Katherina Rose) as he spirals down that rabbit hole and the myriad detours his mind takes him into along the way.

He boils this or that in a bunsen burner, rants about religion, quotes composer John Cage on “silence,” and fumes at how little help the various hearing and acoustics forums are online.

“It seems the only way to get the right answer on the Internet is to post the WRONG answer.”

Long before we see him fiddling with slugs and worms, “experimenting” on parakeets and beheading mice, we’ve figured out he’s lost his Apopka-picking mind. He lets slip that he’s been in therapy, insists he’s attempting “unconventional and yet solid approaches” to his problem. There’s no way he’s making “progress,” but he’s adamant that he is and that it’s publishable.

“My research will NOT end up as epistemological road kill!”

What emerges is a thorough and thoroughly disturbing portrait of a man built from snippets of speech (he’s very articulate and smart), glimpses of body parts and filmed actions ranging from reading and grooming to putting jam on toast, fingering the scars his abusive combat veteran father gave him.

It’s a narrative experiment (not unlike Derek Jarman’s “Blue”) that makes the point that sometimes, you don’t have to see someone’s face to paint in every detail and figure everything you need to know about him or her.

“Masking Threshold” isn’t for everybody, or even every horror fan. I found it occasionally repellent, and mesmerizing in a droning-on to-the-point-you-tune-out way. But even at its most unpleasant, it’s never less than fascinating

Rating: bloody violence, implied animal abuse

Cast: Johannes Grenzfurthner, Katherina Rose and the voice of Ethan Haslam

Credits: Directed by Johannes Grenzfurthner, scripted by Samantha Lienhard and Johannes Grenzfurthner. A Drafthouse Films release.

Running time: 1:31

A spot of Brit horror, what what?

Good cast. RLJE is releasing this one Nov. 4, on to Shudder shortly afterward.

Digital animation has progressed far enough that we can safely assume we’re going to get reasonably convincing naval combat footage on screen, be it ancient Greek (“300: Rise of an Empire”) or World War II (“Midway,” “Greyhound”).

So that’s not a significant worry of “Operation Seawolf,” an ahistorical thriller about a late WWII effort to launch V-1 buzz bombs from U-Boats against the American coast. The worries are a screenplay that is stale cheese, situations that are worn-out tropes and performances that range from perfunctory to eye-rolling.

It’s a B-movie WWII actioner that sinks into C-movie more often than you’d like.

Dolph Lundgren plays a drunken, veteran U-Boat skipper given a boat and leadership of a pack aiming to sink ships on the way to surfacing off New York and buzz-bombing it, a last stab of vengeance in the last days of the war.

“I will not disappoint you. Do not disappoint me!”

There’s strife on the boat — a second officer (Andrew Stecker) who was sure this would be his command — and careless risks.

“VEre iss de captain?” “Passed-out again.”

Facing off with them an Atlantic Fleet desk jockey (the ever-unshaved Frank Grillo) who has the decoded information of the V-1 attack and is scrambling to track down and sink the Germans.

“Checkmate! CHECKMATE!”

The action beats are passable, but every second in between them is just a groaner — clumsy acting, corny dialogue.

“Did ve ever haff a chance to vin?” “No.”

Then there’s our introduction to Captain Kessler (Lundgren), a long LONG scene of Lundgren staggering around a Norwegian hotel room (in a late April snowstorm), drunk and sharing a tender moments with a sex worker one third his age.

So let’s focus instead on two things of note here. First, we’re shown a U.S. destroyer crewed and captained (Hiram A. Murray) by African Americans. The command detail is incorrect, but it’s interesting that they put one of the two mostly-African American crewed destroyers of WWII in the movie.

And then there’s writer-director Steven Luke’s homage to 1965 WWII movie “Battle of the Bulge.” In that film, a German panzer division commander played by Robert Shaw mutters about the “boys” and cast-offs he’s being sent into battle with, and the men burst into “The Tankmen’s Song” to show their eagerness for combat.

Here, it’s the green sub crew that serenades Captain Kessler with a Nazi submariners song, almost a shot-for-shot homage to Bond-film veteran Ken Annakin’s film, without any of the pathos and “patriotic” fatalism of the original.

Aside from that, nothing much to see here that isn’t digitally animated.

Rating: unrated, violence, alcohol abuse

Cast: Dolph Lundgren, Andrew STecker, Cody Fleury, Hiram A. Murray and Frank Grillo.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Steven Luke. A Shout! Studios release.

Running time: 1:27

The question you have to ask when making a reboot is how much of the earlier incarnations of the story you’re setting out to tell anew do you include in your new “origin story?”

In “Hellraiser,” the eighth film spun out of the horrific works of Clive Barker, they decided “None at all.” Two credited screenwriters and director David Bruckner (“The Night House”) just throw a new victim into Pinhead’s sights, give us a new spacesuit/swimsuit-edition Pinhead (Jamie Clayton) and leave out explanations of this ancient and murderous puzzle.

Was the word “cenobites” ever used? Not that I caught it. I’ve seen several of the earlier “Hellraisers,” but it’s been a minute as this franchise drifted off the big screen and into direct-to-video and streaming, where this new one resides (Welcome to Hell, Hulu!). I kept wondering why self-absorbed junky Riley (Odessa A’Zion, not bad) wasn’t more than shocked at all the supernatural mayhem erupting around her when she and her latest squeeze (Drew Starkey) burgle a warehouse and all they find is this baroque Rubik’s Cube looking thing.

You’d think the underneath that unruly Janet Joplin mop-top, our heroine who gets lots of other people killed in excruciating ways might have “questions.”

Oh. Right. “Junkie.”

The basics of the franchise remain the same. You get the ever-shape-shifting oblong, hexagonal or whatnot metallic puzzle, it stabs you in your hand and you’re doomed. Pinhead or her minions come to you in a dark and gloomy corridor and tell the stabbed, “If not you, bring us another.”

Riley gets her hands on a book, but its explanations are not cut and dried, not enough to help her, her lover, her brother (Brandon Flynn), her brother’s lover (Adam Faison) escape their doom.

The ones with answers might be the evil owner of the box (Goran Visnjic), or at least his amoral lawyer (Hiam Abbass). But cracking into Voight’s metal latticework-caged mansion only brings bloody consequences to Riley and anybody unlucky enough to try and help her.

“Your suffering has barely begun!”

These pictures have always been about the pitiless, unemotional murdering machine with pins in its face, their sinister tone and the increasingly gruesome means of death — skin flayed, hooks and knives and pins and the like. Bruckner delivers in that regard.

But at this point, the only real novelty is making Pinhead a (voice-altered) female and limiting the credit passed on to Barker. There’s not enough that’s new to merit raising this corner of hell all over again.

Rating: R for strong bloody horror violence and gore, language throughout, some sexual content and brief graphic nudity.

Cast: Odessa A’Zion, Jamie Clayton, Brandon Flynn, Adam Faison, Drew Starkey, Hiam Abbass and Goran Visnjic.

Credits: Directed by David Bruckner, scripted by Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski, based on the novel by Clive Barker. A 20th Century release on Hulu.

Running time: 2:01

It isn’t the few jolts, the horror shocks that get you in “Smile.” It’s the stress. Here’s a thriller that creates unease and does a decent job of sustaining it even as it takes its sweet time in reaching the obvious resolution.

And it’s not the gruesome, self-injuring, self-skinning, blood-letting effects that make the sale. It’s the cheapest horror effect ever, every “victim” about to pass on her or his victimhood breaking into a demonic, Nicholson in “The Shining” or Malcolm McDowell in “A Clockwork Orange” grin.

Sosie Bacon of “Mare of Easttown” stars as Dr. Rose Cotter, a shrink at the Emergency Psychiatric Unit at Newark’s Mount Pleasant hospital. Emergency cases are sent her way to determine if they’re a danger to themselves or others. She may be petite, but she never hesitates to sit down, alone, in a room with people experiencing crises and exhibiting the most deranged behavior.

We hear her refer to one frequent patient as “harmless,” and we worry that she’s read him wrong, if she’s experienced enough to make that call and if she’s put herself or the staff in jeopardy in the process.

But it’s babbling, shrieking Laura (Caitlyn Stasey) who really rattles Dr. Rose and us.

When Laura says “I’m seeing things no one else can see but me,” she shouts it. When Laura declares “It’s LOOKS like people, but it’s NOT a person!” we buy it. And when she warns “It causes s–t to happen around me,” we wish Dr. Rose could appreciate the threat, not that she’d be any more able to reason her way out of it than we would, in that office with her or sitting in a seat in the safety of a cinema.

Laura proceeds to kill herself in the most gruesome fashion imaginable right in front of the stupefied psychotherapist she just met.

As you gathered from the number one movie in America’s TV commercials and trailers, when you see that demonic smile, you’re a goner. It’s a madness passing from one person to the next. “Smile” is about Rose’s search for medical, mental or supernatural reasons for this to be happening, and a way to escape the fate that’s seemingly been given her.

Writer-director Parker Finn, turning a short film into his feature filmmaking debut, gives us a thriller of austere, quiet settings, extreme closeups and pin-your-ears-back scares. And Bacon ably leads us through a health care professional’s traumatized and increasingly desperate efforts to explain the “symptoms” of what happened to Laura which are now happening to her in a way that doesn’t make her seem crazy, too.

As she’s seeing things — Laura’s smile, and others wearing that same smile — things that she’s sure are “corporeal” and not just in her head, Rose panics. As reality bends and her fiance (Jessie T. Usher), her cop ex-lover (Kyle Gallner), her irritably self-absorbed sister (Gillian Zinser) and her own psychotherapist (Robin Weigert) don’t seem to “get it,” we invest in her quest and try to puzzle out an escape clause with her.

The chilly minimalism of “Smile” limits that viewer investment, keeping events on the screen at a sort of clinical arm’s length. The casting is more”gets the job done” solid than compelling, affecting or empathy building. While Finn takes care to give his players close-ups that they dress up with gestures, tics, looks and “bits of business,” I can’t say any of the deaths here moved me.

But there’s no denying that this works as a thriller, that “Smile” is a well-crafted fright delivery system even as it slows to a crawl and stumbles into an ending we’ve seen coming for the past hour.

Rating: R for strong violent content and grisly images, and language.

Cast: Sosie Bacon, Jessie T. Usher, Kyle Gallner, Caitlyn Stasey, Robin Weigert and Kal Penn.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Parker Finn. A Paramount release.

Running time: 1:55

This November release takes us back to the early days of the Korean War, when the propeller driven WWII vintage F4U Corsair fight bomber was still the Navy’s go to weapon for close ground support, and even air superiority.

Integrating the military was another mission of the US military, and that’s the story of this Nov. Release.

“God’s Creatures” is a quietly gripping Irish coastal drama kept afloat by a powerful, understated performance by Emily Watson, who lets us into the unseen agony of a mother’s questions unasked.

Co-directors Saela Davis and Anna Rose Holmer bathe their film in the overcast gloom of a fishing town where men sometimes drown, almost as a local tradition.

“It’s bad luck to know” how to swim, is how matriarch Aileen O’Hara (Watson) describes it.

“If they can’t swim, they won’t jump in and help anybody else,” is daughter Erin’s (Toni O’Rourke) more cynical view.

Shane Cowley’s script brings a little sunshine into this world, where oystermen regularly misjudge the tide in their heavy waders and get pulled down in a flash when the water laps high enough. With every death, the whole village shuts down and everyone falls into mourning.

But Aileen’s prodigal son Brian (Paul Mescal of “The Lost Daughter”) returns, after years out of contact far off in Australia. Aileen’s first unasked question is why he’s come back, what went wrong Down Under. Her daughter might be blunt enough to wonder more than that. His first love, the now-married Sarah (Aisling Franciosi), is almost too shattered to let herself care.

But Mum just brings him in, watches him comfort her near-catatonic father and reach an uneasy truce with his leery Dad (Declan Conlon) and tries to help. He wants to work old Paddy’s long-idle oyster beds? Let her swipe a few bags of seed oysters from Guiney’s Atlantic Sea Foods. He might be encouraging old feelings in unhappily-married Sarah. Mum’ll turn a blind eye.

Then something happens, something serious, made all the worse by the fact that it happens in a tiny town where everyone knows everyone else. And Aileen finds herself with one other question not to ask.

The twice-Oscar-nominated Watson, most recently lauded for her work on TV’s “Chernobyl,” creates an easy, motherly rapport with Mescal and O’Rourke. Aileen may be a fair-minded supervisor at the sea food processing plant, but these two are too old to listen to any advice she has for the wandering son or new single mom.

There’s even a hint of a lifetime of abuse from her almost speechless aged father (Lalor Roddy). Aileen bears it, and Brian’s shortcuts in life and work, without much protest.

The script sets us up for tests and heartbreaks, showing us the ritualistic grief that comes with a drowning early in the film, with Franciosi giving us a taste of Sarah’s bitterness and vulnerability — she also sings at funerals — and Watson serving up stoicism barely betrayed by weary, her edge-of-tears eyes.

Davis and Holmer, veterans of assorted jobs behind the camera, soak up the atmosphere of County Donegal, painting their portrait of this world in careful, considered strokes — the green-walled pub where Guinness and G&Ts are poured, songs are sung and community is made and shattered, the blessing of the skiffs of the fishing “fleet,” the grueling and dangerous nature of what looks like simple work, harvesting oysters between changes of the tide.

Its modest ambitions notwithstanding, in “God’s Creatures” they’ve created something like the perfect film for autumn, a beautiful portrait of intimacy and warmth and family tinged with a chill that can only lead to tragedy.

Rating: R, violence, profanity, smoking

Cast: Emily Watson, Paul Mescal, Aisling Franciosi, Declan Conlon and Toni O’Rourke

Credits: Directed by Saela Davis and Anna Rose Holmer, scripted by Shane Cowley. An A24 release.

Running time: 1:41

I think my favorite moment in the anti-cell-phone Estonian horror comedy “Kratt” comes when a priest is confronted by a demonically possessed grandmother, and his only prayer is whipping out his phone.

What priest wouldn’t keep an instant crucifix app loaded and ready for deployment at all times?

“Kratt” is a dark, violent not-exactly-kiddie comedy about city children (Nora Merivoo, Harri Merivo), bored when deprived of their cells while staying with their ancient granny (Mari Lill) on her tumbledown farm and too lazy to do their chores. So they summon an ancient mythic creature created out of whatever junk you have lying around the yard — tools, implements, car parts.

A Kratt is depicted here as a demonic helpmate conjured to life in a blood ceremony by the light of the moon. “Give me WORK,” it barks, when it comes to life. And you’d better. When it runs out of work, it’ll turn on you. The kids and seemingly the adults, save for the violent, vengeful and grievance-filled priest, don’t have a clue what to do about this.

Hilariously, if the damned hypocritical grownups had let them keep their phones, the kids could have gotten out of this in a snap. There’s even a youtube tutorial set up to get you out of just this sort of jam.

That’s going to be the only time I use “hilariously” in the review, alas. This Rasmus Merivoo romp-that–never-was is a classic 75-80 minute movie swallowed by a 112 minute long boa constrictor. It takes over an hour just to get the kids the means to create the Kratt, and that’s unforgivably late.

First we have to see the shallow parents — Mari-Liis Lill (Daughter of Mari?) and Marek Temmets — who know they need to keep their kids away from cell phones, but can’t follow their own advice. They drop them off with Granny so that they can go off on an Estonian “AIO Xyacka” (ayahuasca) retreat — God knows what that’ll be like.

Smart aleck daughter Mia has her own Youtube channel. She’s an influencer…at 13. Kevin, a few years younger, is just along for the ride.

The parish governor (Ivo Uukkivi) is caught between a local landowner hellbent on harvesting all the trees in their “sacred forest” and the green activists led by hulking Lembit (Paul Purga) hellbent on stopping him.

Oh, and the wild-haired dwarf (Alo Kurvits, way-over-the-top) running a snack booth on the edge of town? He might be Satan. The kids figure that out when they visit his shop.

“May I interest you in some fentanyl,” he purrs, in Estonian with English subtitles?

“We’d like to buy a SOUL.”

Writer-director Merivoo has lots of amusing sidebars that he throws into this. The kids, when they finally seek help via cell phone, deal with “Vivi,” the Eastern European version of Siri or Alexa. Vivi, how do you trick a Kratt? Vivi is actually child labor online operators working in the back of their Russian mom’s meth lab.

The governor goes a bit mad from the pressures on his chances of being reelected. There are flashbacks to the “little count” who brought the Devil there in the 19th century, and we see the priest beating Wee Satan over all the evils in the world — war, hunger, “promiscuity, gay propaganda, rock’n roll, contemporary art.”

The problem right from the start is that Merivoo can’t see the Sacred Forest for the trees. The flashback, the whole sacred forest thing, anything to do with the governor is only peripherally connected to the Kratt that the kids build which then falls on grandma, who is trying to destroy it. That’s how she becomes possessed.

“Give me WORK!”

Once it finally got going, I laughed at this. And I shook my head at it every time the filmmaker in charge lost the thread and wandered off, which that was far too often to let “Kratt” catch a break and unleash the crazy.

Rating: unrated, bloody violence, profanity

Cast: Mari Lill, Nora Merivoo, Harri Merivoo, Ivo Uukkivi, Mari-Liis Lill, Marek Temmets and Paul Purga.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Rasmus Merivoo. A Red Water release.

Running time: 1:52