Movie Nation

One night, the Latvian newspaper editor and his wife are enjoying Puccini’s “Madama Butterfly,” where Melanie Vanaga can lose herself in its most famous aria, “Un bel dì vedremo.”

The next day, Soviet security police pound on the door of their Riga flat, barge in arrest them all — husband Alexandrs (Ivars Krasts), Melanie (Sabine Timoteo) and their pre-teen son, Andrejs (Edvins Mekss).

Their crime? “Fascists” — the catch-all accusation that served every Soviet need when it came to purging the intellectual, the leaders and the educated from a sovereign state they would absorb. Latvia and the Baltic States were but a 1941 warm-up for the rest of Eastern Europe.

“The Chronicles of Melanie” tells this story through the displaced and imprisoned Melanie, separated from her husband, struggling to keep herself and her son alive in a Siberian gulag filled with women and the low-life Russian predators charged with working them to death.

Writer-director Viesturs Kairiss based this film on the memoir of Melanie Vanaga, which she was only able to publish after the Soviet Empire crumbled and Latvia regained its independence. It’s a moving if somewhat stately (slow) drama of tragedy, privation and perseverance, with hints of poetry poking through the permafrost.

Because Melanie, rendered in shades of resignation and stoic defiance by Timoteo (“180 Degrees”), will not let go of her language, no matter how many Russian brutes who demand that they all “learn a civilized language.” She may fight pigs for the potatoes their captors feed the hogs with, but not eat what her son finds in the Russians’ waste.

“We are NOT going to eat trash!”(in Latvian, with English subtitles).

And she won’t lose the memory of the world they left behind, family holiday feasts, culture and art and “Madama Butterfly,” which returns to her memory and the soundtrack at several poignant moments.

Kairiss filmed this in flat, somewhat featureless black and white, so there’s not a lot of visual lyricism to his treatment of a hard-edged story.

Told she has 15 minutes to ready for transport, Melanie makes her child join her in wolfing down food because “We have no idea when the next meal is coming.”

A mother of small children, taking in the shock that “our husbands were killed,” takes a razor to her children and then herself in the crowded cattle car that hauls them all thousands of miles to the East.

An older woman, casting her eyes on the tractless forests of Siberia where their rudimentary camp has been set up, wanders into the woods to die. And no one stops her. Bodies are scattered everywhere, and losing a toddler means haggling with a callous local carpenter over nails.

Being women, the propositions by the guards have an have-sex-and-eat-or-die bottom line.

Melanie won’t give up, and won’t let her son give up either — through years of hardship, sickness and despair and a diet consisting of whatever herbs and berries they can sneak out and pick, and “400 grams of bread a day,” which is instantly cut to 200 because she speaks out, a “smart ass” surrounded by uniformed thugs.

“If I die, leave me in the taiga,” she instructs one of the few friends she recognizes and clings through through the ordeal. “It’ll be easier on my son.”

“The Chronicles of Melanie” lacks much of the agency and action of many such memoirs. The chief villain (Viktor Nemets) is left under-developed, and there’s barely a hint of an “escape attempt,” and no sense of deliverance.

But it is a vividly detailed reminder that the Axis powers did not corner the market on genocidal cruelty in the years surrounding World War II. The Russians kept at it for years afterward, and only those who endured the unendurable would live long enough to see the truth come out.

MPA Rating: unrated, graphic violence, rape, cruelty

Cast: Sabine Timoteo, Edvins Mekss, Ivars Krasts and Viktor Nemets

Credits: Written and directed by Viesturs Kairiss. A Corinth Films release.

Running time: 2:00

Civil War movies have always been a rare thing, so I was surprised to run across “Men Go to Battle” a few years late.

It came out the same year as the far more conventional “Field of Lost Shoes,” and at the tale end of the short-lived “Mumblecore” film movement of chatty, character-driven meanderings that gave us The Duplass Brothers, “Hannah Takes the Stairs,” “Baghead” and Greta Gerwig.

So, why not a mumblecore Civil War movie?

This deadpan dramedy plays now as what it was destined to become — a one-off stab at doing something different by a director/co-writer trying and failing to make his big break. It works, after a fashion. But there’s an aimlessness to its 5-years-in-Kentucky plot, a sense that too much important action or incident has been left out, coupled with a vivid, offhand-feeling recreation of a time and place.

Brothers Francis (David Maloney) and Henry Mellon (Timothy Morton) are hapless farmers in 1861 Kentucky tobacco country when we meet them. And as fall rolls in, we wonder how perchance these two goofs ever got their hand on the farm.

Because it’s so overgrown they can’t even sell the part of it that used to be good hemp land. And the rest has “gotten away” from them to such a degree it’ll take an army or a lot of animal labor to make productive.

Self-assured Francis blows cash on two mules, and one runs away. He pranks Henry, who seems to have more common sense, by “shooting” him (with no lead) to wake him up. But neither one is to be trusted when they’re in their cups.

Shenanigans with axe or knife are a good way to get hurt, and to avoid doing actual farmwork. Not to lay too much reality on this, but when their chickens drown, neglected during a storm, a sentient viewer is apt to wonder how they haven’t starved or died of careless cooking, gunplay or drunken accidents.

One such accident is how they end up needing a doctor, interrupting a dance at the home of the wealthy Small family. Henry makes incompetent small talk, arguing about the weather, with one of the Small daughters. At least he can joke about his cut hand to impress Betsy (Rachel Korine).

“Doc’s gonna amputate it tomorrow.”

Francis? He’s sticking his foot in it somewhere else.

Henry eventually makes his getaway, joining the Union Army. It might’ve made sense for both of these lazy lummoxes to avoid farmwork for meals and soldier’s pay. But separating them means the two illiterates have to communicate by letter.

“This war might last longer than me.”

But it doesn’t.

Director Zachary Treitz and his team do an impressive job of immersing us in the candlelit world of the rural 1860s, the drudgery of the life (but not the work, which the brothers avoid), the class differences between hardscrabble farmers and the affluent planters like Mr. Small (Steve Coulter).

Politics, slavery and racism don’t enter the story. We see an integrated church service, with slave-servants in the background of a few scenes. There’s no debate about which side these border state folks should be on.

Treitz and co-writer Kate Lyn Sheil concentrate on the brothers, sketching them in, looking for light laughs in their over-their-heads-in-most-situations plight.

Mid-war, with their village occupied, Francis insults a shorter Union infantryman and gets quickly punched-out.

The most interesting theme touched on is the different choices the siblings make — one, staying behind and the other opting for something like an adventure. But even that’s thinly developed.

A camp scene here, a picket line (patrol duty) moment there, a battle barely sketched-in. And then a finale that gives the film the feel of a half-digested parable.

“Men Go to Battle” isn’t awful, but removed from its film festival “moment,” it’s not all that, either. And that’s a shame. Treitz could have gotten something richer out of this setting and these characters.

MPA Rating: unrated, combat, alcohol abuse, smoking

Cast: David Maloney, Timothy Morton, Rachel Korine, Charlotte Arnold and Steve Coulter.

Credits: Directed by Zachary Treitz, script by Kate Lyn Sheil, Zachary Treitz. On Film Movement+.

Running time: 1:38

The idea of multiple universes, multiple realities, multiple “outcomes” to life and our existence gets a sleep-inducing workout in “Expulsion,” a no-budget thriller about scientists who DIY a teeny tiny Haldron Collider in a desert Southwest garage.

Indifferently-acted, with funereal pacing and (high school) student film action, the viewer has five minutes to catch up with its introductory premise, and spends the next 90 minutes two or three steps ahead of this clunky, obvious and dull screenplay.

Scott (Colton Trap) almost manages a convincing “WooHoo” after his “Eureka!” moment. His garage-built gadget has given him a portal, a first glimpse into another universe.

It doesn’t matter that his research partner Vince (Aaron Jackson, also the film’s co-writer/director) declared that “two people (have to be) present at all experiments.” As some discussed when the Large Hadron Collider at CERN first fired up, there is this risk of “destroying the planet” when you go around “smashing God Particles.”

It doesn’t matter that their “real” research, trying to develop safe cryonic storage of bodies that might be revived at a future date for the Cicero Corp, has taken a back seat. Cicero will provide them the power to properly give their portal a test.

And it really doesn’t matter that strange things start happening as they test it — cryptic warnings, a mysterious assassin, a colleague (Robert F. Glass) whom they see shot and killed, but who shows up for work the next day.

It isn’t until Scott breaks that “both of us have to be here” rule again that he gets a whiff of the “expulsion” theory, which posits that you and your doppelganger from a parallel universe can’t interact or you’ll go “poof.”

The fact is that the movie doesn’t pick up after that. It never properly gets on its feet, and the zero-heat performances just smother whatever ideas this comic book idea of a term paper script throws out there.

Stay in this universe. Watch a different movie. Ever seen “Primer?” Rent that instead.

MPA Rating: unrated, violence, sexuality

Cast: Colton Trapp, Aaron Jackson, Rosalie Fisher, Lar-Park Lincoln, Robert F. Glass.

Credits: Written and directed by Aaron Jackson, Sean C. Stephens. An American Pop release.

Running time: 1:40

You never want to “grade on the curve” when it comes to film reviews. But “Love in Dangerous Times” comes as close to earning an exception as anything I’ve come across of late.

It’s a no-budget indie romance about loneliness and love in our current pandemic. They obviously filmed it with an eye toward “social distancing,” and characters react in what feels like real time as they respond to what they know or don’t know, what might be “blown out of proportion” or indeed “the end of the world.”

Much of the acting and inter-acting is done via Facetime, Skype or whatever video call chat app you prefer. Director and co-writer Jon Garcia and co-writer/star Ian Stout make that limitation work, if not exactly pay dividends.

It’s as current as a headline, and as it is set in Portland, has last summer’s protest marches and unrest served up in a montage in the finale.

So yeah, the acting is uneven and the script only occasionally amuses or tugs at the heartstrings. But there’s enough here to recommend this cute, quaint artifact of the Nightmare That Was 2020.

Stout plays Jason, a playwright/restaurant-delivery driver in Portlandia willing to question this “blown pt of proportion” lockdown, but not taking any chances, either.

He’s trying to finish a play that sounds like an intimate, epic downer, trying to talk his boss into keeping the restaurant open for deliveries only, coping with his annoyed Dad (Bruce Jennings), who isn’t taking to Jason not “coming home” to ride this out with him with, and trying to meet somebody via his favorite online dating app.

He’s needy, and it shows. He’s gently blunt, and faintly creepy, or comes off that way at a time when “we’re facing extinction.”

But all this might help him break through with his play, his belief that “love will save me.”

Right now, though, he’s like a lot of folks living alone, disappointed that “nobody’s reached out to see how I’m doing.

One “ghosting” later, after his Dad has bragged about getting a bidet for his “bunker,” after his singer/guitarist pal Ishmael (Jimmy Garcia) has hung out, air-hugged and noted “I could be the last dude you see in a very long time,” ItsaMatch.com comes through. Jason meets somebody.

There’s a wary, arm’s-length chill to Sorrell (Tiffany Groben) the first time they chat, live, screen-to-screen.

In chats and chapters that go on for months (“One Month Later, 2 Million Infected”) they have ups and downs. A deflating answer to the “Are you talking (online) with any other guys” question, a scare over a delivery customer’s cough, sickness reaching people they know, this movie covers a lot of emotional ground.

There’s just a hint of pathos, a touch of erotica and not nearly enough good humor to this screenplay. Attempted jokes don’t land, and when they don’t, the airlessness of this whole situation makes the silence overbearing.

That impacts the charm Jason is supposed to be laying on this out-of-his-league blonde, and their chemistry. This guy is supposed to be a wordsmith?

But there’s enough here to merit a look, to see “What kind of movie romance can you make in a pandemic?” and to feed 2020 nostalgia.

Where were YOU during the first lockdown?

MPA Rating: unrated, sexual situations, profanity

Cast: Ian Stout, Tiffany Groben, Jimmy Garcia, Bruce Jennings

Credits: Directed by Jon Garcia, script by Jon Garcia and Ian Stout. A Dark Star release.

Running time: 1:33

A little celebration of Sean as Bond, at AMC and (I think) other cinemas with an eye toward using nostalgia and our affection for Sean Connery, who just died at 90, to lure in patrons.

C’mon out. Party like it’s the early 1960s! See the Aston Martin and Gert Frobe and Honor Blackman. And Connery.

“My Summer as a Goth” is a coming-of-age tale with too much black, too much makeup, and synth rock, it’s the “Strike a Pose” or “How I spent my summer vacation” romances.

A winning cast, novel “tribal” setting and some witty dialogue put this one over.

Natalie Shershaw is Joey, a high school sophomore we meet at the cemetery. She’s a tad morbid. She talks to a dead person there.

“I’m the girl whose Dad died, remember?”

That’s to her classmates. To her BFF Molly (Rachelle Henry), she’s a bit more flippant when playing for sympathy.

“My Dad’s body is still warm...too dark?”

Mom (Sarah Overman) is on a book tour, so there’s nothing for it but for standoffish/no-fun Joey to spend the summer with her grandparents. But as cool as these aged hippies (Fayra Reeters, Jonas Israel) might be, with their “So, who wants to do drugs?” and Grandpa’s nude breakfast cooking, it’d be nice if she could meet someone her own age.

That would be Victor of the vampire glam rocker makeup, grandson of the friendly seniors next door. Victor, played by Jack Levi, is forward, a tad femme and flirty. Oh, and “smug” — “If by ‘smug,” you mean ‘awesome.‘”

She spies him in a dress, faking a hanging in his bedroom in his grandparents’ house. She is smitten and he is all-in to be a tour guide to his “not just a scene, it’s a way of life.”

It begins with an “emergency makeover” — hair dye, fishnets, the works. A party in a cemetery — everybody dancing to a shared mix via ear buds — leads to spending the night in a tomb.

“You know, there’s no going back.”

And there isn’t. Not for a summer, anyway. Sixteen year-olds try stuff on and discard it by design. We call them “phases.”

A whirlwind summer of parties — her first joint, her first drink — bullying by rednecks and punks (Eduardo Reyes) making out and Goths on a camping trip give our shy Joey a tribe. Well, maybe she’s just a poseur, but the look suits her.

“I wear black on the outside to show how I feel inside.”

Director and co-writer Tara Johnson-Medinger doesn’t hide her cards well, but there are surprises here, largely in the picture’s tone.

Dark clothes, young couples wearing a vial of each other’s blood and making a death pact, New Romantics pop and lots and lots and lots of makeup — “Oh my God I think I’m TANNING.” “When are you EVER going to get the concept of re-appLYING?”

And it’s all so damned sweet, maybe not “strictly PG,” but as our heroine lives her season-long story arc, she comes out in a different place than where she started, bonds with her “a little too cool” grandparents, works out some Mommy/Daddy issues and grows.

Shershaw is a vulnerable, naive delight and former child actor Levi simply loses himself in the makeup, the pose, the effete snobbery and “the scene,” which may be the best thing about “My Summer as a Goth.”

The movie version of this culture may not be the most representative. But it certainly makes all that steampunk black look fun.

MPA Rating: unrated, drug use, sexual situations, smoking

Cast: Natalie Shershaw, Jack Levis, Eduardo Reyes, Fayra Reeters, Jonas Israel and Sarah Overman

Credits: Tara Johnson-Medinger, script by Tara Johnson-Medinger and Brandon Lee Roberts. A 123 Go Films release.

Running time: 1:41

Sordid, slow and stupid, “True to the Game 2” is a drug-trade sequel to the 2017 thriller about falling in love with a drug dealer and paying the price.

An opening scene shoot-out and a trio of coordinated brawls in the finale are little compensation for the tedium in between.

Vivica A. Fox returns as Shoog, streetwise tough gangster who leads Bria (Iyana Halley) in a revenge hijacking of a drug shipment intended for drug boss Jerrell (Andra Fuller).

Poor Jerrell figured he was done with drug dealer Quadir’s minions after taking him out in the first film. He hadn’t counted on the dead drug dealer’s family.

The haul? “A meal ticket,” which is a cool million in cocaine-and-cash-speak.

“It’s gonna be an early Christmas in the (Philly) hood!” Shoog figures.

Gena (Erica Peeples) buried Quadir, finished grad school and is now a workaholic at a New York fashion webzine. She lives large — larger than any mere online mag writer could manage. Yes, she has drug money backing up her lifestyle.

But that bloody shootout that opens the picture has Jerrell and his minions — one played by model and former “Hot Felon” Jeremy Meeks — hunting high and low for those who hit him. That sends Saleem (Meeks) into Quadir’s memorial service and Jerrell off on a hunt for Gena, who decides to drive her Range Rover to California to do an assignment on an LA cannabis king.

That’ll eat up the two week vacation her borderline-harassing boss forces her to take.

The middle acts — full of asking around, intrigues, costume changes and little that animates the plot even if, in theory, scenes do advance it (sort of) — stop “2” dead in its tracks.

We lose track of the hardened anchor of all this, Fox, and dwell on the bar hopping, drinks, kidnappings, threats and what have you that it takes to get Jerrell and his man Saleem closer to their quarry.

Meeks lands one good thug line, announced to a prisoner he’s slapping around in the trunk of his ride.

“STOP! You gonna KILL me?”

“You in the trunk. You already dead.”

The only chuckles are in the memorial service, where Faith Evans sings and Quadir’s mom talks about what “a good boy, a good MAN” her son was.

He was a DRUG dealer. But sure.

All this violence — in New York, Philly and LA — has people in the center of the action “on edge.”

“It’s Philly. People are BORN on edge.”

Love V.A. Fox, but when you leave her out, you’re not being “True to the Game.”

The acting is uneven, the action not awful but not great either (some of the stage punches are obvious) and the ending a total cheat.

Aside from that…

MPA Rating: R for violence, pervasive language, sexual content, nudity and drug content

Cast: Vivica A. Fox, Erica Peeples, Andra Fuller, Jeremy Meeks, Iyana Halley, Rotimi, Tamar Braxton

Credits. Directed by Jamal Hill, script by Preston A. Whitmore II, based on a novel by Teri Woods. An Imani Media Group release.

Running time: 1:33

It begins and ends as an elegy, a somber remembrance of past times and personal loss set against a spare, plaintive plucked-guitar score.

The story has a seething villain and climaxes in a fine, melodramatic fury.

But “Let It Go” is a thriller best-appreciated for its trio of tour de force performances — for Diane Lane and Kevin Costner’s understated Western American couple that’s so familiar and lived-in that their most powerful moments are wordless, and for Great Brit Lesley Manville’s furious, uncompromising North Dakota matriarch.

This intimate Western odyssey marks a return to form for writer-director Thomas Bezucha, years removed from his first break, the Montana-set “Big Eden” and from his break out “The Family Stone.” Adapting Larry Watson’s novel, he tells a story of family, loss, guilt and a seemingly irrational over-reach, a grandmother longing to raise and protect her grandson.

Because we’ve seen Margaret monopolize the child, dismissive of the boy’s mother even when her daughter-in-law (Kayli Carter), son (Ryan Bruce) and their newborn were living with them. But son James dies, Lorna remarries and little Jimmy (Otto and Bran Hornung) is suddenly removed from their lives, abruptly off to “live with his parents.”

Margaret wordlessly packs a bag, loads the station wagon and sits, ramrod straight, until George comes home and gets a clue. He says what we’re thinking.

“What the hell, Margaret?”

They’re off on a late-winter trek through eastern Montana and into western North Dakota, where the second husband’s Weboy clan holds sway. Asking questions about them tell retired sheriff George more than he wants to know.

“You let it be known you’re looking for a Weboy, they’ll find YOU.”

Finding Bill (Jeffrey Donovan of “Burn Notice”) and the ranch matriarch, Blanche (Manville, of “Maleficent” and “The Crown”) leads to tense, brittle conversational stand-offs — Margaret’s pasted-on smile not covering George’s I-know-what’s-coming glower.

Bezucha takes his time getting to that meeting, sharing a little of the Margaret/George backstory, filling in the sad blanks of their son’s death with flashbacks. The pre-Interstate vistas are filled with Patsy Cline and fundamentalists on the crackling AM radio on their ’58 Chevy Nomad wagon, and not-quite-bickering as George scolds Margaret for her doggedness and naivete.

Their stops along the way start with Margaret’s grinning, disarming chatter — “beating around the bush” as she promises to not beat-around-the-bush — and devolve into the old lawman’s blunt “bad cop” questioning.

They even stumble across a Native teen (Booboo Stewart), with hints of the horrors of the Bismarck “Indian School” he escaped.

But meeting the Weboys turns this mournful journey into what the movies long ago nicknamed “A Mexican Standoff.” The music changes from guitar to Thriller Strings and we wonder how we or Margaret or anyone, for that matter, could make the case for the kid without an eruption of violence.

Manville’s Blanche is all cruel, regal bluster, putting her “guests” on notice they’re on her turf. “Anyone knows me knows I can’t be insulted,” she drawls, but we know and George and Margaret know that she can.

Lane’s Margaret shows her mettle without having to proclaim it, but her abrupt way of turning off the sweet smile and the “beating around the bush” suggest she’s absorbed some of George’s wariness and impatience.

And Costner, the Western American Master, lets us see George’s submission to the will of “this woman I married by can’t figure,” and his age. The experience means the mind is willing, even if the body’s lost its fastball.

Some of the characters’ changes in mood and approach seem abrupt. Surely any of the leads would lay on the disarming honey just a little longer before flashing their respective talons. But they all have a hint of George’s sense of fate that’s in play.

Once the Blackledges undertook this quest, there was no pleasant way for it to play out.

The finale is over-the-top and melodramatic, Old West and Old Fashioned in its own way.

But “Let Him Go” is a real showcase for fine talent — veteran villain Donovan included — and a nicely-blended mix of sentiment, sadness and the violence that we know, as well as any character on the screen does, is coming.

MPA Rating: R for violence

Cast: Diane Lane, Kevin Costner, Lesley Manville, Jeffrey Donovan, Kayli Carter, Will Brittain and Booboo Stewart.

Credits: Written and directed by Thomas Bezucha, based on a Larry Watson novel. A Focus Features release

Running time: 1:54

In the title role of Tatsushi Ohmori‘s “Mother,” Masami Nagasawa gives us one of the great screen monsters of recent memory.

Her Akiko Misumi is a Japanese “Mommy Dearest” — cruel, callous, self-absorbed, violent and still enough of a hot mess to appeal to any man who crosses her field of vision.

When we meet her she’s manic, grabbing her little boy for a day of playing hooky from primary school. When we last see her she’s dead-eyed and pitiless, her life of selfish narcissism and emotional brutality doesn’t phase her as she lacks a conscience.

A social worker (Kaho) is the epitome of Japanese good manners and understatement when she describes Akiko as “incapable.” We’ve seen what she did to her son, Suhei, played as a child by Sho Gunji and as an older teen by Daiken Okudaira.

“Mother” invites the viewer to play a grueling waiting game, its suspense stemming from the viewer’s growing desire to see the boy stand up to the woman who has made him cadge cash off relatives, steal, take beatings from abusive boyfriends and lie in blackmail schemes.

And even though Tatsushi (“Every Day a Good Day”) never heard the English expression “too much of a good thing” in drawing this story out over years with a running time north of two hours, his villainess rarely loses our interest or our eagerness to see her pay for her crimes.

“Mother” is a story of co-dependency and loyalty, of lives lived on the street and promise squandered because of an impulsive, martyred mother who A) has a gambling problem, B) ruthlessly uses men, including her little boy, and C) has the idea that her children are hers “to raise as I see fit” (in Japanese, with English subtitles).

Shuhei can never shake her, never defy her. Not after she ditches him at seven to run off with a new thug, Ryo (Sadao Abe), on a drinking/gambling binge. Not after she and Ryo use Shuhei to blackmail the hapless civil servant she talked into “watching” the boy while she left him for her latest misadventure.

Shuhei is who she sends to beg for money off her sister and parents. Shuhei, as a teen, is the one with a job she talks into getting advances from his boss.

We need only one scene to establish Akiko’s addiction. Her eyes glaze over when playing a pachinko (slot) machine. We never see her win, never see her pay a bill. It’s all-consuming, and the boy she brought into the world is just here to facilitate her habit.

There’s wailing and shouting in her encounters with her distraught and had-enough family. And there’s violence as Ryo enters and leaves their lives, slapping around Mother and the little boy who can’t protect her as he does.

It’s not giving anything away to say that a second child enters this world of flophouses and sleeping on the street, when they hit bottom. Akiko’s lack of self-control extends to all things, even the unfiltered insults she rains upon her boy when ordering him to skip school and babysit, or anything else she can command.

Through it all, Masami lets us see the instant calculating, the in-the-moment impulsiveness, with narrowing of the eyes when she sends the boy in search of the next need she orders him to fulfill.

Tatsushi’s storytelling is deliberate and slow, showing us the agonizing days an abandoned child spends eating uncooked noodles because Mother didn’t pay the gas bill, playing video games until the moment the power’s cut off, because guess what?

It gets to be too much after a while, and Tatsushi’s ending is drawn-out, downbeat and deliberately unsatisfying. But every Japanese filmmaker knows that not every monster movie ends up with Godzilla blown up and sinking into the sea.

MPA Rating: TV-14, violence, much of it against children

Cast: Masami Nagasawa, Sho Gunji, Daiken Okudaira, Sadao Abe, Halo Asada

Credits: Directed by Tatsushi Ohmori, script by Takehiko Minato and Tatsushi Ohmori. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:06

Today’s assignment, class, is compare-and-contrast “Come Play,” now in theaters, with “Noise in the Middle,” now streaming.

They’re both thrillers about haunted children. Their shared hook? Both the kids are autistic.

“Come Play” has a name cast and a few decent chills. But for my money, “Noise in the Middle” has a better villain, a more interesting kid and a better grasp of (movie) ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder).

Veteran character actor John Mese is a difference maker here. He plays a Seattle divorce attorney always on the edge of seething. We meet this impatient, short-tempered dad as he’s taking his daughter Emmy (Faye Hostetter) to Canada, turning down the chance to put her in “a home” to take a chance on an experimental treatment for her disorder.

“It’s what Sarah wanted,” Richard says. And Sarah’s wishes are important, because she died just a few weeks ago. A friend’s lent him his three story modernist mansion near the clinic trying this magnetic brain scan therapy.

Testy Richard’s about to get a crash-course in autism. Nurse Zandra (Juliette Jeffers, quite good) picks up on the fact that Richard was never that involved in his moaning, rocking and wandering-off-prone daughter’s care. She doesn’t have to hear him bark “Emmy, I don’t have TIME for this” more than once.

Dr, Helmond (Jim Holmes) explains the “communications disorder” nature of autism, that Emmy is “always saying something” even though she can’t yet speak. “We just have to hear it,” to “sort out the noise in the middle” between her efforts to communicate and Richard’s inability to hear it.

Richard, sweating a case-gone-wrong back at the office, dosing himself with whisky and Xanax, quickly regrets his decision to not commit his child. And Emmy, just starting to learn the text-to-talk phone app that will bridge their gap, has something alarming to tell him.

“Mom here.”

All those giggling kid noises, the skittering up stairs in the night? There are ghosts around, so there’s nothing for it but to talk to the crystals-and-astrology shop owner (Tom Konkle, fun) and figure out what’s afoot and what to do about it.

The frights come from simple effects — nightmare sequences, “Mom” (Tara Buck), glimpsed in a mirror. An evil future incarnation of ill-tempered Dad is in there, too. They’re not big jolts, although the movie does manage suspense in making us fear for Emmy, and fear what Dad might be pushed into doing by the spirits in the house.

While this film makes more of an effort to explain the disorder, the autistic characters “break character” here and there with excessive eye contact, and in the case of “Come Play,” a need to turn its victim into a brilliant child who has agency in his fate thanks to a lot of magical movie thinking.

Both films should have made more of an effort to show the terror as the autistic child experiences it. Because as neither thriller wholly comes off, that shared lapse seems the most obvious way both fall short.

Emmy’s peril, which she cannot fully articulate, should have more of the focus. Making it all about Dad’s credulous acceptance of “spirits” and ghosts, and his breakdown under the strain, just isn’t as interesting, no matter how much seething he does in the process.

MPA Rating: MPA Rating: unrated, violence, drug and alcohol abuse

Cast: John Mese, Faye Hostetter, Juliette Jeffers, Tara Buck and Tom Konkle.

Credits: Directed by Marcus McCollum, script by Glen Kannon and Marcus McCollum A Terror Films release.

Running time: 1:32