Movie Nation

Follows his “Bill & Ted” sequel, nicely timed to cash in on whatever comes of “Matrix Resurrections,” mixed to negative reviews be damned.

That’s part of the Hollywood agent’s credo. Announce your star’s NEXT film before this one hits…or bombs.

Sinister, stark and shadowy, the new “Macbeth” conjured up by Oscar-winning writer and director Joel Coen, and starring his Oscar-winning wife Frances McDormand with Oscar-winner Denzel Washington in the title role, has the cast and production values to compete with any prestige picture this awards season.

But “The Tragedy of Macbeth” puts almost every other blockbuster and “awards bait” film of this fall and winter to utter shame in one jarring regard. A swift and streamlined tragedy by the greatest playwright in the English language becomes a lean, quick and brutally brisk film in Coen’s hands.

And if Shakespeare and Coen can deliver “The Scottish Play” in a riveting 100 minutes, what excuse do the creators of “House of Gucci,” “Licorice Pizza,” “Matrix Resurrections,” “Spider-Man” or even “The King’s Man” have for not getting to the point in 135-150 or more?

Casting great actors pays dividends as Washington gives Macbeth a guile and agency sometimes lost in productions that play up the femme fatale, Lady Macbeth. McDormand’s take on Mrs. “Out damn-ed spot!” is a revelation, a cunning woman reeling at the way her husband takes over “their” plot, fuming and cracking under the strain of his blunders and improvisations to her plan to kill their way to the Scottish throne.

Washington’s ultra-naturalistic and confident line-readings remind us that this poetry has its greatest impact when it sounds like improvised dialogue, and McDormand’s “madness” adds new colors the theater’s greatest conniver-who-cracks-up.

Many a character player (Brendan Gleeson is King Duncan, Stephen Root is the verbose and comical Porter, Moses Ingram the fierce and tragic Lady Macduff) sparkles in a single scene or three, although there are a couple who seem o’er-matched, if not miscast.

The story — that of a brave, brutish and honored Scottish thane who lets a battlefield promotion go to his head, pushed into plotting against those who stand between him and ultimate power by his wife — is simple enough and rendered in greys and whites and bloody strokes by Coen. The dialogue, which has provided the English language with as many pithy quotes as any play Shakespeare wrote, is given room to sing.

“Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.”

This is a bold, wholly recognizable “Macbeth,” if not precisely as you might remember it if you’ve ever seen it before.

There’s nothing that original about bathing the story in Scottish fog and shadows, or filming it in black and white. Orson Welles did both in an equally brisk, more equine-friendly budget-studio rendition of “Macbeth” in 1948. The bloodier moments echo Roman Polanski’s 1971 film.

But here are four clever touches that remind us that Joel Coen has four Oscars and a “Buster Scruggs” to his credit.

Coen taps into Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Telltale Heart” for the thumping, pounding sound that Macbeth guiltily hears for much of the film after he’s killed King Duncan.

The three witches, the “weird sisters” who foretell Macbeth’s ascension and later his fate, are performed by actress Kathryn Hunter, contorting her voice and (literally) her body to embody the three, sometimes simply seen as one.

Coen promotes the messenger Ross (Alex Hassell) into a full-fledged, priest-cloaked Greek chorus, relating not just messages that advance the plot with tales of far off battles and intrigues, but a close and sometimes silent observer to and possible manipulator of Macbeth’s murderous machinations as the bloodbath begins.

Polanski did something similar with the character, and that fact, and the Wellesian production design, suggests Coen consulted both films before directing his.

And although there are many ways to interpret the play, Coen’s adaptation, in casting the 60something Washington, leans into Macbeth as frustrated by the limits to his advancement and impatient — thanks to his graying, childless advancing age — to seize that which others would deny to him. He is high-handed and tyrannical and impulsive.

What this production team — which includes digital black and white cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel, costumer Mary Zophres, production designer Stefan Dechant and art director Jason T. Clark — and stellar cast give us isn’t just a robust rendition that renews The Scottish Play in our memory, but a terrific thriller, a bold, unblinking plunge into murder and madness set against nearly unlimited power.

That has to be what Coen saw in it, an amoral, utterly unethical tyrant who doesn’t “murder somebody on Fifth Avenue,” but acts with equal impunity, fearless of the consequences because “somebody told” him he has nothing to fear. With provisos.

Rating: R for violence

Cast: Denzel Washington, Frances McDormand, Brendan Gleeson, Alex Hassell, Corey Hawkins, Bertie Carvel, Moses Ingram, Matt Helm, Stephen Root, James Udom and Kathryn Hunter

Credits: Scripted and directed by Joel Coen, based on William Shakespeare’s “The Tragedie of Macbeth.” An Apple Films release of an A24 production.

Running time: 1:45

This may be the last thing I see in a theater this year.

It’s not just that I’ve gotten around to everything and I do mean EVERYthing else. There is a title missing here and there I wouldn’t mind reviewing. Perhaps a few of them will present themselves over the holidays.

But even though MovieNation never sleeps — and there are films popping out the last weekend of the year that I have lined up to screen via streaming — 2021 is about to go “out OUT damned spot” with a bang, Joel Coen’s take on Shakespeare’s “The Tragedie of Macbeth” (how Will spelled it), “The Tragedy of Macbeth.”

Thanks, AppleTV, for putting this bad boy up on an Orlando screen where one can truly be immersed in the gloom, the witches, the Lady and the victims of Denzel’s interpretation of an ambitious man and his more murderously ambitious wife.

You can have your zombie pictures — real zombies or Rob Zombie splatterfests. Spare me your “Saw” sequels and “Halloween” abattoirs.

Entirely too neat and “pat” for my tastes.

For film violence to mean anything, it’s got to be personal, the stakes life-or-death from the start, the injuries and deaths grim and gurgling and difficult, because rarely does real life allow the simple “kill shot,” knock-out punch or single fatal slash of a knife.

“For the Sake of Vicious” is in the “Hostel” “High Tension” league — a simple, compact thriller about the struggles of three people to survive Halloween night, trapped in the same house, shedding blood and spilling it to draw a few more breaths.

It’s nobody’s idea of a great thriller. There are clunky moments and leaps in the plot that made me wonder if details had been left out. But it’s intimate, savage and grueling to sit through. Imagine what the poor actors endured.

A single mom nurse (Lora Burke of “Poor Agnes”) comes home from her shift to find a bloodied man on her floor and an armed intruder who cuts off all her avenues of escape. Exhausted or not, this broad’s seen it all and not going quietly, whatever this creep has in mind.

The creep? Of course he assures her “I’m not going to hurt you.” He (Nick Smyth of “Covenant”) even offers his name — “Chris.”

“F— YOU!”

But with a couple of words we and she figure out who he is. His daughter was raped. She was the nurse on duty that night. And this bloodied fellow unconscious on the floor? He (Colin Parradine of “Defective”) happens to be the suspect who “got off,” the guy Chris has evidence was the rapist. He also happens to be Romina’s landlord.

Over the course of this evening, the guys will debate and re-hash the case, Romina will behave with suspicious unconcerned calm.

And then things turn bloody and bloodier and more and more complex. The bodies pile up on a kitchen floor already slippery with blood and littered with damage from earlier fights, and weapons.

There are several moments when the characters’ reactions to this or that — standing staring at a door lock that’s being picked from the other side, with the person doing the picking an eminent threat, for instance — are just…off. We can read ulterior motives into it or wonder what information we haven’t been given, which is sometimes the case. But such moments play as sloppy and dramatically inert.

“Vicious” is at its best at its most vicious. Everything and anything might be a weapon. Injuries are grievous, but don’t stop characters from gasping and grasping and struggling and pummeling as if their very lives depended on it. Because they plainly do.

The stabbings, slashings, bludgeonings and beatings go on and on, and what co-directors Gabriel Carrer and Reese Eveneshen are determined to show us makes you forget they’re Canadian, or forget the Canadian rep for “Ryan Reynolds nice.” No, this is “Deadpool” deathly.

“For the Sake of Vicious” doesn’t blink and rarely lets up, so much so that I found myself mouthing “Wow wow wow” at the carnage and in-your-face staging and photographing of the brawls and butchery.

The fights leave the characters straining for breath, the actors playing them panting and the viewer breathless, at times. That’s how violence is supposed to be in the movies — messy, personal, relentless and unsportsmanlike. If nothing else, these Canadians do a very good job of reminding us of that.

Rating: Unrated, savage, gory and extremely personal violence

Cast: Lora Burke, Nick Smyth, Colin Paradine and James Fler.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Gabriel Carrer and Reese Eveneshen. A Shudder release.

Running time: 1:21

It returns to life as a lark, a self-aware send-up of “The Matrix” as the pop culture-devouring entity it once was. “The Matrix Resurrections” opens at a video gameworks where employees, led by a master designer, are “going to make a sequel to our beloved Trilogy.“

Damned if that designer isn’t named Thomas Anderson, and damned if he isn’t played by the ageless Keanu Reeves.

As premises go, this “meta” twist on the green neon universe of “modals” and “sentients,” that they’re all the mad fantasy of a master video game craftsman, is daring, and in the first act of “Resurrections,” it plays as downright whimsical.

There’s deadline pressure. There are semi-comical tech nerds who idolize our “hero” and bosses who badger him for results. Got to get this “sequel” to the marketplace, come what may. Christina Ricci sparkles (in a single scene) as the marketing director talking up how to sell it.

Anderson, whose alter ego Neo is a part of the “game,” is kind of on task. But he’s noticing things. And he’s in therapy (Neil Patrick Harris plays a shrink who adds to the comic-ironic feel).

 “Thomas. You seem particularly triggered, can you tell me what happened?”

Anderson is off-balance, troubled. “I saw this pattern, and it was EVERYwhere…I know this story. Is this how we began?”

And then there’s this overwhelmingly familiar stranger, a married mother of two with haunted eyes whom Anderson bumps into in a coffee shop. Whatever name she (Carrie-Anne Moss) goes by now, if there’s a “Neo” inside of Anderson, he’s going to recognize “Trinity” in or out of The Matrix, with or without the appearance of a triggering kitty cat.

“Have we…met?”

Eighteen years after the last “Matrix,” years only partly-filled by the addition of video games in that universe, director Lana Wachoswki returns to the franchise that made The Wachowskis sci-fi film cinema legends. But the movie she delivers shows not just indifference to the material. It’s like she’s pissed to be back here again.

Those set-up scenes — more coherent and straightforward than any “Matrix” movie that came before –promise something that’s both sequel and prequel, with more modernish red and blue pills, more existential angst over the choice between seeing things as they “really” are, and self-narcotized delusion.

The object of “the game” that these movies have always been is simpler here. Reconnect with Trinity, take the right pill and either “fight” to figure out what is really going on, or look for “happiness” with her.

No, Laurence Fishburne isn’t back. But a younger Morpheus (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) is, still here to hector Neo to act.

“The only thing that matters to you is still here. I know it’s why you’re still fighting, and why you will never give up!”

Hugo Weaving’s Smith is now played by Jonathan Groff, and isn’t the sunglassed menace we remember.

And as “Resurrections” stumbles into the second act, we figure out all-too-quickly that this “reluctance to make a sequel” joke might be expressing how Wachowski really feels about this dubious enterprise. Almost everything about the last 100 minutes of this movie feels like an assault punishing the audience, “the fans,” for daring to beg for another film and Warner Brothers for demanding it be made.

If that sounds extreme, it is. The middle acts shift from the gloomy, familiarly paranoid dark shadows and green color palette of “The Matrix” and into over-saturated yellows and bright-bright whites. You’re sitting in a dark movie theater watching slightly-upgraded versions of the famous effects — “Bullet time” is a punchline here — hurled at you in light so bright it’s designed to strain your eyes, to make you close them.

Does Wachowski want to hurt or seriously discomfort the viewer? It sure as hell feels like it.

I was reminded of Lou Reed’s infamous “contractual obligations” LP, “Metal Machine Music,” the most notorious “let me make something so atonal and jarring and assaultive and unpopular that they’ll let me out of my contract” act ever committed by a commercial artist. Is that what Wachowski was shooting for here? Killing this thing off?

I love the fact that Moss was brought back, that no recasting of the two leads was attempted to make this “younger.” But that just makes the absence of Weaving and Fishburne, the ways they grounded these movies with their performances, their gravitas and their function as “icons” within this world, more jarring.

The story turns simpler and yet so convoluted as to be even harder to follow. Incidents have a randomness that seems dictated by “We need a chase/fight/shootout here” action film story structure rather than anything organic.

New characters stand around the periphery and aren’t developed beyond their “function” in Neo’s renewed quest.

I was never a huge fan of the original trilogy, but the films were novel, innovative and pulse-pounding and the effects eye-popping. Once you “got it” they pretty much held your interest between action sequences.

That isn’t true here. I was delighted at the beginning, and steadily more appalled at most everything that followed. There’s no sugarcoating the fact that I look forward to never seeing this “Resurrection” again.

Rating: R for violence and some language

Cast: Keanu Reeves, Carrie Anne Moss, Neil Patrick Harris, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Jonathan Groff, Christina Ricci, Jada Pinkett Smith and Priyanka Chopra Jonas.

Credits: Directed by Lana Wachowski, scripted by Aleksander Hemon and David Mitchell, based on characters created by Lana Wachowski. Warner Brothers release.

Running time: 2:25

Every movie is engineered to reach a specific audience, and most of them can’t help but give away that intention. It can be as obvious as the pandering inclusion of this or that extraneous character or Big Supporting Character moment in your typical fangirl/fanboy friendly comic book or “Star Wars” movie, or Denzel making sure he lets his leading lady sing along to her favorite R&B song on the car radio, or that he gives her lingering, tracking close-ups in her PJs, celebrating “Real Black Women have curves” in “A Journal for Jordan.”

I was really struck by the “fan service” the Alabama siblings the Erwin Brothers layered into the faith-based adaptation of The Kurt Warner Story, “American Underdog.”

It’s unusual because Hollywood doesn’t tend to put much effort into this audience — rural, white, identifying as Christian — largely because it skews mostly older. And it’s very hard to get anybody over 40 or 50 into a theater, with or without a pandemic. It’s natural that as filmgoers marry, start families and fret about where their entertainment dollars are best spent that they don’t go out to the movies often, if ever. If Hollywood theatrical studios ignore this audience, it’s because they’re staying home watching cable or streaming Netflix.

We talk and joke a lot about “virtue” signaling — people who add every pronoun they’re not offended by to their facebook/Twitter profiles, who go out of their way to look, act and be “woke.” But there’s a flipside to it lathered all over this faith-based “conservative signaling” formula sports drama.

The first recognizable voice we hear on the soundtrack is Ronald Reagan’s, doing a little politicking by performing the coin toss for Super Bowl XIX. It’s a little jarring and pointless, but if the audience you’re counting on worships the guy as a fifth face for Mount Rushmore, it makes perfect sense.

There are lifted pick-ups and honky-tonks and country music in this mostly-Red State Iowa story. The Black teammate characters — Ser’Darius Blain has the principal supporting role — are portrayed as nice folks, decidedly in the minority, here to endorse, authenticate and back up Kurt (Zachary Levi), drive lifted pick-ups, listen t country music and teach our hero to line dance.

Warner’s future wife (Anna Paquin) can be summed up thusly — ex-Marine, divorced, single mom who likes country music, line dancing, Christian but “living in sin,” tries not to dwell on the mistakes/carelessness that blinded her kid among other misfortunes. And she sports a seriously out of step hair style.

All I remember about Warner’s playing days were how “gunslinger” fun the games were to watch, and the way sports talk radio and the nascent Internet sports chat rooms cruelly picked on the quarterback who wasn’t married to the prom queen. Ugly stuff about her hair and the like.

In the movie, Brenda Warner’s character, modesty and kindness exempts her from political recruitment to run for office. But she’s a walking advert for rural white American conservative “virtue” triggers — hard-working, tested by life, resilient, a real person reduceable here to a “type.”

The “faith” part of this story — Warner was somewhat less outspoken and demonstrative about his faith on the field than Tim Tebow, but not by much — is a soft-sell.

It’s the romance, the hard-knocks “reach for the American dream” struggle — some of the rough edges rubbed off, others mythologized — that is played up and should appeal to just about anyone, but particularly to rural white Christian conservatives and older football fans.

Will they show up to see it?

One has to curate indie and international DVD titles one donates to libraries all over the rural or semi urban Southeast. One must, given the wide range of content pitched and sent one’s way in hard copy form.

Which Spanish language drama or comedy would have an audience in this county or town, which Oscar nominee from Asia or Eastern Europe would add welcome diversity to a local collection in that town?

Urban Maitland, part of metro Orlando, is certainly hip and sophisticated enough to look past the “Gotta be porn” cover of Bruce LaBruce’s French Canadian satire of identity, sexuality and inventing the selfie, one 1972 Polaroid snapshot at a time.

Well I hope so, anyway. Here’s a link to my review of “Saint-Narcisse.*

It’s Out There, for sure. Not porn. Just daring. Are you ready, Maitland?

MovieNation, spreading film knowledge and eclectic cinema throughout the land, one DVD, one pic library at a time.

Because we all should support and patronize our invaluable public libraries. You do it your way, I do it mine.

It’s no coincidence that there have now been two sentimental, plucky-outsider-makes-good pro football stories committed to film built around the coaching of Dick Vermeil. At Philadelphia and later with the St. Louis Rams, Vermeil perfected that heart-on-your-sleeve, “team/players that nobody believed in” storyline to such a degree that Hollywood should probably pay him a retainer.

They don’t. But 15 years after “Invincible,” about a sandlot leaguer who made the Eagles, here’s “American Underdog,” about a quarterback nobody wanted, who found himself on food stamps, bagging groceries in Iowa, whom Coach Vermeil rode all the way to Super Bowl glory.

It’s a film by the faith-based filmmaker Alabama Erwin Brothers, Jon and Andrew, who made a mark with “Woodlawn” and set the box office alight with “I Can Only Imagine.” They deliver a solid formula sports picture with a light dose of faith and some overt small town America “conservative signaling,” and a generally entertaining movie thanks to a decent lead and stellar supporting cast.

Zachary Levi brings a little “Shazam!” swagger and a just-light-enough touch to Warner, whose Midwestern dreams of NFL fame were a long shot from the start, and grew longer and longer until the aging rookie that his coaches took to calling “Pop Warner” made the Rams contenders.

The story is framed within the romance of “fifth year senior” Northern Iowa (Division I-AA) backup quarterback Kurt and honky-tonking, line-dancing, ex-Marine divorced mother-of-two Brenda Meoni, given a flinty vulnerability by Oscar-winner Anna Paquin.

And boy, that Brenda description reads like the movie’s marketing pitch.

Theirs is a romance of modest possibilities and big dreams, but always pragmatic and always strictly PG, “living in sin” or not. Brenda has a little girl and a blind son (Hayden Zaller) just old enough for school. Kurt doesn’t need his single-mom Momma (Cindy Hogan, quite good) to tell him the stakes.

“Single mom? That’s no joke.”

But with a lot of love, a little luck and a busload of faith, they get by. Kurt doesn’t get drafted after graduating, and makes it just two days into a tryout with the Green Bay Packers. The couple and the kids eventually find themselves in an Iowa apartment where the unpaid power bill means the heat’s been shut off, forcing a road trip to his mother’s place in a blizzard in which they carelessly run out of gas.

Their salvation comes from the carnival on concrete Arena Football League — eight-players-to-a-side underpaid teams playing in civic arenas designed for rodeos and basketball games.

“It’s not football. It’s a CIRCUS!” grocery stacker Kurt blusters to owner-coach Jim Foster (Bruce McGill, perfect).

“He GETS it,” Foster enthuses to the not-yet-Mrs. Warner. “People LOVE the circus!”

This is the most cinematically-promising chapter of “American Underdog.” But while all the games are have a certain sizzle to their blocking, filming and editing, and we get plenty of how “football at the speed of NASCAR” prepared Warner for NFL success, not nearly enough is done with this seat-of-the-pants, cut-rate sports spectacle.

As dry as McGill is and as funny as we’ve seen Levi before, the Erwins keep one and all under a wet blanket for these scenes.

That makes the call-up to the Big Leagues — where Coach Vermeil (Dennis Quaid) sees “something” in our hero that his celebrated offensive coordinator Mike Martz (Chance Kelly, testy and testing) most certainly does not — play as more muted than electric.

As for “the rest,” as they say and shouldn’t even bother saying, it most certainly “is history,” and not all that surprising. Even the “inspiring” thing will only register for folks looking for “faith” signifiers.

Despite that preordained story arc and pre-digested feel, “Underdog” still gets more than enough right to recommend it. Real, grainy pre-HDTV coverage of the pre-game shows and actual games, with Levi artfully intercut with vintage footage, lends the film a lot more authority than Levi naturally brings to the role.

He’s entirely too old to be playing even a “fifth year senior,” although he’s big enough to pass for “Pop” Warner in uniform.

The picture flows much better than earlier Erwin films, and although “faith-based” and “corny” can seem interchangeable, they go easy on the corn here.

Paquin won her Oscar as a child and has only gotten better with the passing years. She makes Brenda, infamously mocked on sports talk radio and the Internet for her looks and double-wide beauty salon hairstyle, earthy and real.

Adam Baldwin gives a fine fury to his role as Warner’s college coach, blowing his stack at every fumble of “MY football” during practice.

McGill gives us a chuckle or three as the coach who dryly schools his new hire in the art of surviving Arena football.

Quaid isn’t the appropriately teary-eyed Vermeil that teary-eyed Greg Kinnear brought to “Invincible.” But he’s warm and folksy, with that faraway “underdog” twinkle when he’s talking about being underestimated, but knowing your “moment” and being ready for it when it comes.

I like my faith-based films upbeat, not “God’s Not Dead” angry and political. The Erwins manage that even as they go out of their way to not offend their Southern/Middle American “Football” and “NASCAR” audience.

“American Underdog” is — like its hero — plucky, the sort of guy/gal next door and struggling story that does itself credit when it lets its characters dream and lets us believe the American dream can still come true. Read anything more than that into it at your own peril.

Rating: PG, for some language (mild profanity) and thematic elements (alcohol, honky tonking)

Cast: Zachary Levi, Anna Paquin, Bruce McGill, Ser’Darius Blain, Hayden Zaller, Adam Baldwin and Dennis Quaid.

Credits Directed by Andrew Erwin and Jon Erwin, scripted by David Aaron Cohen, based on “All Things Possible,” by Kurt Warner and Michael Silver. A Lionsgate release.

Running time: 1:52

“The Medium” goes on too long, repeats itself often enough for you to notice and travels so far over the top for its finale that it’s practically bathed in blood.

But this chilling mockumentary from Thailand is one of the most harrowing horror films of the year. Even as it’s going over-the-top for that climax, it pulls you to the edge of your seat with a ticking clock exorcism countdown that may be the cleverest touch of all.

Well, that and sights and sounds of a documentary camera being chased, screaming and weeping, scared out of their wits.

The mockumentary element in writer-director Banjong Pisanthanakun’s film (working from an original story concocted by others) is that a Thai film crew has shown up among the mountain Isan people to make “Shaman Bloodline,” a film about the local Shaman Goddess of Ba Yan, a village spiritual advisor/healer role fulfilled by the same family for generations.

Nim (Sawanee Utoomma) hears people’s problems, helps them bury their dead and sometimes provides healing spells or incense thanks to her connection to a revered spirit, captured in statue form in a local cave.

As the crew follows her through her rituals and routines, Nim reveals she reluctantly accepted the call. Her sister Nio (Sirani Yankittikan) is the one who first caught “Shaman fever” and displayed the signs that she would take over from their grandmother. But Nio wanted to marry, and converted to Christianity to dodge this demanding obligation.

The viewer has just enough time to mutter “Uh oh,” after learning Nio’s husband just died…and that her son died under mysterious circumstances some time earlier.

Nim is nobody’s fool, either. When Nio’s surviving daughter, 20something Mink (Narilya Gulmongkolpech) starts acting “weird,” so odd that her friends and family cell-phone record her lashing out, reverting to childhood at an indoor playground (shoving and hurting the children) and other episodes.

And let’s not get into what the CCTV camera caught her up to after-hours at the office.

Another film crew starts to follow her. And the one following Nim sees her growing concern, and then her doubts about what being be going on with her niece.

“Have you been having nightmares,” she asks Mink (in Thai with English subtitles)? “Have you heard someone calling you?”

Mink’s tirades start with incidents at work and hissed “I hope you all DIE” threats. She flips out, all dressed in a white gown, on a float at the town’s Christmas parade. She brakes down, chasing and hitting the film crew, afterwards mortified and terrified at what she’s experiencing.

Nim starts to think she needs reinforcements. That’s when the shaman Shanti (Boonsong Nakphoo) joins the fray.

This thriller only goes as far as its leading ladies can take it. And Utoomma’s panicked shaman goddess and Yankittakhan’s fiercely loyal but staggered mother are impressive.

But Gulmongkolpech goes at the madness of Mink hammer and tong. This is as fierce and alarming a performance as I’ve seen in many an exorcism/demonic possession movie. There is so much here that a reasonable actress might flinch at or protest — not because its degrading, just that it’s so “out there” as to leave her literally exposed. Gulmongkolpech fearlessly takes this character to depths and depravity that should make one and all who are trying to “save” Mink might be tempted to wonder if holly grows in Thailand in a size appropriate for making stakes.

Writer-director Pisanthanakun shows us more than we need to see, and can’t figure out a quick, chilling exit, so he drags things out in a movie that has a few too many langours in its action beats early on.

He still manages to land many a blow in that pummeling third act, so many he’d win it by decision if he hadn’t bloodied and bludgeoned us almost senseless already.

Cast: Sawanee Utoomma, Narilya Gulmongkolpech, Sirani Yankittikan, Yasaka Chaisorn and Boonsong Nakphoo

Credits: Scripted and directed by Banjong Pisanthanakun. A Shudder release.

Running time: 2:11

The Erwin Brothers, whose faith-based “I Can Only Imagine” (based on the song) was a hit a few years back, first-teamed with “American Underdog’s” biggest name, Dennis Quaid, on that film.

This one is the unlikely story of a Super Bowl quarterback who tried and failed to break into the game, and even wound up stacking groceries, if memory serves.

Zachary Levi of “Psyche” and “Shazam!” has the title role. “American Underdog” opens Christmas Day.