Movie Nation

Oh lordy, what’s that pothead prophet, Doper Dave, stuck his foot in THIS time?

Transgender issues? Again? Is there an Eddie Murphy confession Dave Chapelle will eventually get around to making? What is UP with that, my racial slur-er? Joining arms with J.K. Rowling? Identifying with her as a “TERF?”

That all points to a better title for his “last special for a minute” finale for Netflix. He calls it “The Closer,” as in wrapping things up, a King of Comedy headliner, a closing act worthy of that master salesman label “Closer,” and an end to his nearly twenty year long argument with the transgender community.

Dude should have called it “Baggage.”

The bulk of Chapelle’s “The Closer” is spent leaning into a subject that keeps him controversial, when that seems more pointless by the day. He’s transcended the need for controversy. He’s THE humorist/comic-cultural critic of the moment. And his blundering attempt to claim he’s not “punching down” by continuing his slap-fight with the ever-lengthening-acronym LGBTQ minority community over this, his declaration that the phrase “punching down” offends him, never helps.

“Closer” begins with promise; riffs on COVID, his single-man superspreader carelessness in Texas, chewing on Black folks beating up Asian folks over COVID on Youtube.

He does that thing he does where he sounds serious and sensitive and thoughtful, only to undercut Humane, Sweet Dave with a killer punchline. The first version of that gag? It’s a bit about the latest news on UFOs, his theory and his movie pitch, that “they were here, long before us, and left. ” And now they’ve returned and want “their planet back.”

“I’m calling it, ‘Space Jews.'”

And then he sidles into his main topic of the night for this Detroit crowd — cancel culture and the folks running it, most often people represented by one of the letters in LGBTQ.

The rapper DaBaby, he notes, “KILLED a n—a,” but it wasn’t until he had a homophobic onstage meltdown that he faced cancelation.

“You can kill, but you’d better not hurt a gay person’s feelings…”

He traces his “transphobic” and homophobic baggage to a San Francisco news article nearly 20 years ago, asserts that every criticism since has cited “those same talking points,” and starts his long discourse on defusing all that by A) noting a trans comic he befriended and helped out and B) the price that friend paid for sticking up for Dave through one of his many blasts of trans backlash.

Chapelle can seem a paragon of reason and above-it-all magnanimity when he joins the chorus of comics (especially) who describe this gay “cancel culture” community as “too sensitive, too brittle.”

“Gangsta gay,” those people who rioted at Stonewall, he says. “THEM I respect.”

His “the Defense rests” is far from his funniest special, although there are almost enough laughs to make it worth your while.

Chapelle’s sharpest observations are the career-imperiling minefield any celebrity faces via Twitter or — shudder — “going out.” He relates several episodes where he says he was “trapped” and/or “drunk” and got into this argument or that smackdown when confronted in public.

How funny you see that depends on your reaction to this explanation for one fight. “Bitch, I didn’t even KNOW you were a woman!”

He’s thoughtful about the “racial component of feminism,” calls himself a feminist, and then turns around and labels himself a “TERF,” just like J.K. Rowling.

I noticed director Stan Lathan didn’t show the audience much in this special, and not at all until one defiant slap at Chapelle’s LGBTQ critics inspired a few folks to stand up and applaud.

Few comics performing today work from as deep inside “self-satisfied” as this guy. Not quite Kevin Hart, but close. All his stories give him the last word and make him come off as the quickest, the wittiest and the wisest. Perhaps if he saw that in himself, he’d better understand “punching down.”

Chapelle can attack “mean” “bathroom bills” from reactionary state legislatures, and go for a laugh with “frumpy dyke.” He can see racism in the speed with which gay rights blossomed when compared with the slow pace of African American equality, and land his best punch with “Gay people are a minority, until they need to be white again,” and yet brag about the time he “whipped the toxic masculinity right out of that (lesbian) b—h!”

The average viewer — NOT “these transgenders” who “want me DEAD” — might find common ground in the phrase “My pronoun game wasn’t as (sharp) as it is today,” and enjoy his mockery of “Tiki Torch white people,” aka “MICHIGAN white people,” biting the hands that bought tickets to “The Closer.”

But the best thing to come out of his “last” Netflix special might be this promise. That this is “The Closer,” that he’s not wading into that alphabet soup any more, because, as he puts it, “I’m not transgender…I’m not even gay.”

Chapelle’s obsession with this one subject, which he keeps “explaining” over and over again, reminded me of late period Lenny Bruce, when he took to reading his court transcripts to audiences in lieu of doing his “act.”

Chapelle’s “rich and famous,” he reminds us. Huge. “Clifford” big, he adds. He should start acting like it.

And maybe, now that he’s stuck up for Kevin Hart losing the Oscar hosting gig for the umpteenth time, now that he’s appealed for the uncanceling of DaBaby, we can all move on.

He certainly could stand to.

Rating: TV-MA, profanity, racial slurs

Cast: Dave Chapelle

Credits Directed by Stan Lathan, scripted by Dave Chapelle. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:12

The Turkish police procedural “Grudge” toys with the idea of really saying something blunt and chilling about Turkish justice, Turkish policing and the powerlessness of The People, and only loses its nerve in the third act. The ending is the final “cop out” of this decently-plotted Around the World with Netflix thriller, titled “Kin” in Turkish.

A star vehicle for veteran Turkish star Yilmaz Erdogan (apparently unrelated to Turkey’s current authoritarian president), it’s about a decorated police chief inspector who is ambushed in a taxi, kills his assailant, and then covers up the death in ways that make us wonder why it wasn’t self defense. The film unravels this mystery with varying degrees of urgency, springing a couple of third act twists that land as genuine surprises.

And it’s not half bad. Similar to Denzel Washington’s “Out of Time,” it lacks the “ticking clock” pulse-pounding suspense of a cop trying to stay one step ahead of an investigation that will implicate him, desperate to solve the case and maybe tidy it up before his subordinates get to the real truth.

Here’s the promise it makes. Chief Inspector Harun (Erdogan) lectures the newest cop on his “team” (Cem Yigit Uzümoglu) about an inept interrogation and lays some hard truth about policing in Istanbul.

“Everybody’s a little guilty until our suspicions are eliminated.” Damn, that’s chilling. And you know that ethos isn’t limited to police work in Asia Minor.

“It’s easy to be good” he tells the rookie (in Turkish, with subtitles, or dubbed). “It’s a lot harder to be just.“

But when the “just” Harun is jumped by a cabbie, we remember the opening scene, a poor man being arrested in a slum section of the city. We remember the tearful children watching this. And we recall the film’s title.

The first great twist is what happens to the body of the cabbie the next day. We see it dangling from a construction crane, within window view of police headquarters. Whatever Harun’s crack team expects to dig up about how it got there and who put it there, he’s in a panic about wiping down the scene of the crime and what the city’s many CCTV cameras might have captured about his part in that night’s killing.

His top lieutenant (Ruzgar Aksoy) is in the dark. But somebody else sees him palming a flash drive, hastily trying to finger a suspect to save his trusted boss (Ahmet Mümtaz Taylan) from the public humiliation this case delivers.

Director Türkan Derya, who works mostly in Turkish TV, does a competent job of leading the viewer through Harun’s scramble — tracking down, threatening and torturing old informants, revisiting — in flashback — earlier cases that seem to tie into this.

Erdogan plays the guy who acts if he has something to hide even as he maintains a professional, even moral, demeanor in the office and on the case. That key witness he shoots? It’s almost an accident.

Hints of a mystery woman (Duygu Sarisin), clues from the past and a growing hit list of cops and others let Harun unravel things just ahead of his team. But will that keep him out of trouble, and should we be rooting for him in the first place?

I liked the performances and the plot more than the script itself, which manages only a few punchy cop-speak exchanges and pushes at least one of its twists into the third act, when it would have served the picture better had it been a driving force of the narrative earlier on.

The foreshadowing is entirely too obvious, of the “Send my driver home, I’ll be driving myself” (Uh-oh!) variety.

And that ending feels like this Erdogan was pulling his punches in fear of messaging that might rile THAT Erdogan and Turkey’s police in general.

But “Grudge” comes damned close to checking off all the boxes, and manages to get just enough right to be worth trying on for size.

Rating: TV-MA, violence, profanity, smoking

Cast: Yilmaz Erdogan, Duygu Sarisin, Ruzgar Aksoy, Cem Yigit Uzümoglu and Ahmet Mümtaz Taylan.

Credits: Directed by Türkan Derya, scripted by Yilmaz Erdogan. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:46

Swooning predictions of an epic, maybe a franchise record opening for Daniel Craig’s last outing as James Bond should have been silenced by its Thursday night previews.

“No Time to Die” did a little over $6, compared to “Venom: Let There Be Carnage” clearing over $8 the Thursday before.

“Carnage” opened at about $90, “Die” is on track, after Thursday and a $23 million Friday, to manage $62-64. “Skyfall” tallied $88 million on opening.

Yes, there’s still a pandemic keeping people at home and yes, the Bond audience is older.

The second weekend of the Venom sequel is seeing a 65% plunge. Maybe $31 million by midnight Sunday.

Wistful, melancholy and sadly incomplete, “A Case of Blue” wanders into a new retiree’s drift into his past as a way of owning up to a present he’s checked out of.

It’s a fine showcase for its stars, but a little frustrating to grapple with because of all it leaves out in its 80 downbeat minutes.

Richard, played by dulcet-voiced TV veteran Stephen Schnetzer (“Another World,” various “Law & Orders”), gets a surprise party on the day he retires from his accounting job, and lots of looks of concern from his wife (Tracy Shayne) and daughter (Ursula Abbott) when he gets home.

“Stop pretending to be the Rock of Gibraltar,” his wife complains. Their concern seems more a plot contrivance than anything we can see on his face or in his behavior. But like all retirees, Richard needs something to focus on. That’s why his daughter gave him the gift of life drawing classes with a New York college. He wanted to be an artist before he settled on a “career” and a more normal life.

The classes give him deja vu from the start. They’re in the same studio where he studied as a teen some 50 years before, with the same “one minute pose” exercises. And then there’s the day an exotic beauty comes in to model for them.

Richard is literally slack-jawed when (Annapurna Sriram of “In Case of Emergency” and TV’s “The Black List”) disrobes. She’s the spitting image of his first great love, also an artist’s model, from back in his student days.

When she sees how he’s drawing her — “That’s not how I posed” — she’s a little freaked out. Richard wonders if he’s imagining this seeming rift in time. His old work pal (Ken Baltin) figures this is “some serious ‘Twilight Zone’ s–t!”

Richard isn’t subtle when he tries to find out her name when she abruptly stops posing for the class. He stalks her via a poster she hung up for a folk singer friend scheduled to perform at New York’s famed Cafe Wha, still a folk venue as it was when Richard was young.

They kick him out when she sets eyes on him. It’s only when he risks getting punched by her date (Jay Devore) that enough information is exchanged to explain some of what’s going on. Her name is Amelia. He must have been in love with her grandmother, Marcy.

“You know how creepy this is, right?”

A “relationship,” of sorts, begins between the retiree from New Jersey’s Volvo suburbs and the NoHo/SoHo “Bohemian” Amelia, an artist herself and a “magnet” for Washington Square Park “misfit” lads from art, music, Wall Street or wherever.

Writer-director Dana H. Glazer (“Intermezzo,” and the documentaries “Parents of the Revolution” and “The Evolution of Dad”) lays out expectations of a late life crisis drama/male wish fulfillment fantasy and wisely sets out to upend those expectations.

But the “creepy” vibe isn’t disarmed with the vivacious Amelia’s wisecrack, and Richard’s decision to join her and her entourage for a costume party in a club is merely a showcase for “old guy in the club” jabs.

“Don’t set off your Life Alert bracelet!” “Why aren’t you at the nursing home?”

Amelia’s motivations — either as real-life temptation or imagined life-crisis fantasy — are never made clear.

And Richard’s “journey” seems stumbling, abrupt and missing a few steps — make that SEVERAL steps — on the road from “lost since retirement” to “purpose.”

The players make “A Case of Blue” pleasant enough to sit through, but the movie plays like an appetizer that never amounts to more than an appeteaser.

Rating: unrated

Cast: Stephen Schnetzer, Annapurna Sriram, Tracy Shayne, Jay Devore and Ken Baltin

Credits: Scripted and directed by Dana H. Glazer. A 1091 release.

Running time: 1:21

There was a stretch back in the ’90s and early 2000s when every American network sitcom did an episode or two about how to get “out of the ‘friend zone.'”

So think of the French rom-com “Friendzone” as “Friends” with less coffee and more nudity, and in French. Because I sure did.

This time-killer of a romance has a touching moment or…OK, there’s just one. And there’s a laugh or two. Yes. Two, one of them a fake-out when we think a character’s been killed off. Because THAT would be edgy.

But no. There’s nothing about this Around the World With Netflix outing that doesn’t seem as familiar as a “Scrubs” rerun, with even the nudity playing “A Shot in the Dark” games with the whole “caught skinny dipping on a nude-friendly beach” bit.

Mickaël Lumière (“Mon Bebe,” aka “Sweetheart”) stars as Titi, a male nurse we meet as he joins his girlfriends/fellow nurses (Manon Azem, Fadily Camara, Constance Arnoult) for a bachelorette party weekend on the Riviera.

They’re free spirits, confident, beautiful women who join the crowd at their resort in ditching their bikinis and hitting the water. Titi? He’s a bit of a lump of the “I’m going to read a little and go to bed” (in French with English sutbitles, or dubbed) type.

Still, the water looks inviting, so after everybody else has gone, he strips, takes a dip and gets into a predicament with the gorgeous Rose (Eva Danino). She steps on a Weever fish, he knows how to help because he’s a nurse. And yet, he’s buck naked and “It’s too complicated to explain.”

Still, he nurses her, gets her back to her room, and…doesn’t take advantage of her obvious pleasure at being cared for, massaged and what not.

They get together again back in the city, and she seems to enjoy his company, likes joking around about what they’ll name their children after.

She’s a children’s fashion entrepreneur, so he goes shopping with her. They Netflix movies as he gives her foot massages and she whines about her jerk of an ex.

But let Titi — short for Thibault — show up well-dressed with thoughts of romance and see what happens.

“A date?” “Oui.” With who?” “You!” Ok then, but did you bring condoms? Before he can admit that he did, she bursts out laughing. “Wouldn’t THAT be CRAZY?”

He is in the “friend zone,” which at least sounds prettier in French (zone amie).

“It’s SYSTEMIC with you,” he’s scolded.

Good thing he’s got this hot trio of ladyfriends to help him change that. They propose a bit of coaching, tell him to lie about leaving the country for a bit so that he can hit “restart” on their relationship. Let the “makeover montages set to music” begin.

Maud (Azem) is the perfectly-conditioned lesbian getting him into shape and instructing him how to sexually please a woman. Lulu (Camara) will drag him to her dance classes. Alex (Arnoult) will work on his attitude.

“You’re not some doormat!” “You talk way too much!” “No laughing!” “Ambiguity is the key to intimacy.”

They give him a test run, send him up to a bar to hit on this lovely woman there, and his blunt, laid-back vibe clicks.

“I’m normally a saint. I don’t drink or smoke. I work in social services (he’s a nurse in a pediatric hospital). And no sex on the first date.”

That’s all it takes to land the digits and the interest of “The French Kardashian,” the sexy and quirky French influencer Jennifer (Eloïse Valli).

But wouldn’t you know it, Rose has gone back to he jerk record-producer ex (Maxime Gasteuil) while all this is going on.

The makeover montages are generic in the extreme, the pop selected here ranges from a synth-loaded club mix of Tina Turner’s “What’s Love Got to Do With It?,” The Beach Boys “Wouldn’t It Be Nice?” and Machiavel’s “Fly.”

The slapstick, what little there is of it, works. Jenni’s appetite for sex, seriously high-end cuisine and selfie’s is worth half a chuckle.

But “Friendzone” flatlines for long stretches as it meanders towards the classic rom-com finale.

Use it as colorful background noise or to brush up on your French dating slang, because that’s all it’s good for.

Rating: TV-MA, nudity, sexual situations

Cast: Mickaël Lumière, Manon Azem, Fadily Camara, Constance Arnoult, Eva Danino, Maxime Gasteuil and Eloïse Valli

Credits: Directed by Charles Van Tieghem, Stanislas Carré de Malberg and Charles Van Tieghem. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:28

A tangled, convoluted and over-explained horror tale, “The Secret of Sinchanee” goes kind of wrong — dare I say it? — from its opening title.

If you need a full page of credits explaining an ancient blood feud between a mixed-race Indian tribe, the Sinchanee,” and a pagan cult hell that wanted to “eradicate the bloodline,” and never quite succeeded but still haunts this corner of snowy Massachusetts all these centuries later, you’re already buried in script clutter before a single scene plays out.

The feature directing debut from writer/director/star Steven Grayhm takes forever to get going as he struggles to tie together that age-old battle with events from a troubled guy’s childhood and his haunted, murder-investigated present-day.

And all this third act shouting and over-acting (at least they’re “acting”) by the two cops (Tamara Austin, Nate Boyer) on the case doesn’t translate into “exciting.”

Will (Grayhm) has just lost his father. And because of an infamous crime decades before, the family house out in the woods of Deerfield just won’t sell.

Will has trouble with nightmares and visions, things he saw as a child that relate somehow to weird occurrences hitting him now.

The spooky piano player tells him to “return it to its rightful place,” meaning a talisman he acquired long ago.

And the cops? They’re digging into his involvement from Will’s childhood that might tie him to the murder of somebody he used to know.

All this connects to the Sinchanee, the “new” tribe of intermarried Natives and white settlers, and the cultish Atlantow, who vowed to wipe them out. Somehow. I mean, the facepaint gives that away.

The film spends over an hour showing Will slowly — oh-so-slowly– cracking up at the strain, the cops looking at old interrogation footage from “The Starke/Cotter Murders” case long ago and people wandering in the snow, searching in the snow, finding a body in the snow.

The odd arresting candlelit sequence, fireside shadow scare show bit or attempted chase doesn’t add up to a two hour movie.

The director/star deemed that Will looking for his missing dog was worth 15 minutes of screen time, so you can see what we’re up against here.

Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: Steven Grayhm, Tamara Austin, Nate Boyer, Laila Lockhart Kraner and Rudy Reyes.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Steven Grayhm. A Vertical release.

Running time: 1:55

It’s bloody, it’s chilling, it features the voices of Richard E. Grant, Lucy Lawless, Joe Manganiello and Patton Oswalt and comes to theaters and streaming on Oct. 29, via RLJE.

Lots of fanboy and fangirl — mostly fanboy — buzz for this one.

“The Last Duel,” Ridley Scott’s “Rashomon,” is a brutish, well-acted and stunningly-detailed account of an infamous scandal from the supposed “Age of Chivalry.”

It’s a tale of rivalries, royal favor and rape from the Caroline era of the Hundred Years War, that 14th century blood feud between England and France over royal succession in their until-then Norman-entangled royal bloodlines.

And as Scott’s film — cleverly adapted from Eric Jager’s book into the “Rashomon” three-points-of-view storytelling style by Nicole Holofcener and Oscar winners Matt Damon and Ben Affleck — makes nakedly clear, “Chivalry” had little to do with any of it.

Scott and his collaborators find the ugly human foibles underneath the armor, court finery and gowns and make this story from an age when the one percent had the power of life and death over everyone else, when women were literally “property,” topical and timely.

It won’t be for everyone. But if you like your Middle Ages dark, dingy and dastardly, it’s quite the bumpy, blood-stained ride.

Damon stars as Jean de Carrouges, a scarred and battle-hardened illiterate of the Norman French nobility. Carrouges knows combat and isn’t particularly deft at anything else. He has a fortress and stands to inherit a bigger one and the captaincy of the region when his father dies.

But The Black Death took his wife and young son, his heir. It’s depopulated Europe to such a degree that one and all complain of the rising cost of labor, the inability to make their serf-master land use tradition pay (Sound familiar?).

We meet him as the headstrong Carrouges leads his friend and fellow squire Jacques Le Gris (Adam Driver) in a charge to “save” hostages being butchered in front of them by their foes.

Carrouges saves the dashing Le Gris, who courteously pauses to thank him in mid-battle. But they lose the city of Limoges, which they were supposed to defend.

A sidenote here. Scott and his screenwriters can’t bear to name the cutthroats with long bows that these French fellows are facing — “The English.” Hilarious.

Damon makes Carrouges a fiercely loyal bulldog of a man, simple and brave and blunt enough to rub the more courtly the wrong way. His bluntness helps him bargain for the fair daughter (Jodie
Comer of “Killing Eve” and “Free Guy”) of a rich traitor (Nathaniel Parker). But it’s no help at all in dealing with the king’s greedy libertine cousin, Count Pierre d’Alençon, played with decadent dash by Ben Affleck.

Over the course of several years, Carrouges runs up against the high handed Count time and again and faces humiliations even as he spends his blood in defense of their king, the foppish, not yet “mad” but seemingly inbred Charles VI (Alex Lawther) in France and Scotland.

That erodes his relationship with Le Gris, who being literate and mathematically capable, always has favor in the Count’s employ, a place at his table and a standing invitation to his fellow libertine’s orgies.

That quarrel, complete with lawsuits, sets up “The Last Duel” we see about to take place in the film’s opening scene. A rape charge, a lady wronged and more importantly, a husband suffering injury to his “property” calls for the ancient justice of trial by combat, a fight to the death so that “God will prove” who is telling the truth by letting the just defeat the unjust.

That story — spanning some years leading up to the 1386 duel — is told three times, from three points of view in three chapters — “The Truth according to Jean de Carrouges,” “according to Jacques Le Gris” and “according to Lady Marguerite de Carrouges.”

We’re left with a little doubt about what actually happened, the lies and manipulations and the mortal stakes involved when The Lady Marguerite makes her accusation and begs for justice and “right.”

“Right?” her viperous mother-in-law (Harriet Walter) hisses. “There IS no right. There is only the power of men!”

The casting here is shockingly effective, with Damon looking stocky and battle-beaten, at home on a war horse and in armor. Affleck, dyed blond — soul patch (not quite a Van Dyke) included, is a revelation, managing the menacing, aloof and vulpine Count with droll ease.

Driver’s Le Gris is a little of both of those men — a dark inversion of the historic myth of a “courtly ideal,” an able soldier (if not a leader), a tall, dashing and well-read charmer of court, catnip to the ladies.

Comer, benefiting from the contributions of veteran screenwriter (and sometime director) Holofcener (“Friends with Money,” “Can You Ever Forgive Me?”), navigates a tricky “stay in her lane” character, a victim, powerless in who her father chooses for her to wed, with no Hollywood hope of fighting off a man of war intent on assault. There are just enough scenes of her with other ladies of her class to suggest their recognition of their “chattel” status, but smart enough to chafe at the injustice of it and the many shortcomings of the men who rule them.

The three “chapters” let us see that in action, with Carrouges deluded into seeing noble bearing that others do not, Le Gris viewing his “friend” differently and seeing nothing wrong with his many provocations and the Lady Marguerite seeing their flaws and perhaps misjudging her own.

The dialogue hits a droll Middle Ages sweet spot now and again, but the performances are as immersive as the film’s flawless production design. Irish and French locations capture the age when Paris was little more than a hovel, a few buildings and bridges with this gigantic cathedral slowly rising on the Île de la Cité in the Seine.

For decades, the gold standard for gory, accurate recreations of Medieval hand-to-hand combat have been Orson Welles’ “Chimes at Midnight,” which inspired Mel Gibson’s even more brutal and bloodier “Braveheart,” and Akira Kurosawa’s “Ran.” “The Last Duel” joins them in its depiction of the desperate, unsentimental savagery of bludgeoning, stabbing and slicing someone to death before they just as desperately try to do the same to you.

The “Rashomon” structure is repetitive by design, and that weighs down this two and a half hour plunge into “The Real (Unchivalrous) Middle Ages.”

But I found it fascinating, first scene to last — stunningly detailed in its snowy combat in the “Gladiator” tradition and intriguing that Affleck and Damon, Holofcener and Scott would see this long-ago event as relevant, “A Distant Mirror” to our troubled, sexist and reactionary present day.

Rating: R for strong violence including sexual assault, sexual content, some graphic nudity, and language

Cast: Matt Damon, Jodie Comer, Adam Driver, Marton Csokas, Alex Lawther, Tallulah Haddon and Ben Affleck.

Credits: Directed by Ridley Scott, scripted by Nicole Holofcener, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, based on Eric Jager’s book. A 20th Century Studios release.

Running time: 2:32

“Fever Dream” is a vaguely unsettling horror parable about the ties of motherhood, tragedy and the environmental legacy we’re leaving our children.

Peruvian-born writer-director Claudia Llosa, adapting Samantha Schweblin’s novel, masters the messaging and mournful tone. But the movie never delivers the chills it might have and and her latest — she did the similarly moody and subtle “Maidenusa” and “Aloft” — never rises above “vaguely unsettling.”

A mother, Amanda (Spanish actress María Valverde of Ridley Scott’s “Exodus: Gods and Kings”) seems to be on a psychotherapist’s couch for most of the movie. We hear her, in voice-over, quietly interrogated, remembering the days when she and her little girl Nina first came to this corner of Chile for the summer.

“Details, details,” and “that’s not important” another gentle admonishments from the person doing the questioning. He’s a little boy, perhaps in his tweens. And he’s insistent. He could be the villain, the hero or the victim in this story. So he sees something at stake.

“David” is mostly glimpsed, and then rarely, as his tattooed, chain-smoking mother, Carola (Dolores Fonzi) tells the new neighbor of “the worst day of my life,” the night that her horse-breeding husband’s prized stallion collapsed and her little boy David (played by Emilio Vodanovich and Marcelo Michinaux at different ages) took ill.

Amanda has confused notions of “worms” in her mind, of being paralyzed and dragged somewhere, powerless to alter her fate.

And as her endless narration goes on, we hear how David’s story tied into hers and Ninas, how David’s illness and Carola’s desperate trip to “The Green House” to see someone who is more conjure-woman than doctor didn’t so much seal all their fates as provide the form of the parable we see play out.

Llosa works with dreamy extreme close-ups, characters glimpsed through nature or in it, with furtive phone arguments (Amanda’s husband hasn’t left the city for the country house they’ve rented) and nightmares. She serves up warning after warning from Carola, who can’t stop talking even after she’s said (in Spanish, with English subtitles, or dubbed), “If I tell you, you won’t let him play with Nina,”

Llosa seeks to cast a spell with this story of “the invisible thread” that ties a mother to her child, a thread that wraps her in guilt when things go wrong. But while I admire the picture’s funereal tone, Llosa’s rare attempts at cheap shocks spoil the larger jolt, the one that would make the viewer recoil as we figure out the too-thinly-hidden Bigger Message here.

Fonzi and Valverde are intriguing, but neither gives us much to grab hold of with their characters — who might be crazy, who might have ulterior movies, who might be leery of buying into what she’s told or what she’s figuring out for herself.

The movie’s tedious overuse of voice-over cripples it, a device best left to the printed page of a novel. The constant questions-and-answers do nothing to reveal what we don’t see and hear play out on the screen. Even in the most literary of screen adaptations, voice-over is best used sparingly.

Because at some point, somebody’s got to scare somebody else. The droning on and on, more mesmerizing than urgent or creep — “Am I going to die, David?” — sucks the urgency right out of “Fever Dream.”

The little we see of David at his most troubled and alarming (young Vodanovich looks like Emile Hirsch or River Phoenix at that age) isn’t enough to get us past “vaguely unsettling.”

Rating: R, for brief sexuality and nudity

Cast: María Valverde, Dolores Fonzi, Emilio Vodanovich, Marcelo Michinaux, Germán Palacios, Guillermo Pfening

Credits: Scripted and directed by Claudia Llosa, based on a novel by Samanta Schweblin. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:33

This Dec. 31 musical adaptation from Joe Wright (“Atonement,” “Darkest Hour”) stars Dinklage, Haley Bennett, Kelvin Harrison Jr. and Ben Mendelsohn.

The music? Aaron and Bryce Dessner of The National did it, and there’s little here (other than Bennett’s solo) that grabs me. But maybe they’re saving the better stuff for the next trailer.