Movie Nation

Austere and positively chilling in its austerity, “The Night House” is a haunted house tale with a tasty twist or two to go along with the usual thumps, bumps, disembodied voices and words written on a steamed-over window or mirror.

It’s another thriller that reminds us of the importance of casting. Good actors get across the deflating shock of grief, the jaw-dropping dismay at confronting the unexplained and the terror of being attacked by it.

Rebecca Hall of “The Town” and “Professor Marston & the Wonder Women” brings subtle shadings to the widowed Beth, who starts wondering if the house her architect husband built has been haunted by him after his death.

We meet her on the day of the funeral, dumping the proffered covered-dish consolations of neighbors into the bin, hunting down that last case of brandy in the cellar to watch and weep over old home videos with.

A teacher, she unloads — ever so nicely — on a helicopter parent when she goes back to work, describing the way Owen (Evan Jonigkeit) , her husband, “stuck a gun in his mouth” on the lake out behind their luxurious, custom built home.

But things are happening, and she can’t be certain if they’re “real” or brandy-coated dreams. She gets text messages. Their stereo system kicks on by itself. Knocks on a door, thumps in the walls, and footprints on the dock make her wonder if there’s such a thing as ghosts.

His bloodstained suicide note, just the conversation starter to bring to “drinks” with colleagues after work, seems to suggest no clues, just “you were right” and “You’re safe, now.”

Owen’s blueprints take on an M.C. Escher quality.

But a hunt through his phone suggests other mysteries, perhaps other women, that she has to figure connect to the noises, music, lights and other phenomena.

“I didn’t think we had secrets.“

The “explanations” in this Ben Collins/Luke Piotrowski script (“Super Dark Times” was theirs) might be the most conventional element in this David Bruckner film. But the director of “The Ritual” and his star wring a few jolts and a dollop of pathos out of it.

Sarah Goldberg is nicely empathetic as the colleague who worries about Beth, and Vondie Curtis Hall is the neighbor worried she’s losing it, or that she might dig until she finds something that is neither helpful nor safe.

“You can’t unknow what you know.”

“The Night House” serves up the subtle horror of expectations, invites us to join our heroine in fearing the worst, perhaps simply resigned to it. And Hall makes everything we see and that Beth experiences credible, which may be the creepiest thing about it.

Rating: R for some violence/disturbing images, and language including some sexual references

Cast: Rebecca Hall, Sarah Goldberg, Evan Jonigkeit and Vondie Curtis Hall

Credits: Directed by David Bruckner, script by Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski. A Searchlight release.

Running time: 1:48

John Malkovich, Lori Petty, Ruby Modine (you know who’s daughter) and Julian Sand star in this post apocalyptic thriller, due out Oct 1

We toss that phrase around horror films a tad cavalierly — “skin-crawling.” But here’s a feature that earns that label. If you aren’t squirming — or a least itchy — watching “Mosquito State,” you must have never encountered a mosquito in the wild.

It’s about high finance, unpredictable markets, madness and computer modeling those unpredictable markets.

Richard or “Dicky” Boca (Beau Knapp of “The Good Lord Bird”) is the man whose “honeybee model” is proving flawed in the shaky days of 2007, leading to the financial meltdown of 2008. No one in his office will listen, but fate turns him toward other entomology and he gives his increasingly unhinged life and mind over to mosquitoes.

Will they bleed him out before the markets bleed his firm dry?

The film is not nearly as cut and dried as that, with much left unspoken or inferred in hallucinogenic images of Richard, staggering about his Manhattan penthouse in his tidy whiteys, drinking his too-valuable “investment” wines, giving mosquitos access to his ever-swelling epidermis and the run of the place.

Perhaps a woman triggered all this. Lena (Charlotte Vega of “American Assassin” and “The Bookshop”) is a student of wines and water conservation who seems destined — or ordered — to meet Richard at a company sponsored birthday party. The boss (Olivier Martinez) calls him his “golden goose,” and that means he shrugs off Richard’s quiet, on-the-spectrum anti-social behavior.

But our analyst/computer-modeler is rich, so the forward young wine expert invites herself to his stunning and austere apartment — he has but a single wine glass — and charms her way into his head.

As he obsessively tries to get back in touch with her, he notices lurches and starts in the market that his mathematical “honeybee” model didn’t predict. The woman, the markets and that damned mosquito who got down his shirt and into his apartment send Richard over the edge, raising mosquitoes and wearing the giant welts to prove it as he rages at the stock volatility he could not predict.

Filip Jan Rymsza is a filmmaker who likes the “fever dream” side of the cinematic tracks. He got a producing credit for getting Orson Welles’ disjointed, faintly dreamy and unfinished “The Other Side of the Wind” into some form of releasable shape. Rymsza’s two earlier directing credits, “Sandcastles” and “Dustclouds,” get that “fever dream” label as well.

Rymsza tends toward the obscurant here, stirring in office politics, where a rival labels Richard “the dumbest smart guy I know,” the politics of America in that 2007-2008 window and the warnings that Wall Street’s lifeblood is predation, creatures like sharks or mosquitos, can never stop feeding, even if they’re sealing their own fate.

“If we stop, we die.”

It doesn’t all coalesce into a coherent film. Breaking the story into cutesy “chapters” — “The Pupa,” “The Blood Feast,” “The Larva” — is a favorite crutch of second-rate screenwriters (I see three C-movies a week so ordered.) and doesn’t help it make sense. It just helps us count the “stages” until we know we’re at the end.

But Knapp throws himself into this character, giving us unhinged and letting us figure out the reasons for Richard’s derangement.

We may not buy the gorgeous wine expert indulging his attentions, although “mercenary” comes to mind. And we may get no clue about how these insect-based create-order-out-of-random volatility models might work.

“Mosquito State” still holds our attention, a visually arresting, fascinating failure that may have you reaching for the calamine lotion before it’s over.

Rating: unrated, kind of gross

Cast: Beau Knapp, Charlotte Vega, Jack Kesy and Olivier Martinez

Credits: Directed by Filip Jan Rymsza, script by Filip Jan Rymsza, Mario Zermeno A Shudder release.

Running time: 1:41

Ida is traumatized, wracked by guilt over the accident that just killed her mother. She’s all alone, and her social worker has told the 15 year-old with “addiction” issues that her aunt will take her in. Ida’s protests that “I don’t know them” fall on deaf ears.

And her first clue to just how wrong things could turn comes the moment she walks into her aunt’s house, as Auntie affectionately kisses Ida’s youngest cousin, muscle-bound and glued to a video game.

“You’re too baked, sweetheart.”

Before she knows what hit her, Ida is immersed in this family’s vices — smoking, clubbing, drinking — and its profession. The three sons, Jonas, David and Mads? They’re “collectors,” enforcers for some loan shark or other nefarious enterprise.

Ida, struggling to not make waves, forced to fit in and do ride-alongs, is lost in the “Wildland” that this functionally dysfunctional family lives in.

“Wildland,” titled “Kød & blod” in Danish, is Denmark’s version of “Animal Kingdom,” the Australian thriller that became a long-running TV series. It’s not as good as that harrowing 2010 movie, which featured Guy Pearce, Jacki Weaver and Joel Edgerton. But it’s a fascinating variation on a theme, and a movie that reveals cultural differences in the ways its veers away from what was plainly its inspiration, if not its actual (uncredited) source material.

Sandra Guldberg Kampp (Netflix’s “The Rain”) makes a gawky, introverted Ida, a kid whose own problems (the “addiction” is mentioned just once) take a back seat to the ones she takes on when she moves in with Aunt Bodil (Sidse Babett Knudsen of TV’s “Westworld”).

Ida sees a woman who is affectionate with her three sons, doting on the youngest, Mads (Besir Zeciri), and almost utterly unconcerned with the way the trio turned out.

“Almost.” Because while eldest son Jonas (Joachim Fjelstrup) may be the “boss,” with a partner (Sofie Torp) and a tiny baby, all living with “Mom,” middle son David (Elliott Crosset Hove) is adrift, with hinted at substance abuse problems of his own and a bubbly girlfriend (Carla Philip Røder) his mother does not approve of.

Ida witnesses the kisses, and the slaps that govern this clan, the bullying oldest brother Jonas uses to keep the others in line. And she tries to fit in, be one of the boys, doing shots in the clubs, riding along on collections.

But the alarm bells go off in her head just enough for us to see her humanity. Jonas offering a little girl a ride seems a lot less menacing with Ida in the car. Him giving the girl a threatening note to give her father should shake her more than it does.

“What if he doesn’t have the money?”

“Once I talk to the kids,” Jonas purrs (in Danish, with English subtitles), “they usually do.”

Kampp delivers a poker-faced teen take on Ida, a kid numbed by loss, guarded and fearful at what she’s been thrown into. Ida sees the way the neighbors look at her and this house, sees the general amorality and manipulations of Bodil, and panics just when you think she should.

But who can she turn to? Who can she trust to not get her killed if she talks to the police? And who will she have if she rats out this mob?

“Wildland” lacks the fireworks of its inspiration, “Animal Kingdom,” and the larger-than-life turns by Jacki Weaver in the film and Ellen Barkin in the TV series, playing the gang’s matriarch.

Røder plays the most empathetic character and makes her a more upbeat, less-clued-in version of Ida — the surrogate for the audience in this tale.

And Fjelstrup, a veteran of Danish TV, gives a smiling menace to Jonas.

Other characters seem more thinly developed, and the story’s paucity in terms of big surprises work against it. But first time feature director Jeannette Nordahl puts us in Ida’s shoes and makes us ponder her uncertain fate just enough to make “Wildland” work.

Rating: unrated, violence, drug and alcohol abuse, some of it involving a teen, smoking, profanity

Cast: Sandra Guldberg Kampp, Sidse Babett Knudsen, Joachim Fjelstrup, Elliott Crosset Hove, Besir Zeciri, Carla Philip Røder, Sofie Torp and Omar Shargawi

Credits: Directed by Jeanette Nordahl, script by Ingeborg Topsøe. A Film Movement release.

Running time: 1:28

Gloomy, sad and a tad hard to follow, “The Last Thing Mary Saw” is a period piece that equates persecution of same sex attraction with the war on “witchcraft,” this time in a pre-Civil War religious sect in rural New York.

First-time writer-director Edoardo Vitaletti prioritizes tone over frights, quiet over noise and violence meted as “correction,” punishment for those who tumble in “The Temple of Earthly Desires.” I can’t say it quite comes off, but it’s serious-minded enough to attract an accomplished cast and never breaks the spell it sets out to cast.

Stefanie Scott plays Mary, a daughter born into this sect, in which the preacher (Tommy Buck) is subordinate to The Matriarch (horror veteran Judith Roberts, who’s worked for David Lynch and Woody Allen over her long career).

Something’s happened to Mary when the film opens, and a constable (David Pearce) is trying to get past the sect’s accusations and find out why she’s been blinded.

“She is no devil,” he protests.

But as the flashback that tells her tale begins, her father insists “our daughter’s ears are deaf to the Lord’s preaching.”

Mary has a thing for “the maid, Eleanor (Isabelle Fuhrman), and the Matriarch’s decreed “correction” begins with forcing her to kneel on rice, and escalates from there.

There’s a book about Bethabara that the two lovers pore over, one that seems to touch on the story of Ruth and Naomi, the famous same sex couple in the Bible. The young women dream of fleeing, but looking at The Guard (P.J. Sosko) and remembering how he was kept from escaping, they lament their fate, as does he.

“Fear and weakness keep us here,” he says, “not devotion.”

As the women steal away for alone time and scheme a way out, an “intruder” (Rory Culkin) is summoned, the supernatural makes itself known and “correction” turns to retributions and reprisals.

Culkin, in films since “Richie Rich” in the 1990s, brings a quiet menace to a movie that’s already brimming over with that. The leads, Scott (“Insidious Chapter 3”) and Fuhrman (“Orphan”) have horror bonafides, but have few scenes that might have given them a chance to up the empathy ante, or that titillate or terrify.

Vitaletti has good players all dressed up in period garb, but gives them no place to go.

Rating: unrated, horror violence

Cast: Stefanie Scott, Isabelle Fuhrman, Judith Roberts, P.J. Sosko and Rory Culkin.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Edoardo Vitaletti. An Arachnid Films release.

Running time: 1:29

The producers are premiering it in LA on Aug. 28. Any takers?

“Don’t Breathe 2” is the most gruesomely violent major motion picture since, well, “The Suicide Squad.”

A sequel to a horrific thriller that demonstrated the chilling power of silence, co-creators Rodo Sayagues (who takes the directing credit this time) and co-writer Fede Alvarez opt for a bloodbath this time around as they flip the script and make the victim/villain of the first film the avenging hero of the second.

That would be Stephen Lang‘s ex-Navy SEAL Norman Nordstrom, a blind man who is not to be trifled with in a fight in the dark.

The stakes are higher, from the start, but the plot is nonsense that sounds like a Red Bull-fueled brainstorming story meeting where they kept every idea anybody tossed out.

Our gang of unsuspecting villains are meth cookers serving the hellscape of Detroit’s infamous organ harvester, a doctor (Steffan Rhodri) who forgot his Hippocratic Oath long ago. Oddly, that plot element is pretty much pushed aside.

Because the gang leader, Raylan (Brendan Sexton III), who oozes menace from every smelly, oily pore, if on the prowl for someone, perhaps the tween girl (Madelyn Grace) he checks out at a public restroom.

We’ve seen Miss Phoenix “training” with her Dad (Lang) in the opening scene. They may live in Detroit’s pyromania belt, but she’s at home on the mean streets thanks to that training.

“Never take anything for granted,” he counsels. “God will take it from you.”

But with Dad and their pet Rottweiler looking out for her and even home-schooling her, what could go wrong? A home invasion and night of slaughter, mayhem, fire and firearms, for starters.

Lang brings what dignity he can to Nordstrom, sort of a “blind swordsman” figure, only with a darker past, some of which we saw in the first film, some suggested by revelations here.

Grace is decent at playing the child-in-peril, but doesn’t give us the unadulterated terror of the “hunted” in “Don’t Breathe.” Nobody does.

The giant hole at the heart of this twisted tangent of a sequel is the silence. In “Don’t Breathe,” the young interlopers who broke into the blind man’s house, only to be hunted down in near pitch darkness, had to hold their breath to avoid detection. That spread to the audience, breathlessly anticipating how the man with heightened other senses would track his prey.

There’s virtually none of that here. The villains have no learning curve, never figure out that white noise is their ally as much as turning the lights on could be.

And despite the savagery of the fights, there’s nothing satisfying in this slaughter, a movie which spills blood and spatters gore because it’s out of other ideas.

Rating: R for strong bloody violence, gruesome images, and language

Cast: Stephen Lang, Madelyn Grace, Brendan Sexton III, Stephanie Arcila and Adam Young

Credits: Directed by Rodo Sayagues, script by Fede Alvarez and
Rodo Sayagues. A Sony Screen Gems release.

Running time: 1:38

Ryan Reynolds rules the box office this weekend, with the Formerly Fox/Now Disney release “Free Guy” blowing up to a $28 million debut.

Not a franchise (yet) or sequel (ditto), not showing anywhere but in theaters, and killer RR promotion of the project paid off.

Yes, Shawn Levy’s a bit of a hack, but Mr.”Night at the Museum” brings home the Canadian bacon.”

“Don’t Breathe 2” cleared $10 million, less than half what the original sleeper hit opened with.

“Jungle Cruise” in its third weekend managed $9, edging the under performing “Respect,” which managed $8.

“The Suicide Squad”plunged from a half decent opening to a nose dive second weekend. $7 million.

“Free Guy” out opened it, and “Space Jam” will take in a lot more than James Gunn’s block bust…

At least HBO Max maxed out with it, right? Right?

This is a “Snydercut” bust.

“Beckett” is a piece of pulse-pounding poppycock whipped up as a star vehicle for John David Washington. It’s got enough going for it that I’d like to recommend it. But I have reservations. Boy, do I ever.

The title character and his girlfriend (Alicia Vikander) are touring Greece in the off-season — winter. But protests in the country, beset by debt, an immigration crisis and just a whiff of violent strains of nationalism, are always in season. That’s why Beckett and April have abandoned Athens for the ruins and mountain scenery of the north.

That’s where they are when he dozes off at the wheel, rolls their rental SUV, and wakes up in a hospital. April has died, and Beckett is all alone with the guilty knowledge that it was his fault. He can’t even admit to her family that she’s dead, yet.

Alone in a country where he doesn’t speak the language, he can’t even grieve properly.

A local cop (Panos Koronis) is there to make matters worse. Beckett saw something before passing out, and that gets the cop’s interest.

When our weepy, broken-armed tourist revisits the accident scene — the Chevy rolled into a house — and a woman starts shooting at him, the cop joins in. For an African American, just like…home?

“There’s nowhere to ruuuun, Beckett,” he shouts, like every C-list villain in screen history.

But there is somewhere to run, as Beckett flees cross-country, hoping to get to the sanctuary of the American embassy, and hoping as well to figure out who these people are who want him dead, and why.

The screenplay’s great virtue is in making our hero Everyman. He’s not Liam Neeson or any variation of the “man with particular skills” cliche. But tech guy Beckett endures shootings, stabbing and beatings as he makes insane, self-injuring leaps in his dogged determination to survive.

Nothing is made of him trying to lay low in a country where he stands out, even without the arm cast and blood stains.

The screenplay’s silliest shortcut is the way it dispenses with the language barrier. Shouting “Do you speak English? DO YOU SPEAK ENGLISH?” is all it takes for this hunter, that beekeeper, those activists, to display their mastery of another tongue.

Director Ferdinando Cito Filomarino (“Antonia.” was his) stages some splendid fights and decent escapes. But most of them have a whiff of “far fetched” about them, as do the trite tropes that turn up in the plot.

And then there’s the matter of our leading man. I’m trying hard to like Washington, or at least hope he gets better film to film. His acting indicators are obvious, with too many gestures and looks playing as clumsy and unschooled. Take away his father Denzel’s good name and he’s just another good-looking failed jock, still not much of an actor.

None of this film’s shortcomings took me totally out of it. Movies on the lam are my favorite. I was drawn into the story, in spite of its “Oh come now” moments when our hero gets a break, or avoids having every bone broken by doing something nobody who has a choice would hazard.

But this is Washington’s fourth major starring role, and nobody seems willing to tell him he’s the weakest link in most of the movies he’s landing, or convince him to do something about it.

Rating: TV-MA, graphic violence, sexual situations

Cast: John David Washington, Alicia Vikander, Vicky Krieps and Boyd Holbrook

Credits: Directed by Ferdinando Cito Filomarino, script by Kevin A. Rice. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:48

When you put a fun, well reviewed movie starring a beloved actor into theaters and not on TV, a lot of people will show up.

That’s the lesson from this weekend, as “Free Guy,” a comedy, matches what “The Suicide Squad, a can’t-miss comic book adaptation, ” did last weekend, roughly $26.5 million.

“It’s heart-warming to see people respond to ‘heart-warming,'” Van City Reynolds just tweeted.

“Squad,” streamable as well as in theaters, is a blockbuster that wasn’t. And it is plunging off a cliff on its second weekend, so let’s hope those HBO numbers make up for a 70-80% falloff — to $8 million — in ticket sales.

That’s behind “Don’t Breathe 2’s” $10 million+, the 9 million+ “Respect” is managing and the $9ish “Jungle Cruise” is pulling down on its third weekend.

James Gunn might be grimacing a bit over this.