Wingard: You're Next (2011)

Horror films often ascribe a certain oblivion to their victims – and revisionist horror often involves poking fun at that oblivion. While You're Next follows in that revisionist mould, it also does something a little different with it, making for a slasher self-consciousness that's definitively post-Scream. After an elliptical prologue, the film opens with an extended family arriving at their country home for the weekend. It’s a creepy, macabre house, set amongst gnarled, stunted woods – and the family knows it.  In fact, they spend the first part of the film obsessively checking the house for sounds, creaks and shadows, allowing the film to really capture that obsessive drive to investigate just one more creak, as well as the deeper, creepier implication of creaks – not just that someone is waiting to kill you, but that someone is waiting full stop, symbiotically sharing your space (and the killers spend some time just occupying the house before they strike). It’s a bit of a surprise, then, how badly the family deal with the killers once they appear - most of them are killed off so quickly it feels as if the film is over before it’s begun. What that enables, though, is a secondary, supplementary narrative in which the killers suddenly find themselves challenged to elude the last few family members, who are led by a guest who turns out to have grown up on a survivalist compound. That’s not to say that the narrative simply inverts – it’s not merely that the hunted become the hunters – since that kind of deliberate, flamboyant subversion is an earlier kind of revisionism than what’s on display here. Instead, Wingard maintains the symbiosis between killer and victim that was so creepily evoked in the opening scenes to position the remainder of the film at the margin of error that can make orchestrating a home invasion as terrifying and suspenseful as being invaded. Both killers and victims, the film suggests, are slaves to the contingencies and continguities of domestic fixtures – it only takes a window or door in the wrong place to remind them of their inextricability, of the thread that suspends suspense between them. It feels right, then, that some of the cast and crew are drawn from the mumblecore universe, since the mumblecore attention to diffuse domestic illbience works quite well for this obsession with the elastic zone between killer and victim. And that zone often recalls the risk management horror of the later Final Destination films - a great deal of the film's dark comedy stems from the way it collapses home invasion and property risk assessment, to the point where it’s the endless conundrums and confabulations of risk that are doing the invading. 

Schrader: The Canyons (2013)

The Canyons begs the question: what would it take to imagine Los Angeles without cinema, or after cinema? In some ways, film might not seem like the right medium to answer that question – but, then again, what Schrader presents is not exactly a film either, at least not in a conventional or classical sense. Not only is it the first film by a major director to be funded by crowdsourcing, but it opens with a montage sequence of decaying and dilapidated multiplexes. In other words, this is no longer a film that recognises the distinction between production and consumption, nor a film that demands or depends upon a privileged or sequestered screening environment. Instead, Schrader, working from a trash-noir masterpiece by Bret Easton Ellis, takes a classic trope of LA noir - the love triangle between a director (James Deen), actress (Lindsay Lohan) and actor (Nolan Gerard Funk) - to present something like a film that has adapted to calibrate the evacuation of film from the Los Angeles cityscape. Early experimental film often turned on the gesture of simply placing the camera in pre-cinematic milieux, or at least milieux that hadn’t been fully colonised by cinema – and there’s something akin to that here in the way in which Schrader simply places the camera in post-cinematic milieux, among spaces and structures that have become jettisoned from a specifically cinematic mode of address, spaces that are so cluttered with cameras and other recording devices that they are no longer transformed or even phased by the presence of his own camera. And it quickly becomes clear that this post-cinematic world gives us a kind of nightmare of total cinema, a surfeit of cinematic objects and attachments that prevents anything feeling privileged, spectacular or distinctive, just as Ellis’ stillborn, oddly distended and distracted narrative revolves around a film that is indistinguishable from every other space and object in Schrader’s own ‘film.’ On the one hand, that creates film that is simultaneously its own venue, cinema as a medium, something that can only be partially experienced, albeit something we’re destined to partially experience in perpetuity, not unlike the total television of soap opera. But it also resists that, if only by fulfilling it so mercilessly, as Schrader and Ellis collapse Lohan, Deen and Funk back into the boredom they originally assuaged, in something like an elegy for cinematic scarcity - after all, boredom is only boredom because it is always, aggressively available.

Eastwood: Pale Rider (1985)

Clint Eastwood's first and only western of the 80s bears some resemblance to High Plains Drifter - it's about a stranger who defends a remote frontier community from a band of corrupt miners, and it takes place in the same sparkling, rarefied reaches of the upper atmosphere. If anything, though, it's more rarefied - shooting on location in the Boulder Mountains, Eastwood draws on the alpine vistas of The Eiger Sanction to create a western bathed in snowy, pastel light, seamlessly transplanting his 70s western sensibility onto 80s film stock. More breathlessly Edenic than any of Eastwood’s previous films, it’s full of landscapes that feel newly formed, barely emerging from the smoke and mist of creation. Watching it evokes the wonder of the frontier, the breathtaking momentousness of gazing upon something only previously seen by God, as if the very act of rapturous attention were a kind of completion and consummation of creation. So it's no surprise that this is also Eastwood's most wondrous parable, or that time gets deeper, closer to a dream, as the woods and mountains recede - it's a western driven by altitude as much as latitude, gazing down through strata as much as across horizons. Yet there are still traces of his earlier, more violent Western sensibility as well – at moments, it feels that this might be the end of time as much as the beginning, as if these glimpses of original, uninhabited creation were in fact the first, distant apocalyptic harbingers of things coming full circle. If there is any weakness, it's that this sublimity can make the human narrative seem a bit earthbound by comparison, but Eastwood takes what could have been a stultifying alternation between amethyst vistas and pitch-dark interiors and turns it into a film that's continually poised at that iconic door in The Searchers - it understands that dialectic between claustrophobia and expansiveness more perfectly than any Western since. Besides, the darkened scenes are where Eastwood shines, if only because they occlude him - he has less screen time than in any of his other films, and yet his presence suffuses every frame. And that's where the film's transcendence ultimately lies - in Eastwood's absolute perfection of self-direction, absolute fusion of directing and acting; he commands this film like God in the world, present everywhere but visible nowhere.

Mottola: Clear History (2013)

Clear History has come along around the same time fans were expecting a ninth season of Curb Your Enthusiasm – and it addresses that desire pretty well, perhaps better than another season actually could. As the eighth season of Curb drew to a close, Larry had moved to New York – and while earlier episodes of the series had taken place in the Big Apple, this was the first sustained narrative arc that took place there without any intricate pretext or sustained through-story. In some ways, it felt a bit like an exhaustion of Curb – at the very least, it clarified how attuned the series’ peripatetic, improvisational ambience was to Los Angeles, a fact that Larry addressed by introducing a series of episodes revolving around car travel, effectively creating a pretext to turn New York into a driving city like Los Angeles. Clear History starts from that point – like one of the final episodes in the eighth season, it’s about the fallout that ensues when Larry, here barely disguised as Nathan Flomm, pulls out from investing in a billion-dollar automotive invention at just the wrong time. Losing face with his partner (Jon Hamm) and shamed by the financial media, he retreats to Martha’s Vineyard, where he lives for ten years under an assumed name – and it’s here that the peripatetic momentum of Curb starts to resume, as the privileged micro-villages of Pacific Palisades segue quite naturally into those of Cape Cod. That’s all prologue, though, since the main narrative centres on what happens when Nathan’s partner turns up on Martha’s Vineyard, and Nathan plans revenge. That might sound like a misanthropic exercise in the vein of Sour Grapes, but what gives this just enough modulation from a Curb episode is that Nathan’s beloved by the Vineyard community, fleshed out by a fantastic array of character actors, many of whom have also starred in Curb episodes. Some reviews have suggested that this modulation isn’t marked enough, but Larry’s charisma is so irreducible and unmistakable that it doesn’t really work when directors try and make it over in their own image, as occurred, say, in Whatever Works. It’s a tribute to Mottola, then, that he doesn’t try and remediate Larry as a film actor – instead he embraces Larry as a telemovie actor to produce something like a feature-length episode of Curb that’s just distinct enough from the series to feel eventful and familiar at the same time.

Carpenter: The Ward (2010)

The Ward is John Carpenter’s first film since Ghosts of Mars, but it’s utterly unlike it in spirit. Set in the remote ward of a 1960s psychiatric institute, it’s similar in tone and style to his earliest features, so it’s immediately noticeable that it’s not also written by Carpenter – a disparity that he addresses by turning the ward itself into the screenplay he might have written, continually drifting away from unnecessary exposition to dwell on its recesses and reticulations. This is a good space for Carpenter – as a director whose horror depended precisely on the dissolution of the spatio-temporal strictures of conventional suspense, a dissolution that has now become commonplace, a period space like the ward provides him with a way to both historicise and revisit his legacy, especially given the more recent fetish for the 1960s and 1970s (among other things, the film reimagines Mad Men as a horror film, right down to Jared Harris as a reincarnated Donald Pleasance). And Carpenter beautifully elaborates every space between the ward and the front door – in many ways, it works better as one of his escape films than one of his horror films, a minutely gradated series of thresholds and chambers – making for some quite magical emergences of fully-fledged Carpenter architectonics. In addition, the transition to Super 35 film stock creates a whole new series of anamorphic possibilities, which Carpenter exploits by alternating glacial, extended zooms with extravagant tracking shots – either the walls are imperceptibly, subliminally closing in, or we’re wheeling around corners, down corridors and up stairwells, tracking out the contours of a space that’s not meant to be moved through at all, let alone so effortlessly and flamboyantly.