Peter and the Wolf (2006)

A version of this article appeared in The Age, September 29, 2011.

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra conductor Brett Kelly only has to hum the first bars of Peter and the Wolf, and a familiar picture enters the mind: disobedient little Peter marching away from his grandfather's house through the gate into the meadow, looking for adventure.

Written by Sergei Prokofiev in 1935 to introduce children to the instruments of the orchestra, Peter and the Wolf has been a staple of music education ever since. “It really is a part of our collective unconscious,” Kelly says of the opening melody, played on the strings. “It's not only powerful in its own right, but it's been copied a million times to create a similar feeling of comfort and ease and happiness and youthfulness, always with the slightest hint that something is going to go wrong.”

Kelly is conducting a series of school holiday performances of Peter and the Wolf at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, to accompany a stop-motion animated film made by British director Suzie Templeton in 2006. He says that the style of Templeton's animation came as a surprise, “a little bit grittier and grimier than I was picturing.” The setting is modern Russia at the dead of winter, in a rundown city roamed by gangs; Peter, in his grubby orange parka, looks wild-eyed and under-fed.

Unlike in nearly all earlier versions of the piece, there's no narrator; but the story devised by Prokofiev himself remains intact, with each character represented by an instrument of the orchestra. Grandfather, slow and grumpy, is a bassoon. A twittering bird is a flute, a sneaky cat is a clarinet, and the sinister wolf is a trio of French horns.

It's a tale that might have been conceived for cinema, full of action and suspense: everything depends on the physical layout of the setting, carefully specified in the original text. When the wolf appears in the meadow, both the cat and the bird scurry up a tree; Prokofiev tells us to imagine “the bird sitting on one branch and the cat on another, not too close.”

Having conducted many film scores over the years, Kelly compares this current project to “doing a live movie"; the difference is that Templeton's animation was designed to match Prokofiev's score, rather than the other way around. As a result, he says, the relationship between sound and image is unusually “clear and direct": the music accompanies the action step by step, rather than commenting obliquely or foreshadowing events yet to come. Indeed, there are long balletic sequences where characters walk, glide or scuttle along to the beat – a technique known as “Mickey Mousing” in tribute to Walt Disney, who pioneered it in his early shorts (and who produced his own adaptation of Peter and the Wolf in the 1940s). Getting the timing just right is a challenge for Kelly, who has to be familiar with the film in every detail. “I've probably watched it fifteen or twenty times already.”

From a purely musical point of view, he describes Peter and the Wolf as an “instrumentally virtuosic” work, making resourceful use of a relatively small orchestra. “That wolf theme is like the best version of a horror movie theme you've ever heard, and everyone else has just done second-rate copies for the last seventy-five years.”

Kelly says that his favorite character is Peter, whom he imagines as close to the age of his own thirteen-year-old son. “God, that's a complicated world, isn't it? You've got all these urges, you want to explore, you're attracted to dangerous situations but the problem is they're dangerous. You've got to deal with bullies, you've got wolves, and you've got friends who you might lose...”

He laughs, as if the resonance of the story is still sinking in. “You think of your own childhood, and you think, how did I get through that? How did that work out?”

Tornado Alley

A version of this review appeared in The Age, September 29, 2011.

The spirit of Western imperialism lingers on in many IMAX films, typically narrated by Americans and designed to show the beauty of exotic locations from Mecca to Mars. Tornado Alley is an exception to the rule: a quest for the marvellous conducted at the heart of the US. A spinoff from the Discovery Channel series Storm Chasers, Sean Casey's 3D documentary was shot on the Great Plains, an area that has long attracted fans of extreme weather (including the late filmmaker George Kuchar, who visited every year). The chance to see a tornado up close is worth the price of admission, and there are also some stunning images of houses ripped apart; but most of the film follows Casey and his crew as they trundle up and down the highway in their customised armoured pick-up truck, looking for the perfect storm. In between the flurries of elemental drama, we're treated to snippets of light relief – including an odd moment with a Skill Tester – and just enough factual material to convince us we've learnt something.

Casey is no kind of an artist, and after the first few minutes Bill Paxton's monotone narration is little more than background noise. But it hardly matters: more than most IMAX films, Tornado Alley allows the gaze to wander, all the way to the horizon and the ominously darkened sky. As usual with this format, the excitement of the content comes second to excitement about the medium itself; the point about a tornado isn't where it takes you, but the fact that it can sweep you away.

Spy Kids: All The Time In the World

A version of this review appeared in The Age, September 22, 2011.

The films Robert Rodriguez makes as "family entertainment" are far more bearable, as a rule, than the ones which pretend to be for adults. Rodriguez has a lively, vulgar imagination, and a fair idea of what young children are liable to enjoy: bloodless violence, groanworthy puns, flights of fancy that manage to be heart-warming and tasteless all at once. The first Spy Kids movie in eight years peaks with its opening sequence, featuring Jessica Alba as a heavily pregnant spy mom battling henchmen in between contractions; nothing in Rodriguez's repertoire can top that, not even a robot dog who eats scrap metal, poos out ball bearings and speaks in the thin whine of Ricky Gervais. The film is also presented in so-called “Aromascope”, meaning that scratch-and-sniff cards are provided at the same time as the 3D glasses, adding one more dimension to the gags about farts and blue cheese. When prompts flashed up on screen, I obediently scratched away, but all I could detect was a sweet, faintly chemical smell.

Alexa Vega and Daryl Sabara from the original Spy Kids trilogy are all grown-up by now, but their characters return as mentors to a new brother-sister team: Cecil (Mason Cook), who reads quantum physics textbooks and proves to be a whiz at decoding anagrams, and Rebecca (Rowan Blanchard), who's obsessed with practical jokes. Their nemesis is the mysterious Timekeeper (Jeremy Piven) whose evil plan involves making all the clocks in the world run at high speed, bringing us ever closer to Armageddon. The moral in the end is that time stops for no-one; a hint of melancholy at the climax suggests that even the eternally boyish Rodriguez may be starting to wonder if his glory days have passed. All the same, it seems odd that this workaholic writer-director should be so bent on urging parents to slow down and hang out more with their kids.

Abduction

A version of this review appeared in The Age, September 22, 2011.

The first section of John Singleton's young-adult thriller might almost be a tribute to David Cronenberg's grim A History of Violence (2005), particularly as Maria Bello appears in both films as a wife and mother. Teenage hunk Nathan (Taylor Lautner) is introduced as a regular guy, living a picture-perfect life with his Middle American family; as in Cronenberg's film, we soon gather that beneath the surface something isn't quite right. Regularly, Nathan visits a therapist (Sigourney Weaver) to talk about his anger-management problems and strange dreams; back home, his father (Jason Isaacs) puts him through rigorous sessions of fight training while taunting him without mercy.

There is, indeed, a secret buried in Nathan's past, which eventually forces him to go on the run, accompanied by Karen (Lily Collins), the girl from across the street. But from this point on, Abduction turns into a tame and rather clumsy manhunt story, as if the more disturbing possibilities raised earlier had been deliberately repressed. Lautner, an innocently bad actor, has little to offer beyond muscles and sincerity; in fairness, no-one could make Nathan into a remotely credible character. The more experienced cast members struggle to maintain their dignity, particularly Weaver, who's saddled with some of the worst lines in Shawn Christensen's tin-eared script. Most of the campy humour seems to be unintentional, but there are times when it's hard to be sure; my favorite moment comes when a villain threatens to kill all of Nathan's friends on Facebook, which sounds like the plot for a better movie than this one.

Fright Night 3D

A version of this review appeared in The Age, September 17, 2011.

More a nostalgia item than an immortal masterpiece, the original Fright Night (1985) at least proves that the tradition of self-referential horror cinema didn't begin with Scream (1997). When the teenage hero suspects his neighbour might be a vampire, he calls in the aid of Peter Vincent, played by Roddy McDowell: a washed-up movie star modelled on Vincent Price, and the closest thing available to an expert in the field.

It's a neat idea that deserves revisiting. Shot in 3D, this remake is much slicker and more coherent than its predecessor, with plenty of updated jokes, including an obligatory dig at Twilight. The script is by Marti Noxon, who was Joss Whedon's right-hand woman on Buffy the Vampire Slayer; the director is Craig Gillespie, who seems to have found his level after the grating Lars and the Real Girl (2007) and the forgettable Mr Woodcock (2007). One of the best decisions made by this team was to give the story a fresh setting: Charley Brewster (Anton Yelchin) now lives in the suburbs of Las Vegas, between the bright lights of the casinos and the barren desert. As one character points out, the city is a perfect playground for the undead, offering a large transient population to munch on and no shortage of action after dark.

For the most part, Noxon and Gillespie stick to the rules of a long-standing mythology. Vampires shrivel in sunlight, don't show up in mirrors or in photographs and (crucially) can't step across a threshold without being invited. But like the earlier film, Fright Night 3D offers youthful audiences a small-scale, domesticated form of horror. In the midst of his adventures, Charley has various everyday problems to deal with, such as preventing the cool kids at school from finding out about his nerdy past; the 3D format adds drama to the mundane locations, with characters chasing each other through kitchens, up stairs and across suburban backyards.

The most memorable aspect of the 1985 Fright Night was the wild performance by Stephen Geoffreys as the hero's sidekick Evil Ed – an impish little gore-hound choking with inappropriate laughter, like Duckie from Pretty in Pink (1986) gone feral. This time round, Ed is played by Christopher Mintz-Plasse, best known as ''McLovin" from Superbad (2007): a specialist in seething self-importance rather than manic glee, but still a worthy inheritor of the geek crown. Equally entertaining is Colin Farrell, who has worked hard in the past few years to reinvent himself as a comic actor, and who manages to be thoroughly ridiculous yet alarming as Jerry Dandrige – just your friendly neighbourhood vampire, with his overbearing swagger, college-boy lingo (''Can you do me a solid?'') and the most peculiar speech rhythms this side of Christopher Walken.

Noxon's script is carefully designed so the stars take turns occupying the spotlight, and it's not until halfway through that David Tennant prances onto the screen as Peter Vincent – cleverly reimagined in the Vegas context as a preening stage magician who dabbles in the occult. Yelchin holds his own as the foil to all of these flamboyant types; his acting has a clean, unfussed quality that might make him the nearest contemporary answer to Michael J. Fox.

While the 1985 Fright Night was tinged with homoeroticism, the remake steers a straighter course. If anything links Gillespie's films, it's a concern with immature guys who struggle to live up to a conventional notion of manhood. Charley spends the movie looking for a father figure, but neither Jerry nor Peter fit the bill; eventually his sympathetic girlfriend (Imogen Poots) explains that all he needs to do is be himself. The better episodes of Buffy were a lot more thematically adventurous than this. Still, Fright Night 3D qualifies as a successful entry in a tricky genre – blending flip humour and emotional intensity in a way that feels true, after its fashion, to the facts of teenage life.

Johnny English Reborn

A version of this review appeared on The Age website, September 16, 2011.

This sequel to an largely forgotten James Bond parody from 2003 finds Rowan Atkinson returning to duty as the titular bumbling super-spy – exiled to a kung-fu monastery after disgrace in Mozambique, then summoned back to Blighty by the new MI7 chief (Gillian Anderson) to save the day for queen and country once again.
 As he races to identify the members of a multinational cabal of assassins, there's ample opportunity for him to fumble with gadgets and trip over his own self-importance, like a British cousin of Inspector Clouseau from the Pink Panther saga.



But while Johnny may be accident-prone, he's nowhere near as clumsy as the film's director Oliver Parker, recently responsible for St Trinian's (2007) and its equally dire sequel. When Parker isn't flash-panning to and fro in a pointless effort to imitate the Bourne films, he's lingering on Atkinson's facial expressions as if blinking like an outraged toad gave instant proof of comic genius.

Ironically, Atkinson's performance works best when he's playing it straight: in between all the lurching and gurning, Johnny remains – as Peter Sellers said of Clouseau – a “sad and serious man,” fading into late middle age without losing his schoolboy bashfulness or his forelock-tugging respect for his social superiors.
 There's a touch of genuine pathos here, enough to hint that Atkinson might yet shed his grating mannerisms and emerge as a real actor someday. Meanwhile, few things could be sadder than this unfunny vehicle for a clown long past his prime.

Monte Carlo

A version of this review appeared in The Age, September 22, 2011.

As long as little girls like to play with Barbie dolls, there's a guaranteed audience for a harmless trifle like Monte Carlo, starring Disney Channel up-and-comer Selena Gomez as Grace Bennett, an unassuming teenage girl from Texas who celebrates her high school graduation with a budget holiday in France. Stepping into a lobby to get out of the rain, she crosses paths with bratty British heiress Cordelia Winthrop-Scott (Gomez again), who proves to be her exact double; soon she's travelling via private jet to a sumptuous hotel suite on the Riviera, with her perky best friend (Katie Cassidy) and grumpy step-sister (Leighton Meester) tagging along. 

Despite her qualms, Grace convinces herself to persist with the masquerade till after the charity ball where Cordelia is the guest of honour. Meanwhile, she's faced with complications involving a suspicious aunt (Catherine Tate) and an expensive necklace made by Bulgari, a company that continues to set new standards for aggressive product placement.

The director Thomas Bezucha (The Family Stone) takes a breezy, old-fashioned approach, zooming out from tourist landmarks and deploying a cheery colour scheme that recalls the Disney live-action comedies of the 1960s. Each of the three main actresses is given the chance to emote in close-up, and each is paired with an appropriately sympathetic boy. Finally, the heroines learn that it pays to be yourself, although not till they've got full value from a life of luxury; that might sound like having it both ways, but what else are daydreams for?

Hobo With A Shotgun

A version of this review appeared in The Age, September 15, 2011.

Yet another spinoff from Grindhouse (2007), Jason Eisener's “exploitation” parody was shot in Nova Scotia but takes place in a never-never-land of pulp convention – borrowing from horror comics and spaghetti Westerns, tricked out with 1980s synthesisers and 1970s lens flare. Played by a ravaged-looking Rutger Hauer, the nameless Hobo makes the mistake of his life when he hops off the freight train at Hope Town, a crime-ridden metropolis ruled by the sadistic Drake (Brian Downey) who dresses like a Southern evangelist and stages regular public atrocities to the delight of his flock. A man's gotta do what a man's gotta do: teaming up with an angel-faced hooker (Molly Dunsworth), soon our hero is patrolling the filthy streets and dispensing justice "one shell at a time," blowing away human garbage such as a paedophile Santa Claus (Brian Jamieson) and a gonzo video artist (Pasha Ebrahimi) who does a brisk trade in tapes of vagrants chewing on broken glass.

Aimed at cinematic tourists keen to slum it in the lowbrow depths, Hobo With A Shotgun likewise sets out be as unpleasant as possible, without administering any truly challenging shocks to the system. Even Robert Rodriguez's similar Machete had more in the way of political subtext: the tone is blatantly tongue-in-cheek, the effect almost cosy in its familiarity, with touches of Canadian restraint in the midst of all the mayhem. When a minor villain incinerates a bus full of kids, the biggest shock is the notion that local schools manage to operate at all; it's encouraging to think that “normal” life continues even in this nightmare community, where you can barely walk a block without tripping over someone getting tortured.

The Change-Up

A version of this review appeared in The Age, September 8, 2011.

As a comedy director, David Dobkin's method – it hardly qualifies as a style – involves sketching out the broad lines of an unlikely plot, then allowing his actors to fill the empty space with ad-libbed rants.

The Change-Up is Dobkin's least satisfactory film, partly because it lacks the motor-mouthed gusto of his signature actor Vince Vaughn, seen to best effect in Wedding Crashers (2005). Instead, we get Ryan Reynolds as Mitch, a secretly lonely swinging bachelor, and Jason Bateman as his friend Dave, a harried husband and father. While urinating into a magic fountain (yes) they swap bodies like the mother and daughter in either version of Freaky Friday, giving them a chance to learn if the grass is truly greener on the other side.

Reynolds specialises in snarky sarcasm, and so does Bateman, so there's not much fun to be had watching them impersonate each other. Still, the film is sometimes funny in a sour National Lampoon way, especially when the stream-of-consciousness riffs are allowed to get a little abstract (“Dave wanted to be an astronaut, and I wanted to sell dolphins on the black market”).

For a supposedly raunchy comedy, The Change-Up has a surprising number of scenes where the heroes are desperate to avoid having sex with women, whether out of principle or sheer disgust. You could call this further evidence of the misogynistic streak that Dobkin has displayed since Clay Pigeons (1998) – or you could simply say that the real romance is between the two guys. At least Dave's wife (Leslie Mann) is given a couple of scenes to vent frustrations of her own.

One Day

A version of this review appeared in The Age, September 1, 2011.

She was a prim bookworm from Yorkshire with vague dreams of literary glory; he was an upper-class twit who rose to fame as an annoying TV host. After a failed one-night stand at university, they would meet every so often to bicker and cuddle. Were they soulmates, or just really good friends?

Even if you weren't completely won over by Lone Schevig's An Education (2009), it's a shock to see Schevig crash and burn so spectacularly with One Day, another twee romance set in Britain's recent past. Based on a bestselling novel by screenwriter David Nicholls, the film skips across the years from the late 1980s onward, but all the onscreen action occurs on one particular date: 15 July, otherwise known as St Swithin's Day. There's a point to this contrived storytelling device, but it's not revealed till near the end; in the meantime, we're given little reason to care about the peevish Emily (Anne Hathaway) or the vapid Dexter (Jim Sturgiss) as they blunder through life to no apparent purpose.

For all I know Nicholls's dialogue may be delightful on paper, but on screen it registers as romance-novel slop diluted with jokes about toilets and Star Trek; Schevig's notion of “movie magic” usually involves having the leads frolic in the middle distance while the camera pulls up and back to the strains of a genteel waltz. No serious effort is made to comment on social change from the Thatcher era to the present: the passage of time is indicated mainly by shifts in fashion, and by the novels, films and pop songs which the characters consume.

Despite much special pleading on his behalf, Dexter never becomes an especially sympathetic figure – though Sturgiss is aptly cast as a glamour boy struggling with his own lack of substance. The bigger issue is Hathaway, a once bright and appealing actress whose career has taken a nose-dive since Get Smart (2008). Her shaky Yorkshire accent has already come in for much criticism, but that's the least of her problems here. More than ever, she seems to be going through the motions, mechanically recycling a limited number of tricks: the wan brave smile, the fluttering sensitivity and the brisk head-prefect sarcasm. Hardly plausible as a shrinking violet, she projects, instead, a certain neurotic determination – as if she could somehow make us love her by sheer force of will.

Final Destination 5

A version of this review appeared in The Age, September 1, 2011.

As the Final Destination films have taught us over and over, the end can arrive at any moment; the series itself, however, seems to be immortal. Directed by James Cameron protege Steven Quale, this fifth instalment (the second in 3D) has only a little of the self-referential cleverness David R. Ellis brought to The Final Destination (2009), which climaxed with a conflagration in a movie theatre.

This time round, the story begins at the headquarters of the aptly named Presage Paper Company, where some younger staff members are heading off for a team-building weekend. On the way, most are killed when a bridge suddenly collapses – but a handful escape thanks to Sam (Nicholas D'Agosto) who has a vision of the disaster just before it occurs. Soon afterwards, the survivors start dying in freak accidents, much to the puzzlement of investigating officer Jim Block (Courtney B. Vance).

It's uncertain if the Final Destination films qualify as horror at all, as opposed to live-action cartoons with a lot of blood; still, in its deliberately silly, abstract way, the series does tap into real world fears. Like young people everywhere, Sam and his friends have dreams for the future but remain at the mercy of unknowable fate. The gory set-pieces parody various kinds of torture (gymnastics, laser eye surgery, acupuncture) which many of us inflict on our own bodies as if doing penance for some sin. And the 3D format once again reminds us that death is coming for everybody – in the audience as well.

Kidnapped

A version of this review appeared in The Age, September 1, 2011.

“Always make the audience suffer as much as possible.” The line is attributed to Alfred Hitchcock, but it might well be the motto of Miguel Angel Vivas – the first-time director of Kidnapped, a gruelling Spanish horror-thriller with a back-to-basics premise.

The victims are an ordinary middle-class family: Mum (Ana Wagener), Dad (Fernando Cayo), and stroppy teenage daughter (Manuela Vellés). On the evening they move into a new house, they're confronted by a trio of thugs in balaclavas, who take them hostage in a so-called “express kidnapping” – and for the rest of the night, things go from bad to worse.

Though not strictly a mockumentary like The Blair Witch Project (1999) or the Spanish zombie film [REC] (2007), Kidnapped draws on the same idiom. Vivas shoots in very long takes – following his actors around like a news cameraman, making us wait for revelations in “real time,” or splitting the screen to show the same events from two perspectives at once.

As a film school assignment Kidnapped would deserve at least a B+, but it's neither as skilful nor as poetic as Bryan Bertino's The Strangers (2008), a more “classical” treatment of a similar subject. The theme of class warfare remains undeveloped, as do the suggestions of tensions between the kidnappers themselves: it's hard to tell if Vivas has any goal beyond putting us through a gruesome ordeal, while tormenting us with glimpses of false hope.

Kidnapped will certainly get your heart racing, but then so will an hour at the gym. Aside from a catchy lo-fi pop song by the band Wild Honey – “Isabella,” reprised over the closing credits – it's unlikely anything here will haunt you the next day.

Horrible Bosses

A version of this review appeared in The Age, August 25, 2011.

Despite a few references to the Global Financial Crisis, Horrible Bosses is hardly at all about the bosses themselves, who include a smarmy psychopath (Kevin Spacey, doing his usual thing), a coke-addled brat (Colin Farrell, funny but underused) and a nymphomaniac dentist (Jennifer Aniston, rattling off four-letter words in a feeble effort to play against type).

Seth Gordon's farce really gets going after hours, when three old pals played by Jason Bateman, Charlie Day and Jason Sudeikis meet over drinks to moan about their respective work environments, eventually hitting on a plan to "exchange murders" which bears some resemblance – as one of them points out – to the plot of the Hitchcock classic Strangers on a Train (1951).

Buddy movies – or "bromances" as we're now meant to call them – are still a huge deal in Hollywood, but it's rarer to see a film centred on a male comedy trio: Sedeikis the suave yet luckless ladies' man, Bateman the sarcastic pessimist and Day the pint-sized, over-sensitive fool. Clearly they're having fun bouncing off each other, whether they're quibbling about phraseology or brawling like the Three Stooges.

The trouble is that most of their clowning leads nowhere: Gordon and his screenwriters seem reluctant to go all the way with the black-comedy premise, and the plot strands are never woven into any satisfying pattern. Some of the humour would be doomed under any circumstances: it's understandable that our heroes should feel castrated, but the script still relies to an alarming degree on jokes about male rape.

Friends With Benefits

A version of this review appeared in The Age, August 18, 2011.

Mila Kunis has a distinctive way of shifting between sassy charm and vulnerability; Justin Timberlake moves with a dancer's precision, unassertive but perfectly self-contained. Together they make a pleasing pair, cute as a couple of kittens and ever ready to mock the public that finds them adorable.

In Friends With Benefits, Timberlake plays Dylan, who gets a job as an art director at GQ magazine; Kunis is Jamie, who works for the recruitment agency that brings him to New York. Both scarred by recent break-ups, they agree to use each other for sex minus emotional attachment, a plan that succeeds until it doesn't.

This is a romantic comedy that sets out to be hipper than most. The director Will Gluck keeps things fast and superficial, and relies more on scripted wisecracks than rambling improvisation: the rapid-fire banter about guerrilla marketing and flash mobs almost suggests a lightweight spinoff of The Social Network. I could have done without most of the material assigned to Woody Harrelson, as a gay sports editor with an interest in fonts; still, even the weaker jokes are silly and unexpected, which is more than you can usually hope for in this genre.

But the film rapidly falls apart once Richard Jenkins shows up as Dylan's ailing father, and cynicism gives way to sentiment. There's more romance early on, as Dylan and Jamie go about inventing a relationship with its own particular rules; it's disappointing to see them turn into just another couple.

The Woman

A version of this review appeared in The Age, August 20, 2011.

One ordinary weekend, the court officer Chris Cleek (Sean Bridges) has a very bad idea. Out in the woods, he spies a feral woman (the remarkable Pollyanna McIntosh) living like a wild animal; he captures her, drags her back to his home in rural Maine, and soon has her cuffed hand and foot in his cellar, spread-eagled in a pose suggesting crucifixion.

After some getting-to-know-you skirmishes, he's ready to introduce her to his family. “We're going to train her,” he tells them proudly. “Free her from herself, from her baser instincts.” Young Brian (Zach Brand), a chip off the old block, is frankly intrigued. Chris' wife Belle (Angela Bettis) and teenage daughter Peggy (Lauren Ashley Carter) barely comment, but their stricken faces say more than any words could.

Not merely an innocent at the mercy of an evil patriarch, the Woman herself is the last adult survivor of a cannibal tribe; she first appeared in the little-known Offspring (2009), based on a novel by Jack Ketchum, who co-wrote The Woman with director Lucky McKee. Gnashing her teeth at her captors and wailing in some guttural, unknown tongue, she represents femininity at its most primal – at least for Chris, who can't help lusting after what he most abhors.

Chris is wholly mad, but it's hinted that his delusions aren't so far from those of the average alpha male: a genuinely disturbing horror movie, The Woman is also a satire on the simplicities of a sitcom world where Father Knows Best. Bridges' golly-gee manner suggests a malignant Will Ferrell: “Don't do anything I wouldn't do,” he says merrily to Brian as the boy heads off for school.

As above, so below: Chris' thrilled disgust at the reek of the Woman rhymes with the effusive way he compliments the perfume of his secretary (Lauren Schroeder), whom he leers at from behind. The threat of violence lurks behind banal comments and gestures, and domestic details take on a sinister resonance: McKee makes great play with the gingerbread men baked by Belle, and – as in McKee's earlier cult favorite May (2002) – much fetishistic import is attached to the smoking of cigarettes.

Though The Woman is hardly “torture porn,” McKee seems bent on making viewers feel uncomfortable with their own voyeurism: it's unlikely he put in four years of film school without hearing his lecturers talk about the “male gaze,” a notion the film makes concrete in an almost comic fashion. When he first encounters the Woman, Chris frames her in his rifle sights like a cameraman, and literally undresses her with his eyes: as we watch her running from his perspective, a dissolve shows us her bare breasts.

It's a typically bold flourish in a film which regularly finds inventive ways to shift our point of view, with aid from a suite of specially written songs by Sean Spillane. An driving rock riff forces us to feel some of Chris' excitement over his plans for his captive; other abrasive passages of sound carry us inside the headspace of the generally unknowable Woman herself, especially in her moments of greatest agony.

A song which initially belongs to one character alone may bleed across the entire space of the film, much as McKee uses slow dissolves to hint that all the Cleeks share inherited or acquired traits. Even Chris and the Woman have something in common: she too once headed a family of sorts, and there's no doubting he's the less “civilised” of the pair.

After all the build-up, the climax supplies a gleeful, over-the-top catharsis, followed by a final twist which is simultaneously funny, shocking, and oddly moving. It takes a special kind of director to succeed with a project like The Woman, and McKee is head and shoulders above most in his field: for all its lingering horrors, the film leaves you with a sense of triumph.