CAREY MULLIGAN | Dragged into the underworld in “DRIVE”

One of the most talented young actresses working today, Oscar Best Actress nominee Carey Mulligan (“Never Let Me Go,” “Money Never Sleeps”) stars opposite Ryan Gosling in FilmDistrict's critically acclaimed thriller “Drive.” 

Winner of the Best Director prize in this year’s Cannes Film Festival, “Drive” will be shown exclusively at Ayala Malls Cinemas (Glorietta 4, Greenbelt 3 & Trinoma) starting Nov. 9. The film is directed by Nicolas Winding Refn and adapted from James Sallis's 2005 novel of the same name.

In the film, Driver (Gosling) is a Los Angeles wheelman for hire, stunt driving for movie productions by day and steering getaway vehicles for armed heists by night. Though a loner by nature, Driver can't help falling in love with his beautiful neighbor Irene (Mulligan), a vulnerable young mother dragged into a dangerous underworld by the return of her ex-convict husband Standard (Oscar Isaac).

Mulligan had been a fan of Refn’s past films “Bronson” and “Valhalla Rising” and had even mentioned to her agent that she wanted to work with a director like Refn, but it was only after she expressed interest in the script that she learned who was helming “Drive.”

The actrees’ enthusiasm was matched by Refn's, who immediately ordered small rewrites of Irene's backstory so he could cast Mulligan. In the novel, ‘Irene’ is a Latina. Director Refn confirms, “Originally I was looking for a Latina actress. I hadn’t seen Carey’s films, but the minute she walked in the door, I knew we had our ‘Irene.’ It just cemented the love story in a much more interesting way. It made it more of a ‘Romeo & Juliet‘ kind of love story without the politics that would in this day and age be brought into it if you had different nationalities or different religions.”

Mulligan explains her interest in the part: “Irene's character was a challenge because she's really the pivot point for the film's secondary plot, which is literally about the love triangle between her, Driver and Irene’s husband Standard but dramatically is about where they'll all end up in the most meaningful sense. And it's not an easy decision for her. Driver certainly seems like Irene's knight in shining armor, but Standard is drawn very sympathetically, as someone who's made mistakes but is genuinely trying to turn his life around. Plus she's loved him since she was 17. So to be able to play those two impulses off of one another, especially after Standard and Driver form an uneasy alliance, gave me so much to work with.”

Says Refn: “Since I was a teenager, I've been a big fan of `Sixteen Candles.’ I've always wanted to remake that film one way or another and, in a very unlikely way, I've done that with `Drive.’ Carey has all the intelligence and charm of a young Molly Ringwald. The romantic scenes she has with Ryan make for a very delicate and beautiful contrast to the brutality in the rest of the film.”

RYAN GOSLING takes you for a spin in “DRIVE”

Fresh from the commercial and critical success of his first-ever romantic comedy “Crazy, Stupid, Love,” Ryan Gosling now returns to the psychological thriller genre with the Cannes Film Festival winner, “Drive.”

Winner of the Best Director award at this year's Cannes, “Drive” will be shown soon exclusively at Ayala Malls Cinemas (Glorietta 4, Greenbelt 3 & Trinoma). The film is directed by Nicolas Winding Refn and adapted from James Sallis's 2005 novel of the same name.

In the film, Driver (Gosling) is a Los Angeles wheelman for hire, stunt driving for movie productions by day and steering getaway vehicles for armed heists by night. Though a loner by nature, Driver can't help falling in love with his beautiful neighbor Irene (Carey Mulligan), a vulnerable young mother dragged into a dangerous underworld by the return of her ex-convict husband Standard (Oscar Isaac).

“I was really intrigued by the role of Driver because the performance demanded this very complex dramatic counterpoint,” Gosling explains. “On the one hand, he's really self-contained, really laconic. There's an economy of movement in the way he carries himself, an economy of words in the way he speaks. He keeps his cards close to his chest and there's an almost poker-faced inscrutability to his reactions. All of which ties into his character, because this is the kind of mechanical self-control he achieves in the flow-situation of driving. [Director] Nic kept saying to me, 'The Driver is half-man, half-machine.'

“On the other hand,” Gosling continues, “Driver is literally psychotic, you know? A Travis Bickle, Taxi Driver-kind of character. Beneath all of that eerie outward calm, there is this reservoir of raging energy and hair-trigger violence. It's like when you're cruising in an automobile and the ride feels so smooth, so stable, so safe—then another car crosses your path. BAM. All that energy, all that mass-times-velocity momentum, is released in a flash of physical violence. And that's basically the character of Driver. He navigates around most obstacles with some very flawless trick-driving, literally and figuratively escaping without a scratch. But when the moment of impact unexpectedly arrives, it is violent and it physically slams you. The challenge is making the audience feel that tightly-coiled energy when Driver is ticking along as smoothly as a stopwatch.”

“Ryan is a real rarity,” says director Nicolas Winding Refn. “He has the charisma and good looks of a leading man and the gravity of a Method-trained, master class performer. For the role of Driver, the film needed an actor who could convey the explosive violence and emotional loneliness of that lone-wolf character, yet also make his personal transformation through love authentic and believable. Few movie stars have that range. Ryan is one of them.”

CANNES winner “DRIVE” starring RYAN GOSLING to be shown in Manila soon

Winner of the Best Director award in this year's Cannes Film Festival, FilmDistrict's critically acclaimed thriller “Drive” starring Ryan Gosling will be shown soon. The film is directed by Nicolas Winding Refn and adapted from James Sallis's 2005 novel of the same name.

In the film, Driver (Gosling) is a Los Angeles wheelman for hire, stunt driving for movie productions by day and steering getaway vehicles for armed heists by night. Though a loner by nature, Driver can't help falling in love with his beautiful neighbor Irene (Carey Mulligan), a vulnerable young mother dragged into a dangerous underworld by the return of her ex-convict husband Standard (Oscar Isaac).

Producer Adam Siegel felt the driver was a rare character – someone who has a purpose, excels at one thing and makes no apologies for it. Producer Marc Platt agreed, noting that the driver reminded him of heroes and movie characters similar to characters Clint Eastwood used to portray.

"I was very taken with this little crime story that James Sallis wrote,” Platt adds. “I felt that the way the world was presented in the book demanded that its true grit be retained in the script. The grit comes from seeing the world from the point of view of Driver in the car. It’s those elements that I felt were critical to retain to make this film a very unique cinematic experience."

Academy Award-nominated screenwriter Hossein Amini adapted the novel for the screen. He felt it was a rare book to receive from a studio because it was short, gloomy and like a poem. Because the novel does not present a linear story but has many flashbacks and jumps around in time, Amini found the adaptation challenging. He felt the non-linear structure made it "a very tricky structure" for a feature film.

“Drive” premiered on May 20, in competition at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival. At its first showing to the media, it received abundant praise and received "some of the best responses of the festival.” It was greeted with hoots and howls of joy from the media, with viewers cheering some of the scenes featuring extreme violence. “Drive” also received a 15 minute standing ovation from the crowd.

Likely, it served as a welcome relief to the press with previously serious-dramatic projects being shown earlier. Xan Brooks of The Guardian called the film his guilty pleasure of the 2011 competition, labeling it an enjoyable affair. "Over the past 10 days we've witnessed great art and potent social commentary; the birth of the cosmos and the end of the world. Turns out what we really wanted all along was a scene in which a man gets his head stomped in a lift. They welcome it in like a long-lost relation", he wrote. The festival named Refn best director for “Drive.”

Drive (Nicholas Winding Refn, 2011)

[Note: this review is spoiler-free but I would still encourage those who haven't yet seen the film to go into it as cold as possible.]

Having proudly managed to seclude myself from practically anything related to Nicholas Winding Refn's Drive following its rapturous reception at Cannes, I found myself surprised by the extremity of the praise that filtered through my blinders. What particularly caught my eye was one rhetorical headline (I did not read the story in my anti-hype lockdown) that asked whether Refn and his star Ryan Gosling were the new Scorsese-De Niro, a comparison I found particularly odd since this is only their first collaboration. Having now seen Drive, however, I can almost see where that writer was coming from: Gosling represents a synthesis and an embodiment of the director's goals, thematic intent and emotional frequency. Refn's previous film, Valhalla Rising, was an abstract tone poem to masculine horror, the kind codified and even encouraged by chauvinistic, barbaric religious organization. Gosling introduces feminine contours to Refn's stylized but dimmed and rough side, though the sensitive actor with the gentle eyes displays an equal capacity for brutality here that places him on the tipping point between grace and savagery.

But then, maybe the invocation of Scorsese and De Niro was just that writer's way of getting in on the  referential action. Refn, who says he modeled Bronson on Kenneth Anger films (there's a reference here, too) and Valhalla Rising on Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker, here unloads a dump-truck of stylistic homages, from early Michael Mann to stripped-down car movies like Two-Lane Blacktop and The Driver to an overt reference to Orson Welles' Mr. Arkadin. Hell, the most visible reference point, to my surprise, was that of Wong Kar-wai, particularly his devastating In the Mood for Love. For some, all these references will be a delight, a smorgasbord of retro cool gussied up further by the inexplicable (but fun) use of '80s synth music. For others, this is merely a sign of self-satisfied theft, a lazy repackaging of ideas. Either way, this fixation misses the true joy of Drive: watching Refn wring tension out nearly every moment, even doe-eyed, wistful stares of impossible love.

Drive's opening segment is the best I've seen in a film since the one-act play that launched Inglourious Basterds. With graceful and steady but desaturated and restless images, Refn shows the nameless Driver (Gosling) preparing and executing a job with formal fluidity. Economic editing and deliberate framing keeps our focus inside the Driver's car as he waits for the robbers who hired him to do their job. The sound design layers noises—a basketball game Driver listens to on the radio, the crackle of a police scanner, the blaring roar of an engine when Driver puts the pedal to the metal, etc.—to further ratchet up tension. Refn's judicious presentation extends to his handling of the car "chase," for want of a better word. It resembles more a game of hide-and-seek than some metal-screeching tear through city streets, with Driver losing one cop before stumbling into the searchlight of a chopper or stopping right in front of a patrol car. Refn understands suspense, and by inserting gulfs of space around a handful of thrilling, fast-edited punctuation marks, he generations enough tension and expectation to leave theater seats everywhere etched with the imprints of fingernails.

The rest of the film follows a similar approach to action, tightly handled, formalist bursts of blunt physicality amid an elegant but dark evocation of L.A.'s promises and pitfalls. The Driver is but the first stripped-down archetype. A few doors down from his apartment lives Irene (Carey Mulligan), whose perpetual cuteness is exacerbated by the young child she raises alone and given a faint sadness for the same reason. I say faint because Mulligan is, admittedly, the weak link of the film, never truly conveying much baggage beyond wisps of regret and the confusion caused by budding feelings for the Driver. Nevertheless, her cherubic giggle and empathetic face provide a nice contrast for Gosling's kind but vaguely troubled stares. If Gosling fills the shoes of the existentially bound hero, Mulligan plays her part as the woman who exists to complicate his feelings, but if she lacks any memorable presence, at least she awakens more humanity in the Driver than one can usually expect of such a taciturn protagonist, allowing him to project some form of humanity into a type stripped down to its most inhuman, objective elements, reconstructing a human being from a stereotype.

Other characters fare better with their archetypes. Oscar Isaac adds depth and conflict to Irene's fresh-out-of-prison husband that fills him with residual jealousy, fear, and genuine concern for his family. Bryan Cranston plays the Driver's mechanic and only friend (in a manner of speaking): Cranston handles the Driver's day and night jobs, getting him underpaid work as a stunt driver and gigs as a getaway man. Cranston's genial warmth, compounded by a sympathetic limp, make him so charming that when he confides to Irene that, as much as he idolizes the Driver's skills, he underpays the kid, she chuckles as if she's just been told a light anecdote. But Shannon's exploitation of the kid runs deeper, and soon he gets the kid caught up with the mob, visualized by the menace of Ron Perlman's gigantic head and steak-knife teeth and a revelatory, ingenious performance by Albert Brooks as a movie producer-cum-gangster.

Not even my self-imposed blackout could prevent hype for Brooks' performance from seeping through, and he lives up to the hype. With hair teetering on the boundary between tamed and wild and eyebrows that long ago went into Witness Protection, Brooks the brilliant, ironic comic looks like he doesn't have a funny bone in his body. He radiates such cold, horribly calm energy that when he fusses over the chopsticks with his Chinese order, one begins to fear he'll stab someone with them for not getting his order perfect. Though not as piercingly silent as Valhalla Rising, Drive still prefers to unfold with imagery instead of words, and Brooks seems to own most of the dialogue despite his handful of scenes, as if he lent out the remainder of the script to the rest of the cast. With interest, of course. Brooks doesn't overplay his hand, doesn't openly menace or even speechify despite how much chattier he is than the others. Refn's inspired casting brings out the cruel inverse of Brooks' deadpan style; as a comedian and filmmaker, Brooks follows premises to their ludicrous conclusions. He does the same here, only the endpoint is usually a corpse, which he views with exasperation. Both he and Perlman toy with the idea of Jews playing at being Italian mafiosos, but where Perlman growls about the discrimination, Brooks infuses the two ethnic types into something unwieldy and terrifying. Here is a man who will kill your whole family and make you feel guilty for taking up that 10 minutes of his time.

At some point, these separate lines begin to converge, elements of one plot bleeding into the other until everything is connected and you're not entirely sure how that came to be. As such, the film's distinct emotions of longing, fear and mounting anger crash together so each justifies and complicates the others. Refn and cinematographer Newton Thomas Sigel handle these conflicting yet unified emotions ably, moving dextrously between abstracted shots inside the Driver's car where the lights outside always blur and expand, grim, fluorescent underworlds, and the calming but tense arrangement of floral pastels on the walls of the apartment complex that communicate longing and tragedy so well Gosling likely could have acted off the wallpaper as well as he did Mulligan.

This collision of styles and moods also allows for Refn to explore the space between his stylistic influences; in particular, Drive feels like the missing link between Michael Mann's nihilistic debut, Thief, and his more optimistic view of the same twisting L.A. streets seen here with Collateral. As I watched Refn flex his stylistic muscles whilst standing on the shoulders of giants for greater visibility, I thought of how much he had in common with the other great imitator of modern cinema, Quentin Tarantino. Both indulge in their ultraviolence—Drive features gore so intense it punches through the barrier to absurdity, not unlike Taraninto—but both also have the ability to find fluidity and tension among their quotations and action. Tarantino's films feel more action-packed than they usually are thanks to his command of dialogue and and direction. Refn, on the other hand, likes to let silence do the talking, using his similar grasp of film technique to make the build-up to visions of unorthodox gore more grueling and unbearable than bashed brains or slashed flesh. Watching Refn pile all this together made for the most thrilling experience I've had at the movies this year, and to dismiss its inventive hodgepodge of styles as nothing more than pastiche strikes me as akin to saying green is but a mash-up of yellow and blue.

P.S. Special mention must go to Cliff Martinez's retro electronic score, perhaps the strongest argument one could have for something in this film surpassing its influences. Martinez, who already put out one engaging soundtrack this year with his work on Contagion, here mixes old-school New Wave synths with the greater nuance afforded by modern electronica. Clearly using the film work of Tangerine Dream as a jumping-off point, Martinez finds emotional contours and chilly suggestion that Tangerine Dream never came close to mining, even as he also beats them at their own game of skittish, digitized paranoia. Having never been a big fan of electronic scores (with a few exceptions, of course), I'm surprised to find that my favorite soundtracks of the last two years have both been synthesized works, and while Martinez's '80s throwback isn't as obviously compatible with its host film as Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross' Social Network score was, he nevertheless carries a great deal of the film's mood and never flags. The handful of synthpop songs peppered among the score are demonically catchy as well.

Capsule Reviews: Cronos, Smiles of a Summer Night,

Cronos (Guillermo Del Toro, 1993)

Admittedly more of a primer for Guillermo Del Toro's career to come than a great work in its own right, Cronos is nevertheless a delightfully wicked and kooky spookfest that introduces recurring objects (bugs, gears), actors (Ron Perlman, Federico Luppi) and themes (fantasy's co-mingling with the real and not-as-concrete-as-it-seems in such a way as to expose humans as both the purest heroes and most terrible monsters) in an original vampire story. Intriguingly, Del Toro uses an aged lead and does not transform him into a younger man, instead showing the device that gives cursed immortality to its users only marginally turning back the clock, further demonstrating the futility of this dark quest for eternal life. The film boasts some wonderfully macabre moments, especially an autopsy of the undead man, who revives before cremation with his mouth sewn shut. The scene is all the more darkly funny for the issues the undertaker has with the crematorium's gas line. Perlman steals the film as the put-upon nephew tasked with finding the alchemical device for his loathed, dying uncle, a performance that is as petulant as it is sneering an brutish. Del Toro's camerawork isn't as hauntingly elegant as it would later be, yet his inventive manipulation of existing sets into fantastical sub-realms presages his later gift for grandiose set design. An embryonic work, perhaps, but when you're watching the birth of a filmmaker as good as Del Toro, there's plenty to please the viewer. Grade: B-

Smiles of a Summer Night (Ingmar Bergman, 1955)

Bergman's breakthrough hit is a light comedy that initially seems so unlike the director's later experiments in spiritual vacuums. But even its tone of jaunty, theatrical aestheticism (aided greatly by Gunnar Fischer's trademark cinematography of cinematically skewed stage framings) reveals the darker impulses within Bergman, who makes farce of the psychological mire of a love triangle between a father, his son and the lad's stepmother even after the pressure bursts the dynamic and spills into other characters. Yet if this is a sex farce, it must surely be the most lyric and graceful one ever put to film. The men deal with confusion, insecurity and and hormones they cannot control, while the women's hushed plotting is less misogynistic scheming than a show of their dark amusement at the follies of men and their attempts to, as ever, sort everything out for their hapless lovers. The mixture of Wildean wit and Bergman's despair works magnificently, and lines like "How can a woman ever love a man?" imbue the mired sexual relationships with an overarching poetry. And only someone capable of such bottomless depression as Bergman could spin a positive, warm ending out of a climax of Russian roulette. Grade: A

(P.S. Criterion's new Blu-Ray is one of their best transfers this year along with Pale Flower.)

Animal Farm (John Halas and Joy Bachelor, 1954)

More noteworthy today as the first released British animated feature than as a great work, John Halas and Joy Bachelor's Animal Farm is a dated work but not particularly a failure. It's most telling flaw is its substitution of the melancholy of Orwell's book, which realized the folly of Communism with regret for its impossibility, with a more propagandic sense of victory over the authoritarians who seize control of the supposedly egalitarian society. (It is now believed that the CIA itself funded the film as a piece of anti-Commie propaganda.) That robs the work of a great deal of its power and the satire of its bitterness, leaving a film that, to use the old saying, knows the steps but not the rhythm. And while I understand that the budget for any British production will not compare to the Hollywood or Disney machines, but the lack of visual dynamism holds back the film. It would have been clever to show a transition from a utopia to an autocratic nightmare, but instead the narrative moves through a flat, unchanging background. Nevertheless, the animation of the animals themselves is a briefly redeeming flash of light, allowing them more sophisticated movements while still maintaining their proper forms, only fully anthropomorphizing the pigs for thematic purposes. Grade:C-

Season of the Witch

A recent College Humor video humorously posited the life of Nicolas Cage's agent, a man forced to contend with his client's perennial inability to say "no" to any project in order to keep himself in castles and pyramids. But that sketch, of course, was lighthearted and broad, building the man's outsized grief at being saddled with Cage's willingness to do everything and dilute his brand until the pain reached a frenzy. I like to imagine Cage's agent as a man who expresses his sorrow in the opposite fashion, silently nodding with resignation as his client agrees to be in the latest piece of crap, hanging up the phone and reaching for a home blood pressure kit to test his heart.

He must have had to put a nitroglycerin tablet under his tongue when Cage signed onto Season of the Witch, a film that all but begs comparisons to Monty Python and the Holy Grail despite its straight face. As with that legendary comedy, Season moves largely in a series of vignettes vaguely resembling a plot, but where that played into the Pythons' sketch comedy genius, Season merely moves as if caught in the death rattle of the Black Plague, leaking pustules of narrative drying and caking around swollen nodes of plagiarized fantasy tropes. The plague features prominently in Dominic Sena's film, and I found myself in the unexpected position of feeling sorry for a pandemic disease.

Opening with a scene with only the slightest bearing on the rest of the film, Season of the Witch establishes its style -- for want of a better term -- instantly, carving out its identity with disorienting edits, a slew of references to other (and better) movies and an adherence to historical accuracy that could charitably be described as laughable. Three women accused of witchcraft receive the farcical trial afforded to heretical suspects before being chucked off a bridge with ropes around their necks before their corpses are lowered into the river below, hydroponically planting the corpses in such a way that one simply must expect something bad to happen soon (does that then make this the Spring of the Witch?). A priest wishes to read an incantation to ensure the accused witches stay dead, but a knight says that a hanging and drowning were sufficient. In the interest of honesty, I should say I found this a fair and logical assessment. But of course, they should have let that monk read from his blinged-out book, and soon a drowned woman comes back long enough to wreak a bit of havoc before heading...to some other damn movie, apparently.

But don't think about that, 'cause here comes a Crusade montage. Thousands of miles away, Behmen (Nicolas Cage) and Felson (Ron Perlman), two knights in service to the Church, gleefully hack their way through Saracens and other enemies of God. Whatever statement Sena might have wanted to make about the hypocrisy of religious purity -- and Lord does he want to make that point -- gets swallowed up in the fun he has clumsily staggering through this montage, broken up briefly by a "wait, what?" shot of the two knights reveling in the most minimalistic medieval tavern ever set up on an empty stage before returning immediately to more shots of God's warrior tearing through the Middle East and Southeastern Europe. Unhelpful title cards provide no sense of logical progression -- they seem to go into the Middle East, return to Europe to fight dissident Christians and then back to Smyrna for a bit of Turkish delight.

But then, after years of killing, Behmen accidentally stabs a woman whose protracted death gasp stuns the man into suddenly giving up his ways and returning to England with Felson, only to immediately be recruited once more by a monk who believes the outbreak of bubonic plague in the knights' absence can be attributed to a young woman who has "confessed" to being a witch. A monk, Debelzaq (seriously?), charges the deserters with helping deliver her to trial in some mysterious monastery, the location of which he barely knows. "I serve the Church no more," Behmen intones with solemn finality, about five minutes before he willingly serves the Church again.

And there, after 20 minutes of largely unconnected, gaudy visuals, ends the plot. The rest of Season of the Witch gets by on weak jump scares, poorly choreographed suspense sequences and dialogue so stale you could store it for food on the long journey to the New World, which of course wouldn't be discovered for another century after the timeline of this film but why should I be held to an accurate, linear account of history when no one involved with the film was? Out of context, some lines attain a terrific comedy: one of the women at the beginning about to be hanged pleads innocence for her ointments. "It was just pig fat," she shrieks with wild eyes. "It wasn't witchcraft!" In one scene, Felson undercuts Behmen's religious rants by saying "Keep your souls. I just want a chicken." Behind him is an untended, well-fed dairy cow that could provide drink and meat in much larger quantities. In context, the lines pile up in collisions of exposition, a crisscrossing web of dialogue as self-defeating as the contradictory plots and themes that dialogue attempts to elucidate.

Nothing in this movie fits together, as if someone attempted to complete a single puzzle with the pieces from five or six separate boxes. The only chemistry that exists between Cage and Perlman must be drawn from the juxtaposition of their faces, Cage's giant forehead playing off Perlman's massive, sloping jawline (Perlman's head is so huge that he can make medium shots into de facto close-ups). Perlman, the only decent aspect of the film, brings his one-man, don't-give-a-damn swagger from Hellboy to the role, making him mesmerizing despite his clunky dialogue (nothing but references to food and sex) but solitary, while Nicolas Cage has the look in his eye of a gold digger lying there and thinking of the Lambourgini that's coming his way once the old bastard dies. A veritable "who's that?" fills out the rest of the cast, some of whom are getting their first major international exposure in a manner they will no doubt attempt to hide in the coming years. Oh, but Christopher Lee shows up for a cameo as a dying cardinal with the world's worst zit, inspiring the question, "Is Christopher Lee running out of money?" God damn it, David Cameron, I don't care how bad the economy is; give this man his proper pension. When FDR installed Social Security as a means of protecting the dignity of the elderly, this has to be what he had in mind.

What the hell even happens in this movie? How can a plot so linear and derivative yet so incomprehensible? Everything exists as a storyboarded sequence, though that would imply that enough planning went into the movie that even a connected series of suspense and action scenes might have arisen from pre-production. Season of the Witch moves through so many Tolkien ripoffs that one setpiece impressively manages to plagiarize Minas Tirith and Helm's Deep in one go. They wade around a bit in a forest, engaging in one of the dullest rickety bridge segments I have ever seen, and there is in fact competition for so narrow a scenario. Sena's camera moves with all the precision of a North Korean nuke, though it makes me just as wary: no spatial continuity exists between random close-ups and medium shots that make up all action shots. Even establishing shots don't help, and most long shots appear to move away from the action as if the DP was trying to slink out of the project as surreptitiously as possible. Poor Claire Foy, in her big-screen debut, is forced to oscillate so rapidly between shivering innocent and manipulative, sinister harpy that one could use her performance as a fan.

So jumbled and meaningless is the film that whatever points Sena and writer Bragi F. Schut (who undoubtedly uses the middle initial to distinguish himself among the other Bragi Schuts) might have made are instantly canceled out by a plot contrivance that occurs typically minutes later. Behmen has seen the evil of the Church and both he and another knight (Ulrich Thomsen) know that religious leaders use witch trials to eradicate dissidents and those who don't fit neatly into the Church's vision of the ideal society. Oh, but wait, there actually are witches and demons so some of these hanging/drowning/inexplicably necessary incantations are clearly justified. Ergo, a few holy men might be full of hot air, but the Church itself is founded on a true basis of supernatural connection and some of the most grisly executions in human history are warranted. Likewise, someone finally has the sense to point out the protagonist cannot atone for years of atrocity by saving one pretty girl, but then that's exactly how how Behmen redeems himself.

That's what makes the film's smug tone all the more infuriating. It actually thinks itself clever, gracelessly speaking aloud its perceived subversion before showing another picture entirely. But everyone involved clearly thought they were making something intelligent until the focused looks begin to slack off about halfway through and Cage starts letting his hair do the acting. Sena even had the audacity to cite The Seventh Seal, one of the landmarks of film history, as a key inspiration. One can almost imagine the haughty son of a bitch lounging in an interview, casually taking a pull from a long cigarette and unironically saying, "Well, I felt a certain intuitive bond with witchcraft, because I'm in the business of making magic."

Season of the Witch has that cheap blue-gray glaze that directors like to use to instill a sense of chilly foreboding and despair, but I didn't need color suggestion for this film to make me sad. Compared to the host of oneiric films last year that incorporated dreams and highly subjective filmmaking into corkscrewing narratives, the third-person distance of Season of the Witch should make the movie far more linear, yet the lazy abandon of continuity and thematic development made the film so hard to follow that those series of useless title cards upfront become even more offensive in their inefficiency. We are spared even the glorious overreaction of Nicolas Cage's weirdness, and I feared that the accused witch at the beginning got that pig fat for her ointments by draining that glistening ham that is an unleashed Cage. Too dully self-confident and plodding to work as unintentional humor, Season of the Witch denied me even the thrill of a Nic Cage stinker. I'm giving the film one star, and that's solely for the brief flash of unintentional humor that had me rolling: a freeze-frame on Cage's face that looks as if someone snapped a drunken self-portrait at a Renaissance Fair-themed frat party. It's magnificent: the shot is supposed to move the audience, and I had tears in my eyes, all right.