Murder ‘Mystery’

Sending a cold brisk current down the viewers’ spine, Taylor Sheridan’s Wind River is a darkly piercing mystery crime thriller with an old school western vibe. Providing the film with a unique spin much like another story he penned, Hell or High Water (which earned Sheridan an Academy Award nomination), the motion picture has the feel of a traditional western updated with modern topics and themes. Like a John Ford epic, you’ll find a posse searching for answers, characters chock full of bravery, a sort of wild lawlessness, and picturesque yet harsh locales, though this is not set in the blistering deserts of the nineteenth century wild west, but rather on an Indian reserve in present day Montana, where the chilling wind blows a substance no less forgiving – snow.

A man – lonely, laconic and quick to anger. A woman – cool, collected and in hiding. Both live in the same apartment complex in The City of Angels. Murder brings them together, but will it keep them together? Written by Andrew Solt and directed by Nicholas Ray, In a Lonely Place immerses us within the world of a Hollywood screenwriter, the rough-and-tumble, explosive Dixon ‘Dix’ Steele (Humphrey Bogart – who also produces the film); an apropos name to be sure. Struggling with a multitude of demons, he is quick to anger and even quicker to act. Despite not having a hit since before the war, he is given a solid opportunity by his agent, Mel Lippman (Art Smith), who asks him to adapt a novel. Seemingly uninterested, he invites the club’s hat-check girl, Mildred Atkinson (Martha Stewart. . . not that Martha Stewart), to his home to summarize the book for him (as she has just finished reading it). Following their business, he sends her on her way, directing her to where cabs usually gather nearby.

Director Chan-wook Park, a visual mastermind who concocted the intoxicating Stoker in 2013 (a loose remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s superb Shadow of a Doubt), his first, and to date, only English language film, follows it by putting his talents into making another striking, intricately plotted psychological mystery/thriller in The Handmaiden. Loosely based upon Sarah Waters’ novel "Fingersmith", the filmmaker moves the tale from Victorian era England to 1930s Korea – which is under Japanese colonial rule. Divided into three parts, he utilizes the technique to great effect, providing us with only part of the story each time. In many ways it’s like being given a puzzle with only the edges to start with, so we think we understand what is going on, as we have been given the outline, but only truly gain a stronger appreciation of its complexity and beauty when provided with the pieces that fill in the whole picture. Park’s unique style slowly divulges the true essence of this film by providing alternate angles, different perspectives, flashbacks and flash forwards (those essential remaining puzzle pieces).

Though The Lady in the Car with Glasses and a Gun provides viewers with a pretty good idea of what the basic plot may be about, it is much more difficult to pin down. The French film, directed by Joann Sfar, is rather divisive, the type of love it or hate motion picture that is rarely made in this day and age. A beautifully visual dreamscape of a film, it pays tribute to surrealist movies of both the silent era as well as the sixties and seventies. Think Belle de Jour and Valerie and her Week of Wonders. It is also somewhat like a neo-noir, as well as an old school mystery thriller, à la Diabolique or Vertigo. Sfar utilizes a bevy of shots, angles, split-screens and other pieces of cinematic trickery to draw us in. It is like watching something made by Brian De Palma, Luis Buñuel and Alfred Hitchcock – clear aspects of each director can been seen, creating a certain visual aesthetic (we may have to throw in a little Guy Ritchie to boot). It bounces around in your head, bringing to mind horror (gothic and Giallo), fantasy, crime, drama, while also having a sort of fetishist vibe – on top of all of the other things mentioned above.

Maybe some of you have come across the term Giallo before. A type of Italian thriller that bubbled up in the sixties, it became very popular in ‘The Boot’ at the beginning of the 1970s. Filmmakers and screenwriters fused noirish murder mystery and tense thrills – usually with high doses of violence and more than suggestive nudity to create a crime or horror leaning story that could both scare and titillate its audience. Think of it kind of like when pulp fiction meets slasher film. One example that actually shows ‘some’ restraint in both of the above categories is Luciano Ercoli’s 1971 motion picture, Death Walks on High Heels. With definite connections to Alfred Hitchcock (Vertigo, Psycho) and many other thrillers of the past, as well as bringing to mind the 80's work of Brian De Palma (specifically Dressed to Kill and Body Double), the sordid tale follows a sultry stripper by the name of Nicole Rochard (credited as Susan Scott, a model who used the stage name instead of her original Spanish one, Nieves Navarro).

The saying ‘the eyes are the windows to the soul’ is perhaps no better explored than in the Argentinian Academy Award winning (for Best Foreign Language Film) 2009 motion picture The Secret in Their Eyes. Though the face is often inscrutable, as many put on masks to hide their true feelings from those around them, the eyes truly show the love, hate, lust, passion, pain regret and confusion that lies just below the mysterious facade. Co-written, directed, edited and produced by Juan José Campanella, the story follows retired criminal investigator Benjamín Esposito (Ricardo Darín) as he contemplates the innumerable hours he spent on the Liliana Coloto (Carla Quevedo) murder case (it is his white whale) by way of writing a novel. Struggling with a proper beginning, he visits Judge Irene Menéndez Hastings (Soledad Villamil), who he worked with all those years ago (the murder took place in 1974).