‘The passenger’
Rent or buy it on Vudu
Blasco (Ramiro Blas), a former bullfighter, drives a van that transports people across Spain. He’s a farmer who doesn’t like feminists, and that doesn’t sit well with his three passengers on a fateful day: Mariela (Cecilia Suárez), a religious woman who has cancer, and Lidia (Cristina Alcázar), who takes her moody teenage daughter Marta (Paula Gallego.)), to live with Lidia’s ex-husband.
But Blasco’s macho whining is the least of the group’s concerns. As night falls, they come across a gurgling organism that spits a tiny worm into Marta’s finger, and not long after, Blasco plows his van into a disfigured woman standing in the road. As he transports her to the hospital, she spits a translucent gunk that turns Mariela into a growling killer. From there it is a brawl between humans and evil.
This dark horror comedy, by the Spanish directorial duo Raúl Cerezo and Fernando González Gómez, is more than a stomach cramping infection film. It’s also a surprisingly moving look at how people, especially parents and their children, forgive each other when trauma is a parasite with sticky fingers. I don’t know how much the messy, gooey makeup effects cost, but the directors got their money’s worth.
I admired, more than I enjoyed, this folk-horror fable set in the lush rural landscapes of 19th-century Macedonia, where the supernatural and the ordinary share a fraught coexistence.
When she turns 16, a stupid girl named Nevena (Sara Klimoska) is taken from her mother by a Freddy Krueger-looking demon (Anamaria Marinca), known to the locals as Old Maid Maria. With ruthless ferocity, Maria instructs her new child in the ways of a shape-shifter, a life in which Nevena must slaughter the people she wants to become, including a young village woman (Noomi Rapace).
Macabre and visually striking, the film trades in a style of folk horror that’s just this side of pretentious. Still, writer-director Goran Stolevski and cinematographer Matthew Chuang teamed up to create a film about a young woman’s quest for self-discovery, with beautiful passages of sensuality and joy, as well as shocking acts of brutality. There’s also a subversive queerness: when Nevena becomes a handsome young man, she examines both the male body and the expectations that come with it.
Clayton Witmer’s film is an intensely moody and gripping character drama that masquerades as an old-fashioned creature film.
Ethan (Drew Matthews) is an introverted locksmith who lives alone in an American suburb near his brother (Ryan Davenport) and his family. One night, Ethan drives into a deer carcass and inside he finds a squiggly creature, a cross between a spider and a lobster. He takes it home, where the little guy breaks free from its cage and eventually grows to monstrous size. When a neighbor is found dead one morning, Ethan has a hunch as to who the killer is.
At just under two hours, the film is too long to support its uncanny ambitions. But it’s a spell weaver. I was particularly drawn to how Witmer takes a monster metaphor in unexpected directions as he explores what it means to grow up and never leave a small town. Ayinde Anderson’s fine cinematography makes the North Carolina suburb where the film was shot appear humble and sinister.
‘Moloch’
Stream it on Shudder
This feature film by Nico van den Brink is a conventional supernatural folk horror drama that nevertheless offers a good night’s sleep and a doozy ending.
Set in the Netherlands, the film begins as Jonas (Alexandre Willaume) and his team of researchers work near a peat swamp where Betriek (Sallie Harmsen) lives with her young daughter. They make a bizarre discovery: a long-dead body of a woman whose throat had been cut open vertically. Meanwhile, Betriek’s father places a sensor in the yard after a disturbed man yells, “They’re forcing me to do it!” while attacking the family.
As Betriek and Jonas begin a romance, she tells him that the creepy goings on may have something to do with a family curse that followed her grandmother’s unsolved murder. She’s right, and the curse has its claws out for her and her daughter.
I don’t quite understand the demonic myth that “Moloch” feeds; it has biblical roots and has something to do with a hungry female spirit. But that’s okay, because Van den Brink’s film is brimming with tension and lobs of eccentric fears, like a creepy scene in which Betriek encounters a possessed child in an elevator. The freaky final scene is horrifying.
‘3 demons’
Rent or buy it on most major platforms
Even if it borrows from “Ju-On: The Grudge,” “The Vigil,” and other horror movies, DM Cunningham’s compelling low-budget ghost story still stuns on its own terms.
The film begins on a stormy night in a cell as James (Peter Tell) recounts the harrowing events of a horrific day to his prison counselor (Sherryl Despres). Looking back, James explains that he was a police officer who once had to protect a corpse found near a cabin in the woods. He started seeing red poppies and a woman in a red dress — clues, he says, as to why he was there, who the victim was, and what a fellow officer (Haley Heslip) had to do with it. As he recalls the gory horrors that followed, we learn that James harbored terrible secrets that a sheet could never hide.
From tempo to chronology, this movie is off-kilter; dream states and reality share space in scenes that do not flow from one to the other. But Tell’s dark comedic performance and Cunningham’s adventurous direction make it work. That is, until the film’s many detours — from zombie comedy to sci-fi thriller to Hallmark romance — race to a confusing ending.
