Deliver Us From Evil

Dear Amber Fleming-Shon, Standby Painter,

Scenic artists like you can often help good horror films stand apart from their less-than-palatable counterparts. As an audience, we know all the tricks a filmmaker uses to scare us: tense music, a vulnerable child, a cat that pops out of nowhere, etc. No shortage of those in Deliver Us From Evil. But your new film also straddles genres: it’s a supernatural thriller and a gritty detective story. The horror half will win out in the marketing campaign, but for my money it’s your work that makes this a real winner: you successfully create an atmosphere that feels like Se7en meets The Exorcist. 

Too bad they had to make the villain a painter, eh?

Or maybe not, since it gave you the juiciest scenes to work on. Like the early zoo sequence, when NYPD Sergeant Ralph Sarchie investigates an attempted murder, and there’s a potential witness creeping around the grounds at night. He’s carrying a paint roller and, when about to be questioned, disappears casually into the lion’s den (which is a nice upgrade from the aforementioned cat scare—though we get those as well, plus dogs, and rats, and fish, etc). It’s soon revealed that our mystery man is painting, and then covering over, ancient symbols around the city that are conjuring demons.

Since this film is “inspired by true accounts”,there was probably a painter, once, who painted something weird, and then something weird happened. You wouldn’t know anything about that though, would you?

Actually, don’t answer that. The less I know, the better. Which is the same philosophy I always take with me to the movies. In this case, I only knew about the headliners: Eric Bana in the lead and Édgar Ramírez as an “undercover” Jesuit priest. Ramírez has a lot of goodwill with me after his hypnotizing performance in Carlos, and I still find Bana appealing as an actor (even in his less impressive work). The biggest surprise here was seeing Community’s Jeff Winger, a.k.a. Joel McHale, as Bana’s adrenaline junkie partner. He seems like the most obvious “creative flourish” to this apparently true story, and a rather clichéd addition to the film’s canvas, especially with the very literal homage to Se7en, with each deadly sin tattooed on his neck.

Though director Scott Derrickson, who most recently helmed Sinister and wrote Devil’s Knot, is less interested in doing something new than doing something well. I can’t fault him for that. This film does have a wonderful sense of self and scale (with all those beautiful establishing shots of New York). Beautiful, too, is the rich black cinematography and creative set design. 

The grungy rooms you had to paint and re-paint give the proper sense of lived-in verisimilitude. The attention to detail is extremely useful until the third act, which is essentially one long by-the-book exorcism. At that point, all the subtlety you and the rest of the filmmakers (literally) goes flying out the window.

Peeling off, 

Christopher 

Status: Air Mail (3.5/5)

Kill Your Darlings

Dear Randall Poster, Music Supervisor,

Capturing the youthful rebellions of another time on film is tricky.  The things that once felt dangerous and subversive turn quaint as they become our parents and grandparents’ eras. By the time we hit great-grandparents, well, it’s hard to separate the rebels from the squares amongst all the period costumes and sets.  So it’s probably tempting to take a shortcut by giving modern audiences something familiar to grasp onto rather than doing a lot of world building. Too bad you gave in to this temptation by leaning on music from bands like TV On The Radio and Bloc Party to make-up for the faults in this mid-1940’s set film. 

Sure, if you were working with a director like Baz Luhrman, you could get away with it. But Luhrman is a magpie – he’s constructing his world out of those pieces. The mash-up is the point.  Unfortunately, in Kill Your Darlings, director John Krokidas seems to be asking something different of your soundtrack – he wants the jazz for the period feel, the classical music to show that his characters are intellectual, and the alt-pop to give them a more modern edge.  It ends up being a bad mix, with those contemporary songs belonging on an angsty teen TV show rather than a literary drama.

Based on an actual 1944 murder involving friends of the college-age pre-Beat writers, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs, Kill Your Darlings is also meant to show the birth of a literary movement that resonated for decades.  Daniel Radcliffe at least does a good job of conveying the evolution of Ginsberg’s sexuality and writing style, things that would set him on the fringes of his society.

Unfortunately, the movie doesn’t show us what Ginsberg and his friends were rebelling against. The movie mentions homophobia, anti-Semitism, and the peril of a world at war, but they only give us a sense rather than the crushing weight it must have been.  The movie spends more time on the oppression of poetic rhyme schemes – deadening to be sure (especially to a music enthusiast like you), but not something that really engages the average audience.

As music supervisor, there are much better options you could have presented to the director.  Last year’s On the Road had its flaws, but it was able to convey the audacity of jazz.  It wasn’t fun swing, or moody torch songs, but raw-edged bebop.  In that movie, when we saw Kerouac and Ginsberg dancing sweaty in a proto-moshpit, it was easy to understand how this music would concern the authorities and stir up the youth.  Here, the most we see is Radcliffe doing some enthusiastic table drumming.  No wonder you and Krokidas thought you needed to bring in the modern music. 

That’s not to say that there aren’t things in the film that work and work well. Radcliffe and Michael C. Hall both do excellent jobs of making us forget that they’re best known for other work, and Ben Foster as Burroughs is a treat.  Dane DeHaan as the murderous Lucien Carr has the charm of a baby DiCaprio, though somewhat hampered by overly arch dialogue.  The story itself is an interesting one, with Hall’s character being both stalker and mentor to Carr, while Carr is manipulative enough that it’s hard to believe his version of events. 

If Krokidas had trusted his actors and story more the movie might have had a chance to sing. 

Sincerely,

Erin

Status: Return to Sender (2/5)