By Francisco Silva -
Die My Love
Director: Lynne Ramsay
Writers: Enda Walsh, Lynne Ramsay, Alice Birch based on the book by Ariana Harwicz
Cast: Jennifer Lawrence, Robert Pattinson, Sissy Spacek, Nick Nolte, LaKeith Stanfield
Predator: Badlands
Director: Dan Trachtenberg
Writer: Patrick Aison based on the characters created by Jim Thomas and John Thomas
Die My Love
Were we really made to live in community? It’s comfortable to think we were, that’s how we got society, how we survived adversity and built the progress we now live in. But given the chance, the best of us would retreat to a cabin in the middle of the woods, living by ourselves, without the interference of the outside world. And the outside world loves to interfere.
The characters from Lynne Ramsay’s Die My Love already live in a cabin in the woods, away from most of society. Grace (Jennifer Lawrence) and Jackson (Robert Pattinson) are newlyweds and new parents. They live in a cabin that once belonged to Jackson’s uncle, who committed suicide, close to his mother, Pam (Sissy Spacek). They moved there before the pregnancy and the wedding, and they were young, horny and independent. Jackson’s father, Harry (Nick Nolte), who suffered from dementia, was still alive. But life doesn’t stagnate, and when the baby was born, Grace’s world became solely dedicated to the newborn, as Harry leaves them alone the whole day to go to work.
Grace struggles with the isolation. Or maybe she struggles with the loss of her identity. Maybe the ghost of Jackson’s family’s mental health woes permeates the walls. Maybe it’s her growing sexual frustration, as they don’t sleep as much as they used to. Maybe it’s motherhood. Or maybe, like Sartre says, hell is other people.
What is interesting is how Ramsay never blames the child. Grace’s love for the baby is neither put into question nor serves to excuse her demeanour. In a scene when she was pregnant, Grace connects with Harry, who is being neglected by the rest of his family, son included. Her observation to disconnect from the boring status quo has been there from the beginning.
It’s curious this is Ramsay’s first feature in eight years, since 2017’s You Were Never Really Here. Before that, she had made We Need To Talk About Kevin, where Tilda Swinton plays a mother who struggles to love her son. Before that, she made Morvern Callar, where Samantha Morton plays a woman reeling from grief after her partner’s suicide. These two films and this one form a curious trilogy about the layered complexity of womanhood, told through the points of view of three women who must face a real world they profoundly disagree with. There’s a pivotal scene in Die My Love where Grace and Jackson attend a friend’s birthday party. An ordinary group of people living an ordinary life and having the most trifling ordinary conversations. What Grace does becomes a necessary act of rebellion.
Ramsay’s depiction of mental health is raw and confronting, but it’s elevated by Lawrence’s physical performance. She crawls like a feline ready to attack, her emotions contained to avoid showing any sign of weakness. She’s not a mother in crisis; she’s a woman struggling to find her purpose, surrounded by people who demand her life from her. And Lawrence gives herself to that role, like Gena Rowlands in “A Woman Under the Influence,” she’s unflinching and labyrinthine. There aren’t just multitudes in her; there’s an entire expanding and burning universe.
Twice, the protagonists sing the John Prine and Iris Dement duet “In Spite Of Ourselves”. It’s a goofy tongue-in-cheek ditty about a couple listing the things they don’t like about each other, but none of that matters because “in spite of ourselves // we’ll end up a-sittin’ on a rainbow”. The optimism fizzles out at the end, after a breaking point, Grace sees her family life without her interference and is hit by a difficult realisation. The credits then roll to a haunting cover of Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart”, sung by Ramsay. “When routine bites hard // And ambitions are low // And resentment rides high // But emotions won’t grow // And we’re changing our ways //Taking different roads // Then love, love will tear us apart again.”
Verdict: 4 out of 5
For new mothers, caving to pressure. Remember, it’s not your fault, nor your child’s fault. It’s everyone else.
Predator: Badlands
Until Dan Trachtenberg, no one knew what to do with the Predator franchise. It’s a simple formula that, after the original in 1987 (directed by John McTiernan), studios have been trying to reverse engineer to limited success. The frame is simple, a powerful alien, equipped with state-of-the-art gadgets (including an invisibility cloak), on our planet hunting the most formidable target he can find. The more a human fights back, the more the creature sets its eyes on them. It’s maybe too simple for Hollywood, because even the immensely talented Shane Black (who acted in the original film) couldn’t recreate the same magic.
And then Trachtenberg comes in 2022 with a very simple solution – the same as before, but in a different era and part of the world. In the case of the film Prey, set in North America in the early 18th century, a young Comanche woman fights against both outer space invaders and European invaders. It was like discovering gunpowder again. Trachtenberg’s film was fresh, gripping, and held the spirit of the original on a pedestal. Disney found the solution to the franchise by giving the keys to a man who understood the essence of the character. Since he made a direct-to-stream animated film that expands on the universe and visits their original planet, and it was all set for the upcoming release, a Predator film set through the eyes of the Predator.
So what the hell went wrong here?
Predator: Badlands manages to commit all the sins Trachtenberg avoided in the previous two entrances, and then some. The story follows a young Yautja (the race of the Predators, but honestly, not that we care) named Dek (Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi) on his way to the final hunt before he’s accepted by his clan. The planet he’s chosen is home to an especially gruesome creature even Dek’s father fears, so to prove his worth, that’s the target he chooses.
Upon arrival, Dek finds an inhospitable planet inhabited by a wide range of deadly fauna and flora. He also meets a friendly legless android named Thia (Elle Fanning), who is on the planet in search of the same creature as part of a Weyland-Yutani mission, thus connecting this to the Alien franchise. Used to proudly hunt alone, the young Yautja justifies supporting Thia by seeing her as a tool, therefore acceptable to use. However, this means he will learn to work as a team and appreciate the help of others, or something equally profound. There’s also a little funny monkey sidekick, so it’s effectively Predator out on an adventure with C-3PO and an Ewok.
Halfway through this, I felt like I was watching an episode of a Disney+ TV show. It’s weightless in order to make space for elements that need to be explored in the future of the franchise. The tone is so light and absurd that it calls back to the sins of Joss Whedon in the Marvel franchise. I’ll say this in a pejorative way: it feels like a video game, in the sense that video games have to dilute the universe and the plot to make way for elements that distract from the main plot while keeping our minds occupied. Badlands has a bunch of good ideas, but none of them takes time to develop. Instead, the plot trudges too fast and too loose, connected by swift set-pieces glued by little quippy jokes that Trachtenberg and his writer, Patrick Aison, clearly don’t have the talent to pull off, so I safely assume they were included because of production notes.
Gearing up towards the climax, it feels like Badlands finds its stride, as Dek returns to previous areas from the planet to collect items that he can use on a base invasion sequence (see, it’s just a videogame), but none of these are used in a fun or inventive way because we aren’t given time to wait for the payoff. It just quickly happens.
Predator: Badlands is too silly for its own sake. I refuse to believe that this was Trachtenberg’s plan, just from the fact that it diverges so much from his style, even his pre-Predator features. It plays like a contractual job from a studio setting up the pieces for a franchise and how it connects with their other IPs. It has the cynical benchmarks of corporate infliction. It exists not to entertain us but to expand a brand. It’s a registered mark logo. A stakeholder footnote.
Verdict: 2 out of 5
For anyone interested in this franchise is directly related to the lore. There is enough entertainment to distracting from the film’s many shortcomings.
