Author: Ed Bayliss

By Ed Bayliss

There might not have been a better place to watch Fourth Wall Theatre’s student production of hang than in the Durham Union Chamber, the traditional seat of university debate and dialogue. In collaboration with Durham Law Society, this legal drama pits the grief, anger, and ultimate lust for revenge of a wronged woman known only as ‘Three’ (Alexa Thanni) against the emotional ineptitude of a pair of legal officials (‘One’, Tilly Bridgeman, and ‘Two’, Charlie Fitzgerald). Three must decide the fate of an unnamed man who has committed a crime against her and her family under the supervision and legal advice of Two and Three. 

Minimalist in design, the set consists of three chairs, a desk, and a water fountain. The last of which is used to good effect to fill not only the cups that sit neatly below it but also the toe curling silences that so frequently punctuate the play. One yellow light shines blindingly from the front of the stage. This gave good opportunity for One and Two to stand before the single source of lighting and leave Three in dark, literally, and metaphorically. 

Hang is intentionally frustrating. In the first third of the play, we wrestle with the mundanity of cumbersome legal jargon, protocol, and process. Lines are reeled off in stichomythic exchanges between One and Two with good poise and precision; but all we hear is sound with little to no substance. We develop the neck muscles of a tennis umpire as our sight and attention shift constantly between the two legals in their trivial but constant asides to one another. These are two unprofessional professionals attempting to carry out their jobs ‘by the book’ (bound in bureaucratic red tape) but failing miserably, and often comically. Their dialogues trip over each other as the disillusioned Three remains largely silent. 

Where Three first carries herself with a quiet remoteness and disillusion, clutching her jacket to her body, she gradually becomes more vocal and begins to challenge both Two and Three in their mishandling of the situation, as well as the judicial system in general. At one moment, about halfway through the production, Three delivers an outburst aimed at the sickening diplomacy of Two and Three. At the plastic performance of relatability from the two officials, Three, in a moment of authentic vehemence cries aloud, ‘can you just stop fucking talking!’ Two, wearing a shop-bought smile responds with, ‘I can see how upsetting this is for you.’ 

Director Megan Dunlop manages the space of the stage well to accommodate her audience in the round. One and Two, as though on a conveyor belt, move up and down the central protrusion of the stage in tandem, ensuring all spectators are afforded their fair share of attention. Three has the impressive quality of attaching herself to individual audience members in her particularly turbulent moments of emotional eruption. Being seated on the front row of the benches, I found myself subject to an episode of Three’s fits of anger and felt its effects very personally. Dunlop utilises the off-stage as well; we occasionally hear One and Two squabble over legal technicalities and small prints from the stairwell outside in some instances of comic relief. 

As with most plays, hang finds its ‘crescendo moment’ near enough to the end of the play. But where most theatre productions will raise volume, visible emotion, and physical action, Dunlop’s direction delivers a cold and clinical finale. Three, having contemplated for the man in question the executions of beheading, firing squad, and lethal injection, settles distressingly comfortably on the monosyllables, ‘I want him hung.’ We are told that this will be carried out by an ‘anonymous expert execution team’: it is lines like these that playwright Debbie Tucker Green executes so knowingly in her bouts of black comedy. 

I find that the journey of Three from woman of victim to vengeance is the most striking feature of the play. It’s true, the production riffs on and satirises the longevity and incommodious nature of ‘the legal process’, presented really very entertainingly by Bridgeman (One) and Fitzgerald (Two). But, the most interesting and gripping aspect of Dunlop’s arrangement was the liberty at which she allowed Three to make the seamless transition from vulnerable sufferer to the cunning and calculated author of the man’s fate she eventually becomes.    

By Edward Bayliss

If I could see the world through the eyes of a child

What a wonderful world this would be

In a nondescript apartment block somewhere in London, screenwriter Adam (Andrew Scott) struggles to write about his dead parents. As he reaches for a ready meal, the cold blue light from the inside of his refrigerator illuminates his bent-backed posture. Despite his enormous apartment windows overlooking the nation’s capital below, we only really see Adam in the  white glare of his television or computer screens. We are relieved when Scott’s character decides to leave the confinement and impersonality of his high-rise block to travel to his family home, presumably in search of inspiration. Adam stands atop a field and watches the slant of sunset ripple across trees and grasses. Then, in a strangely unthreatening supernatural moment, the voice of a man in the background beckons him to come ‘home’. The man is Adam’s father. ‘Dad’ (Jamie Bell) leads Adam into his 1980s decorated home where ‘Mum’ (Claire Foy) greets him affectionately. Soft amber light swims across yellowed wallpaper, and a thin cloud of cigarette smoke lends a grainy texture to the shot. Adam revisits his childhood (trauma); most notably, to reconcile his sexuality to his parents who were unwitting products of 1980s state-sanctioned homophobia. 

Andrew Haigh’s film operates, apparently, across the separate plot paths of Adam’s personal and familial history, and the ‘real-time’ story of his delicate but passionate relationship with fellow apartment block dweller, Harry (Paul Mescal). We first meet Harry as he knocks tentatively on Adam’s door – he grips a bottle of whiskey – an object that will gain some significance at the film’s climax. Adam confronts his loneliness by wandering somnambulantly into the oneiric episodes of his childhood, whereas Harry drinks deep in an act of burial and suppression. He has, as he admits defeatedly, ‘drifted to the edge’. They begin to talk. And talking, we should know already, is the only avenue of escape from the torture of loneliness. 

Above all else, All of Us Strangers is an acutely honest film. Unashamedly and forthrightly, the lens isn’t afraid to dig through the rubble of lost childhoods and reclaim something of intense value. With a cast of just four, whose faces seem always to fill the screen in extreme close ups, it perhaps can’t help but be sincere. Andrew Haigh’s film, however, lifts the lid on the traditional trauma-confrontation film and takes us on welcome diversions we didn’t know were accessible. The director focuses on the remarkably abstract and obscure way in which mental turmoil affects memory. 

Terrifyingly, Adam’s mind mangles time and reality. It has its toll on him – at one moment he sees his own face warped into some semblance of a screaming Francis Bacon portrait on the curved tube window. Like many directors before him, Haigh enjoys the use of glass and its distorting qualities in his shot selections. Adam finds it too easy to slip into his childhood life as it becomes an attachment onto which he clings relentlessly, almost unhealthily.  Harry  warns Adam: ‘Don’t let this get tangled up again.’ 

We learn two things from Adam’s progress through the film: 1. That you must coexist with your past self; 2. That in equal measure, you must learn to leave that past self behind when you no longer need it. Adam’s parents, you could say, are almost pseudo-Nanny McPhee characters, reminding us that ‘When you need me, but do not want me then I must stay. But when you want me but no longer need me, I have to go.’   

The lyrics that commence this review are heard near the end of the film when Adam meets with his parents for the last time. With golden light seeping into the edges of the shot, Scott’s character and his parents eat at their favourite American-style diner in Croydon. In an incredibly touching moment, Adam says goodbye for good, and they urge him on to his wide futures with Harry. Yes, Adam has seen the world again through the eyes of a child, and it was instrumental in his reckoning with the past, but he must now learn to look ahead, and wrestle with the complexities of 21^st C. life and living. 

By Edward Bayliss

When asked why he is so committed to his profession as a surgeon and scientific experimentalist, Dr. Godwin Baxter, or ‘God’, replies coolly: ‘My amusement.’ Physically disfigured and clinically disposed, Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe) bears all the hallmarks of a madly possessive psychopath as we see him rear his newest design, Bella Baxter (Emma Stone). Godwin’s literal brainchild (Bella’s brain is replaced with that of her unborn baby) is a young woman beginning to understand afresh the ways of the world. You’d be forgiven for thinking Godwin was a wicked and perverted man. It is however established early in the film that Bella was dead when Godwin performed his restoring surgery on her, and that Godwin is characterised more as a father figure than a Humbert Humbert of Lolita. He asks his creation, ‘Would you rather the world did not have Bella?’   

Bella learns quickly; at first we see her stumbling across the black and white marbled floors with the awkwardness of a toddler, then, there comes her self-realisation and yearning for ‘experience’ and ‘adventure’. The main object of comedy in the film exists in the contention between Bella’s naïve outlook and her exposure to ‘the real world’ as she elopes with the seedy Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo). For her, sex is ‘furious jumping’, food she dislikes is allowed to be spat out at high society dinners, and it is acceptable for her to ask Wedderburn in public if he would like to ‘tongue play’ her. Her physical comedy is also deftly crafted – she hasn’t yet mastered her own body, let alone her mind. It is hard to overstate the hilarity with which Bella’s character is met, accelerated also by Wedderburn’s growing frustration with her and his constant reprimands (‘You cunty cuntface dipshit’). 

The two embark on a kind of odyssey, travelling to Lisbon, Alexandria, sailing across the Mediterranean, and eventually arriving in Paris. Lanthimos’ fantastic use of soundstages with painted glowing backdrops adds a surrealist slant to these settings in the film. These are especially striking as they are pitted against the black and white Victorian gothic look of London, with its strangely postmodern architecture and steampunk-inspired outfit. We move from the trivial treatment of gore and exacting empiricism in Godwin’s laboratory littered with nightmarishly Boschian animal hybrids, to the artistic and cultural wonders of the continent; the wide eyed Bella is arrested by such beauty. In tandem with Bella’s growing emotional awareness and intelligence, the camera becomes more excitable and adventurous. Its fisheye lens begins even more to distort and liven the frame, with increased use of wide angle tilt-shift shots (almost Luhrmann-inspired) that place small figures against fantastical set designs. Cinematographer Robbie Ryan clearly has had his fun, not at all at the expense of the film. 

Bella encounters emotions unlike any she has felt before as she exclaims energetically, ‘my soul has been buckled’. Her mind becomes alive to ideas of politics and philosophy. Where once we might have considered her the ward, child, or sexual object of Wedderburn, she now intellectually outperforms him, and even prostitutes herself in Paris as an act of paradoxical sexual self-determination. At one moment in the brothel, Bella carries out vicious intercourse with a customer, at which point the camera shrewdly cuts to her reading a book entitled ‘Ethics’. She involves herself with socialist doctrine and vies for workers’ rights along with another prostitute colleague. Despite her means or methods, she is as the brothel manager asserts, ‘a woman plotting her course to freedom.’

Poor Things is, at its most basic form, a study. Occasionally, the camera will retreat into a circular frame and watch from a faraway wall, as though we are peering cautiously through an unadjusted microscope. This is a study that calls into question the critical notion of selfhood. Who is Bella Baxter? Is she the warped play-thing of Godwin? her unborn baby whose brain she possesses? or simply, her own evolving and learning creation? Moreso, Lanthimos makes it difficult for the viewer to discern who the real monsters, or ‘deformed’, are in his film. We meet so many characters who are debased, ugly, and despicable, but essentially human, that it leaves us wondering what exactly a ‘monster’ is. 

My friend and I left Tyneside cinema with much to discuss – a train delay of over an hour gave us ample time to do so. I agreed with him when he said that it feels, upon watching Poor Things, like you have just read an entire book. That is how much this film offers.   

By Ed Bayliss

“My whole life has been movies and religion. That’s it. Nothing else.” 

(Martin Scorsese)

There exist three films in Scorsese’s portfolio that are explicitly tilted towards the lives of religious figures. This unusual trinity of films consists of The Last Temptation of Christ, Silence, and Kundun. The latter drifts from the bloody trials of Christianity into the meditative stillness of 20^th C. Buddhist Tibet, perhaps providing a refuge for the three times divorced Scorsese and the guilt of his lapsed Catholicism.   

In The Last Temptation of Christ, the titular Christ shockingly states: “I’m a liar. A hypocrite. I’m afraid of everything. I don’t ever tell the truth. I don’t have the courage. When I see a woman, I blush and look away. I want her…” While screening this film in 1988, the Saint Michel cinema in Paris was bombed and set alight. Scorsese’s rendering of Christ as a man wrestling with his own capricious animalism and a life scripted by a distant and unknowable God became indigestible for many. 

The filmmaker’s most recent ‘religious’ film, Silence, took us on a heavily theological journey through Christian persecution in Japan. The central question asked is one of the literal ‘silence’ of God and its relation to theodicy. Slow and brooding, but ultimately rewarding, this contemplative film, I think, mirrors a director who has recovered some sense of religious direction. 

What interests me most, however, is the veil of Catholic doctrine that falls lightly but definitely over Scorsese’s remaining films. I would like to expand upon what critic Roger Ebert has spoken of as “Redemption by Blood” and the centrality of blood itself to transformation – a fundamental tenet of Roman Catholicism. Scorsese lifts this Catholic mass inspired image, mangles it, and drops it into the avenues of the Bronx as he remarks in Mean Streets, “You don’t make up for your sins in church. You do it in the streets. You do it at home.” For directors like Tarantino, violence is style, but for Scorsese, it’s sacramental.

Critic Barbara Mortimer has identified a specific character type in the Scorsese oeuvre, the “postmodern person”; someone whose identity becomes a “matter of impersonation”. Such characteristics can be seen in Travis Bickle (Taxi Driver), Jake La Motta (Raging Bull), and Charlie Cappa (Mean Streets); all of whom attempt cleansing and redemption through the spilling of blood.  

For La Motta, a man who sees himself in the mirror but doesn’t know himself, the altar rails of the Catholic mass become the ropes of the boxing ring. The camera pans to blood dripping from the ring rope in an extreme close-up. Jake, having abandoned his wife and his brother, takes to bloodshed and endures physical punishment, a symbol of the sacrament, in a bid to effect a spiritual awakening of sorts. A passage from John’s Gospel closes the film resulting in images conjured which are very much in line with the act of redemption by blood. 

Alternatively, Taxi Driver’s Travis Bickle, self-described as “God’s lonely man”, attempts to map himself as the hero of the narrative. At the climax of the film, we see Bickle stalk through a brothel wielding his Smith & Wesson handgun whose bullets rip through every man he comes across. We follow behind him as he is shot several times while blood, sacrificial blood, issues from all over his body. The words “Jesus loves you” are graffitied on the staircase wall as he ascends. Bickle sees himself as the postmodern-martyr; a title that necessitates death, so he attempts suicide, but his revolver is out of ammo. The ‘hero’ sits on a sofa, blood-soaked, with his head tilted upwards while closing his eyes acceptingly. Jodie Foster’s character collapses to her knees, weeping before Bickle, much like Mary Magdalene at the scene of Christ’s crucifixion.

Harvey Keitel’s character in Mean Streets seeks his redemption not in church but through sacrificing himself for his friend Johnny who is in debt to loan sharks. He admits: “Ten Hail Marys, ten Our Fathers, ten whatever … Those things, they don’t mean anything to me. They’re just words …” One can’t help but hear the pained voice of Scorsese through Charlie Cappa’s (nicknamed St. Charles) moral musings. At the concluding stages of the film, we watch Charlie’s efforts to drive Johnny and his cousin Teresa out of town as they are pursued by hostile ‘debt collectors’. Charlie crashes the car as he is shot in the arm and bleeds while kneeling beside the cleansing spray of a fire hydrant. This is, as critic Joel Mayward recognises, “religious cinema for non-believers.”  

Scorsese has said that he “wouldn’t presume to be God’s point of view.” And so, ultimately, he accounts for the loftiness of Christ’s trial by bloodshed in terms of the hardships of the everyman in search of redemption.         

By Edward Bayliss

The Phillipou brothers seem to be the next sibling duo to stamp their seal on the cinematic landscape of the 2020s with the release of their film Talk to Me, made available to the public this summer just gone. An A24 horror film that follows an increasingly esteemed pedigree from the same producers, Talk to Me offers challenging takes on the nature of the supernatural object (in this case an embalmed hand) and its teenage users. I apply the word ‘users’ here because this ceramic hand is presented as an article of obsession for the characters who take turns to enjoy its terrifying ecstasy of possession, all while filming it behind mobile phones. That is until the central character played by Sophie Wilde (embodying brilliantly the dizzying psychologies of childhood grief) believes she has contacted her dead mother through the ‘hand’ and unwittingly unleashes a paranormal presence.

Cue the inevitable line: ‘What if we opened the door but didn’t shut it?’

What follows is an effort spearheaded by Wilde’s character to amend the rift with the parasitic spirits of limbo, while peeling back the mystery surrounding the circumstances of her mother’s death. 

This film seems to be cut from the same cloth as The Babadook (2014), a fellow Australian production whose crew involved many of the same that are present in Talk to Me. Despite relatively low budgets, both films explore their respective objects of horror (the Babadook book & the embalmed hand) with a shrewd eye. 

The embalmed hand itself is a great object of cinematic invention. Unlike the doll of The Conjuring, or the blood stained hockey mask of Friday the Thirteenth, the hand has an implicit dexterity, angularity, and importantly, a grip; all of which give it an impression of uneasiness. It is white with graffiti all over, displaying its use over the ages by similarly curious teens. There is no heavy-handed discussion of the object’s backstory, and no such origin is questioned in any detail by any of the characters. We are told it is the hand of a medium, that’s it – the rest isn’t important to the plot so isn’t worth dissecting to a tedious degree, allowing for a good pacing and continuation of plot in real time. 

A great supporting cast convey convincingly the stubbornness and unforgiving nature of the contemporary teenager navigating relationships at a tricky time in life. They cover most archetypes of the college character, from shy misfits to smug socialites, albeit in a sensitive and reasonable fashion. The characters behave plausibly, while also allowing for decent plot development. Additionally, it must be said that the Phillipou brothers have their fingers on the pulse when they enjoy the strap-line, ‘Possession Goes Viral’, as they capture our era of internet crazes and trends in this absurdly horrific iteration of the phenomenon. 

The camera is at its most ‘involved’ in the possession scenes which punctuate the film with regularity. The lens flings itself with the possessed subjects, rotating and jolting as we the observers participate in the rituals with the teens. There is one very clever match-cut wherein our perceptions of horizontal and lateral plains are completely messed with by the camera work as the main character moves seamlessly from reality to her possessed state. Prosthetic effects are used with a potency that will satisfy any gore enthusiast, mainly thanks to a really ‘head banging’ scene relatively early in the film’s run time. 

Having not gone too far into the ins and outs of plot, the film does have a tangible and satisfying narrative; it begins with a flashback scene and returns there to embellish it later, suitably connecting the threads. The ending, however, is the exceptionally gripping moment in the drama which will stay with you for some time. Interviews reveal that the directors were sure that the horror would conclude with this twist regardless of what preceded it – I think this says something of its gravity. 

Talk to Me has enjoyed some celebrity among the releases of the year so far, and I’m not surprised. It brushes broad strokes across horror history – inviting us into the age old traditions of the candlelit séance and the cursed object all through the zeitgeist lens of the Phillipou pair. This feature directorial debut is one to watch.