Category: One Thing I Like

One thing I really like about Ballerina is the scene in which our protagonist Eve finds an arms dealer to equip her with all the various weaponry she’ll need to continue her quest of ultimate vengeance. To explain why I like that scene so much would require me to spoil it, so I’ll save it for later.

Based on the trailers, I’d expected this just to be Ms John Wick. At this point, I’ve still only seen the first movie, so I wasn’t sure exactly what that would entail, but regardless, I was all for it. One of the most beautiful women in the world as a super assassin going to exotic locations, shooting, stabbing, judo- and flame-throwing a bunch of bad¹ guys? What’s not to like?

And I’m delighted to report that the movie does indeed kick so much ass. It manages to include everything I’d expected from the first John Wick movie after hearing about them for so many years: shamelessly gratuitous hyper-violence, ridiculous world-building about clans of assassins who live by a strict code of honor, and beautiful cinematography surrounding its lengthy bouts of ass-kicking. Including, yes, a set piece inside an absurd purple-lit nightclub, this one full of walls and tables made of ice.

It also manages to include a good bit of what pleasantly surprised me with the first movie: a sense of restraint and economical storytelling. I don’t want to overstate that and give the wrong impression, since Ballerina is a lot more excessive than John Wick, and everything that that movie either implied or showed in flashback is explicitly shown here in a long origin sequence starting with Eve as a child and continuing through her training. But there’s still a sense that the movie knows exactly what it is and what’s important to this story, and it knows exactly how to make a simple story engaging enough that you’re not distracted by how simple it is.

Even more importantly, it wastes as little time as possible getting its story obligations out of the way and advancing to the next action set piece. There’s a great command of timing and pacing; the beginning does seem to drag on a bit, but you soon realize that it’s been putting all of the pieces into place, so that the entire last half of the movie can be practically uninterrupted action.

And a side effect of that command of timing is that the movie is surprisingly funny. There are no comic relief characters, and everyone plays it completely straight-faced throughout, but the action is choreographed so that scenes will have laugh-out-loud moments interspersed with all of the hyper-violence.² It is unapologetically a “He done blowed up real good!” movie that remains aware of the point where all of the action just becomes silly, and it lets the audience enjoy the silliness for a beat before quickly reining things back.

I don’t know whether the rest of the franchise is as much bombastic fun as Ballerina is, but now I’m actually looking forward to diving back in and finding out for myself. Getting into specifics about my favorite scenes will require spoiling things. This is such a simple movie that there’s really not much to spoil, but I’d hate to ruin what made the scenes work so well for me.

My favorite moments in The Life of Chuck are in the scene when the world ends, and I don’t consider that a spoiler. It’s simultaneously wonderfully fantastic, ominous, and so grounded, with near-flawless performances from Karen Gillan and Chiwetel Ejiofor. The full weight of the entire story rests on that scene, and the movie nails it.

Which is a relief, since I think The Life of Chuck spends its entire running time walking a tightrope over a chasm of either apocalyptic nihilism or overly maudlin, Forrest Gump-style sentimentality. I thought there were several moments when it stumbled, threatening to go over the edge, but in the end, it made it. And delivered a tasteful and understated flourish.

For me, most of those stumbles were due to the narration. The movie was written, directed, and edited by Mike Flanagan, adapting a novella from Stephen King’s collection If It Bleeds. So periodically, we get extremely King-sounding descriptions delivered by Nick Offerman. (I haven’t read the book, but I wouldn’t be surprised if entire passages were lifted directly). The casting and the performance are as good as they can be, with Offerman reading everything with his very recognizable tone; I can easily imagine it’s the tone that King had in mind when he was writing it. It’s blunt and matter-of-fact, giving everything an edge that keeps it from becoming too maudlin, but is also just flippant enough to remind you that it’s not a horror story. This is one of the life-affirming ones.

So my issue with it isn’t the performance, but the choice to have it at all. I hate narration in adaptations of literary works, because it just feels like the filmmakers throwing up their hands and taking the easier way out. It feels clunky but acceptable when it’s just giving exposition like characters’ names and backgrounds. It veers into the annoying when it jumps in to describe exactly what a character is thinking or feeling in a particular moment, instead of trusting the performances to get the point across.

But even that is part of the one thing I like the most about The Life of Chuck — do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself — which is that I overwhelmingly got the sense that this was a very heartfelt, sincere, and personal project from Mike Flanagan. I know enough about him to know that he loves cinema and that he’s a big fan of Stephen King, so it’s very easy to imagine that he included passages of narration when he thought that the author had described the character or the moment perfectly.

After Asteroid City, I was concerned that my time as a Wes Anderson Movie Enjoyer had come to an end. He’d gotten so enamored of his own affectations and mannerisms that everything became completely impenetrable, and I was left like one of his characters, staring blankly at everything and unable to feel anything.

So it’s a relief that I thought The Phoenician Scheme was actually pretty funny. It’s still in love with all of its own affectations and mannerisms — and rigid compositions, and flawless art direction, this time set in 1955 and delivering a mid-century modern take on an alternate-reality Europe and Mediterranean — and it’s still about the familiar themes of dysfunctional families, odd people unable or unwilling to connect with their own emotions, unexpressed grief, and flawed men trying to make sense of their own legacy. But it has a lot of fun with it.

As usual, it’s the side characters who are the most interesting, since the main characters are invariably forced to deliver perfect performances all delivered in a deadpan monotone. Here, the standouts are Jeffrey Wright (playing almost the exact opposite of his character in Asteroid City), and Michael Cera as a tutor turned administrative assistant with an absurd accent. I’m not the first person to say it, but it immediately feels as if Cera has been part of Wes Anderson’s ensemble all along, instead of this being his first time.

One thing I really liked happens in a scene in which Benicio del Toro’s character Zsa-zsa Korda is getting a blood transfusion from his business partner Marty. The two men are lying with another man sitting in between them, manually pumping the blood. Korda is being grilled by his daughter Liesl (played by Mia Threapleton) asking pointed questions about her mother.

The scene is shot like a fairly typical argument in a Wes Anderson movie, cutting back and forth between POV shots of Korda and Liesl as they give short bursts of dialogue. Korda says something offensive, and Liesl slaps him. But we see the slap from Korda’s POV, meaning that Liesl pulls her hand back, and the camera whips to the side to show Jeffrey Wright’s character looking alarmed. The argument continues a bit, and she slaps him again, and the camera once again whips around to show Marty.

The reason I like it so much is mostly because it surprised me. It took me a second to realize what exactly had happened, and it was only after the second slap that I put it all together. These movies are so rigid and so formalistic — and here, even the camera movement is a perfectly level 90-degree quick pan, instead of like reacting to an actual slap — that they’re so rarely surprising. Even when there is a dramatic jolt, like in the first few minutes of this one, both the characters and the camera tend to react completely dispassionately. I feel like I’ve seen a similar scene dozens of times in Anderson’s movies, where a character displays a sudden burst of emotion, and they’re all filmed the same way: the camera remains static, and all the characters immediately reset to default. It was a surprise to see the camera become more than just a silent observer, and to realize that we were actually seeing things from Korda’s perspective.

And it was a surprise to see a Wes Anderson movie having fun with the format. Or more accurately: all the movies I’ve seen have the feeling that the filmmakers are having a lot of fun, but this felt like an attempt to let the audience join in.

There’s another bit later on, where Korda is talking to Liesl about his possibly getting baptized as a Catholic. During the scene, his dialogue and his delivery both subtly change. His speaking throughout has been very tightly controlled and reserved, but here it gets slightly more naturalistic. Less regimented and like self-consciously written dialogue, more like the character is trying to say what he’s actually feeling in the moment.

It all feels a little bit like small cracks in the ice, like the movie is very cautiously considering the possibility of maybe slightly breaking through all of its layers of deliberate artifice. As if it’s trying to be playful in a way that engages with the audience, instead of playful in a way that’s presented to the audience, and we’re expected to politely clap and say, “yes, quite delightful, that. Good show.”

Before going to see the movie, I’d read several reviews that complained that the movie was too detached and impenetrable to be enjoyable. But I thought that’s just baseline levels of Wes Anderson Movie, where you’re occasionally not even sure if it’s trying to be classified as a comedy. I didn’t think The Phoenician Scheme was quite as funny as the movie itself seemed to think, but I was pleasantly surprised to see a Wes Anderson movie that could surprise me.

After over a decade of cultural diffusion — marketing campaigns for four movies and now a spin-off, countless memes, the character’s appearance in video games — the act of actually watching any of the John Wick movies seemed like just a formality. I assumed that whatever magic was inside had dried up a long time ago, and I was impossibly late to the party.

But after watching the first movie, I suspect that it might’ve been excellent timing. This is a movie about a character whose reputation precedes him. So much of John Wick is devoted to scenes establishing what a fearsome bad-ass John Wick is, without actually showing him being a bad-ass. I’d imagined it would be an hour and a half of non-stop slow-motion gunfights in purple-lit nightclubs, but that doesn’t really make up the bulk of the running time. Instead, we get lots and lots of people telling us how scary he is.

This is delivered best by the bad guy Viggo, a mobster who talks about Wick as if he were a fairy tale. He’s not the boogeyman; he’s the guy they send to kill the boogeyman! Much of this is in Russian, with stylized subtitles filling much of the screen, certain words given particular emphasis.

They’re light on specifics. The only actual story I can recall is when Viggo says that Wick once killed two men with just a pencil. A pencil! I felt like I wasn’t sufficiently impressed by this detail, though: I’ve already seen The Dark Knight and don’t consider it that much of a stretch to imagine how a pencil could be used as a lethal weapon.

As it is, the first time we see Wick really show his stuff is when he kills a bunch of dudes (presumably; they’re in masks) trying to get into his house, in a vain attempt to stop his pending killing spree. We know that he kills twelve of them, but I’ve got to say it feels like pretty rote stuff. Certainly more home intruders than I would be able to kill, but not exactly an unprecedented number for an action movie.

But by that point, the movie has done a really good job of establishing its vibe. I was already familiar with a lot of the “Wick-iverse” from the aforementioned cultural diffusion, so I knew about the hotel that catered to assassins and had a strict code of no-killing-allowed. But I’d imagined that all of it would be bigger, or given out in small dollops of lore across at least the first two movies.

Instead, I was pleasantly surprised by the restraint in John Wick. It’s a fairly simple, straightforward story, coasting mainly on vibes and mood. Apart from repeating what a bad-ass John Wick himself is, there’s very little exposition, and it’s all streamlined and economical. You know very quickly who each character it is, and which role they play in this story. The simplicity really does give it the weight of modern mythology: a bunch of archetypes playing their parts in a simple story about revenge.

And about this recurring idea of “honor among killers,” which is bullshit in the real world but makes perfect sense in an action movie that’s presented almost like a fable.

If anything, I wish they’d gone farther into making Wick a super-hero. Have him doing five-finger death punches and the like, without ever breaking a sweat. When commenting on one of his many wounds, he admits that he’s “rusty.” But it creates this weird dissonance where everyone talks about him as if he’s a super-human killing machine, but the movie also wants us to relate to him as a John McClane, seat-of-his-pants type. I think it would’ve been stronger if they hadn’t bothered to put any tension around his getting wounded or kidnapped, but instead made the stakes all about his allies being in jeopardy, or simply the chance that his target will get away.

I definitely wouldn’t add John Wick to my list of favorite action movies, but I was impressed by how confidently it seemed to know exactly what it wanted to do. And how it seemed to suggest a story, a history, and a world much bigger than anything they needed to actually show us.

This post has lots of spoilers for both Final Destination: Bloodlines and the first Final Destination movie, as well as maybe The Monkey and The Cabin in the Woods.

When I was still coming off of my high of seeing Final Destination: Bloodlines, I said that not only did it nail the formula better than any other entry in the franchise, but it also managed to avoid being completely nihilistic, and even ended on a note that was almost uplifting. I didn’t want to overstate it, but was just marveling at how it managed to lean into the black comedy inherent in the premise, but without becoming so campy or silly as to turn into a horror movie parody.

But since watching the sixth movie (and scheduling another visit to see it in IMAX), I’ve been reading through my old posts about the series, and re-watching all of the recaps on the YouTube channel Dead Meat. That reminded me of the maudlin (and in my opinion, just awful) original ending of the first Final Destination, which had the characters breaking the cycle by having our hero sacrifice himself and help bring new life into the world.

You could conclude that that’s a lesson about focus testing and studio interference, or you could conclude, as I did, that the Final Destination movies need to stick to their formula and stop trying to introduce any kind of emotional heft into a series specifically about a cast full of people all dying in absurdly improbable ways.

But then I started thinking about another scene in Bloodlines, which built off an idea from Final Destination 2: you can “satisfy” death by dying and then somehow being resurrected.¹Which is an idea I’ve seen pop up in several other movies since then, as well. The character of Erik plans to save his brother Bobby, who’s next in line, by aggravating his peanut allergy until he flatlines, and then having the hospital staff bring him back.

Erik starts to get him a bag of roasted peanuts, but Bobby says as long as they’re doing this, he wants to get a pack of peanut butter cups. (Which he’s presumably never tasted, of course).²And we’re given a clear shot of the warning label on the vending machine, right before they start trying to tip it over, because this movie understands exactly how the series is all about planting ideas in the audience’s mind. And the moment I like so much, which seemed like nothing more than a good gag at first: Bobby takes a bite of it, and he says, “It’s so good.” The reason I like it is because he’s marked for death, but he has a small moment of choosing to enjoy something.

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  Which is an idea I’ve seen pop up in several other movies since then, as well.
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  And we’re given a clear shot of the warning label on the vending machine, right before they start trying to tip it over, because this movie understands exactly how the series is all about planting ideas in the audience’s mind.

The Final Destination series is a perfect example of why it’s usually a bad idea for me to review a movie right after I’ve seen it. Until I get the chance to ruminate on it for a while, I’m either too positive about it¹I actually said I really liked Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. What’s up with that?!, or I’m too negative about it.

I absolutely love the gimmick behind the series, but I was way too dismissive of them initially, and I’ve tried to set the record straight in recent years. In fact, after being too dismissive, I got weirdly possessive of the franchise enough that I never saw the fourth one, for some dumb reason like thinking it was way too early to be doing a reboot.

But in my defense, it often seems like the filmmakers aren’t quite sure what they think of the franchise, either. They seem a little bit reluctant to fully embrace the idea that these are almost black comedies as much as they are horror/suspense movies. The third has long been my favorite, because it felt like they leaned into the fact that it’s all absurd, without ever devolving fully into camp.

I’ve heard that the fifth installment gets the tone right, but I’ll never see it because it has a set piece involving LASIK surgery, which is my biggest can’t-handle.²Lots of horror posters seem to involve eye trauma over the past few years, and I wish they’d cut it out.

So I completely loved Final Destination: Bloodlines, which might be the best realization of the franchise’s premise. It was so much fun. And the horror isn’t diminished by the sense of humor, since the most horrific scenes are also inherently the funniest. I was laughing out loud while I was cringing, covering my eyes, and trying to crawl into the theater seat. Not to mention frequently reflexively covering up the most sensitive parts of my body like a hot woman in a shower in a teen sex comedy.

Also, I’m grateful to this movie for putting a permanent end to the notion that I might someday want to get a septum ring.

The best example of how the movie hits exactly the right combination of suspense and comedy is the opening set piece, which perfectly sets the tone for everything that’s to follow. It’s a staple of the franchise to start the movie with an elaborate disaster, the scale of which has increased from movie to movie. This one — following a Laura Linney-esque protagonist on a momentous date to the top of a Space Needle-inspired building — is especially drawn out. Not even so much for the scenes of disaster, but for moment after moment after moment of perfectly-executed foreshadowing. In fact, this one goes so far that it’s fiveshadowing.

Lines like “I think I’ll live” and “I’ll hang onto you” and “for the rest of my life.” An over-stuffed elevator that doesn’t seem to be functioning. A snooty maitre’d who you’re just waiting to meet a grisly fate. A tower whose groaning superstructure you can hear from the floor-to-ceiling plate glass windows. An out-of-control flambé. A glass dance floor. A chandelier shedding crystals onto the glass. A band performing a raucous version of “Shout” and encouraging the dancers to stomp on the floor. As the tension builds, there’s a mind-blowingly great sequence of quick cuts showing threats around the restaurant, including a guest cracking the top of a creme brûlée, and a carver slicing up prime rib.

And a running story of just the shittiest kid, starting with him getting yelled at for pulling a penny out of a fountain.

This sequence, and the way it’s perfectly in sync with what the audience is thinking, and the way it sadistically stretches out the tension, are a perfect encapsulation of what makes the Final Destination series so brilliant. It’s not just a case of planning out an elaborate death sequence, and it’s not even just a case of hinting at all the ways a character might possibly die in this scene. It’s knowing exactly how long to hold a moment, exactly how to plant an image in the audience’s mind that will continue to linger for the next several minutes, and exactly how to strike the right balance between suspense, horror, and comedy.

And that sequence isn’t even my favorite thing about the movie, which is a spoiler. I will say that my only criticism of the movie is that so much of it is in the trailers and teasers, so if you’re lucky enough not to have watched them yet, avoid the promotional stuff until after you’ve seen the movie. There are still some great surprises, but it did lessen the tension when I’d already seen a couple of the best set pieces.

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  I actually said I really liked Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. What’s up with that?!
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  Lots of horror posters seem to involve eye trauma over the past few years, and I wish they’d cut it out.

Several years ago, I went with my family on a rare trip for us all to see a movie together. I don’t remember what we went to see, probably whatever was the blockbuster out in December 2004 that seemed like it would appeal to everyone. What I do vividly remember is that when we got to the theater, my family surprised me by telling me that they’d gotten us all tickets for The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, simply because I’d said I was looking forward to seeing it.

During the scene where the crew finds the jaguar shark, and Bill Murray delivers the line, “I wonder if it remembers me,” I burst into tears. Afterwards on the drive home, I said that I’d loved it. The rest of my family said some variation on “I’m glad you liked it. I didn’t get it.”

I mention that mostly to illustrate how awesome and generous and kind my family is. But also to say that I now understand exactly how they felt. I watched Asteroid City, and I had the clear impression that it was trying very hard to say something profound, and I just plain didn’t get it.

When I finished it last night, I was content to say that it was very pretty, and I appreciated that it went so hard on its 50s aesthetic, and it did actually make me laugh a few times. (The only one I remember is when the stop-motion alien realizes he’s being photographed, and he poses with the meteor). And I thought it was interesting to switch between the movie and the movie as a play about the development and production of the play that is the movie.

But when I woke up this morning, I was bizarrely, irrationally, irritated by it. What was the point of all that?!

I guess I can appreciate the notion of Wes Anderson attempting to take the twee artifice of his movies as far as it can possibly go. Asteroid City makes the deliberate, tightly-controlled artificiality not just a stylistic choice, but an idea. An insistence that the style of unnatural compositions; stilted delivery of overly-wordy, mannered dialogue; and scene structure that leaves the purpose of each scene enigmatic; is all just presentation, but it’s not the point. That all of it is artificial, down to its core, but the point isn’t to make people believe the artifice, but to understand and feel the universal ideas floating underneath in a way that’s emotional instead of intellectual.

So, for instance, you can be looking at too many recognizable actors crammed into a fake submarine looking at a clearly fake fish and still be suddenly moved to tears. I got the sense that the equivalent scene in Asteroid City was supposed to be the one in which Jason Schwartzman’s character steps out of both the movie and the play-that-is-the-movie, and he listens as Margot Robbie’s character describes her scene that was cut from the production. But if there was something there that was intended to hit me like an emotional ton of bricks, I deftly avoided it, somehow.

I saw a blurb from a review where the reviewer confidently and simply summed it up as being “about grief.” But that’s a topic that seems to run through all of Anderson’s movies; it’s kind of like patting yourself on the back for saying a Martin Scorsese movie is “about Italians.”

Maybe it’s an extension of the idea of mannerisms piled on mannerisms, to the point that we’re completely out of touch with how we feel and why we do things. Like the conversations with Scarlett Johansson’s character, where she reveals that she’s been acting so long that she’s aware of how she’s supposed to feel, and she can perform emotions, but doesn’t actually feel them. Or the repeated scenes where the moments of genuine emotional connection in Asteroid City are described instead of performed. Or for that matter, the whole format of plays within movies within plays. (Which they completely undermine by having Bryan Cranston appear in the color segments, just for what felt like a gag that didn’t land, which annoyed the hell out of me).

Anyway, the whole point of “One Thing I Like” was to keep myself from rambling on trying to interpret everything about a movie, so I’ll just name one thing I like: Tilda Swinton’s performance as Dr Hickenlooper. There wasn’t a bad performance in the movie; everybody was doing exactly what was required by the handbook of How To Act In A Wes Anderson Film. But Swinton somehow seemed to be so thoroughly present. (I thought the same about Cate Blanchett’s performance in The Life Aquatic).

Not really naturalistic — because a naturalistic performance in this kind of movie would feel tone-deaf — but simply like she actually existed in this universe, instead of being an actor playing a character who exists in this universe. I realize I’m not breaking new ground by pointing out that Tilda Swinton is an astonishingly good actor, but this relatively small part made me think that I would believe her in anything.

Oh, I also liked that in the scene where Jason Schwartzman’s character is auditioning for the part in front of the playwright (played by Edward Norton), we get increasingly clear shots of the homoerotic art hanging on the playwright’s walls. The focus is on the performance, while a painting of a bare ass is clearly visible in the background, in spotlight. It’s never addressed or explained. (But I would’ve greatly preferred it if it had been left completely unaddressed, and hadn’t ended with a kiss that makes it feel like a cheap gag).

Bodies Bodies Bodies is a horror comedy satire from 2022 about a bunch of rich, terminally online, awful Gen-Zers trapped in a house during a hurricane. I didn’t like it very much, but I was genuinely pleased to see a movie so completely unconcerned with whether I like it.

I can’t even recall the last time I saw a movie that wasn’t making at least a token attempt to play to the Gen X crowd. Here, representing the out-of-touch old man community is Lee Pace, who’d I’d always assumed was a Millennial, but turns out was born right at the end of the 1970s. His character, and Pace’s performance, were my favorite things about the movie.

He’s the character I identified with the most, for reasons that should be obvious. Pace, like me, is also supernaturally handsome and with a physique that has other men seething with jealousy. But even more than that, he’s trying to have a good, fun hang with a bunch of people in their 20s and finding himself completely out of his element.

The part might not seem to give Pace a lot to work with. He’s basically just there to be older, super hot, and a little bit dumb. If it were under-played or over-played too much, he could’ve just ended up being either the butt of the joke, or just another arrogant beautiful person who’s completely unsympathetic. Instead, he makes the best use of his relatively limited screen time: a realistic expression of annoyance, a good-natured attempt to have fun with a bunch of the shittiest people, or a scene trying to make sense of the game that everyone but him seems to be playing.

The movie’s structure would suggest that Bee is the audience’s entry point into this awful and close-knit group, but it’s actually Greg who’s the most human one in a group of monsters.

Considering that it’s a horror comedy, I didn’t think Bodies Bodies Bodies was scary enough or funny enough. And I appreciate the ideas behind the satire, but the execution just didn’t work for me. I did like the description that I read from the filmmakers, describing it as being less like a slasher movie and more like Lord of the Flies, with the character completely breaking down in just a few hours without their cell phones.

There’s a ton of dialogue throughout, but the only lines that I thought actually landed were Bee’s final line “I’ve got reception,” and an earlier one from Sophie. The other characters are asking if there are any guns in the house, Sophie says no with something like, “David’s dad is a jerk, but his politics check out.” They have no reference for anything genuine outside of social media.

But to me, the rest of it felt like the movie wanted to have it both ways: most of the characters are both the targets of the satire and the ones doing the criticism, often at the same time. The scene at the end with Jordan, Alice, Sophie, and Bee all bringing their baggage to the surface seems like it’d be clever and funny on paper. And I can’t fault any of the performances, especially Rachel Sennott’s, since they’re all played as believable, instead of winking at the camera, or over-playing the punchlines. But the end result just seems like a bunch of shitty people with their Obnoxious dials turned up to maximum at all times. I didn’t get any sense of rhythm.

Which is, I don’t think coincidentally, how I usually feel after using TikTok for more than a few minutes. I don’t actually know whether that was deliberate, but either way, I really do like the idea of something well-made that knows exactly the audience it’s trying to reach. Even if that audience doesn’t include me.

David Sandberg has had a strong presence on the internet for as long as I can remember, making how-to videos about his process of making short horror films and how he’s applied that mentality to big-budget studio movies like Shazam. It’s clear that he just loves the craft of filmmaking and sharing that with other aspiring filmmakers.

As part of the promotion for his new movie Until Dawn, he’s made a great video about his desire to do as much of the horror movie gags in camera as practical effects, using CGI sparingly and only when necessary. He shows how he made quick tests with his wife, co-producer, and frequent collaborator Lotta Losten, to prove out how scenes like smashing someone’s face against the floor, or stabbing them through the chest with a pickaxe, could actually work.

If it’s not clear, I highly recommend watching that video before you see Until Dawn, for a few reasons: first, it’s just interesting to have the process in mind as you’re watching it play out. Second, it’s fun to see the actors having fun with the process of making a horror movie, since the final product always just shows them being miserable. But most importantly: it was a perfect bait-and-switch to set me up for my two favorite scenes in the movie.

I can’t say what those are without spoiling them, but I can say that the movie was kind of rough going until it hit my favorite scene. It has to set up its premise, of a young woman with a group of her friends traveling to the last known locations of her sister, who went missing a year ago. I guess that all of the exposition is effective for setting up everything it has to: those details, plus the relationships between all of the characters, along with the fact that one of them is at least a little bit psychic. But it sure is clunky.

Even after the movie gets to the good stuff, and sets up the part of the premise that is revealed in the trailer — all of the characters are killed, after which time resets and they have to go through it all over again — it doesn’t seem to do a lot to make itself stand out as more than a b-grade millennial horror movie. That’s until the third night of the cycle, which is when the movie completely won me over.

Until Dawn is only loosely inspired by the video game, more borrowing images and ideas than a concrete plot line. That’s not a problem for me, since I only ever got about halfway through the game before I lost interest. For people like me who are v e r y s l o w at getting through games, the time investment wasn’t worth the payoffs. But it borrows the best elements: the story of a mine cave-in, a mention of Rami Malek’s character from the game, the game’s monsters, and best of all, Peter Stormare coming back to play his creepy psychiatrist with a copious amount of beard dye.

As the filmmakers themselves have said in interviews, making a live-action adaptation of the game would be a pointless retread, since the game was already cinematic and heavily relied on motion capture performances from recognizable actors. So I think taking it in a different (and in my opinion, much more interesting and fun) direction was exactly the right choice.

Because more than anything else, it’s based on the idea of video games, and the way that having multiple lives changes how you think about stories. And it’s based around delivering the most memorable moments from exploitative horror and slasher movies: the kills that make you cringe, or laugh, or ideally both. There’s just enough story and character development to tie everything together, and I don’t think it’s at all dismissive to say that. Instead, it’s a sign that the filmmakers knew exactly the strengths of this format and what they wanted to emphasize, with as little as possible getting in the way.

Now more about my two favorite scenes, and why I liked them so much, after a spoiler break.