By: Paul Farrell

Falling Stars

Reports of dangerous, high winds continue to roll in as a local AM radio DJ pontificates on ancient calendars and the modern-day misunderstanding of when the new year actually is set to begin. People are to stay indoors tonight and huddle close. Tonight is the beginning of the Harvest, after all, where the witches fall like stars from the heavens and those they choose are swept to the skies never to be seen again.

For the careless person, it’s a night that carries death on the breeze.

Falling Stars follows three brothers as they navigate this particularly mystical October eve, leaving the safety of their home to meet up with a friend who has supposedly killed a witch and buried it in the desert. Evoking shades of Stephen King’s short story The Body, the small, incredibly personal tale has all the hallmarks of a remarkable coming-of-age story as the characters face the burgeoning transition from adolescence to adulthood and consider the ramifications of their own mortality.

Dialogue-heavy, peppered with metaphor, and bolstered by one-scene characters who impart some wisdom or anecdote intrinsic to the path our trio of accursed brothers must inevitably follow, Falling Stars crafts a wide worldbuilding net on a shoestring budget. Still, it’s the baked-in lore and zeitgeist mythos apparent in every nervous glance, offhand remark about warding spells, and blue-collar rants about the rules of dealing with a fried witch corpse that elevates the film to the windy, broom-filled skies so high above its small-scale origins.

Beyond the clever writing and innovative folklore, directors Richard Karpala and Gabriel Bienczycki put their skills to remarkable use, building tension and crafting scares with little more than camera placement, intuitive editing, and strategic blocking. Therefore, when someone is spirited away, it’s not about witnessing the spectacle of such a thing but rather the emptiness left behind.

The radio DJ makes his return toward the end of the film, speaking briefly with the eldest of the three brothers. Looking for salacious stories to exploit on his show, he’s oddly reticent to speak about the witch corpse these boys supposedly desecrated and their quest to burn the body. His words are steeped in disbelief, but its hard not to wonder if his caution doesn’t derive from something other than doubt. It would seem, on this first night of the long Harvest which comes every year to take more and more people to the realm of the witches that those on the ground know so much and yet so little about, there are some things even he doesn’t wish to examine.

As one odd man on the side of the road observes as the brothers head toward their destiny, there’s a seed of meaning in each and every one of us. One wonders if it’s the witches, not the ones below, that have sussed out how to germinate them. It is a harvest, after all, and what does one gather in a harvest if not those things which nourish and help to thrive?

Perhaps, for the judicious witch, it’s a night that carries life on the air.

Strange Darling

Strange Darling opens with a question both answered and left dangling, ushering in a chaotic series of fragmented chapters of a story being simultaneously told and withheld, while a victim and a demon engage for the final time:

Are you a serial killer?

JT Mollner’s Strange Darling feels dangerous and charged from the first frame. The film refuses to relent as its chapters appear out of order and out of context, carrying viewers into a bloody game of cat-and-mouse that remains obscured through the convolution of events, intentions, and expectations until the finale hits with devastating clarity.

As scenes jump from climactic showdowns caked in blood, sweat, and screams to softly romantic moments confined to a car bathed in sensual blue light, it’s the film’s two leads that ground the story and compel the splintered emotional through line ever forward. Both Willa Fitzgerald and Kyle Gallner shock and surprise at every turn, churning sensuality, violence, and unbridled passion into a thickening stew of murky aims and moralities that lays the foundation of Strange Darling’s uncompromising track.

From its opening scrawl and voiceover — in the style of Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre — ensuring that the story being told is based on that of a real serial killer to the epilogue bringing closure to the reign of demons both seen and unseen, Strange Darling plays as a dangerously unhinged window into a mind willed by its murderous drive. Intimate and savage, it’s a film that examines its opening question from every angle:

Are you a serial killer?

It’s a question every woman who ever goes home with a man from a bar has to ask herself and one every man picking up a woman near closing time rarely even has to consider. A question that demands a lie in return but one prescribed to be asked all the same.

Its answer is there, beneath the surface, wriggling amongst the lies its host so desperately clings to, accessible only through the out of time, order, and contextual lens of its perpetrator’s jilted perspective. It’s in that place that Strange Darling lives and there that the film finds the dark answer to its coiling query.

You’re Not Me

Pigs scatter about the road, nearly causing Aitana, her wife Gabi, and their adopted baby son to crash as they make their way home from the airport to surprise Aitana’s family for Christmas. What Aitana doesn’t realize, however, is that the roaming pigs are an omen, not an obstruction — a representation of innocence raised and lost in a feast begetting the selfish, hoarding whims of the empathy-devoid upper class.

Marisa Crespo and Moisés Romera direct You’re Not Me as one might a dark family drama, watching voyeuristically as Aitana’s new family is met with open disdain and disregard from her wealthy parents. Furious and dismayed that Aitana showed up unannounced, they press for their uninvited guests to stay in a hotel rather than welcome them in with open arms.

Aitana’s fury only grows when she discovers a stranger named Nadia sleeping in her room, having taken Aitana’s place in the family as a surrogate daughter and caretaker to her younger brother, Saúl, who is confined to a wheel chair due to a muscular degenerative disease. A Romanian refugee, Nadia has inherited Aitana’s jewelry, clothes, and even the frames where her photos once resided. Her parents’ hearts, it would seem, now belong to Nadia too.

Roser Tapias plays Aitana with the kind of progressively deepening hurt that can only be brought about by family. Her anxious glares and progressively widening paranoia help to expand the well of tension that fills to overflowing throughout the film. As her childhood home crowds with more and more strange dinner guests in lieu of the extended family that tradition normally suggests, her frustration turns to maddening outrage. In response, Aitana drowns herself in wine and engages in increasingly questionable outbursts. As a result, she begins to distance herself from Gabi and even puts her infant son at risk, if only accidentally.

As the night progresses and the dinner guests’ talk turns to hand-raised pigs that are loved and cared for before the fateful night of one most delicious feast, visions of the room bathed in red and the people there staring dangerously forward at Aitana break the awkward monotony of the family’s melodrama. While Aitana’s sordid past, her family’s obvious bigotry, and the resentment shared on both sides informs the rapidly decaying familial bonds, something far more sinister rises to the surface. Christmas is a time for togetherness and family, but this year, it seems, that togetherness may come with a hefty price.

You’re Not Me is a tightly drawn work of horror and drama, carefully constructing a twisted puzzle of blood-soaked inevitability that stretches beyond Aitana’s imagination. Like the pigs so helplessly attempting to navigate the pitch black road, Aitana struggles to escape the clutches of her family’s agenda. But she is one of them.

She can run. She can squeal. But, in the end, she’ll be there for the feast.