By: Paul Farrell

There’s Something In The Barn

The craggy trees sparkle while their branches sag under the weight of freshly fallen snow, glimmering under the moonlit sky. All is calm and bright, aside from the man on fire burning to death as something sinister watches from the shadows of the nearby barn.

Still, the man’s loss is Bill and his family’s gain as they inherit his property with plans to turn the old, dilapidated (and some say haunted) barn into a bed and breakfast. While his daughter Nora is furious about being uprooted, his lonely son Lucas attempts to find a connection and quickly does so by way of a mystical elf dwelling in their barn. A museum operator in the small nearby town educates the boy on the creatures and how it is to stay in their good graces.

No bright lights.

No changes.

No noise.

Three simple rules that, if followed, lead to peace, prosperity, and a functioning farm. If ignored, however, well, the barn elf will not be happy and, dare I say, neither will the people sharing its land.

These rules hold true in There’s Something In The Barn, breaking down as Bill adorns their new home in bright, flashy Christmas lights and holds a raucous dinner in the barn for the whole town. Despite Lucas’ attempts to befriend and placate the elf, his father’s transgressions only continue to aggravate it more until the ultimate disrespect is leveraged on Christmas Eve and all hell breaks loose.

With Martin Starr in the lead and Magnus Martens in the director chair, the film is a hilarious exercise in holiday horror. Interpersonal melodrama abounds between Nora and her former self-help guru stepmother as they square off about drinking, disrespect, and all manner of questionable teen conduct. Meanwhile, Bill can’t be bothered to take a side or a stand against anything really, employing weaponized emotional ignorance in lieu of actual direction or spousal support. All of this comes to a head, of course, once the barn elves lay siege.

The effects are stellar. Practical effects are employed more often than not, and the barn elves embody a silly flavor of dangerous scariness reminiscent of Gremlins. The final third of the film descends into bloody, murderous, yuletide chaos, standing side by side with the best family-friendly (but still bloody) holiday flicks and carving out a place for itself amongst the green- and red-tinged genre greats.

Its message is sweet and its characters full of heart, but — make no mistake — the viscera falls like wet snow when the barn elves let loose. With jabs at American gun culture and oh-so-much entitlement and unacknowledged privilege, There’s Something In The Barn brings as much wit, charm, and commentary to the Christmas dinner spread as it does bodies and blood.

A sight to behold, the ocean of trees bathed in clumps of white powder, brightening the blue sky with their effervescent glow is still nothing compared to the fires and screams of those burning alive. Human, barn elf, we’re all the same in the end. Together. And isn’t that what Christmas is all about?

The Coffee Table

The salesman fawns over the faux-golden statues that hold up the tempered glass, promising that a table like this can only bring happiness. He balks at the idea that such a magnificent piece of craftsmanship could ever be damaged or broken. After all, as the self-proclaimed furniture expert points out, this coffee table is not like a marriage.

This coffee table is unbreakable.

María grits her teeth and cries out as her son emerges into the world. Her pride. Her love. Her everything. He is what she’s been waiting for. What her life has been building toward. He is why she is here, and now they can finally be together.

Jesús, on the other hand, has decided that he wants a coffee table. His wife hates it. It’s a gaudy, ugly thing that represents everything that’s wrong with her husband’s judgement. But she said he could choose the coffee table and she’s a woman of her word. Regardless of what he really thinks about it, Jesús has no choice but to claim the coffee table as his own. A resolution made by his own volition, willed into their lives by determination, stubbornness, and spite.

So begins The Coffee Table, a film that starts stressful only to exponentially exacerbate its pervasive anxiousness. As the gulf between María and Jesús deepens with the purchase of their new coffee table, the day will only worsen, inviting the kind of absurdist horrors reserved for the most disturbing social situations, interpersonal dramas, and pitch black comedies. Writer and director Caye Casas balances the film’s many spinning plates with a steady hand, maintaining the discomfort and unpleasantness for the whole of the film’s runtime and successfully translating it to the viewer — for better or worse.

The truth of the matter is, The Coffee Table is best experienced, not described. While the time spent with the film is not something I’d care to repeat, I cannot deny its power and effectiveness. Like the shoddy, cheap salesman says when he retracts his initial pitch, one must exercise caution with the coffee table or it will certainly break. That is to say, anything can break, if one isn’t careful. Life. Love. Tables. Anything.

Nothing’s unbreakable.

So Unreal

In the beginning, mankind lorded over its technological creations with feverish drive, their hubris and hunger outweighing any caution that might have been in the face of digital birth. All too soon, however, our rudimentary work evolved into unquantifiable complexities, a new world with new intelligence — new life — that would begin to shape mankind as opposed to the other way around. And, as So Unreal quickly observes, nowhere were people’s hopes, dreams, and most desperate fears regarding this cyber revolution more thoroughly examined than in the movies.

The film is as much a documentary covering the multitude of titles that leveraged the imagined dangers of cyberspace as it is a thought-provoking commentary on how the world at large has grappled both successfully and unsuccessfully with such staggering anxieties. The films are not covered in a specific order — The Matrix kicks off the show as opposed to something like Tron which appears later — rather occurring as they would in a conversation when appropriate and in line with the narrator’s train of thought.

Topics like artificial intelligence and digitally recreated celebrities are mined not necessarily through the hyper-real capabilities of modern systems, but rather by way of the crude music videos of the early 1980s. A digitally primitive, featureless proxy for Mick Jagger might have seemed fun at the time, but its use began a path to a dangerous precedent that hangs as a dark cloud over the future of the entertainment industry today. Movies like Looker are brought up in relation to this concept as well, allowing the film to explore the sinister probabilities inherent within ever-advancing computer animation.

Electric Dreams, Weird Science, and even pornography are utilized to show the technology’s applications when it comes to sex and fantasy while War Games, Sneakers, and The Net face death and war. Writer and director Amanda Kramer tackles humanity’s eternal fascinations with an insightful eye and biting social awareness, carried skillfully through by Debbie Harry’s engrossing narration.

As the age of the hacker has dawned, so has the age of the natural world begun to wane. Through the lens of entertainment, humanity has been adapting to this shift for decades. So Unreal sifts through the media that sensed and sometimes exploited the arrival of the digital sphere. It’s a documentary that traverses budgets and cultural footprints far and wide, providing context, wisdom, and cautious consideration. The film encourages its audience to contemplate the future these cinematic artifacts might represent and which of their components — both good, bad, and otherwise gray — are already firmly in the present.

Door (1988)

A barrage of callers, telemarketers, and solicitors descend on Yasuko’s middle class world of domestic confinement. The constant rattle of the telephone, ring of the door buzzer, and desperate pitches over the intercom have worked in tandem to construct a wall of anxiety around Yasuko’s apartment. Her husband is at work and her son is at school, but Yasuko is trapped in her own home, lonely and suppressed, struggling to fend off the leagues of wanton men who only seek to take.

Banmei Takahashi’s Door is a claustrophobic cat-and-mouse thriller that manages to explore its primary location with a visual cleverness that keeps the frame interesting and inventive despite the film’s lack of dynamic locations. The door mentioned in the title is an important component of the place, the blockade which keeps those who wish to penetrate Yasuko’s stronghold at bay. Takahashi expresses that through close-ups of the handle slowly cranking up and down, or a hand reaching through the small crack to unchain the lock. Each unwanted interaction with Yasuko’s door feels like a violation, a representation of what’s at stake for the woman for whom it stands guard.

Yasuko is played by Keiko Takahashi, who brings a somber elegance and inner strength to her character that otherwise might have felt like more of a victim than a person. Her stalker is portrayed by Daijirô Tsutsumi in a chilling turn, portraying a door-to-door salesman that finds a mark and decides to pursue her, refusing to accept no for an answer. It’s a film about the socioeconomic power dynamics between men and women, exploiting the expectations of civility and politeness that apply to Yasuko and that empower the men who objectify and sexualize her.

While the bulk of the film is spent in relatively quiet contemplation and budding tension, the final act descends into a violent hell that is on par with the most exciting, upsetting, and blood-soaked slashers of its time. Built upon obsessive voyeurism, degrading and disgusting sexual acts, and a climactic battle between a housewife and a man who thinks he is owed, Door emerges as one of the great psychological stalk-and-slash movies of the 1980s.

One thing’s for certain — you’ll never look at a slowly turning door handle the same way again.