The Most Terrifying Movie Of 2015

It took till the end of August for the scariest movie of the year to arrive. No Escape is not a ghost story, monster flick, or serial killer horror, it’s a well crafted thriller from the Dowdle brothers. Owen Wilson plays Jack Dwyer, an engineer who moves his family from Texas to an unnamed (they don’t disclose the name of the country in the movie) Asian country for a new job opportunity. Once Jack, his wife Annie (Lake Bell) and their daughters Beezy and Lucy arrive in Asia, things aren’t going the way they expect them to. The TV doesn’t work, they have no cell reception, basic necessities are taken away from them for no apparent reason. Nothing says welcome to Asia like no phone reception or TV!

It’s quickly established that the Dwyer’s are very much on their own in a foreign land. Jack can’t establish communication with his company, so naturally he starts assuming something isn’t right. There is a neat scene where Jack attempts to find a place that sells any American newspaper, he bounces around this marketplace and can’t find a way to communicate that he wants a newspaper. He finds an old man who manages to provide him with a 3 day old USA Today. It’s scenes like this that director John Erick Dowdle does a fantastic job illustrating the communication barrier and isolation that the Dwyer’s are experiencing in this new foreign land. From the moment Jack gets the newspaper things go haywire. He finds himself in the middle of an uprising between the people and the government (the country’s leader gets assassinated at the start of the movie, this is the set-up for the instability that begins to take place in the country). The movie doesn’t let up from that point on. Jack is seen fleeing for his life, running through and away from all sorts of chaos and destruction that’s happening all around him.

Soon after he manages to get away from the herds of people causing the violence, Jack realizes that they are after him and his family when he witnesses an execution of an American. Fortunately for Jack and his family, he does have an ally in Hammond (Pierce Brosnan) an eccentric, odd, yet friendly European white guy (should be noted, considering there appears to be a very few of them left alive in that country) that they met on the airplane coming over. We later find out that there is a whole lot about Hammond that nobody knew about.

The rest of the film, or majority of it consists of Jack and his family attempting all sorts of death defying maneuvers in order to survive from the onslaught of barbarically perceived Asian’s. There is a scene in the movie that will probably be much talked about where Jack tosses his kids across from one building roof to another. It’s fairly unrealistic, yet also gripping. It’s the kind of scene where viewers will be talking about how ridiculous and cool it was in the same sentence.

The cinematography by Leo Hinstin and music by Marco Beltrami should be mentioned. Hinstin does real nice work showcasing this unnamed Asian country, capturing the beauty as well as the devastation that is caused. The night scenes are really nicely lit and have a unique glow to them. Beltrami’s music is spot on, working shamelessly with the events in the story. You feel the moments before they happen because of the musical set-up prior to it. It’s some really nice work.

John Erick Dowdle and his brother Drew just “get it,” when it comes to capturing the sense of desperation and fear. The tension in this film is off the charts. John directed the clever horror film Devil, and he borrows some of that suspense and multiplies it in No Escape. This is a really talented young director who has a great feel for true real-life horror, in this case the horror the Dwyer’s endure.

The most common question I hear regarding this movie is people wondering what is Owen Wilson doing in a non-comedy. Many of the same people might not remember seeing him in Behind Enemy Lines, well this is sort of the Owen Wilson from Behind Enemy Lines, just without a gun. He’s actually perfect for this role. After leaving the movie, I couldn’t have thought of anyone better suited for the role of Jack than Wilson. He might be comedic gold, but the guy has some real acting chops, this is a great role for him to demonstrate his more serious, tender, and intense side. Wilson really relates as a young father that tries to deal with his own fears, while trying to be “10 steps ahead” (a line he utters frequently in the movie) of the bad guys. Lake Bell is a talented actress, and fits really nicely alongside Wilson. She’s has this real nice toughness about her, along with these motherly instincts that are on full display in the film. The little girls played by Sterling Jerins and Claire Geare who go uncredited on Imdb (not sure why) are terrific. It’s one thing to have kids cry and scream in fear of the terrors happening around them, but to have them play calm and brave was a really nice choice by the Dowdle brothers. Pierce Brosnan is starting to expand his characters on-screen. He played a hitman in Survivor, and now he plays a charmingly weird Hammond in a supporting role that suites him perfectly at this stage of his career. It appears that Brosnan is having fun expanding his horizons, it also makes him a lot more refreshing on-screen. The interesting thing is that while Brosnan is known for being James Bond and playing the tough guy in his films, in No Escape, Wilson seems like the more tougher and clever of the two.

Review of Tom at The Farm

 Québécois filmmaker Xavier Dolan is only 26 years old and has already directed 5 features, 4 of which he wrote. Some he has acted in, some he has not. He has gotten the kind of attention young artists dream about, some good, some bad, festival awards, critical raves and critical derision. As an actor, Dolan has a blank and beautiful quality reminiscent of the young Alain Delon, whose almost otherworldly good looks were show-stopping and yet somehow off-putting as well (utilized to great effect in Jean-Paul Melville's "Le Samouraï"). Audiences are drawn to such cinematic beauty, but can also be envious, and slightly hostile. (Alfred Hitchcock loved to fill his films with beautiful people and then make horrible things happen to them.) Is there anything there behind that mask of pure beauty?

Dolan's latest, "Tom at the Farm" was completed several years ago (before last year's "Mommy") and is the first time he has adapted an extant work for the screen. Based on a play written by Michel Marc Bouchard (and Bouchard wrote the adaptation with Dolan), the adaptation appears to adhere closely to the original (I have not seen the play), with only a couple of scenes where the action is "opened up." (Those scenes, on the whole, are not successful.) "Tom at the Farm" strains to be a psychological thriller but its length (102 minutes) dissipates the tension that should be taut and compressed. This is Dolan's first attempt at genre, and while there is much to admire here (mainly the visuals and the score, both stunning), Dolan's interests lie in the strange undercurrents of sado-masochism between the two main characters, and it's a through-line that deserves more attention. That through-line could have carried the entire movie if Dolan had let go of being faithful to the original.

Tom (Dolan) drives through serene and brightly-colored autumn fields to attend the funeral of his boyfriend Guillaume. Once he arrives and meets Guillaume's mother Agathe (Lise Roy, who gives the best performance in the film), he learns that his boyfriend was closeted to his mother and had lied that he had a girlfriend. Tom is a greasy-haired boy, dressed in black leather and huge black boots, clomping through the immaculate farmhouse and the rural surrounding environment, a slash of black against the yellow dying corn. Agathe is eager to meet someone who knew her son, but confused and hurt that the never-met girlfriend did not attend the funeral.

The emotional pressure in that farmhouse is so extreme that Tom is roped into going along with his dead boyfriend's lie. Tom closets himself, in other words. He decides not to read the shaky eulogy he is seen writing in the first image of the film. It's an uneasy choice for him to make. More problems arise when Francis (Pierre-Yves Cardinal), Guillaumes's swaggering older brother, who still lives at home with his mother, struts into the kitchen bare-chested, seething with hostility towards the blonde urban interloper. Francis knew his brother's secret life, has homophobic contempt for it, and has banned all of the gay friends from coming to the funeral (there's a confrontation with one of them at the back of the church). Francis is so intimidating, so awful really, that it's strange that Tom doesn't just leave immediately after the funeral. But the farm exerts a pull on Tom (the real story of the film). Tom is hypnotized into the dysfunctional workings of the family, their subverted energies working on him like a drug. He can't seem to leave. The only time he shows rage and frustration is when he is alone in his car after the funeral. Agathe becomes increasingly frayed. Francis picks fights with Tom, one particularly horrible one in the cornfield, with Tom getting torn to shreds by the razor-sharp dead corn stalks. In one terrible moment, Francis spits into Tom's open mouth. But one day, Francis teaches Tom how to milk cows. Then another day, Tom helps birth a calf, and cries with emotion afterwards. Francis reveals that he used to take dance classes, and in one haunting scene, Francis and Tom ballroom dance through the empty barn, Francis dipping Tom back gallantly, the scene moving to romantic slo-mo.



What Dolan appears to be going for is a portrait of what could be seen as Stockholm Syndrome or perhaps the beginnings of a possible folie à deux situation. Francis and Tom hate each other, want to be each other, role-reverse, flirt, lash out. Tom is relatively submissive to Francis, taking the beatings, even encouraging them, and Francis senses that, takes pleasure in it. There's a sexual dance going on throughout, reminiscent of the murdering duo Leopold and Loeb (especially in the portrayal of the characters in 1959's "Compulsion", highlighting the hypnotic cult-like Master-Slave dynamic), or the novels of Patricia Highsmith, filled with doubling isolated characters. Francis won't let Tom leave, throwing obstacles in his way. Tom's cell phone doesn't work. He doesn't just walk down to the main road and hitch a ride. He stays. Francis has no friends, Francis hates gay people, swaggers like a rooster, glories in his singularity. But Tom's beautiful blank face before him is dying to be punched, or kissed, or marked in some way. These are the best sections of the film. It's really the story, and Dolan's intense interest in them is clear in the lingering way these scenes are shot.

But as the film continues on and on (it's way too long), and Sarah (Evelyne Brochu), a city friend of Tom's shows up, pretending to be the girlfriend in order to put Agathe's mind at ease, "Tom at the Farm" unravels. There's not enough structure to these different threads. It could work on the stage where movement and place and time are necessarily compressed, but on film it feels artificial, not fully worked out.

Beautiful visuals abound throughout (André Turpin, who also shot "Mommy", is the cinematographer), and there's a moody high-contrast look to the landscape (bright trees and bright corn behind dark shadows and fog) that speaks of secrets, torment, hope. The lush and heavy-on-the-strings score of Gabriel Yared is a clue to what Dolan was after. The score punctuates all of the scenes, casual or intense, adding portentous emotion, tension, fear of what is coming. It's a melodramatic score, and "Tom at the Farm" works when it is a family melodrama. These are out-there people with outrageous emotional lives, subsisting on lies and denial, and the abyss between what they think their lives are and what their lives really are is enormous. All of them choose denial. They get tied to one another by their shared lies, and their unspoken agreement to keep on lying. The score supports that uneasy and terrible energy. The visuals, like the score, are exaggerated and stylistic, starting off with the helicopter shot following Tom's car into the countryside, making him seem dwarfed by the surrounding land, a tiny figure entering an unknown isolated world. It's a nod to Hitchcock or Kubrick.

The thriller elements, the chase scenes, the reveal of horrifying secrets, feel like add-ons, clumsily done and unmotivated, especially when compared to the dark and deep dance (metaphorical and literal) of violence and sex going on between Tom and Francis. That's the real juice and guts of the film. It could be an answer to the nagging question throughout: Why the hell doesn't Tom just leave? In thrillers, people are always making ridiculous choices that go against their self-interest, or ignoring the red flags in front of them of potential predators. In a well-done thriller, you mostly forgive the unreal quality of these moments. But "Tom at the Farm" does not foreground the thriller aspect enough (although the score tries mightily to do so), and so Tom doesn't seem quite real. Nobody does.