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James Wan is a fear driver, and in more ways than one. To concern Insidious Where The Conjuring, and it’s easy to imagine the director standing in front of the screen as if it were an orchestra, stick in hand – guiding the bites of the jerky violin, yes, but also the general rise and fall of the tension, and perhaps the predatory movements of the camera as it weaves its way around the bends and rushes into petrified close-ups. It is perhaps just as easy, however, to imagine Wan standing on the side of the roller coaster, pulling a lever to rock a few screaming teenage cars down a steep, rocky track. He makes music from the fear of jumping and turns multiplexes into funhouses, like a William Castle in the age of digital ghosts. He led horror. Regardless of the definition, it takes a few chops.
Wan’s new film, Smart, is more wrinkle than symphony. But it’s a ride to remember. The film returns its director to its original genre wheelhouse after a stint in the CGI waters cartoon cinema. The opening frames make this sheer over land literal, as we graze the surface of a rough sea to find a surely haunted hospital looming on the cliff above like a Transylvanian mansion. Over the next two hours, Wan will rummage through his bag of tricks with a renewed sense of the evil purpose: zooming through peepholes, peeping from inside washing machines, tearing hallways, pushing invasions into faces. pale of its actors. When a gust of wind pushes back the curtain of an open window, revealing the towering specter it previously hid, you can almost see the director’s layered skeleton smile, sneering through his rudimentary but cleverly timed gag.
Inside this medical facility, seen in a violent prologue and returned for exhibition purposes later, hides a croaking ghost – a poltergeist with the knife habits of Jason Voorhees, the flexibility of Ray Park and the recordings. phone calls from a serial killer mocking the authorities. A few decades after making minced meat from some nurses, the shadow-masked “Gabriel” reappeared to start hacking and slashing again. (He’s like Wan himself, eager to be back in the world of chaos.) The ghoul’s murderous madness begins in the home of a certain Madison Mitchell, who loses her unborn child.– the latest in a series of miscarriages – with her abusive husband in the attack. From there it will be sucked into a Sleep paralysis psychic bond with the killer, his conscience forced to helplessly witness each of the brutal murders that ensue.
Poor, trembling Madison is played by Annabelle Wallis, who previously escaped another of Wan’s malicious toys, the possessed doll who shared his first name. She telegraphs what any informed viewer will immediately guess: that beauty and the beast have a story. Could this have something to do with Madison’s real family background? Or that horror movie habit that kids have of making not-so-imaginary friends? For a moment, Smart seems just an inch to the left of Blumhouse’s master key in the history department. The secondary characters have all the dimensions of Halloween decorations: the skeptical detectives in stock; nerdy CSI agent who’s like a distaffing parent to those boring comic book relief Insidious acolytes; Madison’s devoted actress sister (Maddie Hasson, who looks suspiciously like Florence Pugh). We think, for a moment at least, that we have already breathed the musty air of this crypt.
Corn Smart has surprises up its sleeve. It gets crazier and crazier as it goes, with the script harnessing the audience’s supposed familiarity with the haunted house tropes that Wan helped repopulate. Our reward for healthy portions of the backstory, delivered via long scenes of characters watching grainy VHS tapes, is an evil revelation that takes the film’s craziness up several notches. Smart does more than redirect wasted talent onto green screens painted in wavy blue in post-production. He also frees Wan from his most elegant Sunday school. Conjurings. It is not a film with pretensions of Catholic seriousness. He’s more imbalanced in his tactics, pulling the filmmaker from Amityville horror and reconnect it with his piercing skin roots as Jigsaw’s father. There’s a touch of giallo in the red of the lighting and arterial spray, and in the stilted investigative dialogue of the cops about the case. And the film brings to the fore the influence of Sam Raimi which lurks like a repressed memory in the resonating rooms of Wan’s style. What his endless ambulatory camera, after all, but a less caffeinated version of that demonic POV heartbreaking at full speed Evil death‘s neck of the wood?
Regardless of his calculations on the relationship between pleasure and the idiot in Aquaman, there’s no way to look at this deranged follow-up and not conclude that Wan is back in his place. Still, some of that time spent in the superhero trenches seems to have crept into his supernatural comeback. Smart is a wacky psychodramatic creepfest that here and there turns to bloody action hilarity, as if Pazuzu had taken over the body from a Batman movie. About halfway, one of those archetypal detectives runs off after his parkour demon perp – a chase that leads to a treacherous fire escape and a warehouse, where the cop runs into … a car like this one. who took Harker to the Earl. The best rides make unexpected turns on their way to the next drop.
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