richardgeuter

The central metaphor is "Charlie Kaufman as Jesus". Of course I love it!

"Fifty Shades of Grey," if I remember correctly, was pretty much content in setting up various subplots and side characters without ever developing their relevance or relationships to the main couple. It ended with Anastasia running away from Christian because he went too far during sex. Within the first ten minutes of "Fifty Shades Darker," the two are back together. In other words, if you've missed the first installment, it doesn't matter much.

One thing the predecessor had going for it, though, was the director Sam Taylor-Johnson, who actively worked against the laughable dialogue and uninspired plotting of the script. Together with her DP they even managed to sneak some interesting visual ideas into the thing. After a much-publicized falling-out, Taylor-Johnson has now been replaced with James Foley, and with her the last hint of subtlety has departed the franchise.

Which is not to say that "Darker" is, as its title and the marketing would suggest, is a more aggressive and raunchy chapter in the trilogy, far from it. The sex scenes (that's what we're here for after all, right?) are not too far removed from what you would see in your average James Bond flick. There's maybe a higher number of sex toys on display here, and there are even some breasts and buttocks to be seen, but all in all, given the franchise's reputation, I was expecting much more out of an erotic thriller about S&M. Most of the sex scenes are even filmed in the same way (shadowy silhouettes shot from the side) and have overbearing pop music going on in the background, so it's hard to get into them all that much. The movie just seems to stop every couple minutes to show us a music video.

Other than sex, the movie tries to sell itself by its thriller leanings. Throughout the movie we get glimpses of mysterious characters and hints of tension, but all of these suspenseful elements are always resolved just a few scenes later, usually by Christian appearing out of the blue. Whereas the first movie kept its subplots underdeveloped, this one is even worse. If being held at gunpoint and (later) potentially getting raped are only minor footnotes to the larger story and don't affect our protagonist for more than one or two scenes, why should we care about anything anymore in this story?

I guess it's the romance the film is about. However, I rarely had so much trouble suspending my disbelief during sex scenes. You know the trope of teenagers having sex while the killer stalks them in slasher movies? The whole of "Fifty Shades Darker" felt like that. During the first 40 minutes or so, there are only three types of scenes: People warning Ana about Christian, Christian behaving like a dick towards Ana, and Christian and Ana having sex. I'm not Alfred Kinsey, but I don't think that's how sexual arousal works. Most of the relationship talk happens through text messages and their dates are even more music-video like than the sex scenes. It's very hard to get into the love story, especially since Jamie Dornan is not very charming in this role (he looks the part, though) and Dakota Johnson acts constantly intimidated, speaking in a quiet voice so as to not disturb her boyfriend. You want to tell her not to get in cars with strangers, not see her have "kinky" sex with her millionaire lover.

There is indeed a thriller in this. If you replaced the pop music and the gentle Danny Elfman score with a Trent Reznor/Atticus Ross soundtrack, you'd have a less-beautiful, worse-written and woodener-acted David Fincher film about an abusive, dysfunctional relationship between an insecure weak-willed girl and a psychologically damaged rich playboy who preys on women like her. All the elements are in place, even Christian's relatives and other surrounding characters and the fact that Ana's friends only ever appear after two-thirds into the film, isolating her from real life, are in place. They just didn't wanna go there (probably because SM movies that actually break taboos aren't as easily marketable), so what we're stuck with is this mess of a movie with very little plot.

I know it's a cliché to hate on these movies, but I just don't see what makes them good in any way. "Fifty Shades Darker" doesn't look exceptional, the acting is bland, the story just repeats the same three or four beats for over two hours, the music is distracting ... Nope, this isn't good.

"The Uninvited" is a remake of the Korean horror film "A Tale of Two Sisters," which I have seen. Fortunately, my memory is not the best when it comes to recalling specifics about films I've seen, so I can't compare this movie too closely to the original. Let me just say that: Obviously, you should watch "Tale of Two Sisters" over this. It looks nicer, the acting is better, the story is more unpredictable, the pacing is more fitting. All of these are areas in which "The Uninvited" does not particularly stand out, at least in a good way, and this failure is heightened if you compare it to the original.

If you're done watching the Korean version, though, there are a couple things about "The Uninvited" that may surprise you. The story is not a point-by-point retelling of the original. This shows that there were at least some ambitions behind the movie beyond just making money out of Americans' unwillingness to read subtitles, and that is to be appreciated.

Most other attempts, though, to make the movie into anything more than a throwaway teen mystery thriller are in vain, sadly. The runtime of this movie is 87 minutes, which is a good length for a slasher flick but not for a movie like this. There is a severe lack of scenes that show the characters interacting in a natural way, as pretty much all of the scenes see our main character investigating the true motives of her creepy step-mother. Giving her more time with her father, or her sister, in the beginning of the film could have gone a long way in making me care for their relationships.

Instead, the movie wastes time with stupid nightmare scenes. Maybe the producers thought they need scenes like that in a horror film, but they have absolutely zero tension or suspense, because we KNOW that they are only nightmares and our heroine will wake up screaming and then the movie will go on as before. If these scenes were only visually interesting or inventive, there might have been some value to them, but most of the time you're just staring at a mostly-black screen and listening to ambient noise and jumpscare music. It's boring. The narrative sense behind the nightmares, of course, is to show that Emily Browning's character is traumatized. As if the rest of her scenes didn't make that obvious already ...

The acting is mostly fine, though Elizabeth Banks is not scary and Arielle Kebbel's character is annoying. If the movie had more depth, I might be able to tell you more about the acting or the characters, but they're all little more than archetypes.

As for the visual side, there is one very clever shot in the film that is a very smart example of foreshadowing (and, as such, telling you what it is might count as a spoiler so I'm not gonna do it). During the other 86 minutes, "The Uninvited" looks like every other American horror movie from the 2000s.

Also, on of the twists is quite predictable. I've seen the original, so that criticism might be unfair, but in the 2003 movie, the way the movie was written, directed, and acted made the reveal less predictable, whereas in this one I might have seen it coming even if I hadn't seen the Korean version before.

I appreciated that the movie has a slightly different story from its original, but they do so little with it that I can't recommend this remake to anyone.