Film Round-Up: Immaculate, Monkey Man and Challengers

I saw a few films I can talk about for a hot minute.

Immaculate

Sydney Sweeney joins a convent in Italy but becomes pregnant as part of an immaculate conception, but the convent has dark secrets. It’s a return to the ‘American woman goes to Europe, encounters incredible horror’ genre, one which Amanda Knox probably should have watched a few of before her gap year. And look, it’s fine. It’s perfectly creepy in places with some uncomfortable moments. I’m never gonna feel right when finger nails are coming off, instant weakness for me. But I don’t think it ever becomes particularly good. It’s never properly scary, it’s imagery also feels pretty done. You are entering a genre in which you end up talking about Suspiria, you need to up your visual game. So yeah, I’m not going to stop you from watching it if you’re determined to see Sydney Sweeney as a nun, you naughty boy, but it’s very forgettable.

Monkey Man

Dev Patel looks to take revenge on a man who killed his family and village and gains the power of Gods to do it. This is another film in the unstoppable force action genre, but it does have grander ambitions. It brings in mythology and spiritualism in order to make it a bigger and more impressive film than some of it’s rivals. In some ways it works, it certainly feels like a more robust movie than something like The Beekeeper. But also it kind of forgets that in this sort of film, we do want to see the Monkey Man just beat a lot of people up in brutal ways, and while there are some good action scenes throughout, they never feel complete and are too few and far between. The final action scene is very good and worth it, but if someone asked me ‘I need a brains out action film to veg to this evening’, I’d have to go for the flimsier but more satisfying Beekeeper, which admittedly is like recommending a McDonalds over a coq au vin because the ratio of chicken to onions is off.

Challengers

Art Donaldson and Patrick Zweig stop being friends as young tennis stars after both going through relationship drama with Tashi Duncan. They then see each other again when at different levels of their career, and the relationship drama begins again. At times, this movie is everything it wants to be. A pulsating ‘sexy’ drama between a lot of young attractive people, the sort of movie that would get Euphoria fans into the cinema. And the relationship drama is tense and brilliant, with this love triangle being incredibly intense and pairing it with tennis works brilliantly. But then there’s some pacing issues with it’s back and forth narrative sometimes losing track of itself, and then a very unsatisfying ending which makes sense for film studies students, but leaves everyone else just going huh and wondering why it ended ten minutes early. Fun though.