This month’s selections include a period sci-fi/action hybrid, low-budget domestic puzzlers and a mega budget, yet overlooked, time-travel spectacle.
‘Shadow in the Cloud’
Why doesn’t this bonkers mix of science fiction, horror and action have the cult status it so richly deserves? In this 2020 movie, Chloë Grace Moretz (“Let Me In,” “Kick-Ass”) plays a seemingly fearless officer, Maude Garrett, who boards a B-17 bomber in 1943, carrying a mysterious package. Over the course of a rather eventful flight she must battle the crew’s rank sexism, enemy fighter planes and a giant, bloodthirsty rodent-like stowaway.
Any one of these adversaries would be enough for a movie, but the New Zealand director Roseanne Liang deftly handles all three at a breathless pace. The first third, which Maude mostly spends alone in a gun turret under the plane’s belly, is especially gripping, making the most of the tight space and our fearless heroine overhearing the Airmen’s dumb comments on the communications system.
Maude gets out of many pickles during the tight running time, but one in particular is so insane, it might well make you laugh in sheer delight. Mahuia Bridgman-Cooper’s synth-heavy music nods to the classic John Carpenter scores of the 1970s and ’80s, an apt reference for this deliriously fun movie.
‘Vivarium’
Gemma (Imogen Poots) and her boyfriend, Tom (Jesse Eisenberg), were not overly keen on Yonder, a development of identical, pistachio-colored houses, but they went for a visit anyway. Tough luck: When they try to leave, every turn in the labyrinth-like streets leads them back to No. 9. (a nod to the brilliant British anthology series “Inside No. 9”?).
Theirs is the only house that appears to be inhabited, and when Tom climbs on the roof to check out the lay of the land, he discovers that Yonder extends into infinity in all directions. As if this weren’t unsettling enough, a baby mysteriously appears. Overnight, it grows into a little boy dressed in black slacks and a white shirt like a miniature version of a Mormon missionary — or a “creepy little mutant,” as Tom puts it.
The movie’s descent into horror is all the more effective because it is not burdened with explanations: This is strictly B.Y.O.I. (Bring Your Own Interpretation). “Vivarium,” from 2019, is simultaneously open and hermetic, just like Yonder itself. It is all too easy to get lost in Lorcan Finnegan’s twisted fairy tale of suburban parenthood and conformity gone berserk.
‘Homesick’
Buy it on Amazon.
This quiet, deliberate British film starts when an unnamed student (the director Jason Farries) returns to his childhood home from university: We are in March 2020 and, titles tell us, Prime Minister Boris Johnson has put his country in lockdown because of a global pandemic.
The student’s parents are stuck in New Zealand, where they were vacationing, so he is on his own in their comfy home in the countryside. He orders food deliveries to the isolated house — we are told early on that the phone and internet connections are wobbly — and sets up a schedule of studying, gaming and exercising. Slowly, however, the solitude starts getting to him, and the outside world sinks into abstraction as technology becomes less and less reliable.
The quasi-documentary feel is undermined by niggling details, like the fact that in real life the Thomas Cook travel group went bankrupt in 2019 and not 2020. But just as you feel firmly settled into a Covid tale, the movie escalates into an apocalyptic nightmare (albeit a low-key one).
Despair creeps in as the student’s health declines, his loneliness becomes crippling, and he slowly realizes that the world outside his windows has changed in ways he could not have imagined. File this one in the dystopian subdivision of solo (or almost solo) films such as “Castaway” or “All Is Lost.”
‘Solitary’
Here’s another British production that proceeds at a deliberate pace and makes the most of its tiny budget. “Solitary,” from last year, takes place in 2044, when our overpopulated planet is dying (movies set on a future Earth where we have fixed global warming and world strife are few, bordering on nonexistent). Issac Havelock (Johnny Sachon) wakes up from a suspiciously unnatural sleep to find himself in a capsule orbiting Earth, sharing a room with Alana Skill (Lottie Tolhurst). A new policy has been implemented to kill two birds with one stone: Prisoners from an overflowing criminal system are packed off on one-way missions to colonize new planets, and Issac has been volunteered — any resemblance to the settlement of Australia is surely coincidental.
As for Alana, she is cagey about the reason for her presence. What’s clear is that she is a smart cookie, yet she weirdly defers to Issac, who is not that sharp, on most things involving contacting Earth. The best parts of the writer-director Luke Armstrong’s debut feature are devoted to discovering who Alana is, and here “Solitary” actually delivers a satisfying twist. Armstrong does not necessarily follow through in a satisfying manner — the fight scenes are especially bad — but he shows potential, and we should be on the lookout for his next effort.
‘The Tomorrow War’
While small budgets require big helpings of ingenuity, mega budgets have their own problems, which often involve being lumbering — for results that can be just as fleeting. Amazon reportedly paid $200 million for the rights for this ginormous time-travel extravaganza, and it must have cost a pretty penny to make, too. Yet “The Tomorrow War” came out in July with relatively little fuss — or at least the minimum fuss expected for a Chris Pratt actioner — and it does not seem to have made much of a lasting impression.
Let the rehabilitation campaign start here and now: This is some of the most effective sci-fi popcorn of the past few years, and it moves with a nimbleness that’s relatively rare among such juggernauts. Pratt plays a biology teacher who is conscripted to “jump” 30 years into the future to help fight off alien invaders. That’s pretty much all you need to know.
The film handles the paradoxes inherent to time travel better than most, or at least fast enough that you can push those pesky questions to the edge of your consciousness and just enjoy the absurd battle scenes, the absurd plot twists and the no-less absurd conclusion on a volcano. “The Tomorrow War” may have cost a bundle, but it has the spirit of a movie ten times smaller.
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