Smile 2

Year 17, Day 303 - 10/30/25 - Movie #5,180

BEFORE: Kyle Gallner carries over from "Smile", and of course he does - for once my mad obsession with linking movies aligns PERFECTLY with a director's narrative intent. Kyle played the last person infected with the "suicide virus" in the first film, so of course he needs to be the first person seen in the sequel.

What has not paid off about my system was my plan to build up a tolerance for horror movies. When I started this project 17 years ago, I was not really a fan of horror, but I forced myself to watch them, and I started with the old ones from the 1930's and then gradually as the films got newer, they also got scarier. Oh, the plan worked, mostly - a couple weeks ago I watched "Nosferatu" and I wasn't freaked out by it at all. But this "Smile" series is like on a whole other level, I had trouble sleeping last night, and I'm guessing I'll have trouble again tonight. 

This Parker Finn guy is somebody to watch out for, he could be the next Eli Roth or the next M. Night Whats-his-name. Maybe he's a one-trick pony, but he could also be someone to breathe some new life (or death) into the genre and really blow things up. 

THE PLOT: About to embark on a world tour, global pop sensation Skye Riley begins experiencing increasingly terrifying and inexplicable events. Overwhelmed by the escalating horrors and the pressures of fame, Skye is forced to face her past. 

AFTER: Oh, this one is so damn clever, though you can also see that it's probably based on films like "The Ring", where everyone who watches a video mysteriously dies, but everyone is still curious enough to WATCH the damn thing in the first place. (Some maybe didn't know, but the people who did - WHY?). Sure, this is a new spin on it, everyone who watches someone commit suicide gets possessed, but it's the same concept. This director, however REALLY blew up the idea and went crazy nuts with it. I mean, sure, if you're gonna do it, don't do it just half way, really DO IT.

When we see Joel again, he's in the middle of an operation to rid himself of the "suicide curse", he's apparently done his research and learned that as alternative to killing himself, he can kill someone else and make a third person witness that, then the curse will leave him and go to the third party - but it's got to be BIG, and it's got to be chaotic, something flashy enough to make the Entity want to leave and find more fertile ground in the innocent witness who has just had their mind blown. It's a fantastic idea, and in theory it should work, only getting it to be successful amidst all the chaos is another thing entirely.  Remember that Joel might be deep into his week with the curse, and he might be seeing hallucinations and so he might not be in the best frame of mind to plan something.  Still, poor Joel manages to get himself free (in a fashion) and the curse passes to an observer, a drug-dealer who then inadvertantly passes it on to one of his clients, a recording star, Skye Riley, who seems to be part Lady Gaga and part Miley Cyrus. (They might as well have named her Gaga O'Riley?)

What better character to focus on than a young pop star with trouble in her past? Drug abuse, alcohol abuse, regular abuse-abuse maybe, and then on top of that the sense of entitlement that can only come from being a recording industry superstar and a few hit records, so a big ego to go with that, and also trauma from a car accident in which her boyfriend died, and the Entity's got SO MUCH to work with here. Plenty of fuel for her hallucinations and nightmares to use in taking her over to the dark side, she's already 90% of the way there, really, she just needs a little push.

Then you've got the stress of dealing with her momager, the stress of doing a meet-and-greet with love-struck fans, the stress of touring, rehearsing and dealing with back pain left over from that accident, then on top of that the media, the social media, and texts and e-mails and such. But that lifestyle comes with a cost, Skye hasn't just abused her body over the last couple of years, she's apparently used people and abused people and clearly there's a price to pay, when she goes to see her former drug dealer for some Vicodin (umm, yeah, right...) that's the start of the downward spiral, during which she leaves herself and her trauma vulnerable to the Entity.

As with Rose Cotter in the first film, at some point the hallucinations take over and she can't be sure what's real and what isn't, and therefore neither can we. The Entity is going to make her relive her darkest moments, and that means we get to see them too, but for the first time.  Like Joel, Skye is presented with a work-around, a way to maybe avoid her suicide, but it involves trusting a man who says he can "kill" her by stopping her heart and then bringing her back to life once the Entity (presumably) leaves her body - but can that work? And is this man real, or just another one of the Entity's hallucinations? To find out, she'll have to travel to a very different Hellscape, one called Staten Island which, NITPICK POINT, does not have any mountains in it, none that I'm aware of, anyway. 

I just recently learned a couple things about German expressionism, particularly the use of irregularly placed horizon lines to disorient the viewer and cause feelings of angst, despair and loss, and other German emotions. Some shots here in "Smile 2" are crooked or upside-down and they enhance the idea that chaos has taken over, nothing is what it should be, or what should be has been broken. But maybe the cleverest thing of all here is that the story can continue for an infinite period of time, just as long as one person lives on and witnesses the last suicide in the previous movie, we could have "Smile 3" and "Smile 4" and "Smile 10: Dead Reckoning" before long. 

The biggest problem, however, is that if you saw the first film, you can probably guess that the sequel is going to end in a similar fashion, but again, as long as it's a little bit different and/or amped up each time, this storyline can continue for a very long time.  And this is surely amped up, like the action and the horror is 1,000% extra compared to the previous film. Even if we all know where this is going to end, it's HOW we get there that's important. 

I think my favorite scene might have been when Skye hallucinated that she was being attacked in her aparement by her back-up dancers, moving in deadly but also highly coordinated fashion. If you can imagine the Jets or Sharks from "West Side Story" dance-fighting but also performing the moves together like the "blob" of dancers seen in "Sweet Charity", you'll realize this was a fascinating tribute to both Jerome Robbins AND Bob Fosse, and we came closer than ever to cinema's first "Death by Jazz Hands" moment.

DIrected by Parker Finn

Also starring Naomi Scott (last seen in "Charlie's Angels" (2019)), Rosemarie DeWitt (last seen in "Men, Women & Children"), Lukas Gage (last seen in "Assassination Nation"), Miles Gutierrez-Riley, Peter Jacobson (last seen in "Fly Me to the Moon"), Ray Nicholson (last seen in "Licorice Pizza"), Dylan Gelula (last seen in "Dream Scenario"), Raul Castillo (last seen in "Army of the Dead"), Zebedee Row, Roberts Jekabsons (last seen in "Bright"), Sean Stolzen, Jon Rua, Margot Weintraub, Christopher Bailey, Xhloe Rice, Caitlyn Classey, Ivan Carlo, Mila Falkof, Christopher Sky, Jarrett Austin Brown, Erika Chase, Micaela Lamas, Karma Jenkins, Daphne Zelle, Ken McGraw, Brandi Bravo, Delphi Harrington (last seen in "Sully"), Fredi Bernstein, Trevor Newlin (last seen in "Superman"), 

with cameos from Drew Barrymore (last seen in "Barbara Walters: Tell Me Everything"), Vladimir Duthiers, Kristine Johnson (also last seen in "Sully"), and Parker Finn.

RATING: 6 out of 10 broken mirrors

Smile

Year 17, Day 302 - 10/29/25 - Movie #5,179

BEFORE: The Atlanta Hawks beat the Brooklyn Nets last night, and I should know because I was there. Well, I was in the building, my new job is working concessions for the company that runs all the stands and restaurants there. My first shift, and they put me on the Craft Beer "Grab and Go" station, which means that either somebody knows me very well and my love of craft beer, or somebody has gone crazy and put the fox in charge of the hen house, so to speak. Working in a sports arena turns out to be much like working at a comic-con, only more so, but perhaps that's just the way I look at things, based on my experiences.  

I took this gig to get more concessions experience, I was interviewing for theater manager positions and it got pointed out to me that my last concessions job was back in 1989, I avoided this when I worked a commercial theater in 2021 and it's not part of my current theater job, since that theater is run by a college and is not profit-oriented. The majority of a commercial theater's revenue comes from popcorn and candy (and alcohol in the newer theaters) because the mark-up is incredible, a box of popcorn costs under a dollar to make and package, and they'll sell it for $7 or $8 or more. Last night I was helping sports fans purchase beer at $17 a can, which kind of doesn't sit well with me, I'm used to paying $4 a can max. Plus I'll go to a beer festival and drink for four hours for under $30, that's more my style. So right now I can't even afford to drink a beer at my new job, I don't know how long I'll last there, but I'm hoping at least to get some work in late December and early January, when my primary job is shut down for winter break. That's the new plan, unless I can come up with something else. 

Kyle Gallner carries over again from "Strange Darling". 

THE PLOT: After witnessing a bizarre, traumatic incident involving a patient, a psychiatrist becomes increasingly convinced she is being threatened by an uncanny entity. 

AFTER: Well, the chain sure has a way of making sure that the absolute CREEPIEST films end up where they should, which is on or just before Halloween. OK, last year that meant "Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire", but in previous years it's been films like "Candyman" or "Bird Box" or "Pet Sematary". It's a sign that the process works, if I can't get a really scary one sometimes at least I get one where people are actively trick or treating...

Look, I don't ever regret programming a film, that would be stupid. A worse sin than scaring the bejeebus out of me would be NOT scaring me at all, because that would make a film very pointless indeed, especially around this time of year. So I guess if you're gonna do it, really DO IT - this is probably the scariest film I've seen since "It: Chapter Two", that's what I'm trying to say here. If you watched the ads and the trailer for this one, you might think, well, what's scary about a bunch of people smiling at you? Yeah, it's not just the smile, it's what they DO while they're smiling at you. This is enhanced by effects, of course, but also it demonstrates what I call the "Serial Killer" smile, and not everyone can do it. You have to make your eyes and your brain work in conjunction with your mouth - I can't remember which job, but I had a manager once who would ask me to do this smile, and then he regretted it.  

This movie also poses the question, what if suicide was contagious, like a virus?  One person here is having hallucinations of people with that sick, dead-eye smile, lots of different people - as if some entity has possessed them, or is disguising itself as different people, all with that smile and slowly getting closer and closer. She ends up in the psych ward, describing her problem to Dr. Rose Connor, who, you know, sees a lot of deranged or manic people, but nothing like this before. To make matters worse, the patient starts actively having the hallucinations in front of Dr. Connor, then while the doctor is calling for help, the patient stands up and is now smiling that smile herself. Well, that's a sign that something really bad is about to happen, and sure enough, the patient commits suicide.  

This has an impact on Rose, as you might imagine. She herself has a family history of suicide, her mother apparently took her own life, and this new trauma causes the old trauma to re-surface, only worse than before. Rose had a bad sleep schedule before because of her job, and now that's worse too. Before long her job and relationship start to suffer, and she begins having hallucinations herself, of people at a moderate distance away from her, all smiling that same demented smile. Uh oh...

I don't want to give too much away here, but she turns to her ex-boyfriend, who's a cop, and since he has access to police reports, they are able to determine that her patient had previously been a witness to a suicide a week before, and THAT person had also witnessed a suicide a few days before that, and so on, and so on. So this can't be random, and it can't just be that each suicide had a psychological impact on the next person, and so on and so on. Perhaps it is some kind of demon working through different people, jumping from one to the next, trying to cause chaos and suffering in the world. What else could it be? 

This is the new school of horror, mixing the supernatural with body horror, and taking a cue from viral videos and social media. Perhaps this is all a metaphor for fake news or misinformation, like how suddenly people eating Tide Pods became a thing, or doing the "gallon challenge", which was potentially just as deadly, as nobody is supposed to ever chug a whole gallon of milk at once. You can drown in milk just as easily as you can drown in water, which is also deadly if you drink too much of it. Anyway, what we're really seeing here is suicide spreading between people just as fast as bad ideas do. Well, four to seven days, at least. 

Rose determines that there is one person who witnessed a suicide that managed to break the pattern, instead of killing himself he killed someone else, and is now in prison. She and her ex drive to Altoona to visit him, to figure out exactly what's going on and how to (maybe) stop it. Rose also figures she's on borrowed time, and thinks that maybe if she just spends the next few days by herself, maybe she can also break the pattern. So she travels to her old house, which is where her mother committed suicide, however she ends up getting more than she bargained for, is it possible that the suicide chain goes all the way back to her mother?  

OK, no more plot-points, if you want more you're just going to have to watch the film, like I did, and get scared, like I did. Well, like I said, all that is seasonally appropriate, if you're not sleeping with the light on this time of year then maybe you're not doing it right. Happy (almost) Halloween!

Directed by Parker Finn

Also starring Sosie Bacon (last seen in "The Last Summer"), Jessie T. Usher (last seen in "Shaft" (2019)), Robin Weigert (last seen in "Things We Lost in the Fire"), Caitlin Stasey, Kal Penn (last seen in "The Namesake"), Rob Morgan (last seen in "The United States vs. Billie Holiday"), Gillian Zinser (last seen in "The Guilty"), Judy Reyes (last seen in "The Circle"), Jack Sochet, Nick Arapoglou (last seen in "Pain Hustlers"), Perry Strong, Matthew Lamb, Dora Kiss, Meghan Brown Pratt, Jared Johnston (last seen in "Wonderstruck"), Ura Yoana Sanchez, Vanessa Cozart, Shu Q, Shevy Gutierrez, Sara Kapner, Steven Strickland, Kevin Keppy, Marti Matulis (last seen in "Men in Black 3"), Felix Melendez Jr., Anne Schmalzigan

RATING: 7 out of 10 shocked birthday party guests

Strange Darling

Year 17, Day 301 - 10/28/25 - Movie #5,178

BEFORE: After two months of training and waiting (mostly waiting), I'm starting my second job today. Will talk about what it is and where it is tomorrow, but it's been a challenge just to get to this point, I kind of had to re-think what it is I've been trying to do, and by extension who I'm trying to be. Remember that one's career history may not be a straight path, there could be twists and turns along the way, this is probably a turn, but I'm making it with a plan for other turns down the road.  

The problem with my main gig is that twice a year the place shuts down for nearly a month, and I can't get any shifts that way. I understand, it's a college and there's a summer break and a winter break, and permanent staffers like to take vacations, too, but I'm not a staffer, I'm a temp, and two months where I can't make any money presents a bit of a problem. So maybe with two part-time jobs I can do a little better, however the new challenge is figuring out how to make myself available on two different calendars for the maximum number of days without creating the conflict of needing to be in two places at the same time. Before, when I had two jobs, they were only about 10 blocks away from each other, so I could sometimes work both in the same day, or if I was needed for an emergency at the other one, I could be there fairly quickly. That's not the case any more, my jobs are in two different NYC boroughs, so I have to work out each month's schedule in advance, and then before each week starts, when I find out when Job A doesn't need me, I have to adjust my availability for Job B. Now I just have to figure out which job is Job A and which one is Job B. I guess I'll see how things go tonight, who knows, I could fail in some spectacular fashion, it's been known to happen. 

Kyle Gallner carries over from "A Nightmare on Elm Street" (2010)

THE PLOT: A twisted one-night stand spirals into a serial killer's vicious murder spree.

AFTER: This film really shouldn't work, because the story's broken up into chapters, and the chapters are maddeningly not presented in chronological order. Sure, why not? Somebody thinks that he's Tarantino, I'll bet. But it kind of low-key works, because the first couple chapters don't give us that much information, and then as we continue bouncing around in time it's not TOO difficult to put things in the proper order, and I get that if we had that slow build that came with waiting for things to develop, this could have turned boring very easily.  

And two serial killers coming together and circling each other and trying to both figure each other out AND come out on top, well, that should be pretty exciting, and yeah, it kind of is. You can imagine this as a one-night stand gone wrong, but then also realize that maybe every interaction with a serial killer becomes a one-night stand, for obvious reasons. We don't think of serial killers as normal, not by any stretch of the imagination, so what happens when you get TWO of them in the same hotel room? Well, a lot of freaky stuff, to start with. And here maybe we see the difference between male and female serials, the males are more likely to be introverted, perhaps even closeted, and also maybe socially disconnected, so we might not expect a sexual interaction with a woman to go well, for a number of reasons. A woman serial killer (and they're probably less common, other than Aileen Wuornos, I'm hard pressed to think of any) would be more likely to have an agenda, perhaps due to sexual abuse in the past or a genuine hatred of men and how they operate.  

It's too bad, because these two crazy kids seem like they might be meant for each other, they at least understand each other, and you can't say that about every couple. But right away you can see there's going to be a problem, like who's going to make the first move, who's going to tie up who?  And then trust is a two-way street, are you going to let that person tie you up, do you believe that they will untie you when you ask? Always have a safe word, sure, but how do you know the other person is going to honor it? Then, when each person knows a number of different ways to kill the other one, who's going to make THAT move first? Really this is a peek into the brains of two broken people, though they may be broken in different ways - and male serial killers are from Mars and female serial killers are from Venus, so perhaps this relationship was doomed from the start, they were never going to hold it together for any length of time. 

The only question then becomes, how many other people are they going to drag down with them? Once the chase begins there's a very madcap but violent "Cocaine Bear" feel to all of this, and if you think you know how it's going to play out, you're probably very very wrong. Is there, deep down, any actual love or attraction here? Perhaps just for a minute or two, which is sad to say, but this is where we find ourselves. Of course, this one's set in Oregon, because we know that the rainy climate there produces two types of weirdos, serial killers and animators. Prove me wrong.

Directed by JT Mollner

Also starring Willa Fitzgerald (last seen in "The Goldfinch"), Madisen Beaty (last seen in "Other People"), Bianca A. Santos (last seen in "The DUFF"), Steven Michael Quezada (last seen in "Girlfriend's Day"), Ed Begley Jr. (last seen in "Stay Hungry"), Barbara Hershey (last seen in "The Pallbearer"), Denise Grayson (last seen in "The Social Network"), Eugenia Kuzmina (last seen in "That Awkward Moment"), Duke Mollner, Sheri Foster (last seen in "U Turn"), Andrew Segal, Jason Patric (last seen in "The Lost Boys"), and the voices of Giovanni Ribisi (last seen in "Basic"), Robert Craighead (last seen in "Cujo") 

RATING: 6 out of 10 pieces from a Scott Baio jigsaw puzzle

A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010)

Year 17, Day 300 - 10/27/25 - Movie #5,177

BEFORE: Getting close to the end of October now - I lost a week of course, by going to North Carolina so it feels like the month went by very quickly, and losing shifts at both jobs of course didn't help me out, but it is what it is, and we've got four days until Halloween. I've got one shift at the new job tomorrow and I'm at the theater on Halloween because nobody else wants to work that day, the kids just want to go out and party. 

Rooney Mara carries over from "The Discovery". This is one of those film franchises that I have left very much alone over the years - in the horror genre, I first focused on the "classic" films, going back to the original Dracula and Frankenstein movies and such. Then I started to watch a bunch of more modern horror films, but I did not make it a top priority to cover the period in-between, the 1980's and 1990's films like "Friday the 13th" and "Halloween" and "Child's Play" and such. There's still time, I can get to them when I choose or when I start running out of other films, but I don't know that I'll ever run out of horror films, the list seems to be endless. Next year's schedule is kind of set, so I'll have to play it by ear. 

But I've got the time and the linking to watch the re-boot of the "Freddy Krueger" franchise, I'm sure the older films will always be available, but that's a long-term plan. I did use to work at a movie theater in Massachusetts that was located on an Elm Street, and I was working there when I think the fourth film in the franchise was released, and people went nuts, the crowd was tremendous because everyone wanted to visit the theater on Elm Street to watch it. 

THE PLOT: The spectre of a disfigured man haunts the children of the parents who murdered him, stalking and killing them in their dreams.

AFTER: This feels like another case of a movie franchise that lost its way at some point - when you're frantically re-booting it and re-casting your lead actor at the same time, that's a really bad sign. (Are you listening, James Gunn?). When they stop numbering the movies, that's another bad sign - I know there's a school of thought that says people won't go see a film with a "3" or a "4" in it, especially if they haven't seen the films numbered 1 & 2, but that should be an added incentive to make them better, or make the story so relevant that people simply can't miss one! But no, that's crazy - instead you can almost imagine the studio meetings they have when the installments start to bomb, let's STOP numbering them so people will get confused and also new fans will be more likely to jump in at the fourth one, and then if THAT doesn't work, let's just scrap the whole thing and wait a couple years, then reboot it all. How long before another actor can play Sherlock Holmes or Victor Frankenstein or Luke Skywalker?  

The "Nightmare on Elm Street" series is a classic example, they numbered the first five films, then the wave of reboots started - "Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare", "Wes Craven's New Nightmare" and then "Freddy vs. Jason". Then things got so bad that Robert Englund didn't want to play Freddy any more, hell, he must have made enough money already, so the next attempt at a solution was to scrap everything and start over, with a film that incorporated elements from some of the previous films, but also with a new twist or two, stripped down and simplified, no continuity to keep track of, back to basics. Simplified and more complicated at the same time, I think the only horror franchise with a more convoluted history is the "Halloween" films, and I've been afraid to get into those also. But hey, never say never, I once said no to the "Twilight" films and the "Scream" films, but then I became a regular customer. 

The linking says I need to deal with Freddy Krueger, if I want to continue with the chain. I've learned to listen to the linking, but still, slasher films just aren't really my thing. The first few killings here are a set-up for the big confrontation down the road, I get that. But it still feels like a waste to umm, kill off a couple of the biggest stars they cast near the beginning of the film. There's a precedent, sure, they killed off Angie Dickinson in the early part of "Dressed to Kill" and Deborah Shelton in the first half of "Body Double", I guess by the end of a horror movie you may been down to just a few characters, anyway, they're works of attrition after all.

They never really say here what exactly Freddy Krueger is, did they cover this somewhere in the first 8 movies? Ghost, demon, spectre, how exactly are we supposed to classify this, or does it just never come up? He's got the power to attack teenagers through the collective dreamscape, a thing that was also proposed in "Dream Scenario", but that came later. He's a variation on the boogeyman, or Nightmare from the Marvel comics, and if he manages to kill you in your dream about him, then you're slashed up and dead in real life, too. It hardly seems fair, how the hell are the teenagers supposed to counter him?  They try here with various ADHD drugs like Ritalin and then later on, adrenaline, however this only sets up a situation where the characters start taking "micronaps", and then Freddy's got a toehold in the door again. Apparently if you don't sleep for three or four days, supposedly you can then fall asleep at the drop of a hat and NOT be aware that you're in the dreamscape. Whoopsie. Quention even manages to take a micro-nap during swim practice, which is, umm, not a great idea and maybe also not possible. 

The film really only has one gag, which it uses again and again - that is "HA! You thought you were awake, but really you were asleep, and now here comes Freddy!" OK, sure, high school kids fall asleep during class, I've done that. But here they fall asleep everywhere, while eating dinner or watching TV or while driving, which is dangerous for at least two reasons. Thanks to MTV and cell phones and social media, all of these kids have the attention span of a goldfish, that may be part of the problem. And then I think a couple times these kids take a micronap while they're already asleep, so then they're two levels in, like in "Inception". It's a vicious cycle, they fall asleep and dream about Freddy, after a close call they're so afraid they CAN'T sleep, so then they stay up and drink more coffee but that only makes them more tired, so they have to crash, and we're back to the original problem. Look, I've worked long days at the theater during film festivals, and I've been so jacked up on free ice coffee from the pre-screening reception that I go to sleep right after I get home, but then after a four-hour evening nap, good luck getting back to sleep at 2 am, right? Might as well just watch another movie at that point. 

The original Freddy was a child-killer, but they took the extra step here and made him an (alleged) child molester, he was apparently the handyman and gardener for a day-care center or pre-school, and the parents got together and solved the problem via vigilante justice, burning down the school building with him in it. This way the kids didn't have to testify against him, and the parents could focus on getting their kids to forget about any incidents. Sure, that works, until the handy-man's vengeful spirit targets those kids in the dreamscape - but then I'm not really sure who I should be rooting for here, I know it shouldn't be the child molester, but if not him, then whose side am I on? 

I think there must be other reasons why this film was problematic, note that they haven't made any more sequels since the reboot - but there is talk now about rebooting the whole franchise yet again. There was talk of making Freddy innocent but falsely accused of his crimes, which would have made his killings more heroic, but then, NITPICK POINT, why would he be targeting the kids instead of their parents, you know, the ones who killed him back then? I mean, eventually he kind of gets there, I'm just wondering why he didn't START there. I mean, everything is ultimately the parents' fault, right? This freaking generation of post-millennial teens blame everything on their parents - "My parents didn't pay enough attention to me!" "My parents paid too much attention to me!" "My parents gave me ADHD!" "My parents gave me autism!" "My parents were too strict!" "My parents weren't strict enough!" "My parents killed the gardener at my pre-school because I got molested!" Suddenly I'm starting to wonder if Freddy had the right idea in the first place... JK!

Directed by Samuel Bayer

Also starring Jackie Earle Haley (last seen in "The Union"), Kyle Gallner (last seen in "Scream" (2022)), Katie Cassidy (last seen in "Black Christmas"), Thomas Dekker (last seen in "Cinema Verite"), Kellan Lutz (last seen in "Love, Wedding, Marriage"), Clancy Brown (last seen in "Marvin Hamlisch: What He Did for Love"), Connie Britton (last seen in "Luckiest Girl Alive"), Lia Mortensen, Christian Stolte (last seen in "Novocaine"), Kurt Naebig (last seen in "Road to Perdition"), Kyra Krumins, Brayden Coyer, Max Holt, Andrew Fiscella (last seen in "Gotti"), Bob Kizer, Peter A. Kelly (last seen in "Contagion"), Jason Brandstetter, Rob Riley (last seen in "Prelude to a Kiss"), Parker Bagley, Tommy Bartlett, Aaron Yoo (last seen in "10 Years"), Julianna Damm, Don Robert Cass, Scott Lindvall, Dominick Coviello, Jennifer Robers, Tania Randall, Logan Stalzer, Christopher Woods, Christine Crawley, Charles Tiedje

RATING: 4 out of 10 prescription refills

The Discovery

Year 17, Day 299 - 10/26/25 - Movie #5,176

BEFORE: OK, I'm back from a week in North Carolina. We spent one day at the N.C. State Fair and did a LOT of walking - like, too much because with the tools I had, I couldn't sit down with a proper map of the fairgrounds and work out the best path through all the booths to get the things I wanted to eat. I've been there before, so I kind of know my way around, and there was a list of the best new fair foods posted online, but in order to figure out where each booth was, I needed to take the name of the company that owns the booth (which is sometimes different from the posted name of the booth) and put it into a fairground search engine, which could only give me one location at a time. There were maybe 8 foods I was interested in, and four that I thought my wife would enjoy, but I didn't have a printer, so there was no chance to get a printed map before going to the fair, instead I had to prioritize my top two locations and her top two, and mentally think about which direction we were going to head after entering the fair. And where we entered was going to have everything to do with where we parked, and I just couldn't predict that. Luckily we parked in a free lot and took a shuttle-bus, which took us to gate 8, and we've come in that way before. 

Another stroke of luck, in the first section we walked through, I spotted a couple of the items on my list, plus an ice-cream stand, so in my mind that was an exit strategy, head back toward the gate we walked in, get those last few items and/or ice cream, and then leave before the dinner or late-night crowd came in. So instead we headed for the center of the fair, and I found the booth with the breakfast sausage on a stick, dipped in waffle-batter, deep-fried, then covered with cheese, bacon and country gravy. YUM! My wife got some nachos with the exciting topping called "nacho cheese", and then I tracked down the fabled "BBQ donut", that's a donut filled with BBQ meat, covered with BBQ sauce and bacon crumbles. YUM again!  

I wish they would number the booths and make everything easier to find, that's the way they do things at the Texas State Fair plus every Comic-Con I've ever been to - I shouldn't have to search by company name to find everything, plus the next thing I'm looking for could then be on the other side of the fair and it would take me an hour to walk over there. But if each booth had a number then I could have a better idea of each booth's location and I could have worked out a better path to hit more items. Just saying.  

Beyond that, we visited my parents at my sister's house every day, talked with them or did crosswords or jigsaw puzzles with them, went through some old photo albums and such, tried to remember the names of some of their favorite restaurants and some stories from years past. They're both turning 84 this year, my mother's got dementia so sometimes she doesn't remember that her mother and sister have both passed on, sometimes she doesn't recognize her own grandchildren, you know, fun stuff like that. Which kind of leads me in a round-about way to tonight's movie, which is all about people dying and wondering what comes after, if anything. This, of course was not planned, except that the chain totally plans stuff like this to tie in with my life, or it's my subconscious sending me messages, still not sure which. 

Rooney Mara carries over from "A Ghost Story". I'm going in tonight with that same sort of genre confusion, I'm not sure if this is a horror movie exactly, because IMDB lists it as a drama and a romance and a sci-fi film. So, um, what the hell is it, and does it belong in October or February? How can it be all of those things? Only one way to find out, and cross it off the list at the same time...

THE PLOT: Two years after the afterlife is scientifically proven, a man attempts to help a young woman break away from her dark past. 

AFTER: A number of this year's Shocktober films have been dancing around the same subject, which is "What happens when we die?" and possible answers have come from "The Eye" and "A Ghost Story", to a lesser extent "Haunted Mansion" and "The Fog". But then there's also "What happens when we dream?" which was broken down in "Dream Scenario" and "Awake", and then there's "What happens when we forget stuff?" as seen in "Blink Twice" and "I Lost My Body". 

Now we've got a film that puts the notion out there that we know so little about how the human brain works, including what constitutes a "soul", if there is one, that maybe all of those things are tied together somehow, and perhaps there's a unified theory of sorts that might explain how the universe works with regards to human life and a possible after-life. Of course, we could just fall back on Occam's Razor, which states that the simplest explanation for things is quite possibly correct, and there's nothing more simple than we die and we cease to exist and our soul goes nowhere because there's no such thing, whatever energy we had just dies too, like what good is the gas in the tank if the car doesn't work? 

But let's roll with what this film has to say for the moment - there's a scientist who has found the way to track the energy that leaves the body right after death, so let's say soul particles, for lack of a better term. They go somewhere, but he can't really tell where, however this is enough for most people to prove the existence of an afterlife. And that "proof" alone is enough for people to start committing suicide in mass numbers, because they're anxious to get to whatever's on the other side, sure, let's go, the sooner the better, you know this will also have the benefit of preserving the Earth's resources for a while longer, another couple of generations perhaps, so really, it's a win-win.  Well, except for a couple of things. 

Proving that energy, or the soul, leaves the body is not really tacit proof that it GOES somewhere constructive. What if it just wanders around like a ghost, but isn't able to accomplish anything? What if it flies up into the cosmos and spends years floating through space until it gets sucked into that black hole in the galaxy's center, where the energy is burnt up or recycled or used as fuel in another dimension?  We only know what we know, and once upon a time, people tried to weigh a human body at the moment of death to find out how much a soul weighs, and again, this seems like a B.S. experiment because it assumes things not in evidence, and you can't really answer the question before you ask it, or believe your process is spot-on when it isn't, so you may find out the hard way that the universe doesn't work the way you think it does. 

I had some stressful dreams over the last week, part of that may be because I was sleeping in different motel rooms, not in my standard position, plus I was spending time with my parents and looking at old photos, so that was sure to jog something loose. Also I wasn't watching movies, and sometimes movies are stand-ins for dreams and vice versa - without my daily movie (like watching other people's dreams) my brain came up with its own during the night. Makes sense. Our best guess these days is that dreams are our brain's way of sorting out the day's events, or working out different possible life scenarios, good and bad. Most of us don't remember them for long, so then, come on, what's the point of all that? Ah, but we're assuming there IS a point to them, which again, is something we could be trying to prove instead of assuming it to be true. 

We follow Will, the son of the man who proved the afterlife (and therefore caused 4 million suicides) as he travels on a ferry to his father's island - it's never good when a scientist or a tech guy has an island, remember?  He meets a young woman named Isla on the ferry and they hit it off, later on he learns that she has come to the island JUST to commit suicide, and he stops her from doing that. Will learns that a bunch of formerly suicidal people live at the compound with his father, and work as lab techs and medical assistants and whatever, also he learns that his father has been clinically dead several times, as he's researching what's on the other side.  Look, we know that several people have reported seeing an afterlife while temporarily "dead", but here's where we don't know what might be real and what might be a dream and what might be a fantasy created by their bodies shutting down, even temporarily.  Some combination of religion and science may someday be able to explain all of this, but they'd have to start working together, like chocolate and peanut butter, and so far they've been mutually exclusive. 

"Life is but a dream" is something we've all heard, but often when people say they're "living the dream" they're being sarcastic. I shouldn't be looking to language to solve the afterlife riddle, but what else can I do?  Do we think that dreams give us a peek at the afterlife? Do we think people who die temporarily and remember the afterlife were just dreaming about it? Where ARE we on the science of death, anyway? Can we get religion and science to work together, or is that just a fantasy, too? 

Anyway, the way Will sees it, his father has assembled something like a death cult of followers, which, you know, is good because it tips the scales here a bit more toward a horror movie.  But then Will's dad invents a machine that can not only look through the portal, but capture images from it - essentially it's reading the dreams of the dead in video form - and what it records is something that looks like memories, only they're not 100% accurate, something is different, and it tends to be related to some mistake that the person made while alive, only in the dream/afterlife this mistake is corrected. So, we put it all together, and what results here is a form of reincarnation, whatever our biggest regret is, in the next life we get to fix that and move on in the changed timeline, we still have to live out the rest of that life, but it's hopefully with a better result, and then I suppose whatever regret we have in THAT life gets corrected in the following one, and so on. We don't go back to the embryonic stage and have to live our whole life exactly the same again until we get to the critical juncture, the universe kind of resets itself to just before the fateful decision (or whatever) and we'll remember JUST enough about our previous life to make a better decision this time around. Well, that's all just a little too convenient, if you ask me. But it's a big problem with the other suggested forms of reincarnation, which suggest that if you lived a good life maybe in the next one you get to be a happy dog, but if you were a bad person then in the next one you only get to be a mosquito or a fruit fly or something with a very short life-span.  

Well, without proof it's as good a theory as any other, of course there's also the one where our souls wear white robes and halos and float around and learn to play the harp - or any of the countless variations on that. Still, there are many logistic questions unresolved, like where exactly IS this other dimension, and how do our souls get there, or is everything imaginary, including the reality we're all in right now?  And if we're all stuck in a bunch of infinite loops, is that a good thing or a bad thing? Do we want to stop that, and if so, how?  Or, as I said before, is the simplest explanation for how life and death works the easiest one to fall back on? 

This is not the final film that Robert Redford made, four more came out after this one, including "Our Souls at Night" and "The Old Man & the Gun". However, this is the first film of his I've seen after he passed away, and it's all about dying and the afterlife, so I don't know, it feels like there's a tie-in there, or there would be if the depiction of life as one giant "Groundhog Day" scenario weren't so far-fetched. Really the film is about the lies we tell ourselves about how the universe works so we're able to get through the day, but since we'll probably NEVER know the answers to these questions, are they really lies if they can't be proven or unproven? 

Directed by Charlie McDowell (director of "Windfall" and "The One I Love")

Also starring Jason Segel (last seen in "Jeff, Who Lives at Home"), Jesse Plemons (last seen in "Varsity Blues"), Riley Keough (last seen in "Under the Silver Lake"), Robert Redford (last seen in "Dear Ms.: A Revolution in Print"), Ron Canada (last seen in "The United States of Leland"), Mary Steenburgen (last seen in "Hope Springs" (2003), Brian McCarthy (last seen in "Like Father"), Connor Ratliff (last seen in "Mean Girls" (2024)), M.J. Karmi, Kimleigh Smith (last seen in "Bad Words"), Willie C. Carpenter (last seen in "Monster"), Wendy Makkena (last seen in "The Tomorrow Man"), Adam Khaykin, Paul Bellefeuille, Richard O'Rourke (last seen in "Mona Lisa Smile")

RATING: 5 out of 10 bodies in the morgue (be sure to pick a GOOD one)