BEFORE: Well, we're back from North Carolina, it took us two days to drive down there and we spent five days visiting with my sister's family and my parents, and then the drive back took another two days, so I went nine days without watching a movie, but that was intentional. I've got some extra space to play with right now, and I can still hit Father's Day on time. In fact I'll still need to take another five or six days off to hit the holiday right on the button, but I figure I'll be so busy in June that should be no problem.
We mostly just hung out with my parents, watched TV with them, and I did some jigsaw puzzles with my Dad, which is strange because he was never really interested in that when I was a kid, we played canasta or cribbage together and I did a lot of jigsaw puzzles by myself. But I guess now they're good for keeping his brain active. They're both turning 83 this year, so visits are becoming important, because, well, you just never know. On Friday we stepped out to an agricultural fair in Raleigh, not a State Fair but it was held on the same grounds as the N.C. State Fair, which we've been to twice now. So yeah, I had some fair foods and we also went to Waffle House and Cracker Barrel a lot, maybe four times each.
While we were driving back, we got a text from my sister that my mother was in the hospital again, but this time her heart was beating too slow, not too fast as usual. It seems like some of her medications have been building up in her system and she had a bad reaction to it, and had some kind of seizure or something, and she was unresponsive for a while. If we hadn't been halfway home already we might have turned back around, but we both needed to get back to work - Mom's in the hospital now, recovering and being monitored, and they may have to adjust her meds. Again, you just never know.
Today's film has been on the docket for quite some time, I think I recorded it on my DVR in September of 2021, and I've just never found a good place for it before, I had it on a list with other films about mothers, but it didn't QUITE feel like a Mother's Day film, because it's also listed as something of a horror film - however, I haven't been able to find a place for it with the other horror movies in October, either. OK, so it at least LINKS to the other films I was able to get to during Mother's Day week, so that's some sign to me that it wants to be watched now. Sure, Mother's Day was over a week ago, but as I said this doesn't completely feel like a Mother's Day film, so that's perfect timing then.
Dermot Mulroney carries over from "Georgia Rule".
THE PLOT: After India's father dies, her uncle Charlie, who she never knew existed, comes to live with her and her unstable mother. She comes to suspect this mysterious, charming man has ulterior motives and becomes increasingly infatuated with him.
AFTER: And now, after watching this film, I'm more confused than ever about what it wants to be, it clearly has that identity problem that I mentioned above. It's not relationshippy enough to serve as a Mother's Day film, but it's not really scary enough to serve as a horror film, either. OK, so it's a tense psychogical thriller, maybe, but even then, it's a bit hard to pin down. Was this meant as a gender-swapped take on "Hamlet", or does it serve better as some kind of origin story for a serial killer? It's tough to say what exactly the intent was, because it's so all over the place. It's about a girl coming of age as a teen, but also it's about her uncle coming to live with her after her father's death, and it seems for a long while like Uncle Charlie's there to hook up with her mother. I mean, come on, the mother is played by Nicole Kidman, so why wouldn't he?
Ah, but there's more going on here - a lot of confusing and perhaps contradictory stuff, but still, it's a lot of stuff. India Stoker's father dies ON her 18th birthday, which is a bummer, sure, and only later on in the film do we learn that maybe there's no such thing as coincidence, and maybe everything's connected, from her father's death to the mysterious birthday gifts that India gets every year. Uncle Charlie's been traveling around the world for years, but there's also something that's just OFF about him, maybe it's the fact that anyone who has something bad to say about him just sort of disappears and nobody is then able to find them, dead or alive. Hmm, it's pretty shady for sure, but as a young woman India has bigger problems, like getting bullied at school by a bunch of rough jock guys, and there's only one who comes to her defense, but even he may not be doing that for the right reasons. Like, for all we know, he's colluding with the bullies and only pretending to come to India's rescue, but really his intentions aren't any better than the others.
Meanwhile the head housekeeper of the Stoker estate is the latest to disappear, only India is fairly sure she's spotted a body in the basement freezer. Well, be careful when you pull some frozen meat out of there, please. Then Aunt Gin comes to visit and is concerned when she learns that Uncle Charlie seems to have moved in - and she wants to have a talk with Evelyn, India's mom, probably to warn her about Charlie's true nature, only that kind of puts a target square on Aunt Gin's back, doesn't it?
India also appears to have some kind of powers, she can see what others can't see and hear what others can't hear, which admittedly is kind of vague and also the movie can't be bothered to explain this any further. But she does have some kind of vision/hallucination that she's playing a piano duet with Uncle Charlie, but then somehow he's not really there? Yeah, again, this is all just a bit weird, maybe the movie needs to figure a few things out here about exactly what's going on. I guess that India is experiencing some kind of crush on her uncle, even after watching him make out with her mother, but this doesn't really seem to be a superpower, just an overactive imagination perhaps.
Eventually it all gets explained during the flashbacks, not just what Charlie''s been up to, but who's been really leaving those birthday gifts for India, and why she'd never known about her uncle before. Yes, we even learn how India's father died, but it's really just an afterthought at some point, especially to the audience members who have already figured out what Charlie's all about. Charlie wants to make that move to New York, and he wants India to come with him, but it's a bit unclear whether he wants her to come live with him and be his niece, or his lover, or something else entirely, like a protégé. Does it even matter, though?
I can't really tell if this film just had no constructive ending, or it just feels that way because we ended up losing so many characters along the way, that by the end of the movie, there was nothing to do because there was nobody left around to do it. You know what I mean?
Also starring Mia Wasikowska (last seen in "Bergman Island"), Matthew Goode (last seen in "The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society"), Nicole Kidman (last seen in "Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom"), Jacki Weaver (last seen in "Poms"), Phyllis Somerville (ditto), Alden Ehrenreich (last seen in "Fair Play"), Ralph Brown (last seen in "Withnail & I"), Judith Godreche (last heard in "She Said"), Harmony Korine (last seen in "Manglehorn"), David Alford (last seen in "The Last Castle"), Peg Allen (ditto), Lauren E. Roman, Lucas Till (last seen in "Paranoia"), Dominick "Dino" Howard, Tyler von Tagen, Thomas Covert, Jaxon Johnson, Paxton Johnson,
RATING: 4 out of 10 empty shoeboxes
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