A Little of Everything

American Thanksgiving is just around the corner, and the labels are doing their best to get all their new releases out ahead of the holiday. It’s a lot to cover, so I’ll dive right in, starting with an absolute treasure.

Like everything the Winnipeg avant-garde filmmaker Matthew Rankin does, Universal Language feels distinct and special the moment it meets your eyes. An eccentric, deadpan comedy about two people who feel lost in the world – tour guide Massoud (Pirouz Nemati) and Montreal civil servant Matthew (Rankin) – it’s a delightful transposition of Iranian cinema to wintry Winnipeg that finds Rankin infusing the clear dramatic lines and cultural specificity of Abbas Kiarostami’s Koker trilogy with his own deadpan perspective.

I screened Universal Language twice at TIFF, and both times I was delighted to watch audiences get on board with its delightful alchemy. Rankin takes influences that should grind against each other and turns them into something warm and inviting. Isabelle Stachtchenko’s geometric compositions invoked comparisons to Wes Anderson from some critics, but that felt like a stretch to me: Sure, Anderson has cornered the market on obsessive symmetry these days, but Universal Language is Kiarostami (and Makhmalbaf, and Panahi) through and through.

It’s a story in which children give themselves curious missions to annoy grownups, while those grownups set out on their own quests in the hopes of figuring out why they live with such malaise. It’s just that Rankin has applied the absurdist tweak of setting his very Iranian story in a Winnipeg where everyone speaks Farsi. It’s entirely different in texture and tone from Rankin’s first feature, the Maddinesque historical miasma The Twentieth Century – and see that if you can, by the way, because like all of Rankin’s work it’s full of weird delights and unexpected pleasures. (There's a trailer for it on Oscilloscope's Blu-ray.)

Universal Language is the closest the director has come to making a crowd-pleaser – as we saw with the flurry of prizes and awards, which culminated in a run at an Oscar for Best International Feature as Canada’s official submission. That didn’t pan out, but even without a little gold man, Universal Language remains a charming, inventive and deeply human picture that – as I said in my TIFF note – dares to imagine Canada as a nation where the official languages are Persian and French, and loneliness is the common currency.

In addition to a lovely presentation of the film, Oscilloscope’s Blu-ray comes fully loaded with an audio commentary with Rankin, producer Sylvain Corbeil and co-stars Nemati and Ila Firouzabadi, who also collaborated on the script. Rankin’s short films Discount Everything and Municipal Relaxation Module are also included, just in case you needed further proof of his versatility. It’s all good stuff, really.

Universal Language premiered at Cannes in 2024; a year later, along came Splitsville, Michael Angelo Covino and Kyle Marvin’s followup to their 2020 comedy The Climb.

Like that film, this is a tale of best pals whose inability to respect each other’s boundaries leads to broken noses, broken property and broken hearts; this one has the benefit of a bigger budget and the high-wattage presence of Dakota Johnson and Adria Arjona as their characters’ partners. (Covino and Marvin wrote and produced the film; Covino also directed it, with a lovely appreciation for fussy hesitations and visual punchlines.)

Marvin is Carey, a contented guy whose world falls apart when his wife Ashley (Arjona) – to whom he’s been married for a little over a year – announces she wants a divorce. Carey’s responds by literally running to the home of their best friends, Paul (Covino) and Julie (Johnson), who are sympathetic enough but also reveal their own marriage is open; Paul can sleep with whoever he wants, and Julie is free to do the same. The only thing they can’t do is tell each other about their activities. Paul goes back to the city for a thing; Carey and Julie almost immediately bang. And Carey, of course, tells Paul about it the very next day, ruining things for pretty much everybody.

Like The Climb, Splitsville unfolds in chapters, catching up to Carey and Paul – and Julie, and Ashley – as they stumble in and out of one another’s lives, picking up exactly where they left off and refusing to deal with any of their accumulating problems. The arguing is the fun part, after all, which is something Covino and Marvin understand even if their characters do not. Johnson and Arjona are both excellent at finding the flickers of compassion behind Julie and Ashley’s entirely justifiable frustration with their men, constantly resetting their expectations while trying to move forward on their own.

Also like The Climb, Splitsville builds jokes on top of jokes as it glides along, escalating complications into crises and paying it all off in a sustained panic attack of a finale, set at a child’s birthday party that spirals spectacularly out of control and featuring a cameo from Succession’s Nicholas Braun as a mentalist who’s surprisingly good at his job, but can’t make his audience happy. Poor sap.

Rare for an indie drama, Splitsville was shot on good old-fashioned film – an accomplishment of which Covino and Marvin are clearly proud, since it comes up in the featurette that’s the only extra of note on Decal’s Blu-ray. They’re also justifiably high on their big fight scene, and you will be too once you see stunt coordinator Tyler Hall explain how much of it was just the two of them going after each other, take after take after take.

Okay, there are some things you can only do once.

There are a lot of genre movies about wobbly relationships challenged by isolation and impossible stressors; off the top of my head I can think of The Lonely Planet, Backcountry, Midsommar and Von Trier’s Antichrist. Oh, and Straw Dogs, I guess. What distinguishes Michael Shanks’ Together is its self-awareness: It knows what it’s selling, and what the audience wants to see.

Longtime couple Tim (Dave Franco) and Millie (Alison Brie) have hit a rough patch. His music career has stalled out, and his depression over it has been exacerbated by some truly horrible shit with his parents. He clings to Millie but can’t express how much he loves her; Millie loves him too, but feels increasingly like his enabler. A move to a small town where Millie has landed a job teaching at an elementary school feels like it could be a new beginning for them … and it is, but not the way they’d think.

See, the forest behind their house has this weird grotto or pool or something that creates a lasting bond between those who are exposed to it. And after Millie and Tim spend a rainy night there, they find themselves experiencing a strange new level of connection. The prologue gives us a sense of what’s coming, so we’re ahead of the couple the whole way – and primed for both explicit body horror and the emotional chaos of two reasonably intelligent people who are about to be forced to deal with all of their attachment issues in a very short period of time.

Shanks’ script isn’t perfect – a subplot involving Damon Herriman as a teacher at Millie’s school could have been a lot more subtle, and would have shaved a few minutes off the running time. But when Together focuses on Tim and Millie’s attempts to understand what’s happening to them, it’s a genuinely great combination of freakshow horror and chamber drama.

The fact that Brie and Franco are an offscreen couple lends a queasy power to their darkest moments, but it’s more important that both actors are deft comic performers, and can let their characters snipe at (or laugh with) at one another with undercurrents of mounting frustration (or lingering affection) that ground the envelope-pushing material in something immediate and human. Shanks has studied his Cronenberg and his Carpenter, and knows a good premise is meaningless if you can’t care about the people trapped within it.

The US Blu-ray of Together, from Decal Releasing, has the same suite of extras as Elevation’s Canadian disc: Two brief interviews – one with Shanks, the other with Brie and Franco, each running about five minutes – and a fluffy little extra thing where Brie and Franco take a compatibility test. It’s clearly made for the socials, but they seem to be genuinely enjoying themselves – and after what they put themselves through in the movie, they clearly need a break. The lack of an audio commentary feels like a real missed opportunity, though; this movie really cries out for a group conversation.

Elsewhere in the genre space, there’s MJ Bassett’s Red Sonja – released on disc in Canada last month by VVS Films, but freshly on US shelves from Samuel Goldwyn. I have to admit my expectations weren’t high for this, as every previous attempt to bring the beloved sword-and-sorcery warrior to the screen has fallen short, and the producers of this version struggled for more than a decade to get it off the ground. They did, however, make some promising creative choices: Killjoys’ Hannah John-Kamen was attached to a version to be written and directed by Joey Soloway a few years back, which sounded really interesting. Ultimately, director MJ Bassett got the film into production, working from a script by Tasha Huo of the Netflix Tomb Raider animated series and starring Matilda Lutz as Sonja.

It’s an origin story, pitting the young Sonja against the machinations of Robert Sheehan’s Dragan, a technocratic emperor whose expansionist aims threaten the Hrykanian forest has Sonja sworn to protect, and Dragan’s ruthless consort Annisia (Wallis Day), who may be her equal in both swordplay and strategy. Sonja’s resistance gets her conscripted into Dragan’s gladiators, forced to battle beasts and monsters – and sometimes one another – for the despot’s entertainment. There are giant scorpions and a frenzied Cyclops, and a quest for the other half of a mystical book that promises unimaginable power. Also, yes, there is chain-mail bikini armor, but at least the movie knows it’s cheesy.

It doesn’t not work. Lutz – who established both her grit and her action chops in Coralie Fargeat’s Revenge – is a good choice for the young Sonja, a protector who fights to defend rather than destroy. Bassett, whose credits include Deathwatch and Solomon Kane, understands the value of world-building and creates a convincing fantasy setting on what’s clearly a limited budget, casting actors like Sheehan and Day (and, briefly, Rhona Mitra) to bring hints of complexity to archetypal characters. The action scenes are well-choreographed, and the storytelling dares to be thoughtful every once in a while.

Red Sonja may not be as lively as Steven Kostanski’s goofball remake of Deathstalker or as self-serious as John Milius’ Conan the Barbarian, but it’s unpretentious genre entertainment, and a movie that respects its protagonist enough to see her in three dimensions. This Sonja isn’t as dynamic – or as lusty – as Gail Simone’s definitive comic-book take on the character, but she’ll get there.

VVS Films’ Blu-ray includes a decent production featurette in which the cast and producers sell the movie as best they can, praising the script, the production design and director Bassett – who is curiously absent. She’s all over the B-roll, and everyone has a fun set story about her, so it’s curious that she didn’t sit down for an interview. Maybe next time.

Less successful, both as a genre experiment and just generally as a movie, is Him. Justin Tipping’s horror-thriller was marketed by Universal and Monkeypaw as a high-intensity thriller about a promising young quarterback who arrives at a weeklong training camp to be mentored by an aging lion, and soon discovers “becoming the GOAT requires discipline and sacrifice” is a phrase that can be interpreted in all sorts of ways.

I will allow that it’s stylish as hell, with cinematographer Kira Kelly going all in on X-ray-inspired imagery that shows us organs shaking and bones splintering when bodies collide on the field and hyper-saturated nightmare imagery of monsters and beasts crashing into the mind of phenom-in-waiting Cameron Cade (Tyriq Withers, from this summer’s I Know What You Did Last Summer), who’s been trained since birth to be the Best At Football. Marlon Wayans has a little more fun with the role of Isaiah White, the current and actual Best At Football, amping up his comedic energy to a level of manic fury. The actor’s flirted with dramatic work before, but he’s really going for it here, and it works better than you’d think.

But both stars – along with Julia Fox and Tim Heidecker, who play Isaiah’s wife and Cam’s manager, respectively – are in the hands of a director who doesn’t really have a handle on his style, starting at full throttle and never really giving his cast the chance to play characters rather than types. It might have worked with a better script, but Him has no center; like the recent Opus, the longer it goes on the less credible its big conspiracy seems, and the big swing that Tipping and his co-writers are teeing up is more of a whiff. I know that’s the wrong sport, but the point stands.

Still, the movie looks spectacular in Universal’s 4K presentation, which showcases the hallucinatory imagery and vivid color scheme in exacting detail. Kelly shot the hell out of the thing, and after the range she’s demonstrated on Ava DuVernay’s 13^th and Sydney Freeland’s Rez Ball – along with some supporting work on Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings – I’m excited to see more of her eye. But Him will have more of an impact as part of her showreel than as a whole movie. And hey, according to the extras everybody had a great time.

 

Universal Language is now available on Blu-ray from Oscilloscope Laboratories. Splitsville is now available on Blu-ray from Decal Releasing; Together is now available on Blu-ray in Canada from Elevation Pictures, and in 4K/BD and Blu-ray editions in the US from Decal. Red Sonja is available on Blu-ray from VVS Films in Canada and Samuel Goldwyn Films in the US, and Him is now available in 4K/BD and Blu-ray editions from Universal Pictures Home Entertainment. Phew!

Up next: Criterion brings Hell’s Angels to disc in a restoration that lets you really feel the manic fervor of Howard Hughes. But first, subscribers to the paid tier can enjoy this Friday’s edition of weekly recommendations for What’s Worth Watching! What’s this? You’re not one of those lucky people? Well, you can always upgrade your subscription and join the fun.