All the Rage

Despite the title, and the fact that 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple is also out on disc this week, I am not reviewing that here because I have not been provided with a review copy. These days I’m offered more catalogue titles from Sony than new releases. Darn the luck. (I will say that The Bone Temple is a phenomenal piece of work, and you should see it as soon as you can. Me, I’ll keep an eye out for a used copy.)

I’ll get to Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die as soon as that disc arrives. But there’s plenty to write about this week, so lets focus on the titles that got to me on time.

The Scots filmmaker Lynne Ramsay doesn’t make movies often enough – or rather, she doesn’t make enough movies – so the arrival of Die My Love last year was cause for celebration. Even more so because it’s a film of phenomenal power, a study of passion, depression and conflicted motherhood featuring one of Jennifer Lawrence’s strongest and wildest performances.

Robert Pattinson’s not bad either, but this is Lawrence’s film from start to finish, playing a new mother named Grace who moves with her partner Jackson (Pattinson) to a remote house he’s just inherited; it’s a mess, but they’ll renovate it. It’s got good bones, and it’ll be a great place to raise a child. And it is, for a while. Until Jackson’s job puts him on the road for long stretches, and the book Grace is supposed to be writing takes a back seat to parenting their baby. Grace isn’t exactly isolated – Jackson’s mother (Sissy Spacek) lives down the road a bit – but she feels like she is, and as time stretches on her state of mind fractures even further.

When I interviewed Ramsay about her last release, You Were Never Really Here, she mentioned having screened it for her Morvern Callar star Samantha Morton, who described the new film as being placed “inside this headspace that’s such a flood of emotion.” Die My Love tells an entirely different story, but Morton’s description fits here as well: We are trapped with Grace as she slowly comes apart, losing her sense of self as her world gets smaller and more suffocating – but she doesn’t grow numb, and neither does the movie. It’s an onslaught of feeling, a study of unhappy domesticity played out as an immersive, unrelenting nightmare, anchored in Lawrence’s ferocity.

In full collaboration with her cast (which also includes Nick Nolte and LaKeith Stanfield in small but potent roles), her co-writers Enda Walsh and Alice Birch and the masterful cinematographer Seamus McGarvey, with whom she made We Need to Talk About Kevin, Ramsay spins Ariana Harwicz’ 2012 novel into something audacious and brutal and eerie and haunting. Die My Love feels like the missing link between Morvern Callar and Darren Aronofsky’s mother!, and I cannot recommend it enough.

Mubi’s 4K/Blu-ray combo release is entirely featureless, which is disappointing; I know Ramsay has never recorded an audio commentary, but given that she’s spoken of how personal this project was for her, I’d have loved to see an interview or EPK at the very least. (Criterion’s Ratcatcher Blu-ray demonstrates that she isn’t averse to such exploration.)

That said, the film is given a luxurious presentation in the UHD master, which brings out the intensity of Seamus McGarvey’s color palette and enriches the shadows and darkness that are so crucial to the film’s midsection. Audio is offered in DTS-MA 5.1 and 2.0 options; obviously, the surround mix is the way to go.

A very different sort of relationship breakdown is expressed in Johannes Roberts’ Primate, which – as you may have heard – is the one where a group of attractive young people find themselves trapped with a rabid chimpanzee in a cliffside Hawaiian home. Sometimes that’s all you need, and Primate has been running on strong reviews since its premiere last fall on the festival circuit; while it didn’t exactly dominate the box-office in January, I can see people discovering it at home for years to come; it’s another of my pal Corey Atad’s five-star three-star movies, a film that takes its simple premise and delivers a grand old time.

After losing her mother to cancer, Lucy (Johnny Sequoyah) spent some time away from home; now, a year later, she’s coming back to her father Adam (Troy Kotsur) and kid sister Erin (Gia Hunter) in Hawaii, accompanied by her best friend Kate (Victoria Wyant) and Kate’s friend Hannah (Jessica Alexander). And also, Ben is there.

Lucy’s late mother was a professor of linguistics, and she’d spent her career working on the connection between apes and humans – raising Ben from infancy and teaching him to communicate through a combination of sign language and vocalization software. Lucy and Erin relate to Ben like a younger brother, and he clearly loves them right back. But Ben has recently been bitten by a mongoose, and while there’s no history of rabies on Hawaii … well, there is now.

I admit I was initially skeptical, but it turns out “Cujo with thumbs” is a pretty great idea, and Primate executes it very, very well: It establishes the characters and the situation, places plausible limits on the action and just guns it. Roberts – a genre stylist filmography includes the 47 Meters Down movies, and sequels in the Strangers and Resident Evil franchises – and co-writer Ernest Riera take the time to make Ben as dimensional as possible, letting us see him interact normally with his human family. He’s smart, and he has a sense of humor … and both of those qualities will be turned against his victims once the virus takes over.

Ben is played by actor Miguel Torres Umba in a very convincing chimp suit, giving the human actors something to work with and bringing a weight and presence to Ben in every shot. Ben’s expressions are realized animatronically rather than through prosthetics, which makes him read as not quite human even though there’s a person under there. It’s really unsettling.

The humans are fairly well-realized, too. Sequoyah, an actor with whom I was not previously familiar, is an empathetic lead as Lucy, who’s at least as resourceful and clever as Ben but also aware he’s much stronger and faster; Kotsur doesn’t have a lot of screen time, but he creates a full character as well. And while the film doesn’t ask as much from Sequoyah’s co-stars beyond “be attractive young people who can scream really loud,” they’re all up to the challenge.

It all makes for a very entertaining ride, and a spectacularly gory one; Roberts is clearly excited by breaking new ground in chimp-on-human violence, and the premise allows for some elasticity in the execution of same. This must have been a blast with a festival crowd.

Paramount isn’t releasing Primate in 4K, which is a shame; this is a good-looking picture, and the additional resolution of UHD would give the largely practical effects the showcase they deserve. (I really liked that year or so when Paramount just released everything in 4K/BD combos. Let’s get back to that!)

But even at 1080p/24, this is a mighty fine presentation, a pristine master that showcases Stephen Murphy’s fluid, inventive cinematography with razor-sharp clarity, and supports it with sneaky-scary Dolby Atmos audio that highlights every thumping fist and skittering shard of glass. Primate is an expertly crafted B-movie, and it’s a pleasure to watch.

This release does have supplements, and they’re also pretty enjoyable. Roberts and producer Walter Hamada contribute a chatty audio commentary, clearly proud of the movie they’ve made, and four featurettes show us just how much work was put into creating the creeper, since virtually everything in the movie is a practical simulation of one sort or another: Not only is Ben a practical character, but his entire environment is similarly manufactured.

As “Designing Paradise” demonstrates, the bulk of Primate was shot on a soundstage in England, with some location work in Portugal; “Primal Terror: Directing Primate” focuses on Roberts’ mission to restage the teens-under-siege thriller of 47 Meters Down in a new environment, while “New Blood: The Faces of Primate” introduces us to the cast, and lets their Oscar-winning co-star discuss the importance of playing a Deaf person who isn’t defined by his disability. Kotsur’s signed responses to the offscreen interviewer are subtitled, as you’d expect – but also play out underneath relevant film clips, another welcome element of accommodation.

Finally, “Creating Ben” gives creature actor Torres Umba the spotlight – and features some very entertaining B-roll of him in and out of costume. We’re all accustomed to actors saying that a complicated movie shoot was a lot of fun, but on this one I think I believe them.

Die My Love is available in a 4K/Blu-ray combo from Mubi; Primate is available on Blu-ray from Paramount Home Entertainment. They're both horror movies, really.

Up next: It's a UHD Brad Pitt double-bill as 4K editions of Sleepers and Moneyball hit the shelves, and the Imprint collection adds a franchise boxed set and rescues a couple of ’80s curios from obscurity – and subscribers to the paid tier can look forward tomorrow’s all-new What’s Worth Watching! Don’t want to miss out? Upgrade now! It’s the easiest thing you’ll do all day!