Find Your People

I am drowning in new releases here, so much so that I’m breaking this week’s newsletter into two parts just to fit it into your mailbox. So I’m covering three titles today, with three more to come next time. Here we go.

If not for Sinners, Oliver Laxe’s pulverizing apocalyptic road movie Sirāt would have been the cinematic event of 2025 … but it’s still awfully close. Sirāt is a stunning accomplishment, a film that uses image and sound to shift an audience into an existential nightmare, theorizing that the path to nirvana – or annihilation – might lie in the space between two massive speakers in the middle of the desert.

This is an ambitious idea for a movie about the North African rave scene, but Laxe gets us there legitimately. Sergi López – the villain of Pan’s Labyrinth, grown stouter and more haggard in middle age – is Luis, who’s following the ravers from one location to the next, along with his young son Esteban (Bruno Núñez) and their terrier. They’ve been doing this for weeks, searching for Luis’ vanished daughter with no luck. She might be at the next event. Or the one after that. And Luis and Esteban will be there to find her.

The pair are eventually befriended by a few older ravers, played by nonactors Richard Bellamy, Stefania Gadda, Joshua Liam Henderson, Tonin Janvier and Jade Oukid. Gradually it becomes clear that the world beyond the rave scene is not what it ought to be, and that this search may be all Luis has left. They form a little convoy, trading stories and car parts and keeping their spirits up even as things grow bleaker and less hopeful, and the road turns to dust. And then things get much, much worse.

Over the course of two hours, Sirāt shifts from a simple, straightforward drama to something else, a hallucinatory, excruciatingly tense survival story that takes the work of Henri-Georges Clouzot, William Friedkin and George Miller and pushes it into a daring new gear.

It’s not that I’ve never seen anything like Sirāt; obviously I have. So have you; so has Laxe. But he’s orchestrated these familiar pieces in an entirely new and immediate way, making a film that’s as invigorating as it is nerve-shredding. It’s what cinema is supposed to be.

I was surprised to see Decal Releasing offering Sirāt as an MOD Blu-ray – like last year's Seeds, it’s burned rather than pressed – but the dual-layer disc has more than enough space for a pristine 1080p/24 presentation with both Dolby Atmos and DTS-HD 5.1 audio options. Six brief featurettes – quick interviews with Laxe, López and Núñez, and hits about the production, the music and the camaraderie of rave culture – amount to perhaps fifteen minutes of online marketing content, and the teaser and trailer are also included.

And speaking of movies that reconfigure existing ideas to create something singular: The Bride! Maggie Gyllenhaal’s truly audacious mash-up of James Whale’s The Bride of Frankenstein, Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde and a dozen or so film noir lovers-on-the-run pictures is a revisionist delight, a movie about patchwork characters that is itself a patchwork creation, pinballing through ideas that don’t always make sense, but get under your skin just the same.

In an eerie prologue, the restless spirit of author Mary Shelley (Jessie Buckley) announces she’s not quite done imposing herself on the living, and decides to possess Ida (also Buckley), a party girl/gangster’s moll/sex worker in 1936 Chicago. Ida/Mary immediately asserts herself to the goons at her table, and is just as immediately thrown to her death for talking wise. It’s Chicago, 1936; this is just how things go.

Fortunately, it just so happens that a certain century-old creature who goes by Frank (Christian Bale) has turned up in town seeking the brilliant Dr. Euphronious (Annette Bening), the one scientist mad enough to indulge him in his desire for a bride. Mary/Ida’s corpse is disinterred, Euphronious and her assistant Greta (Jeannie Berlin) follow in the footsteps of Frank’s creator and bring her back to vivid, twitchy life, launching the new couple into a world that finds them creepy and disturbing, their own steps dogged by mismatched detectives Jake Wiles (Peter Sarsgaard) and Myrna Malloy (Penélope Cruz).

Also, Frank is infatuated with the movies of screen star Ronnie Reed (Jake Gyllenhaal), so that’s another layer of reality for its creator to play with. By the time the movie reaches its most audacious moment – a convulsive dance performance of “Puttin’ on the Ritz,” the song Mel Brooks used so wonderfully in Young Frankenstein half a century ago – there are so many texts in play that Frank and The Bride seem to be inventing their own reality wherever they go. Are they human, or are they gangster? The answer, best I can tell, is “Yes, and.”

The Bride! is therefore a humdinger, a rollicking hybrid of a picture that keeps finding new ideas to incorporate into its ever-morphing story. There’s body horror and gender commentary and comedy and tragedy and melodrama and movies and singing and dancing and anything else Maggie Gyllenhaal can cram into two hours of screen time, each scene crackling with weird energy and strange ideas. Where Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” toyed with a radical interpretation of the source material, Gyllenhaal’s movie actually accomplishes that, building its story on the implications of Shelley’s novel (in which a Bride was merely theoretical) and Whale’s movie (which gave the Bride about four minutes of screen time) and showing us what might have happened next.

And I know it’s not really fair to compare the two films, except that they’re both expensive big-screen adaptations, made by actors turned writer-directors and released by the same studio within a month of each other, of English novels written by women in the first half of the 19^th century. If anything, The Bride! has more in common with Sarah Polley’s Women Talking, taking that film’s declaration of itself as “an act of wild female imagination” and running with it. Huh, that’s another film by an actor turned writer-director. Go figure.

Warner’s 4K release delivers The Bride! in a beautifully grotesque master, with Lawrence Sher’s steampunk-tinged visuals framed at a consistent 2.39:1 rather than in the split-format presentation of its IMAX exhibition. The hyperactive Dolby Atmos soundtrack crackles with energy and activity; there are moments when Gyllenhaal seems to be pushing her ideas through the speakers with her bare hands. Or maybe that was a brain attack.

I would have killed for a director’s commentary on this one, and maybe a second track that let her bring in husband Sarsgaard and brother Jake – but that wasn’t in the cards. Instead, four featurettes let the filmmaker and most of her collaborators discuss the production in a variety of contexts, with a total running time of 30 minutes. It’s all drawn from a single EPK round table with Gyllenhaal, Buckley and Bale, with contributions from additional players as needed.

“Stitching Together The Bride!” and “Designing the Look” plunge into the concept and the aesthetic of the movie, with further input from producer Emma Tillinger Koskoff, makeup artists Stella Sensel, Scott Stoddard, Robin Pritchard, hairstylist Lori Guidroz and costume designer Sandy Powell. Sarsgaard also turns up with some salient observations.

“The Muse and the Reimagined Monster” lets Maggie Gyllenhaal and her two leads dissect their characters at length, and “The Bride Party” invites Bening, Cruz, Sarsgaard and co-stars John Magaro and Julianne Hough into that conversation, with special attention paid to the versatility and goofiness of the absent Jake Gyllenhaal. It’s all fun, if a little superficial. Them’s the breaks, I guess.

Finally, we have another auteurist masterpiece. Yes, really.

Matt Johnson has always operated under the belief that it’s better to seek forgiveness than ask permission. It’s gotten him a pretty long way, from his school-shooting debut The Dirties and his alt-history comedy Operation: Avalanche to the radical drama of BlackBerry. And on the side, he’s been building an impressive resume as an actor in Kaz Radwanski’s Anne at 13,000 Ft. and Matt and Mara. But all the while, he’s been working towards Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie.

Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie – which is now Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie the Blu-ray and/or the DVD, I guess – is the culmination of twenty years of Matt Johnson and Jay McCarrol being idiots together in front of a camera. First, there was a web series about two Toronto slackers, “Matt” and “Jay,” who form a band and resolve to launch themselves with a set at the Rivoli, a legendary local venue, despite never having written and recorded a single song. The Rivoli being understandably hesitant to book an act with no following and no CV, the guys are forced to mount a series of increasingly ridiculous publicity stunts in order to raise their profile and realize their dream.

The web series led to a TV show, building an enthusiastic fanbase of extremely online bros who could connect with the passion behind Johnson and McCarrol’s doofus double act – while maybe missing all the hard work and skill that went into its production, and the subtle point that they’d both be a lot happier if they could channel Matt’s mania and Jay’s supportive nature in a healthier direction.

Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie finds Johnson and McCarrol back on their bullshit, quite literally: It’s two decades later, and they’re still scheming in obscurity. After one last big stunt fails spectacularly, Jay finally tells Matt it’s time to reexamine their priorities … and then Matt accidentally invents a flux capacitor, and the movie turns into Back to the Future Part II.

This is not a spoiler; I don’t think it’s possible to spoil what happens in Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie. Its utterly derivative mechanics are a direct outgrowth of the fictional Matt’s magpie nature – and maybe the real Matt’s too, given the way The Dirties and Operation: Avalanche both built their stories on top of previously existing ideas. The shameless plundering of Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale’s IP is part of the joke, complete with a metatextual argument about licensing rights that can be applied to at least four different story points.

Matt Johnson is a showman, and Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie is his big-top high-wire act, a genuinely audacious work that should have been lawyered into oblivion as soon as its script was registered with the guild. Watching this feels like you’re not just witnessing a reckless act but actively being implicated in it. That’s what makes it so much fun.

As far as I’ve been able to determine, both the US Blu-ray from Decal Releasing and the Canadian disc from Elevation Pictures offer the same extras: Two audio commentaries (one from Johnson, McCarroll, director of photography Jared Raab and producer Matt Greyson and a second from Johnson and the post-production team), animatics for two major scenes, an alternate opening, the post-credits scene that was added to the film for its digital release, a deleted scene with Johnson and Ethan Eng, a making-of featurette, “home movies” (aka Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie the bts”) and “Figured It Out,” twenty minutes of very strange bloopers and breaks. The first episode of Nirvanna the Band the Show, “The Banner,” is tucked in there as well.

It’s a great resource for aspiring filmmakers who want to make something ambitious and preposterous someday. Just make sure you retain an attorney before the cameras start rolling.

Sirāt is now available on Blu-ray from Decal; The Bride! is now available in 4K and Blu-ray editions from Warner Bros. Discovery Home Entertainment. Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie is now available as a Blu-ray/DVD combo from Decal Releasing in the US, and in individual BD and DVD editions from Elevation Pictures in Canada.

Up next: Twinless, How to Make a Killing and the A24 edition of If I Had Legs I’d Kick You also came out this month! And I will write about them! But first, think about upgrading to the paid tier so you don’t miss out on this Friday’s What’s Worth Watching newsletter. I have thoughts about Backrooms!