In the Bleak Pre-Winter

Hi, everyone! American Thanksgiving is behind us, and all of Western culture is rushing headlong towards Christmas. But you wouldn’t know it from the video shelves, which are practically bulging with dark, bloody delights. Arrow Video just rolled out a 4K restoration of Sam Raimi’s bleak 1998 thriller A Simple Plan, and Shout! Studios just dropped 4K editions of Mike Flanagan’s Hush and Luca Guadagnino’s Bones and All.

Oh, and Vinegar Syndrome shocked everyone by releasing a 4K restoration of Michael Mann’s long-buried The Keep as one of its Black Friday surprises … but I wasn’t able to snag a copy this weekend, so that’ll have to wait. But let’s dive into the other stuff.

Written in uncomplicated, efficient and ultimately devastating prose, Scott Smith’s 1993 novel A Simple Plan tells a story about the way people justify their worst impulses, and how easy it is to convince oneself that one is not a monster. Smith wrote the screenplay, too, and makes sure his themes come across in every scene.

Bill Paxton – in what might be the best performance of his career – is Hank Mitchell, a family man in small-town Minnesota who has a comfortable life and a happy marriage to Bridget Fonda’s Sarah; Sarah is pregnant, and they’re both looking forward to becoming parents. But work is slow, and Hank is worried about the future … so when Hank, his brother Jacob (Billy Bob Thornton) and Jacob’s pal Lou (Brent Briscoe) stumble onto the wreckage of a small plane in the snowy woods, with a dead man in the pilot’s seat and about four million dollars in a duffel bag, it feels like the answer to his prayers. All they have to do is cover their tracks, hide the cash and wait a few months for the snow to melt so the plane can be discovered. Then it’s just a matter of making sure no one comes looking for the money. Couldn’t be easier, right?

Except, well, Hank and Jacob and Lou are human beings, and human beings are flawed. Jacob, who isn’t the brightest, keeps saying the wrong things at the wrong time – and later decides to go violently off-script, leaving Hank to clean up his messes. Lou decides maybe he doesn’t want to wait so long to collect his share. Sarah isn’t sure Hank can trust their co-conspirators. Hank defends his brother, and says the right supportive things to Sarah, but … maybe she has a point. Maybe no one can trust anyone. Certainly four million dollars would go a lot further if there weren’t so many people to share it with. And so it goes.

Sam Raimi tried to step back from genre work in the decade between Army of Darkness and the first Spider-Man, though his love of lively camerawork found its way into most of his pictures – The Quick and the Dead is full of impossible shots, and even For Love of the Game and The Gift have their wilder moments. A Simple Plan is the one film that’s entirely devoid of tricks, eschewing both the rampaging dolly shots that made his name and the temptation to juice a scene with a musical sting or even a jagged cut.

It’s all about the performances, and the actors are up for it: Paxton and Fonda have never been better, and Thornton – who co-starred with Paxton in One False Move, though they had just a few moments of screen time – gives the hapless Jacob a lifetime of grudges that bleed into his reasoning at every opportunity. The guy’s not as dumb as people think he is, but neither is he smart enough to realize when he’s acting foolishly, and he’s learned to count on Hank to fix his mistakes … and he hates his brother for being the sharp one. Thornton plays the character without ever going big or pathetic; he just shuffles around, trying so hard not to fuck up, and fucking up spectacularly anyway. And somehow that’s not the story’s biggest tragedy.

The result is a quiet, despairing study of ordinary people trudging their way into the darkness, a modern version of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre that’s all the worse because it’s a family turning on itself rather than a random collection of prospectors.

I was originally disappointed that the film didn’t go as dark as Smith’s novel, which ends with the universe serving horrible justice on two of the characters, but having had a couple of decades to think about it, maybe Raimi was right to drop that thread. Leaving his characters – and us – adrift in an uncaring universe might be worse.

A Simple Plan was released on DVD in the early days of the format, and has been in need of a decent remaster ever since. Arrow’s restoration – available in separate 4K and Blu-ray editions – is stunning, finding new texture in cinematographer Alar Kivilo’s wintry exteriors, which looked awfully washed-out in Paramount’s disc, and also making it clear that the scenes in Hank and Sarah’s house are being drained of warmth over the course of the picture.

Raimi approved the new master but otherwise didn’t participate in the release, which – combined with the obvious absence of Paxton – means the package isn’t what it could have been. But there are new interviews with Kivilo and bit players Becky Ann Baker and Chelcie Ross, and a decent package of never-before-released EPK material: Archival interviews with Raimi, Paxton, Thornton, Fonda and producer Jim Jacks and a making-of featurette.

And Arrow has also commissioned two new audio commentaries: A critics’ track with Glenn Kenny and Farran Smith Nehme, who are more than ready to dig into the film’s performances and themes, and a second track with costume designer Patrizia von Brandenstein, who’s joined by Justin Beahm of Reverend Entertainment – which also produced the supplements for Mike Flanagan’s Hush, as it happens.

Right, Hush. That one starts out with a simple plan too, or at least a simple premise, being a cat-and-mouse thriller about a writer named Maddie Young (Kate Siegel, Flanagan’s real-life partner and regular member of his repertory company) tormented by a masked killer (John Gallagher, Jr.) in and around her Alabama home over the course of one evening. Maddie is deaf, and the killer is intrigued by the possibilities of being able to make as much noise as he wants while stalking his latest victim; once she realizes what’s happening, Maddie has to figure out how to outwit the fucker.

Comparisons to Wait Until Dark were inevitable, but inappropriate: The classic Audrey Hepburn-Alan Arkin faceoff was adapted from a stage play and took a pretty long time setting up its confrontation. While its action is similarly confined to one location, Hush is determined to be more cinematic, and Flanagan and Siegel – who brought the film to SXSW in the spring of 2016, the year they married – find all sorts of ways to implicate the camera (and therefore the audience) in the action. We’re not quite an active partner in the story, but we’re constantly aware of things at least one character isn’t, which is a very clever way of making us appreciate both Maddie’s resourcefulness and the killer’s commitment.

The film doesn’t push its concept too far, either, respecting both the physical limitations of its characters and the audience’s intelligence. The supporting characters are given as much consideration as the leads, rather than being set up as cannon fodder; the violence is brutal but can also be clumsy and inaccurate. Hush has none of the spirits or ghouls that usually populate Flanagan’s films; in fact, unless I’m mistaken, this is his only project without any fantastical elements. And it’s pretty damn entertaining.

Hush was snapped up by Netflix, meaning Shout! Studio’s new 4K special edition – under the Scream Factory label, where it belongs – is the first physical release of the film. And Flanagan has gone all in on the package: The four-disc set offers two different versions of the feature, the original release and a black-and-white “Shush Cut” that removes most of the Newton Brothers’ musical score along with DP James Kniest’s color palette. I don’t know if it’s scarier, exactly - I think you’d have to be seeing the film for the first time to make that call – but it does feel chillier and more remote in monochrome, and the creepy blank-face mask Gallagher’s character wears is definitely more striking against a B&W background.

Each version gets its own 4K platter in the set, accompanied by new audio commentaries from Flanagan and Siegel (who are joined on the original version’s track by Gallagher and co-stars Samantha Sloan and Michael Trucco); both cuts are also included on a Blu-ray disc, and an additional BD offers new interviews with Flanagan, Siegel, Gallagher, Sloan, Trucco, Kniest, the Newtons and producer Trevor Macy. There’s also the option to watch the original version with a picture-in-picture version of its commentary track, and see just how much everybody enjoyed getting the band back together to celebrate their scrappy little thriller. It's very sweet, and I hope Flanagan gets the chance to do similar special editions of his other features. Oculus just had its 10^th anniversary, and it could do with a new master.

Let’s move on to Luca Guadagnino’s Bones and All, initially released on Blu-ray under Warner’s distribution deal with Amazon MGM, and now arriving in a 4K edition from Shout! Studios. Despite the whole cannibalism thing that drives its premise, this one isn’t a scary movie at all. Like A Simple Plan, it’s more of a slow-rolling tragedy.

An adaptation of Camille DeAngelis’ 2015 novel, Bones and All is a coming-of-age story that stars Taylor Russell as Maren, born with an irresistible hunger for human flesh, after she’s abandoned at 18 by the father (André Holland) who did his best to protect her from her own nature.

Setting out to find the mother she barely remembers, Maren meets the eccentric Sully (Mark Rylance), who explains that they’re part of a race of “eaters” and tries to enlist her in his predatory ways. But he’s a weirdo, so Maren soon ditches him and resumes her journey, eventually meeting Lee (Timothée Chalamet), another eater who wanders around America feeding mostly on jerks.

Lee is as much of a predator as Sully, really, but slightly more ethical. Also he’s really hot, and Maren is as horny as any teenager in a Luca Guadagnino movie, so they quickly couple up, with Lee pledging to help Maren find her mom. More stuff happens, including an extremely uncomfortable reunion with Chalamet’s Call Me By Your Name co-star Michael Stuhlbarg, before Maren gets the answers she seeks.

On the one hand, I'm really glad Russell is getting the showcase she deserves: She’s been rock-solid in genre projects like the Netflix reboot of Lost in Space and the Escape Room movies, and she's terrific here. The camera loves her, and she moves through Arseni Khachaturan’s lustrous 35mm visuals with a hesitancy that speaks to Maren’s (relative) innocence as an eater in a world of humans – not that she has all that much knowledge of what it is to be a human, either.

Russell’s performance keeps Bones and All interesting even when the movie itself is tracing slow circles around its meager story, drifting through episodic encounters as Maren’s quest takes shape. It’s a road movie, so the pacing isn’t necessarily bad … but this particular road movie is one about cannibal lovers who leave a trail of bodies in their wake, so maybe a little urgency might be called for.

Even more so than Guadagnino's Suspiria remake (another adaptation by David Kajganich, as it happens), Bones and All feels undercooked and overwritten. It splatters metaphors and ideas around like so much viscera, but never really rips into them. The central love story between Maren and Lee is affecting, when it's allowed to breathe, and Chalamet finds a wistfulness in Lee that slowly comes into focus as we discover more about his past. But it's also very, very obvious where these two people are going to end up … and it takes forever to get there.

Say what you will about Suspiria and even Challengers, but their third acts were willing to throw unexpected complications at us; the closest Bones and All comes to a surprise is that Guadagnino allowed Rylance to give what has to be the worst performance of his career, playing Sully as a gawping Southern-fried idiot in a cargo vest who salivates over potential victims like a cartoon cat.

(Come to think of it, there’s a similar moment in Challengers where Josh O’Connor can’t stop staring at a stranger’s breakfast sandwich; now I’m wondering whether I missed a similar moment of pop-eyed desire in Queer.)

Looking back at Warner’s initial Blu-ray, I was surprised to find out it actually had a supplemental section; it’s the only Amazon MGM release that does. It wasn’t much, but those five brief featurettes – just ten minutes of empty EPK interviews, really – have been ported over to Shout’s new UHD edition; there are no new extras. But you’d be picking this up for the 4K presentation, mastered “from the original elements”, which I assume means a 4K digital interpositive – and if you’re a fan of the film, it’s worth it.

Warner’s Blu-ray looked fine (and sounded great, deploying the same Dolby Atmos mix included here), but the additional resolution and HDR grade brings Bones and All to fully sensualized life, restoring the bleary mornings and bleary dusks of its world and making the messiness of the eater lifestyle so much more tactile.

The film doesn’t shy away from the mess left behind when a body eats a body, and the 2160p image is practically clotted with flesh and grue. Clothes and hair are caked with drying blood, and Chalamet’s Lee never seems entirely clean, carrying a fine layer of grime with him wherever he goes. (Maren finds it cool, at least.) It’s all right there in our faces, along with Rylance’s slack-jawed yokelry. The heart wants what the heart wants, I guess.

Up next: Viggo Mortensen’s The Dead Don’t Hurt and Chris Sanders’ The Wild Robot find surprising complexity in familiar landscapes. And my beloved Shaun of the Dead marks its 20^th anniversary. Christ I’m old.

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