Personal Hells

Let’s start with the new thing.

Emily the Criminal, a ground-level thriller from writer-director John Patton Ford and producer-star Aubrey Plaza, landed in North American theatres this week, and it’s terrific. A small, coiled study of a young woman who turns to crimes both petty and not so petty to deal with the twin problems of the gig economy and her crushing student debt, it functions equally well as a drama and a thriller, with Plaza’s remarkable performance navigating the center section of that Venn diagram.

Plaza’s Emily works as a catering delivery driver in Los Angeles, driving around the city to set up meals for anonymous workers in generic office boardrooms. The job sucks, but it’s all she can get because of a couple of stumbles in her past: A conviction derailed her college career, and she’s still paying off the loans for a degree she never completed. She’s trying to land something better, but it’s not happening, and now she’s just doing whatever she can to stay above water.

When a co-worker gives Emily the hookup for a different sort of piecework – taking part in a credit-card scam that opens the door to a lot more money than she can make legally – Emily throws in. She’s good at it, impressing the guy in charge, Youcef (Theo Rossi), who offers her additional opportunities with bigger rewards – but with higher stakes, too. Emily says yes every time.

Ford’s screenplay is meticulous and spare in a way that evokes early Michael Mann, both in its approach to criminal activity as a series of small, specific details and its lack of interest in big expository monologues. You have to listen closely to hear exactly how grim Emily’s life is, and why she’d jump at the possibility of a quick, tax-free payday – but at the same time, her constant stress is right there on her face.

Plaza, who’s spent the last few years tweaking the flinty, sarcastic persona she established in Parks & Recreation into something darker and more dangerous, holds the screen with a cornered intensity and nervous intelligence that makes this feel like the best work of her career. She makes it really easy to track Emily’s state of mind; just listen to the way her Jersey accent comes out when she’s stressed.

I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say Emily the Criminal goes to some fairly dark places. I found myself thinking about something Steven Soderbergh said on the Magic Mike junket: He wanted to make a movie about what people are willing to do for money, and realized most of his movies are about that. Emily the Criminal is firmly in that mode, a story about one woman discovering she’ll do almost anything to get out from under … and leaning into it. Really, what else is she going to do?

Emily the Criminal is in theatres now.

DISCS OF THE WEEK

It’s my birthday on Tuesday (why, thank you!) and the distributors have conspired to give me a present: Blue Underground rolled out Larry Cohen’s God Told Me To in a new 4K edition, and Paramount did the same for Paul W.S. Anderson’s Event Horizon. I love bait-and-switch horror movies, and these two are fine examples of the genre … even if they have literally nothing else in common.

God Told Me To, which was initially released under the much less interesting moniker Demon, is Cohen’s version of a police procedural, following exhausted cop Peter Nicholas (Tony Lo Bianco, appropriately haggard) as he tries to understand a plague of violence in New York. Random people are committing murder all over the city – a sniper in midtown, a father shooting his wife and children dead, a cop going rogue during the St. Patrick Day’s parade – and blissfully explaining that, well, God told them to do it. The only pattern is that there is no pattern … although it might have something to do with a cult leader called Bernard Phillips (Richard Lynch), who might also have a connection to events in Lt. Nicholas’ past – and a secret Peter’s mother (Sylvia Sidney) never shared with him.

As with most of Cohen’s movies, God Told Me To situates impossible events in weirdly relatable surroundings: It’s Alive forces nervous expectant parents to deal with a murderous mutant baby, Q centered on a two-bit criminal who stumbles on the hiding place of an Aztec god and decides to blackmail the city with his knowledge; The Stuff is about a corporate espionage investigation that discovers a popular dessert is consuming its consumers. This one finds Cohen’s funhouse sensibilities applied to a run-and-gun cop picture shot on the streets of New York, that barrels towards a preposterous, psychedelic climax that somehow feels both earned and even moving, Lo Bianco’s skeptical hero confronting his own repressed past and discovering his real identity and purpose.

Blue Underground’s 4K edition expands on an earlier Blu-ray release with a new restoration and HDR grade that enhances everything I love about this movie: Paul Glickman’s handheld 35mm camerawork always had a vague documentary feel, but now the film grain and occasional blown-out image feel even more authentic; we’re right there on the street with Lo Bianco as the world goes mad around him. It must have played this way for audiences in 1976, who had to reconcile the verité aesthetic with the bananapants story they were watching.

The soundtrack has been supercharged as well, with a new Dolby Atmos mix that expands the sound field of the original mono soundtrack. I’ve been trying to figure out how to explain the effect, and the best I can settle on is that it feels like the location sound is surrounding around you without discrete activity; outdoor scenes feel more alive, and indoor scenes have a little more air to them. Dialogue and most of the effects still comes out of the center channel, they just have a bit more weight. It’s a sonic analogue to the handheld camerawork, making the movie feel that much more messy and vital. But the original mono is included as well, along with the 5.1 and 2.0 remixes produced for Blue Underground’s previous Blu-ray.

All of the supplements from that release are carried over here, too: A characteristically freewheeling audio commentary by Cohen, two Q&As with the filmmaker (recorded at the New Beverly and Lincoln Center, respectively), interviews with star Lo Bianco and effects artist Steve Neill, poster and trailer galleries, etc. There’s also a new commentary with King Cohen director Steve Mitchell and journalist Troy Howarth that serves as a critical appreciation of the feature and a history of its deliberately chaotic production. The commentaries and trailer galleries are included on both the 4K and Blu-ray discs; the rest of the supplements are exclusive to the BD, which as far as I can tell isn’t being released separately. Totally worth trading up, though.

In contrast, Paramount’s UHD release of Event Horizon doesn’t offer any new supplements, just the same suite of extras you’ve encountered on the studio’s special-edition DVD and Blu-ray: Audio commentary by Anderson and co-producer Jeremy Bolt, a feature-length documentary, deleted/extended scenes, on-set clips and a featurette about elements that never made it into production. None of this is bad, exactly, but it’s all rather familiar … and the package has been upstaged by the collector’s edition BD Shout! Factory released last year, which added nearly an hour of new cast and crew interviews.

If we’re being honest, I’ve never really understood the enduring appeal of Event Horizon. As Anderson’s follow-up to Mortal Kombat, it established him as a gifted visual stylist who can take a concept as thin as “What if Alien but also Hellraiser” and make a whole movie out of it … even if he doesn’t have all that much to say. It was a decent enough time-waster, and Sam Neill is having a truly great time, and if you were a kid who brought this home because you saw Dr. Alan Grant in space on the DVD cover, watching him do what he does in this movie would be very upsetting indeed. Still, I think even he’d be surprised that this movie is still remembered a quarter-century after the fact, while the 40^th anniversary edition of The Final Conflict went by entirely uncelebrated.

In addition to its spiffy steelbook packaging Paramount’s 4K edition of Event Horizon drops a stunning UHD transfer mastered from the original camera negative. It’s likely the same source used for that remastered Shout disc, but with the expected step up in detail and depth: The inky black of interstellar space is that much darker; the reds that run throughout the film, in various permutations, are much more tactile. The strobing flash cuts that punctuate Anderson’s vision of hell (or whatever that dimension you-know-who is trying to drag everyone into is supposed to be) are actually a little painful in this version, and I found myself wondering if the disc should come with a seizure warning.

Surprisingly, the audio hasn’t been upgraded to Atmos; if there’s a soundtrack that would benefit from the assaultive properties of that format, it’s this one, though the Dolby TrueHD 5.1 mix (which I believe is the same one from the original Blu-ray release, a decade and a half ago)

If you can only pick one, there’s no question: God Told Me To is the superior work, with a more coherent mythology and a genuinely disturbing sense of things sliding into chaos just outside the edges of the frame. Event Horizon is more of a funhouse ride through some enthusiastic makeup effects, delivered with an intensity that made me wonder whether the Saw franchise would have existed without Anderson’s little space creeper. So that’s nice, I guess.

God Told Me To is available now in a 4K/Blu-ray combo from Blue Underground; Event Horizon is available now in a 4K/Blu-ray combo from Paramount Home Entertainment. Go with god, or whatever dark deity unto whom you’ve pledged yourself.

Next week: Well, obviously we’re going to talk about She-Hulk. But respectfully.