M. Night’s best movies work on multiple levels — supernatural thriller, faith parable, domestic drama — some of which you can only access with age. I couldn’t have known this as the eleven-year-old who saw Unbreakable in theaters, fresh from the hair-raising twists of The Sixth Sense, but I needed to be old enough to worry about calcifying into my own looming mediocrity, unexplored potential, and failures toward my loved ones before I could fully grasp the aching, yearning heart of this movie. Few have done it better than Shyamalan does it here.
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Garden State 2004
Among the reams of unnatural dialogue shot during the post-Rushmore indie-quirk boom of the aughts, Zach Braff’s exchange with a department store clerk (“I thought you killed yourself. That wasn’t you?”) in Garden State might be the most grating — so unreasonably solipsistic and contemptuous that its attempted metaphor about depression is kneecapped by incurable main character syndrome. The film as a whole follows suit.
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Summer with Monika 1953
This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.
I hate to say it, but I made a Letterboxd account specifically because the top-rated review of Summer With Monika by Cramer K. is so childish and offensive that I felt compelled to post a rebuttal. Not because Summer With Monika should be beyond criticism, but because of how loudly and overconfidently he misunderstands its characters. I know: it’s over a decade old, and who really cares, but his writing is the first assessment of this movie that many people…
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Pulse 2001
Terrifying and apocalyptic. Kurosawa's genius, aside from making the scariest movie I've ever seen, is that he was able to identify the irrevocable retreat of humanity from the social world into the digital world all the way back in 2001, years ahead of Myspace or Facebook. What's more impressive is the throughline that he draws between the withdrawal of Japan's terminally online hikikomori culture and the nation's last major disappearance of people — those murdered by the atomic bomb. The black blotches that remain of his characters in Pulse, once they become ghosts, look eerily similar to the flash-burn outlines left behind in Hiroshima.
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