Josh Hartnett takes Greg Williams to the pub.
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Words by JANE CROWTHER
Those who experienced 2022’s Danish horror of the same name may not wish to revisit the particular trauma of that movie, taking in mutilation, social discomfort and a bleakness that snatched breath. A disquieting hit at Sundance, Speak No Evil pitched a Danish couple against a Dutch couple – leveraging middle-class politeness to devastating effect. Now writer/director James Watkins recasts and re-sets the tale in Britain under the Blumhouse shingle, with a reserved American couple, Louise and Ben (Mackenzie Davis and Scoot McNairy), meeting a brash Brit duo, Paddy and Ciara (James McAvoy and Aisling Franciosi), on holiday in Tuscany. Both pairs have kids of a similar age and though they probably wouldn’t usually gel as friends, an alliance is formed and invites to weekends in the country are extended post-vacation. Despite Louise’s misgivings, the American family travels to a rustic farmhouse where Paddy flips from gregarious host to seething bully and back, and the kids discover something terrible in the basement…
To discuss specifics of the horror is to spoil the experience of an incremental discomfort for audiences as social niceties are tested to the limit. At what point, Watkins asks throughout, would YOU say something? What inappropriate action, unpleasant comment, disregard of personal values would be the tipping point to cast judgement? As Paddy and Ciara display boorish, cruel and ultimately sinister behaviour, Louise and Ben are forced to confront the unspoken trauma hidden in their own marriage, as well as question their liberal credentials.
That tonal tightrope rests on the performance of Paddy, here essayed by McAvoy, bringing all his charming and venal charisma to the role – delightfully chummy one minute, a savage the next. It’s a monstrously entertaining turn in his hands and one that makes a revised ending work despite softening the nihilism and inhumanity of the original. It also allows more agency for Davies, playing a spikier version of the first film’s fussy wife, a woman who can, and will, bring her own barbarity to the fore when required. As a brisk, assured social horror (with plenty of vengeful tool use) Speak No Evil is a satisfying scare. But those that can bear the terrible sadness and appalling use of secateurs, should also seek out Christian Tafdrup’s urtext version. And hug your children twice as hard after watching either…
Words by JANE CROWTHER
Speak No Evil is in cinemas now
DISPATCH: JENNA ORTEGA BEETLEJUICE BEETLEJUICE
Words by JANE CROWTHER
Photographs by GREG WILLIAMS
With the Venice Film Festival marking the move of summer into Autumn, it’s perhaps fitting that a Halloween movie opened the 81st festivities. Thirty five years after Beetlejuice was first released, its sequel reunited the original cast alongside Jenna Ortega on the Lido’s red carpet – something director Tim Burton had never envisaged for a film he admits he doesn’t quite understand the success of. A quirky horror comedy starring Michael Keaton as a potty-mouthed, green-haired ghost who haunts the Deetz family when they move into a new house, it was the film that made a star of Winona Ryder (aged 15 when she filmed) and cemented a decades-long collaborative process between Burton and his two leads.
In the years since, Beetlejuice has become a cult classic and after the success of other legacy sequels such as Top Gun Maverick and Ghostbusters: Afterlife it was only a matter of time before ‘The Juice’ returned to haunted audiences anew. And on a balmy August evening Greg Williams joined the cast pre-premiere at their Venetian hotel as the film received warm reviews from critics tickled by the return to practical effects, a Ryder-Keaton re-run, Ortega’s snarky charm and the daft fun of Burton’s distinct signature touch.
‘Over the past few years, I got a little bit disillusioned with the movie industry, I sort of lost myself,’ the director admitted to journalists earlier in the day. ‘For me, I realized the only way to be a success is that I have to love doing it. For this one, I just enjoyed and loved making it.’ For Burton that meant working with Ryder, Keaton and Catherine O’Hara again. Having worked with Burton on other projects, Ryder felt safe to step into a new story with the director again. ‘My love and trust for Tim runs so deep and there was a sense of a certain playfulness and readiness to try things,’ she said, confessing that one of her favourite things about returning to the role of Lydia Deetz – not a TV medium and mother to a teenage daughter – was staring into Keaton’s eyes again. ‘It had been such a special experience the first one and just to be able to come back to it was just a dream come true.’
Burton calls Beetlejuice Beetlejuice ‘a weird family movie’ that examines the rifts between parents and children as Lydia returns to her original haunted house after the death of her father. Her teen daughter, Astrid, may not believe her mum can see dead people but she soon changes her mind after a run-in with a ghost and the afterlife. Burton credits some of his creative rejuvenation to making the first season of Wednesday with Jenna Ortega so she seemed the natural choice for the role of Astrid. Ortega – whose red-carpet custom Dior dress nodded to Lydia’s wedding dress in the original film – has had a similar fast rise to fame as Ryder and the two women bonded immediately on set, not only as mother and daughter but as actors who have become emo icons of their generation. ‘The way Winona and I got on was quite weird,’ Ortega says. ‘It was like we could read each other’s minds a little bit.’ Ryder was, she says, immediately warm and welcoming. ‘It was at a time where my career was taking a different turn. I didn’t realize that I needed that from somebody who could relate, but I did.’
Also along for the ride are Willem Dafoe as an afterlife detective who used to be an actor on a TV cop show, Monica Bellucci as Delores, a long-dead vamp with unfinished business with Beetlejuice; and Justin Theroux as Lydia’s odious boyfriend and manager.
Burton also brought SFX guru Neil Scanlon onto the project to ensure that the low-fi, fast and fun ethos of the first film was resurrected – so just like the original, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice features tactile practical effects to add to the comedy and off-kilter vibe (the waiting room is rammed with ridiculous deaths via piranha, chimney, cats, sharks and hotdogs). The result, says Burton, is a movie very much in the spirit of the original and ‘a very simple emotional movie’ – one that gained a standing ovation post-premiere. ‘The Juice’ is very much loose.
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is in cinemas now
Read our review of Beetlejuice Beetlejuice here
Words by JANE CROWTHER
The juice is, once again, loose. Tim Burton returns to his 1988 horror-comedy for the opening of this year’s Venice Film Festival for unapologetic fan service and warm-fuzzies. Having admitted to becoming disillusioned with the film industry before deciding to revisit the ‘ghost with the most’, Burton throws all of his trademark quirks into a movie that features cameos, wacky needledrops, stop-motion and tactile practical effects to nostalgic effect.
Catching up with Lydia Deetz (Winona Ryder, complete with goth chopped fringe) decades after she first met so-called bio-exorcist, Beetlejuice, as a teen, this legacy sequel from the producer behind Top Gun Maverick, mines audience affection for the weird and wonderful original by lovingly repeating the journey. So TV psycho Lydia is called back to the New England haven of Winter River when her father dies (in an animated, comedic fashion) along with her step-mom (Catherine O’Hara), cynical teen daughter Astrid (Jenna Ortega) and odious boyfriend/manager, Rory (Justin Theroux). Lydia and Astrid have a strained relationship, not least because Mom’s slimy romantic interest is always trying to be a ‘dope dad’ figure, but their familial bonds are put to the test when Astrid meets a local boy and when Beetlejuice’s past comes back to haunt him – forcing him to plague the Deetz family again. Along for the helter-skelter ride are Willem Dafoe’s Neitherworld detective, Monica Bellucci’s corpse bride and an army of shrunken headed minions led by tremulous ‘Bob’…
Keaton and Ryder seem to have hardly aged since the original and fall back easily into step with him growling fourth-wall-breaking Beetlejuice one-liners and her looking delightfully bewildered. While the script may not seem quite as subversive as its predecessor, the film really takes flight when logic is abandoned and frivolity is honoured. Keaton literally spilling his sloppy guts, sucking influencers into their phones and making the entire cast sing and dance to Richard Harris’ bonkers 1968 single Macarthur Park (and yes, an oozing, green-iced cake is present) is a hoot, a couple of segments featuring stop-motion Saturn sand worms tickle and a daft character death genuinely upsets (the film is dedicated to their demise). Fans wanting more of the waiting room get it – plus a built-out ever-after universe featuring dry cleaners, immigration halls, subway stations and call centres inhabited by people who have died ridiculously. There’s disco dancing, a Richard Marx nod, a disquieting offspring and a goofy ending that leaves room for more. Might we want another visitation? If it’s brisk, disposable, self-aware silliness like this, then we’ll likely take a ticket and get in line.
Words by JANE CROWTHER
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is in cinemas now
DISPATCH: KEVIN COSTNER HORIZON: AN AMERICAN SAGA – CHAPTER 2
Words by JANE CROWTHER
Photographs by GREG WILLIAMS
Kevin Costner wasn’t meant to be in Venice. The original release plan for Chapter 2 of his sweeping Western series, Horizon: An American Saga meant that the actor/director would not have been able to attend the film festival in the floating city. But like all things Costner seems able to manifest, the release date changed and festival director Alberto Barbera asked the Californian to bring his epic oater to Venice where Costner was mobbed by fans during a standing ovation at the premiere.
‘It’s been a perfect experience, really,’ Costner tells Hollywood Authentic of the way things turned out, not least because he brought his 17 year-old son, Cayden, along for the ride. The four days the duo spent at the festival turned out to be a teaching moment about the nature of resilience and the ability to get things done despite roadblocks. ‘He’s seen me labour over the course of this movie. For his entire life he’s known that I’ve talked about this thing,’ Costner says of his son. ‘And then to see me not let go of the opportunity, and the hope of it, and to actually go out and make two of them – he was able to see the culmination of that. It’s a weird thing when you look at your dad, I think, and see suddenly this movie playing, and the people standing and clapping for it. I think, maybe, he saw something in not letting go of a dream, and that you keep pushing.’
It’s a drive and self belief that makes him something of a pioneer in the wild west that is the Hollywood studio system… ‘I don’t see that correlation because there’s people that hide behind corporation momentum, and look at numbers,’ he says. ‘They wouldn’t survive out in the West. That’s a whole other corporate mentality that allows you to be cutthroat.’ Costner, who plays lone gunslinger and cowboy Hayes Ellison in the films seems cut from the same cloth as his character; a resourceful man who has a definite destination in mind. ‘Maybe my individualism is what you’re looking at,’ Costner acquiesces, ‘and then I’m kind of a unicorn in my own business, by using my money. I don’t like doing that. I don’t want to do that. I don’t even know why I do that. But when I do, I do a lot of sharing of work that could be revisited and revisited. And I certainly think Horizon qualifies as that because I promise you: if you watch it a second and a third and a fourth time, you will see something new.’
Hollywood, and Costner’s fans, await to see if the unicorn manifests chapters three and four of his saga. Our bet is that he will…
Costner certainly has form in not letting go of dreams – his 1990 revisionist western Dances With Wolves was considered a folly by critics yet the actor pressed on and saw the film a crowning success which went on to win seven Oscars. The same is true of Horizon – a saga Costner has long imagined as an epic four-parter and put his own cash into when studios didn’t share his vision. He’s made two chapters of the tale with plans to continue filming three and four later this year. ‘I don’t fall out of love that easily,’ Costner laughs of his decades-long drive to make the movie he dreamt of. ‘I don’t pretend to be the last say on this subject. I don’t try to be a person who’s trying to reinvent the western. I just simply want to go at it historically, and apply human behaviour to the themes that I think tell the story.’
Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 2 will be released later this year
Read our review here
DISPATCH: KODI SMIT-MCPHEE DISCLAIMER
Words by JANE CROWTHER
Photographs by GREG WILLIAMS
‘I should have stayed in my seat,’ Kodi Smit-Mcphee smiles when he recalls premiering Alfonso Cuarón’s new Apple+ limited series Disclaimer on the Venice Film Festival red carpet directly before the premiere of Maria, in which he also stars. In Disclaimer, based on Renee Knight‘s 2015 bestseller, Cate Blanchett plays an award-winning documentary filmmaker, Catherine Ravenscroft, who’s past comes back to haunt her when she receives a novel in the post. Told via three different perspectives and two different time periods, Smit-Mcphee plays the directionless son she shares with Sasha Baron Cohen. In Pablo Larrain’s biopic of Maria Callas starring Angelina Jolie, he appears as the personification of her sedative medication who manifests as a TV reporter questioning her in the week of her life. ‘’I’m literally named Mandrax, which is this suppressant kind of medication that she takes. It’s these therapeutic conversations that she’s ultimately having with her subconscious – but with me,’ he tells Hollywood Authentic when we sit down overlooking the Grand Canal in the St Regis Hotel. Both projects gave him the opportunity to work closely with powerhouse actors in Blanchett and Jolie. ‘It was great in the sense of just how generous and giving and safe and comforting these women are. I really feel like both took me under their wing, and made me feel welcomed and good. And a couple of Angelina’s sons were also on set. So I hung out with them quite a bit. They were really beautiful as well.’
Venice hosted two red carpets for the premiere of the seven-part Disclaimer – the cast photographed on both occasions by Greg Williams – and for Smit-Mcphee coming to Venice gave the actor the chance to spend time with co-stars he didn’t meet during filming as their characters’ timelines didn’t cross on-screen. He and Leila Geroge, who plays the younger Catherine, and Louis Partridge – who essays a young man who has a life-changing impact on her – compared notes on filming as Smit-Mcphee spent six months filming on sets in London (and adopting an English accent) while George and Partridge filmed for seven weeks in Italy.
For George the role required the actor to play two very different versions of the character as well as perform key explicit scenes with Partridge. The part required her to go to some dark place. ‘I use music quite a lot for when I have to shift into another place emotionally. Different playlists for different things, and that just immediately triggers something for me,’ she says. And the intimate scenes were an additional challenge. ‘It’s really important, of course, to have an intimacy coordinator so that everyone feels that there’s someone that they can go to, and feel safe. So there’s that side of it – the technical side of it. The other side of it is just getting to know [Partridge], and feeling safe with the person as a friend. We had so much time in Italy before we did those scenes. We’d go to each other’s trailers before we’d do something like that, and be like, ‘How are you feeling about the day?’ Communication and check-ins. And then just being able to let it go. Just leave it behind.’
‘It was kind of like a dance. It was all rehearsed,’ Partridge agrees. ‘And so, in some ways, it was more helpful to be in your own space, and occasionally checking in. Because we knew what we were about to do. And then, at the end of the day, we’d have a little dance, and shake it all off.’
Smit-Phee laughs that he enjoyed digging into playing a ‘grubby, homebody kind of teen’ as Blanchett and Baron Cohen’s son. As for working with Blanchett as his mum, he says: ‘Cate makes you question your abilities in the best way because she can go from this beautiful, light-hearted, joking fun in between takes. But then when she needs to go into something dark and heavier, it’s almost as if there’s a switch. But of course, there’s not a switch. It’s a great deal of work she does to develop these characters and get into these moments. But, my God, it looks like magic.’
The resulting work in Disclaimer is ‘so powerful’ and will prompt important conversation, says Partridge. He’s just completed work on Noah Baumbach’s new film and is currently filming Guinness, the story of the stout dynasty, playing Edward Guinness. ‘It’s brilliant, I’m loving it,’ he enthuses. ‘Do I get a lifetime’s supply of Guinness now? It wasn’t in my contract. That was a mistake, perhaps…’
Disclaimer premieres on Apple TV+ on 11 October
Read our review of Disclaimer here
Words by JANE CROWTHER
Kevin Costner’s sweeping saga charting the disparate lives intertwined through the often brutal expansion of the 19th century American west continues to focus on the experience of women on the frontier. Picking up events and storylines immediately after the first film (viewing that is required to understand the interwoven narrative threads), the tale of desert town Horizon is told via the wagon trains, cowboys, first nation tribes, pioneers, chinese tradespeople, sex workers and the moneymen in Chicago selling plots of land – and dreams – in an unknown region. Graves are prominent in every story…
Having been widowed in the first chapter, Frances (Sienna Miller) navigates a new life for her and her daughter, understanding that though she is resilient and resourceful, it is the protection of men that will inform their future. Meanwhile, on the dusty wagon train plodding across dangerous territory, snobby Brit Mrs Proctor (Ella Hunt) discovers both the venality and usefulness of male companions as she makes her way solo, her priggish ways broken into a new kind of defiance. Three put-upon sisters working for their Pa test the limits of their independence, while the on-the-run sex worker (Abbey Lee) helped by Costner’s stoic Hayes Ellison continues to evade the Sykes brothers. And the matriarch and granddaughter of a Chinese lumber company and teahouse are instrumental in building a settlement from canvas dwellings to a homestead community.
Costner and other male stars are integral to events but designed as it is (a planned four-part saga), their stories will have room to develop in later instalments. While Hayes Ellison was key in part one, he takes a back seat here, keeping his counsel at a horse breaking camp until his temper frays to thrilling effect with a bar room shootout. As a rich tapestry of tales destined for the long haul, Chapter Two could feel unresolved to some, but if viewed as a halfway point in a robust series, it hits emotional highs. The story of Mrs Proctor is particularly affecting as she is terrorised by Douglas Smith’s Sig, her despair galvanising in the cool waters of a river – a baptism for a new life and attitude. Miller also makes an impression with two key speeches; one explaining the options open to her to Sam Worthington’s cavalryman, another parsing the need for sisterhood in a cruel climate.
Costner’s shootout aside, it’s a quieter, more contemplative instalment, setting up high plains wagon chases, skirmishes with first nations and dead shots from the backs of horses (seen in the end reel preview of Chapter Three). And the scenery… lensed with a sweeping score, Costner understands the lexicon of Westerns and provides numerous moments that will make aficionados’ hearts soar.
Words by JANE CROWTHER
Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 2 will be released later this year
DISPATCH: SOPHIE WILDE & HARRIS DICKINSON BABYGIRL
Words by JANE CROWTHER
Photographs by GREG WILLIAMS
As she looks out of Venice’s Grand Canal wearing a 16Arlington dress teamed with Church brogues, actor Sophie Wilde contemplates her ‘surreal’ 13 months which started with the release of Australian horror hit Talk To Me in July 2023 and culminated with her attending the premiere of one of the buzziest movies at the city’s film festival this year, Babygirl. Wilde attended the red carpet in a Loewe custom look with archive Cartier jewellery from the year she was born. A special moment for the Sydney-bred actor who has been pinching herself since the rave reviews for Talk To Me. ‘We all knew we’d made something special, and that it was something that we were all super-proud of. But for it to have this international response was totally beyond our comprehension. It’s interesting that one project can really shift so many things in such a dramatic way. I’ve signed with US agents and interesting roles are coming my way. So it’s definitely been a shift.’
One of those roles is Babygirl. Telling the story of a CEO (Nicole Kidman) who embarks on an affair with her younger intern (Harris Dickinson) and explores the spectrum of female desire, the erotic drama sees Wilde play an executive assistant to Kidman. She is a key player in a chess game of power moves. ‘It’s definitely a very interesting conversation that Halina is playing with,’ Wilde says, ‘in the sense of women of different generations, and how they approach their womanhood. And their relationship to power and progression.’
Wilde was sent the script after impressing Reijn with her work in Talk To Me and was immediately hooked on the project after a meeting with the writer-director. ‘I think Halina’s a literal genius. She’s amazing,’ she ethuses. ‘She’s curated such an incredible film. I think what was interesting to me was the characters. They all felt incredibly infallible. There was a sense of moral ambiguity around everyone which I really liked. It was like, no one was right or wrong. It was just complex, like human beings are, and how relationships are.’
The gig also offered the opportunity to work with Kidman, who Wilde describes as ‘very much an Australian icon’ and a trailblazer for Antipodean talent breaking into Hollywood. ‘Watching someone like Nicole work is such a privilege. She’s honestly such a master of her craft, and such a powerhouse. I feel like I’ve very much grown up watching her films – Moulin Rouge is literally one of my favourite films. So it’s amazing to be able to work with someone who’s been such an inspiration. And to have someone of her calibre just there, supporting you, and backing you, and championing you – it’s really special.’
Babygirl is very much the kind of work Wilde wants to do going forward, she says. ‘There’s something so interesting about doing smaller, auteur-driven work that is very character-driven.’ Before she arrived in Venice Wilde finished shooting Watch Dogs, an adaptation of the video game which she describes as unlike anything she’s done before. And then there’s the possibility of her returning to Talk To Me 2. ‘We’ll have to wait and see,’ she teases. ‘All I know is that I find it exciting, that range of creative spaces you can enter.’
Babygirl is released in cinemas later this year
Read our review of Babygirl here
