Heartland International Film Festival 2023: FOE, RADICAL, A DISTURBANCE IN THE FORCE, NEW LIFE & SHUDDERBUGS

The 32nd Heartland International Film Festival rolls on, and for my second report I bring a look at some of the surprises of the fest, unique finds, and a major disappointment.

Foe (Garth Edwards)

Contemplative sci-fi is a highly demanding subgenre nowadays, especially at the film level. It’s increasing common to see them on television thanks to expanded budgets and inexpensive effects. Small stories that lean more on ideas than a world far removed from our own? People are routinely seeing them at home for free (minus a monthly subscription fee, but who thinks of those?). If you’re going to take these stories to the big screen you must deliver big ideas to feel satisfactory, which Foe is sorely lacking.

Its setup is intriguing enough. Scratching out a living on an isolated farm is Junior (Paul Mescal) and Hen (Saoirse Ronan), whose lives would seem familiar if it wasn’t for the decay all around them. Turns out they’re living in the near future, where drought has made large swaths of the world near uninhabitable. The couple are among the few people still holding on to an old, rural way of life, their home a meticulously maintained illusion within a disaster we could very easily see come to pass.

Junior seems relatively happy with this setup. Hen, though, longs for more. Into this pressure cooker comes Terrance (Aaron Pierre), who informs Junior he’s been conscripted into a government resettlement program. He’s going to live in space, and his wife will be kept company by a brand new invention: a robot replica.

Here the film stays, in the bleak limbo before he leaves and an uncanny experiment takes place. It’s the perfect setup for contemplative science fiction, so much so that it’s been used many times before. Unfortunately, writer and director Garth Edwards finds nothing new to explore this scenario. In fact, he doesn’t really settle on a unifying idea. But, there’s so many intriguing avenues to this story it’s hard not to be entertained by its flickering ideas.

Doing their best with the quagmire is Ronan, Mescal and Pierre. They’re a trio that can make even the most boring story compelling, and here they’re given lots of moments to pick and prod at each other’s soft underbellies. Whenever these three are sparring, the film has a propulsion that’s otherwise sorely lacking.

They are just completely let down by Edwards, who doesn’t deliver a script worthy of their efforts (was there a more intriguing version that attracted them?), but who also doesn’t trust them to communicate emotions and themes. Foe is an annoying try-hard, hammering home moments as if they are far more incisive than they are. I mean, how often do we need to see Mescal and Ronan nude? I don’t say this as a prudish critique; it’s just that we don’t need nudity as a constant reminder that the film is stripping their characters bare psychologically.

Pushing this hard for intellect is just painful, and that is the lasting feeling of Foe. So much effort was put into it, from its integration of timely environmental warnings to its detailed world building to the investment of the actors. But it takes you nowhere, leaves you with nothing, except maybe a nasty taste in your mouth.

Radical (Christopher Zalla)

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: at a struggling school, a new teacher rolls in with an unorthodox approach. He tosses chairs out of alignment, abandons lesson plans, and ignores standardized test prep. This quickly draws the suspicion of fellow teachers and administrators alike, but he also draws the attention of his students.

Wait wait wait, don’t go. I know you’ve heard this story before. Radical knows you’ve heard this story before, and it’s learned from hackneyed attempts at real-life teacher inspiration how to deliver a story that is truly heartwarming.

Two great strengths make Radical stand out from the pack. First off, it got a stellar cast. That’s not unusual for these films, at least not for the coveted role of the teacher with a heart of gold, which Eugenio Derbez plays here with aplomb. But the rest of the cast is equally as strong, with Daniel Haddad providing an appropriately skeptical but intrigued foil to Derbez as the straight-laced man in charge of the school. It’s the child actors, though, that really elevate the material. So much hinges on two in particular: Jennifer Trejo as a secret genius and Danilo Guardiola as a kid already enmeshed in their town’s dangerous underbelly.

Actually, per writer/director Christopher Zalla‘s portrayal of the border town Matamoros, the town’s dangers aren’t hidden. That’s the other strength of Radical: the circumstances these kids have to deal with aren’t defanged. There are drugs, shootings, and crushing poverty everywhere you look, and all of it feels like true threats to these kids. A wrong move, or simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time, would have disastrous consequences.

Guardiola and Trejo play the two kids closest to the brink, and Zalla guides them to realistic, unsentimental performances. In a more boisterous role, Guardiola infuses his character with the perfect amount of insecurity, circumventing the usual trope of the class clown who just needs space for his energy and sending his character down a much more complicated path to redemption. Trejo, though, is the real find, having to get across all her character’s desires and sharp-eyed ability to see reality through her teacher’s bravado. She is the genius, after all. She sees the cards they’ve all been dealt, and she knows her intellect isn’t enough to get her out of Matamoros.

Derbez’s Sergio realizes this, too, which helps his idealistic character fold into the film’s more grounded approach to the genre. He doesn’t just run around the classroom telling his students to believe in themselves. He fights, cajoles, and sacrifices to get these kids what he can, and in private he allows himself to be unsure and in need of help. There’s real vulnerability to this guy, not just a bleeding heart.

When Radical does gear up for its inevitable ending, the familiar notes are supported by the surprises that came before, and emotion flows freely instead of being forced. No, Radical does not break the rules of inspirational teacher films, but it does elevate them as high as they can go.

A Disturbance in the Force (Jeremy Coon and Steve Kozak)

Rapacious Star Wars fans leave no stone unturned, including heavily researching and wildly speculating about the infamous Holiday Special. So why do we need a documentary on it? Well, we don’t, and yet here comes A Disturbance in the Force, a shallow dive into the wackadoodle program that just barely justifies its existence.

If you weren’t around for its initial airing in 1978, watching the Holiday Special feels like an out-of-body experience. Lore will prep you for a disaster, for an oddity, but it can’t prepare you for Bea Arthur fending off a hapless paramour in the Mos Eisley cantina. None of it feels in the same universe as the space operas fans love because it wasn’t intended to be one. It was a marketing ploy, and a terrible one at that.

The greatest strength of A Disturbance in the Force is digging into that origin story and placing it among many out-of-universe attempts to make Star Wars the cultural juggernaut it is today. Back then, Star Wars alone didn’t sell. But in late ‘70s TV culture, Chewie and R2D2 with Donnie and Marie Osmond would. Of course the era of variety shows molded the Holiday Special into a loose collection of skits and musical performances. Of course its special guests skewed older to match CBS’ audience. And of course it doesn’t feel like a space opera, because… well, I guess because no one told George Lucas that Wookiee families aren’t why we come to a galaxy far, far away.

Once this insightful intro is established, Disturbance is left to delve into the Star Wars of it all, and it’s here that the film becomes underdeveloped. Director Jeremy Coon comes with experience working on fan-centric docs like Raiders!: The Story of the Greatest Fan Film Ever Made while Steve Kozak is a complete novice, and both backgrounds show. The film relies on a mix of interviews with people involved in the production and famous fans. Their contributions are messily edited together, which occasionally muddles whether the doc is exploring facts or speculation. A key example is when it addresses my biggest question about the Holiday Special: what the hell is with Mark Hamill’s makeup??? The historical speculation and the supposed answer both come from fans, which throws their alleged answer into question. How are we to know they aren’t continuing to speculate, especially since the “answer” they provide begs for a follow-up that’s never broached? 

The standard editing pattern for this sequence would be the history of wild speculation from the fans, then a hard, comedic cut to an authority from production delivering the answer. But these simple storytelling beats are missed, as are other opportunities for clean, bizarre fun. 

Disturbance is lighthearted, but like so many products related to Star Wars, love for the subject masks lackluster work. I mean, even I’m guilty of grading on a scale. Anything that’s Star Wars fine gives me such a thrill that I love it. Anything Star Wars bad gets brownie points for the simple joy of Star Wars. Except for the Holiday Special, which makes even this lackluster examination of the singularly unappealing Star Wars entity worth the time.

New Life (John Rosman)

The breadth of horror is an interesting thing to wrestle with, one that New Life will have you struggling with long after its genre trappings are revealed.

There’s nothing in the setup to indicate there’s creepy crawlies about. There’s just a woman, bloody and beaten, on the run from whatever inflicted the damage. Viewers, like many of the characters in the film, will jump to mundane assumptions. That’s not to say the mundanity of domestic violence isn’t horrifying, but the other side of New Life’s story reveals something else is going on.

On the young woman’s trail is another woman, a little older and with an arsenal of tech wizards backing her up. This outfit wouldn’t show up for the average woman fleeing an abusive partner, so something else, which the film leaves unspecified for as long as possible, must be motivating her flight.

This extended period of uncertain chasing is New Life’s most vibrant offering. It takes its time, burns slowly, and allows the two women to reveal their secrets at their own pace. Both actresses, Hayley Erin as the younger prey and Sonya Walger as the older predator, make the characters pop despite their guardedness, a feat that keeps their mysteries from becoming frustrations.

Also key to this section’s success is the gentle feel writer and director John Rosman gives to the chase. It’s an odd choice, especially when you know this belongs to the horror genre. The young woman doesn’t encounter obstacle after obstacle nor is the older woman a single-minded obsessive. In fact, both encounter a surprising amount of kindness along the journey. Strangers, perhaps assuming the abusive background many viewers will guess, assist the young woman as they can. The older woman has a chummy relationship with a tech guy on her team. Whatever is going on, these two exist in a very real world, one where kindness and cruelty can come from anyone, even themselves.

Where New Life begins to stumble is when answers enter the frame. The explicit horror element is fairly banal, although some well-done effects make it an impressive entry for its budget. More detrimental is how the development changes the tenor of the story and muddles its message.

There’s a thoughtless cruelty to its ending, not through brutality but in how it reframes the kindnesses we saw before. In fact, it sends the two women’s stories towards opposite meanings, even as the plot goes to clunky lengths to tie them together. It made me wonder what Rosman would say about his intent. My instinct is that my reading wasn’t intentional. Plot concerns overrode tone and messaging, so while the ending is very tidy, emotionally it lands with a hollow thud.

I’m not saying this film should have a happier ending. Great kindness can be found in horrific scenarios. Just look at how New Life balances this reality for most of its run time. The tricky and rewarding stretch where it dangles hope and horror in front of you makes it worth watching, and it gives Rosman a solid calling card. Hopefully next time he sticks the landing.

Shudderbugs (Johanna Putnam)

Movies about isolation are a dime a dozen as we recover from the pandemic, as are movies about grief. Combining the two is Shudderbugs, a film that rises above its cohorts thanks to a commitment to situational oddities.

Johanna Putnam stars as Samantha, a woman who returns to her childhood home in the wake of her mother’s sudden death. Putnam also writes and directs this modest feature, one of several people pulling double and triple duty to bring the picture to life.

Samantha had happily left her rural home long ago, and coming back seems to be an uneasy prospect. With her mother’s death to take care of and signs all over the house that she had been struggling quietly and alone for a while, an inescapable weight presses down on Samantha, as does a mystery. Her mother wasn’t sick enough to pass away, and the coroner is being cagey about the cause of death. Alone and with much on her mind, Samantha spirals out of control.

Shudderbugs doesn’t aim to be a tense mystery, but it could’ve done with a tad more propulsion. Sitting with Samantha in her grief is an important building block to the film’s eventual conclusion, but the screws need to be tightened a little more to support its elaborate framework. The ending is a big step with a lot of loose ends to tie, and it takes a tad too long to get there and a tad too long to put a bow on all the moving pieces. Also, the production design is frustratingly underutilized, never fully marrying the crumbling isolation of the rural setting with Samantha’s own deteriorating mind.

What does work, though, is the details Putnam puts into the journey Samantha goes on. She spends most of the film languishing in her childhood home, only occasionally seeing a childhood classmate who was never her friend. Despite the unease, there’s a sense that she’s settling, as many of us do, into the person she was when this was still her home. It’s subtle shifts, like wearing pajamas long since left behind and casually popping on a pair of children’s plastic sunglasses. The loosening completes in a scene where Samantha gives into the flurry of emotions she’s processing, dancing through stages of grief without a modicum of shame.

These moments, along with the well-measured and deeply felt performance she gives, are what makes the film a calling card for Putnam. This is her movie, in front of and behind the camera, and while there are a few instances where more collaborators may have smoothed over the finer points, one can’t deny just how much she gets right. It’s a strange little movie, all the better for its oddities. After all, no two people grieve the same way, and while no one should take Samantha’s approach, it does make for an interesting story.

All films screened at the Heartland International Film Festival.