Writing a Life: Kristen Stewart’s Triumphant Directorial Debut, The Chronology of Water

THE CHRONOLOGY OF WATER 

(Kristen Stewart, USA, 2025, 128 minutes) 

"It's all a series of fragments, repetitions, pattern formations…" 

Kristen Stewart's full-length debut, an empathetic adaptation of The Chronology of Water, adheres to the fragmentary form of Lidia Yuknavich's 2011 memoir, a recollection of the incidents that shaped a troubled and ultimately joyous life, but not always in chronological order (it follows Stewart's 2017 short Come Swim). It isn't, after all, how we remember things, and both book and film play like a swarm of vivid memories. 

They aren't Stewart's memories, but after eight years and 500 drafts of the screenplay, she must have felt as if she had earned joint custody.

Much like RaMell Ross's adaptation of Colson Whitehead's Nickel Boys and Mary Bronstein's If I Had Legs I'd Kick You, even individual sequences are fragmentary, since DP Corey Waters often skews the 16mm compositions. 

Instead of full-frame bodies or faces, he captures parts of the whole, frequently emphasizing texture over shape. It's a sensual approach, though so intimate it can prove disorienting until the fragments take fuller shape and start to cohere thanks to editor Olivia Neergaard-Holm's intricate work.

The film begins with a stillbirth. Lidia's older sister, Claudia (Thora Birch), comforts her as she (Imogen Poots) processes a loss she associates with water–she associates everything with water–because Lidia is, or was, a competitive swimmer. As she crumples to the shower floor, and as the water continues to flow, blood that once sustained a life now runs down the drain. 

One minute, she's an adult, and then she's a child with an alcoholic stay-at-home mother (For the People's Susannah Flood) and an abusive architect father (German actor Michael Epp, convincing as a native Pacific Northwesterner). Swimming is something she's good at, and it's also an escape. Other coping mechanisms include journaling, collecting rocks, and re-reading her sister's copy of Vita Sackville-West's St. Joan of Arc. 

The film continues to toggle between childhood and adulthood (Angelika Mihailova and Anna Wittowsky play Lidia as a child, while 35-year-old Poots successfully passes for the high school and college-age Lidia). 

Since the fragments are so brief–even more so than the book's short chapters–sporadic voiceover provides an internal monologue; an expression of Lidia's feelings rather than a delivery system for exposition. Composer Paris Hurley, who provided the score for Rose Glass's pulpy thriller Love Lies Bleeding with Stewart, contributes to the sense of unease and discomfort. 

Lidia's dad, who recalls Jon Hamm on Mad Men, is a handsome creep; a reminder that not all sexual predators are unattractive men who can't hold down a job; they exist, too, but this kind is more likely to get away with it. 

Claudia leaves home as soon as she can, leaving Lidia defenseless until she goes away to college. For all her mother's faults, the real-life Yuknavich extends little sympathy to an unhappy woman who suffered from crippling depression compounded by a painful disability, a philandering husband, and an unsuccessful battle with the bottle. Lidia and Claudia deserved better to be sure, but Dorothy did, too, and her options were even more limited.

For Lidia, her mother's native Texas--Austin rather than Port Arthur--represents freedom, but left to her own devices, she develops an insatiable appetite for sex, drugs, and drink; a problem for any young person, but especially an athlete on scholarship. She also falls for Phillip, an aspiring musician, who tells her, "It's my father and my brother who have the real voices" when she compliments his singing–a bit of an inside joke, since he's played by Earl Cave, the son of Nick Cave (if anything, he is a better singer). 

Phillip is a good guy, but all Lidia knows is bad guys, so she keeps fucking up, but he has an inexhaustible capacity for forgiveness, and he becomes her first husband. There will be others after that relationship runs aground, as well as relationships with women, including a college friend (Esmé Creed-Miles), transgressive novelist Kathy Acker (not featured in the film), and an older dominatrix (nicely played by post-punk musician Kim Gordon). 

By the time Lidia ends up at the University of Oregon, where Ken Kesey (an excellent Jim Belushi) becomes her mentor, she's a mess, but so is he, with his great novels long behind him. In Lidia's memoir, she details his many shortcomings, but he encouraged her talent–Kathy Acker did, too–and it seems unlikely her book would exist without his fatherly guidance. 

Sometimes when two people meet while one is on the way up and the other is on the way down, they click in the middle. It's about timing as much as shared interests and compatible personas. If Lidia and Kesey had met at a different time, they might not have been able to connect in the same way.

Claudia aside, none of these relationships are built to last until Lidia meets Andy (Charlie Carrick), a writing student 10 years her junior who will become her husband and the father of their child. Just as Stewart and her spouse, producer Dylan Meyer, have collaborated on projects, like this film, Yuknavich and Mingo have worked together, most significantly on their own independent press. 

Beyond the fact that this is a well-made film from a neophyte writer/director who appears to have learned well from the art house auteurs with whom she has worked, like Olivier Assayas (Personal Shopper) and Kelly Reichardt (Certain Women), it's exceptionally well cast. Thora Birch hasn't had the easiest time of it since her American Beauty/Ghost World days, and she honors the faith Stewart, who also started out as a youth actor, puts in her.

Everybody else is pretty great, too, but Imogen Poots is fantastic. It shouldn't be news that she's a very good actor--from 28 Weeks Later to last year's Hedda--but she convinces in all of Lidia's many guises, including champion swimmer, reckless drunk, and established author and mother. 

Right: Ken Kesey to the left and Lidia Yuknavich to the right; he and his graduate students publishd a 1990 book called Caverns. 

It's often said that the book is better than the film, because it's often true, and The Chronology of Water, which started out as a short story, wouldn't have been possible without Lidia's life and work--something that affected Stewart so deeply she reached out years ago to visit the author, and the two became friends. As Stewart told Kate Dwyer, Yuknavich "changed or at least helped shape my relationship with expression itself; not a small thing.'

So, it isn't completely fair to say that the film is better than the book, but I preferred it, because Lidia can be a very performative writer. That isn't to suggest she's insincere, though she does classify herself as an experimental writer, an outlier. Her book always makes sense, and there's nothing wrong with a varied writing style, but as a screenwriter, Stewart cuts out a lot of the showy stuff to focus on the essence of incidents. It's not about making Lidia more likeable, since she does plenty of unlikeable things to herself and others, but about making her more relatable–and less eager to impress. 

A few years ago, Stewart acknowledged that she was having a hard time finding funding for her film, and it led to a lot of hand-wringing from critics in light of her achievements as an actor, but she found a way--filming in Latvia and Malta, for one thing--and she also found a distributor--The Forge--but not one of the big names you might expect, so her debut hasn't gotten as much attention as it deserves, despite a six-minute standing ovation at Cannes and praise from the likes of Sheila O'Malley and Richard Brody.

Things might have been different if Kristen Stewart had cast herself, but she made the best choice, the right choice, in casting UK-born Imogen Poots to play all-American fuckup-turned-bestselling-novelist Lidia Yuknavich. 

She could have put herself front and center, and it might have pleased financiers, but she chose to honor the story of a woman who made sense out of her life through writing. I couldn't say for sure, but I believe the film served a similar purpose for its maker, who has really done herself proud. 

The Chronology of Water, which opened in Seattle on Jan 9, returns for a run at SIFF Film Center thanks to the Grand Illusion Cinema on Jan 30 and Feb 1, 12, and 18. Images from MK (Imogen Poots), Kino-Zeit (Poots and Thora Birch), Les Films du Losange / The Daily Beast (Susannah Flood, Michael Epp, and kids), The Forge (Flood), Variety (Jim Belushi), and Hawthorne Books (Ken Kesey, Lidia Yuknavich, and other students).  

Joy Wilkinson Reinvents the Erotic Thriller for a New Era in 7 Keys, Her First Feature Film

7 KEYS
(Joy Wilkinson, UK, 2024, 94 minutes) 

For her feature-film debut, British playwright and television writer Joy Wilkinson (Dr. Who, Lockwood & Co.) crafts a riveting erotic thriller. 

It begins as Lena (Emma McDonald, The Serpent Queen), a working-class single mother in London, dresses up for a night on the town–complete with oversized hoop earrings and short, fitted dress–to meet a man she met on a dating app. With a history of abandonment, she's eager for connection.

She waits and waits, but he doesn't show, so she commiserates with Daniel (1917's Billy Postlethwaite, rangy son of Pete Postlethwaite), whose date also ghosted him. "It's a big city full of assholes," she reasons (McDonald and Postlethwaite previously worked together in Paul Hart’s 2019 musical version of Macbeth and Wilkinson’s 2021 short "The Everlasting Club").  

Daniel keeps the key–or copy of the key–to every place he's lived, and he's lived all over the city, so she suggests they sneak into each one. He's put off by her assertiveness, and at first she seems like the predator, but he eventually relents. It injects excitement into her life, on the one hand; on the other, visiting his past helps Lena to better understand this stranger. It works until it doesn't. Then it all goes to shit. 

Lena didn't tell Daniel she has a seven-year-old son--she and his father share custody--and Daniel didn't tell Lena about his sociopathic tendencies, because why would he? He's a sociopath, and what starts out as an unexpected, adventurous date turns into a perilous battle for survival. 

For a $300K debut, 7 Keys is stylish, but not slick, with each section represented by a different color scheme and a score that ranges from suspenseful to ominous as Lena and Daniel reveal more of themselves, through words and actions, and the situation escalates from erotic to horrific (the film was shot by Mary Farbrother and scored by Max Perryment). 

If the ending could be more satisfying, the acting is always compelling, particularly from the  charismatic Emma McDonald. Until he turns aggressive and demanding, Daniel is more withdrawn by comparison, which Lena initially reads as timidity or cautiousness.

Neither victim nor superwoman, she takes risks to be sure–loneliness can do that to a person–but she's strong and resourceful, yet also openhearted and nurturing. Wilkinson doesn't press the point, but they're valuable qualities for a single mother...though her ability to read social cues could use work.

In her director's statement, the filmmaker explains the thinking behind a scenario both symbolic and plausible: "I've always been fascinated by keys. They're mythic objects in stories, unlocking secret places, other worlds, and even in our world, they have a magic. Children can't be trusted with them, which fueled my childhood fears of being homeless and my obsession with finding a home, primal drives that still fill my dreams and nightmares." She adds, "Keys had power to unlock new experiences. Illicit things." 

The end result plays like a post-millennial take on the 1990s erotic thriller with a woman of color given greater agency than the sidekick roles of yore. Lena reminded me of Stephanie Sigman's Laura in Gerardo Naranjo's original Spanish-language Miss Bala or Matilda Lutz's Jen in Coralie Fargeat’s blood-soaked Revenge. 

Those films have more gore, but all three women, accustomed to being underestimated, find reserves of strength when tangling with men too dazzled or tradition-minded to understand what they're up against. 

There's no slut-shaming here, just a story about loneliness in the big city and a vulnerable woman's desire for companionship gone very, very wrong. 

7 Keys premieres on VOD Jan 27, 2026. Images from the Jeva Films via IMDb (Emma McDonald) and Mashable (McDonald and Billy Postlethwaite).   

Nia DaCosta Brings Thrills, Chills, and Duran Duran to 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple

28 YEARS LATER: THE BONE TEMPLE 

(Nia DaCosta, 2026, USA, 109 minutes) 

What has happened to it all?

Crazy, some'd say

Where is the life that I recognise? (Gone away)

--Duran Duran, "Ordinary World" (1993)

Danny Boyle's 28 Years Later, the third film in a series--and first in a new trilogy--that began with 2002's 28 Days Later, ended with a cliffhanger that left some delighted and others pissed. Count me among the delighted. 

As last year's film came to an end, young Spike (the terrific Alfie Williams), who gets separated from his newly-widowed father (Aaron Taylor-Johnson, missing in action this time around), has endured all manner of cancerous and rage-infected calamities and come out the other side, fully intact. 

 

Left: Spike and Jamie running from rage zombies in 28 Years Later

Then he runs into the bejeweled and velour track-suited Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal (Jack O'Connell, fresh from Ryan Coogler's Sinners and back for more villainy). Jimmy calls his followers Fingers: platinum blond cretins who look like a cross between the Feral Kid in Mad Max 2 and the towheaded terrors of Children of the Corn. (Though he previously recalled odious British entertainer and notorious pedophile Jimmy Savile, they've toned down that look this time around.)

The end. That was it. Until 28 days later...in film time.

Nia DaCosta, who was behind last year's revitalized adaptation of Ibsen's Hedda Gabler, picks up where Boyle left off with Spike's induction into a hyper-violent subculture where every kid is a "Jimmy," a miniature version of their megalomaniacal leader, who reports to a never-seen "Old Nick." 

Spike is a brave and resourceful boy, but unlike his new companions, he's neither sadistic nor stupid. He will, however, do what it takes to survive–and possibly even to escape–even if it means murdering a fellow human being.  

 

Miles away lies the Bone Temple, an ossuary created by Dr. Kelson (a fired-up, iodine-coated Ralph Fiennes). 

 

I assumed he wasn't alive at the end of the previous film, but Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland--who wrote every film in the series except 2007's 28 Weeks Later--never definitively confirmed his fate, and DaCosta has, essentially, handed the sequel to the madman and the doctor. 

No offense to 15-year-old Williams--13 when the two back-to-back shoots began in 2024--but when you've got two uninhibited, road-tested talents like O'Connell and Fiennes at your disposal: it's the right thing to do. 

The result is a film that dispenses with the world-building to amp up the weird and the funny with even more what-the-fuck moments than before.

Once again left to his own devices, the good doctor becomes obsessed with Samson (6' 9" ex-MMA fighter Chi Lewis-Parry), the big, hulking, frequently nude "alpha" introduced in the previous film. True to form, Garland doesn't spell things out any more than necessary, but the brilliant, if lonely eccentric detects--or dearly wants to detect--the slightest trace of residual humanity in this vicious, bug-eyed creature, so he comes up with a plan to calm him down, and from there, to try to quell the psychosis that animates his kind. 

 

Though DaCosta didn't call on Scottish band Young Fathers, like Boyle--who first hired them for T2 Trainspotting--she introduces a side of Dr. Kelson previously unexplored, and it involves pop music, because he keeps a set of 1980s and '90s records in his bunker along with a functional player, so while he's toiling away on a project that could have monumental ramifications for the dwindling dregs of humanity, he has Duran Duran in all their synthy glory to buoy his spirits.

Just as Fiennes gave his all to the record producer he played in Luca Guadagnino's shockingly good La Piscine remake A Bigger Splash–in which he does a snaky sashay to the Stones' "Emotional Rescue" that has to be seen to be believed–he ups the ante here in ways sure to put a smile on the gloomiest of faces (he also joins Lewis-Parry in a bit of full frontal).

 

I've never seen a Shakespearean actor let his freak flag fly so high. Dr. Kelson's pop fandom is the light to the film's considerable dark, because it's otherwise as gory as the previous one--if not more so--with spine-snapping, chest-flaying, and plenty of Jimmy's upside-down cross version of "charity."

 

Everything comes together at the end with an electrifying showdown involving Jimmy Crystal, Dr. Kelson, Spike, and a surprising new friend (The Green Knight's Erin Kellyman, a kick in the pants) the kid made along the way. 

If you're all about themes, Garland, most recently of the unsparing docudrama Warfare with co-director and Navy SEAL Ray Mendoza, has your back with cynical thoughts about religion, groupthink, and whatnot, but I enjoy this series for the enthralling fusion of action, ingenuity, and vivid characterizations.

I appreciate the larger themes, but they aren't what keep me coming back, and this entry offers an additional attraction: the return of Jim, the bicycle courier from the first film. I can't imagine Cillian Murphy, who won an Oscar for Christopher Nolan's 2023 Oppenheimer, would return after 24 years unless he had sufficient confidence in Garland's screenplay and DaCosta's direction, but he appears in a touching story line that seems likely to expand in the third (technically fifth) and final film to be directed by Danny Boyle.

 

Granted, the state of today's world, even without real-life rage zombies wreaking havoc, has had me tearing up at most anything, but the sight of Jim safe and sound–for the moment–made me a little misty. 

From her 2018 debut Little Woods through Hedda, with stops along the way for The Marvels and a Candyman sequel, Nia DaCosta has a solid track record, but there was no guarantee she was going to pull off this high-stakes sequel in such fine style, but I'll be damned: she does. And then some. 

 

28 Years Later: The Bone Temple opens in Seattle on Jan 15 at SIFF Cinema Downtown and the usual AMC and Regal suspects. Images: Dexerto (Jack O'Connell and the Jimmys), People / Credit: Miya Mizuno (Alfie Williams and Aaron Taylor-Johnson), Sortiraparis (Ralph Fiennes), Reactor (Chi Lewis-Parry), and The Seattle Times / Sony Pictures (Fiennes and O'Connell).  

Blood's Thicker Than Mud: Jim Jarmusch’s Unsentimental Father Mother Sister Brother

FATHER MOTHER SISTER BROTHER
(Jim Jarmusch, USA, 2025, 110 mins) 

You see, it's in the blood, both kids are good to mom, 

blood's thicker than the mud.--Sly & the Family Stone (1971)

After dancing to the beat of his own minimalist, post-punk drum for 45 years now, I wouldn't expect filmmaker and musician Jim Jarmusch to turn into a sentimentalist just because he's entered his eighth decade and, thank goodness, he hasn't. That would be a pretty disappointing turn of events.  

Much like 2005's Broken Flowers, though, in which Bill Murray's aging Lothario attempts to locate the son he never knew, Father Mother Sister Brother finds the 72-year-old filmmaker in a reflective, stock-taking mood. 

Though he's always kept his personal life to himself, Jarmusch has been in a partnership with producer/director Sara Driver for nearly 50 years, and the same daughter who inspired him to cast Selena Gomez in 2019's The Dead Don't Die, is now in her 20s. (For those unfamiliar with Driver's work, I suggest starting with her very good Jean-Michel Basquiat documentary.) 

In the first story, Father, two adult children, Emily (Mayim Bialik, most recently of Jeopardy!) and Jeff (Adam Driver, so terrific in 2016's Patterson) take a road trip to rural New Jersey to visit their estranged father (Tom Waits, who first worked with Jarmusch on 1986's jailbird picaresque Down by Law). 

Neither is looking forward to it. To them, he's just an old coot who's been cadging them for money for years. If anything, Jeff is the softest touch, while Emily is more skeptical (the actors are very good together). Only four years older than Jarmusch, Waits looks even older, though it's always a treat to see him on screen, especially in the films of Jarmusch and the Coen brothers, who have the best handle on his well-honed comedic skills. 

The three proceed to have an awkward, but not completely unpleasant visit filled with water and tea–Father isn't exactly living large. Or is he? It's clear they don't trust the guy, but they don't really know him either, since he keeps surprising them in various ways. It feels like there's something he's trying to say, possibly about his estate, since Jarmusch makes the most of pregnant pauses–something he's been doing since at least 1984's Stranger Than Paradise–but the conclusion relies more on actions than words. 

Mother presents a parent-child relationship from another perspective as a proper British mother (Charlotte Rampling) waits in her Dublin home for her daughters, Timothea (Cate Blanchett, reuniting with Jarmusch after 2002's Coffee and Cigarettes) and Lilith (the ever-versatile Vicky Krieps), to drop by for a visit. The former looks like a square in her oversized glasses and sensible shoes, while the latter looks like a Fassbinder player with her pink hair and fake fur coat (though Catherine George designed the costumes, producer Saint Laurent, the French design house, made them).  

Another awkward tea party ensues, though not for the same reasons. Most everything Lilith tells her mother, a successful author, is a lie. She wants her to think she's a heterosexual with a wealthy fiancé, but she doesn't appear to be or to have either of those things (Irish actress Sarah Greene assists with the charade). Though Father has a conclusive ending, this story doesn't, other than to establish that the sisters, differences aside, get along well enough.Their mother, however, is like a stranger, though Timothea puts up a better front than Lilith, who may never meet with her approval. 

The film ends with Sister Brother in which twins Skye (Pose's nonbinary Indya Moore) and Billy (Luka Sabbat, who made his feature debut in The Dead Don't Die) reconnect in Paris after the death of their parents (they're at least the second set of non-white twins to appears in a Jarmusch film after Spike Lee's siblings, Cinqué and Joie, in Coffee and Cigarettes).

One has short hair, while the other has long dreadlocks, but they both favor black leather jackets. They're also younger than the other siblings, in addition to more thoughtful and less anxious. If the brother swears by his daily micro-dose regimen, the drug-free sister is fine with the occasional shot of espresso. 

While paying their respects to the now-empty flat in which they grew up, they have an exchange with the landlady (Françoise Lebrun from Jean Eustache's The Mother and the Whore, a Jarmusch favorite). It's a brief, but touching moment that wouldn't work as well with another actress. 

If their parents also come across as mysterious, there's less tension here with the not knowing; with the fact that there was a lot about their American-born parents they didn't know–and now they never will.

Father Mother Sister Brother is Jarmusch's fourth anthology film, though I wouldn't say it completes a quartet, since it's as different from the tales of cultural dislocation in 1989's Mystery Train as the dark nights of the driver-and-passenger souls in 1991's geographically-diverse Night on Earth as the comic vignettes about addiction and obsession in Coffee and Cigarettes.

Granted, there's a lot of driving in this film, shot by Frederick Elmes and Yorick Le Saux from the front seat, so it feels like we're in cars with the characters as roads in New Jersey, Dublin, and Paris stretch ahead of them into futures unwritten.

Like Krzysztof Kieślowski's Three Colours Trilogy, in which a pensioner struggles to place a bottle in a recycling receptacle in each film, Jarmusch includes certain details in each section: color coordination (Mother is fairly horrified), a Rolex that may or may not be real, toasts with water, tea and espresso ("Can you toast with tea?," asks the literal-minded Jeff), tables laden with beverages shot from above, and skateboarders snaking in front of and around moving vehicles before slowing down and speeding up again. 

The film begins and ends with an electric guitar-and-synth score from Jarmusch and German-British artist Anika (they both record for Sacred Bones). The music returns between each section alongside imagery that recalls Jeremy Blake's interstitials for P.T. Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love. 

Anika also sings a couple of covers in her heavily-accented style, Classics IV's "Spooky," which  appears in its original form, as well, and Nico's "These Days." If a little wobbly on the former, she's quite effective on the latter. I'm not sure if there's any significance, but both songs debuted in 1967.  

Since it premiered at the Venice Film Festival last year, where it won the Golden Lion, some critics have described Father Mother Sister Brother as a return to form, which seems like another way of saying that they didn't like The Dead Don't Die, his sole foray into zom-com territory, except Jarmusch's filmography has always had its ups and downs, so I wouldn't go that far.  

All told, it's one of his most understated films, even as it asks some of the biggest questions, like, "Can we ever really know our parents?" And, "Can we ever really know our kids?" In each case, the answer is a resounding no. 

Since I know little about Jarmusch's off-screen life, I couldn't say whether he took inspiration from his relationships with his parents or with his daughter, but only the third chapter asks: "Does it really matter?" He doesn't hesitate to provide a definitive answer...though yours may be entirely different. 

Father Mother Sister Brother opens in Seattle at SIFF Film Center on Jan 9. Image from The New Yorker via Bethuel / Vague Notion / MUBI (Indya Moore and Luka Sabbat), Consequence (Tom Waits and Mayim Bialik), AP News (Françoise Lebrun), and First Showing (Moore and Sabbat). 

Grzegorz Królikiewicz's Through and Through Flips the Script on the True Crime Narrative

THROUGH AND THROUGH / Na Wylot 

(Grzegorz Królikiewicz, Poland, 1973, 74 minutes) 

Why would a couple kill three people who never did them any harm?

In his 1973 feature debut, Polish filmmaker Grzegorz Królikiewicz, who began as a documentarian, provides a spectacularly expressive answer to that question. The result, as cultural critic Ela Bittencourt aptly puts it in the essay included with the new Radiance release, is "complex and invigorating."

I tend to think of experimental films as those without a clear-cut narrative or in which the narrative is scrambled. That isn't the case with Królikiewicz's film, which plays out in chronological order, and has a beginning, a middle, and an end, in addition to two distinct characters, but in most other respects, it's an experimental feature or, more accurately, a narrative feature that incorporates experimental or avant garde techniques. 

I say this not just to set the scene, but because I was dazzled by the high-contrast black and white images and discordant sound design, but also confused and frustrated, since I couldn't, at first, figure out who these people were and what was going on. To be sure, things happen, but Królikiewicz prioritizes impressions over conventional narrative beats. 

Left: Jan and Maria Malisz

To Polish viewers at the time, it might have made more sense, since Królikiewicz drew from an actual case. Granted, by 1972, when he made the film, the story of Kraków couple Jan and Maria Malisz was old news, since the crime they committed took place in 1933. Nonetheless, the film premiered on the international stage at Cannes where it met with a warm reception. 

In their physicality, 25-year-old Jan (Man of Iron's Franciszek Trzeciak) and Maria (Anna Nieborowska) are a study in contrasts. He has thinning hair, a wide forehead, and rounded features, whereas she has straight hair with severely-cut bangs and sharp, angular features. His face is open, hers closed, but the camera loves them both, and they're always compelling even when it isn't clear what's going on, not least since, like New York crime-scene photographer Weegee, DP Bogdan Dziworski often surrounds them with negative space to emphasize their isolation from everyone else, including Jan's judgmental younger brother (Camera Buff's Jerzy Stuhr). 

Królikiewicz depicts a few critical weeks in their lives, opening with a raucous house party in cramped quarters that plays like something out of an Aleksei German or Robert Eggers film; it's possible they both live on the same street, or even in the same building. The revelers eat, drink, puke, exchange unpleasantries, and, in one case, pass out before Jan breaks it up. 

Right: A party to which you would not want to be invited.  

An aspiring illustrator and architect, Jan arrives the next day, late and unshaven, at the photography studio where he works as an assistant as Janusz Hajdun and Henryk Kuzniak's string-laden score merges with a disturbing squeaking sound–from some kind of machinery, perhaps–that gives way to something more ominous when his boss lets him go.

The director then catches up with Maria, who appears to be waiting for someone, or maybe she just met up with them. She has leaves in her hair as if she slept on the ground, an indirect way of revealing that she's a sex worker. She straightens out her clothes and combs her hair loudly–the loudest, more aggressive hair-combing I've ever heard–but then, as the expression on her face grows angrier, the sound drops away to nothingness. 

Królikiewicz continues with these intriguing, if inscrutable vignettes. Jan and Maria visit a church, presumably to get married, followed by an administrative building, where they have an unsatisfying encounter, culminating in a sequence in which Jan sits on a park bench at the bottom of a hill to meet up with Maria. When she arrives, he hits her with a white bird of some kind, a pigeon or a dove, though I have no idea why. (This sequence was deleted from British prints due to 1937's Animal Rights Act.) 

Each encounter, together or separately, is more miserable and humiliating than the last. More often than not, there's no dialogue, just classical horns or violins that give way to something more atonal or even just sound effects like children whispering, dogs barking, or clamorous bell-ringing. 

It's all meant to be unsettling, and it is, not least the way Królikiewicz places nearly as much emphasis on the texture of objects, like a particularly rough-hewn table, as the posture of a body or the planes of a face. It's disorienting, to be sure, but it doesn't feel like art for art's sake, so much as an attempt to show a claustrophobic world through jaundiced eyes. A despondent individual isn't likely to spend much time looking up at the sky when they could be staring at a splinter-laden table or the muddy ground. 

Jan becomes so despondent he attempts to take his life, but Maria rescues him in the nick of time. For all its challenges, the film is never dull, though this sequence had me on the edge of my seat. It's no spoiler to reveal that Jan doesn't die, because he hasn't yet committed the crime that will make him infamous, but he's lost all hope. In rescuing him, Maria doesn't simply do a good deed--she confirms that she still has faith in their future. 

When things don't get better, though, they scheme to rob the postman who delivers pension payments. While their neighbors see the 30-year-old as a bearer of good news, they see him as a living, breathing bank. Even if you sympathize with their plight, it's not like they're targeting a well-endowed institution or wealthy landowner who can absorb the loss. On the contrary. 

Until this point, Jan and Maria have exhibited a propensity for violence, but not murder, and nor do they plan to kill anybody, but everything goes so horribly wrong that they end up killing the postman and their elderly property owners (their names were Walenty Przebinda and Helena and Michał Süskind). 

Only the couple's 47-year-old daughter survives (the braces on her legs suggest polio). The sequence is so frenzied and fractured, it's hard to tell what's going on, not least since the POV alternates between victims and perpetrators. In a way, Michael Powell's 1960 Peeping Tom predicts what the director is doing here, just as it would also predict how Richard Brooks handles the brutal murder that concludes 1977's Looking for Mr. Goodbar. 

Though they make their escape, the police catch up to Jan and Maria soon enough. The film ends as they present their respective cases. This remarkable sequence concentrates so intently on their words and faces, that most everything else, including judge and jury, literally fades away into the darkness. The two finally have the chance to explain themselves, and they do. I won't say what happens other than that their undying love for each other comes through loud and clear. Though the murder reveals them at their very worst, they're at their best here, but by then it's too late.

It isn't mentioned in the film, but after Jan's passing, interest in his work took off. 

It's the Van Gogh Syndrome in full effect--Jan might not have turned to such a deperate, futile act if people could have seen the value of his work while he was still able to benefit, though I would imagine his infamy juiced its value. Further, Through and Through isn't the only film to depict a Polish artist whose reputation grew in the wake of a horrific murder. Surrealist painter and photographer Zdzisław Beksiński, however, was the victim and not the perpetrator. Jan P. Matuszyński recreates the whole sordid affair in his 2016 docudrama, The Last Family. If less successful as a film, Beksiński's paintings are quite extraordinary.  

In the illuminating interview included with this release, Walerian Borowczyk biographer Michał Oleszczyk claims that comparisons to Arthur Penn's 1967 Bonnie and Clyde and Leonard Castle's 1970 The Honeymoon Killers, both inspired by real cases, make sense, but don't quite fit, and I'm inclined to agree, though I'm not convinced that Terrence Malick's elegiac Badlands, also released in 1973, proves more fitting. Near as I can tell, Charlie Starkweather, both in person and as portrayed by an electric young Martin Sheen, was a bad seed, whereas Jan was an artistic soul who lost his way.

Over the years, critics have also cited Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Jean-Luc Godard. 

Królikiewicz taught seminars on the French filmmaker, and I can see similarities with 1960's Breathless, which was also inspired by a real case, and 1965's Pierrot le Fou, which also features lovers on the run. The Crime and Punishment comparison proves misleading, however, because unlike Raskolnikov, neither Jan nor Maria has any interest in getting right with God. Though the director's feature hews closer to Italian Neorealism than French (or even Czech) New Wave, he shared Godard's interest in abstraction, ellipses, and misdirection. 

In his interview, Oleszczyk goes on to proclaim Through and Through the best Polish film--pretty high praise considering the competition, some of whom are still going strong, like Jerzy Skolimowski, Agnieszka Holland, and Paweł Pawlikowski, all of whom have received Academy Award recognition--in 2014, Pawlikowski won the Best Foreign Language Film award for Ida. 

One way or the other, though, it's a singularly shattering achievement.  

Through and Through makes its Blu-ray debut courtesy of Radiance Films. Though Królikiewicz passed away in 2017, cinematographer Dziworski oversaw the film's 2K restoration. Supplemental features include three short films–"Everyone Gets What He Doesn't Need" (1966), "Brothers" (1971), and "Don't Cry" (1972). In her excellent essay, "Altered States: The Cinema of Grzegorz Królikiewicz," Ela Bittencourt proclaims 1993's The Case of Bronek Pekosinski as the director's masterpiece, so I hope Radiance gets around to that one, too. I found this paper useful for my research. 

Images from Cinema Crazed (Anna Nieborowska), Krowoderska.pl (Jan and Maria Malisz), the IMDb (Franciszek Trzeciak and Nieborowska, alone and with revelers), and Mabumbe (Trzeciak with Jerzy Block as "Old Man").

Lost and Found Film, Book, and Music Reviews: The Aura, Fame Whore, Radio On, and More

Between 2005 and 2007, I contributed reviews, interviews, and other features to Resonance, a Seattle-based magazine dedicated to music, movies, literature, and other arts. In 2008, it ceased publication after 14 years. Here are four of my video reviews, plus a couple of movie-related reviews.

THE AURA 

(Fabián Bielinsky, Argentina, 2005, 129 minutes) 

The final feature film from Argentina's Fabián Bielinsky, who was felled by a heart attack in 2006 at the age of 46, starts out much like his 2000 debut, Nine Queens, but soon segues into something altogether stranger. 

 

It's also more of a character study, and Bielinsky has conjured up one heck of a character, an unnamed epileptic taxidermist (Nine Queens' Ricardo Darín) with a photographic memory. After his wife splits the scene, his colleague Sontag (Alejandro Awada) convinces him to go on a hunting trip. 

During their foray into the woods, the men argue, Sontag leaves, and the taxidermist suffers a seizure. As he convulses, he experiences "the aura," a moment of intense clarity before the plunge into darkness. 

When he returns to consciousness, he's disoriented and startled by a sound. Is it Sontag, a deer...or something else? In his confused state, he pulls the trigger. Near the body of the deceased, he finds an eerie dog and plans for a robbery. He absorbs every detail. 

 

Like the hunt, the ensuing heist doesn't go as planned, but The Aura isn't a mere morality tale; it's weirder and thornier than that. That there will never be another keenly-observed movie from its visionary maker is an undeniable tragedy. (IFC)

 

Click here for the longer version.   

FAME WHORE 

(Jon Moritsugu, USA, 1997, 73 minutes) 

Wooden acting, clunky dialogue, and gaseous humor (a crank caller and big imaginary beagle bring the noise). So it goes with this grainy 16mm film from indie auteur Jon Moritsugu (Mod Fuck Explosion, Terminal USA). 

 

The 1997 satire's titular whores include surly tennis champion Jody (the obnoxious Peter Friedrich from Moritsugu's 2002 Scumrock), trust fund dilettante Sophie (the robotic Amy Davis, Moritsugu's wife) and kindly, yet creepy canine placement officer George (Victor of Aquitaine doing his best Crispin Glover imitation). 

 

Their desperate need to succeed has all the narrative drive and technical expertise of a glorified home movie--one featuring a soundtrack by indie-rock royalty Dub Narcotic Soundsystem, Emily's Sassy Lime, and Barbara Manning--but a home movie, nonetheless. Some people find this kind of thing charming. They should get out more. (Modulus Studio Arts)

RADIO ON 

(Christopher Petit, UK, 1979, 104 minutes) 

As the Modern Lovers once exclaimed, "I'm in love with the radio on / it helps me from being alone late at night." In "Roadrunner," front man Jonathan Richman had 1950s America on his mind; in Radio On, critic-turned-filmmaker Christopher Petit transfers that phenomenon to 1980s England, exchanging exultation for something more enigmatic. 

 

The result is Get Carter gone post-punk: TV actor David Beames plays a London DJ trying to unravel the mystery of his brother's demise. 

 

Instead, he meets a succession of travelers who share his feelings of loneliness and loss. Shot by frequent Wim Wenders cinematographer Martin Schäfer (Kings of the Road), Petit's first feature is a monochromatic road movie that captures a time of Bowie in Berlin, Kraftwerk on cassette, Wreckless Eric on the jukebox, and Police-era Sting (above) as an Eddie Cochrane-obsessed gas station attendant.  

 

Radio On would make for the ideal double bill with Border Radio, the restless debut, also in black and white, from fellow Wenders acolyte Alison Anders. 

 

Like the 1987 Anders film, which was co-directed by Kurt Voss and Dean Lent, the journey trumps the destination--Bristol in the case of the former, Mexico in the case of the latter. Petit's cinematic project may be chillier, but the patina of time only makes it seem cooler than ever. (Plexifilm)

CINEMA 16: EUROPEAN SHORT FILMS
(Various directors, 10 countries, 2007, 218 minutes)

Democracy rules in Cinema 16 as up-and-comers rub shoulders with established filmmakers. Previous UK-only installments of the series focused exclusively on British and American work. Now Warp Films widens their scope to encompass an entire continent. Spread over two discs, this portable film festival offers 16 short films plus commentary tracks.

The earliest selections include Ridley Scott's 1958 ode to truancy "Boy and Bicycle," starring his younger brother Tony Scott (left), and Jan Švankmajer's 1971 Lewis Carroll-inspired "Jabberwocky." The rest are more recent, like Andrea Arnold's 2003 Oscar-winning "Wasp," which packs all the emotional complexity of a feature film into an economical 23 minutes.  

Cinema 16's combination of big names and promising neophytes, like playwright-turned-director Martin McDonagh (2004's profane "Six Shooter”), serves as an ideal introduction to today's art house--with nary a tightly-corseted literary adaptation to spoil the fun. (Warp Films)  

CATCHING THE BIG FISH: MEDITATION, CONSCIOUSNESS, AND CREATIVITY

(David Lynch, USA, 2007, 192 pages)

 

David Lynch explains the title metaphor of his short, punchy book, Catching the Big Fish, as follows: "Ideas are like fish. If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you've got to go deeper." The famed director proceeds to describe his creative process through the prism of Transcendental Meditation.

 

Catching the Big Fish consists of 83 koan-like chapters, most less than a page in length. Lynch makes a point and then moves on. 

 

Those readers looking for explanations may leave disappointed, but Lynch has always insisted that all interpretations of his work are valid, and he isn't about to start spilling their secrets now--hence no director's commentaries on any of his Criterion Collection releases.

 

Granted, the director dubs his nightmarish debut, Eraserhead, "my most spiritual movie," but doesn't say why. Mostly, he reveals how he keeps the ideas coming, while staving off the "Suffocating Rubber Clown Suit of Negativity." And really, who wants that in their life? (Tarcher/Penguin)

YOU'RE GONNA MISS ME (Original Soundtrack) 

(Roky Erickson solo, with the 13th Floor Elevators, and with the Aliens, 2007, 12 tracks, 38:05 minutes) 

 

Though he found fame 30 years ago, 2007 will go down as the year of Roky Erickson--the year of this one-of-a-kind musician's resurrection, that is. 

 

After decades lost in a schizophrenic haze (exacerbated by electroshock therapy), Roky's brother, Sumner Erickson, established a trust and secured his sibling with the help he needed. Now Roky's playing out again, there's a new book about his wild and wiggy Elevators, and Keven McCalester has unleashed the six-years-in-the-making documentary You're Gonna Miss Me. 

 

Though the soundtrack covers ground similar to essential Roky anthology I Have Always Been Here Before, collectors should note the inclusion of two previously unreleased tracks: stripped-down versions of "For You (I'd Do Anything)" and "Goodbye Sweet Dreams"--both of which provide the blueprint for Austin neighbor Daniel Johnston's entire career. (Palm Pictures)

 

Images from Mubi (Ricardo Darín in The Aura and Tony Scott in Boy and Bicycle), American Genre Film Archive (Victor Fischbarg and giant beagle in Fame Whore), Cineform (David Beames in Radio On), and Kinship Goods (Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness and Creativity cover art).    

Two Filmmakers Have Adapted Donald Westlake’s The Ax, but One Got It More Right Than the Other: No Other Choice vs The Ax

NO OTHER CHOICE / Eojjeolsugaeopda / 어쩔수가없다
(Park Chan-wook, Korea, 2025, 139 minutes) 

"I subscribe basically to the theory that a movie is not the book it came from, and in almost every case it shouldn't be the book it came from... 

The responsibility for a movie is not as easy to define as the responsibility for a novel."--Donald Westlake to bank robber Albert Nussbaum in 1974

For nearly as long as I've been watching them, I've associated movies with books, and not just in a general sense, since every year offers hundreds, if not thousands, of literary adaptations, but in a more personal one, i.e. if I'm sufficiently interested in an author or filmmaker–ideally both–I'll read the book before seeing the film. It's especially helpful if I plan to write about it. 

Reading the book beforehand helps me to understand the author's intent, which may or may not align with the filmmaker's, but it comes with drawbacks, too. The most obvious is that the film may not live up to the book, which happens more often than the film that surpasses the book, though it's unrealistic to expect every detail to make it onto the screen. 

On the other hand, it's why we have so many limited series. You want the entire book spelled out for you? There are directors and streamers more than happy to comply. Length aside, another drawback is that the film may not hold any surprises, no matter how artfully executed, though if it's sufficiently engaging, knowing the outcome shouldn't spoil the show.

All of this is to say that I read Donald Westlake's 1997 suspense novel The Ax before seeing Park Chan-wook's loose adaptation, No Other Choice, and now I kind of wish I hadn't. 

Before explaining why, I have to admit that this is the first book I've read by the author, though I've long been familiar with his birth name, in addition to his best known pen name–Richard Stark–and some of the films adapted from the Westlake/Stark bibliography, especially Point Blank, The Hot Rock, The Actor, Made in U.S.A. (though Jean-Luc Godard neglected to clear the rights), as well as The Grifters, the first-rate Stephen Frears neo-noir for which he adapted Jim Thompson's 1963 novel. 

Putting his stamp on a work of literature, such as The Ax, is nothing new for Park, a former film critic who previously adapted a Japanese manga (Oldboy), a 19th-century French shocker (Thirst), a 21st-century potboiler set in Victorian England (The Handmaiden), and a spy story from the 1980s (John Le Carré’s Little Drummer Girl, his first English-language series). 

The deeply-saturated look of the new film rhymes with his previous work, especially the high-contrast lighting and inky blacks that make the vibrant colors pop, but though he preserves the darkly comic tone, he loses the subtlety of Westlake's matter-of-fact prose by amping everything up to 11. 

Granted, Lee Byung-hun (Park's Joint Security Area, Netflix's Squid Game) goes all in as Yoo Man-su, an upper middle-class paper mill manager who turns to desperate measures after his employer downsizes him out of his position and into a labor market with little need for his specialized services. 

Man-su's solution is just as fiendishly clever as it is in the book–eliminate his competitors one by one–but Park has added lashings of sadism and gore that make for an exciting time at the cinema, while also giving the impression that this suburban father was always a murderer at heart; too much time on the unemployment line has brought his killer instinct to the surface. 

That's fine as far as it goes, but there's nothing sadistic about Burke Devore in the original novel, and that's the point. None of this comes naturally to him, and it troubles his conscience, but not enough to make him stop. In fact, killing becomes his 9-to-5 business. Not a hobby, not a pastime, but a j-o-b, and his body count is even higher than that of his on-screen counterpart. 

Park is such a strong visual stylist that it comes as little surprise that he ditches the first-person narration of Westlake's novel such that Lee does more showing than telling, so it's fortunate that he's such a magnetic performer. Son Ye-jin as Man-su's wife, Mi-ri, also makes a vivid impression as a woman who starts to put two and two together, whereas Burke's wife, the family's sole breadwinner, never figures out what's going on (she isn't stupid, just busy). She cheats on her husband, too, unlike Mi-ri, who also takes a job as a part-time dental assistant–but doesn't sleep with the boss. 

I won't list every way the film differs from the book, though many of the changes don't register as improvements, not least the disturbing scene in which Man-su buries a victim up to his neck and force-feeds him to death.

All that said, No Other Choice always feels like a Park film. Something similar could be said about Stanley Kubrick's many literary adaptations, which revolved around–and even depended on–the creative liberties he took with the source material. And I do mean that as a compliment to the younger filmmaker, even if I didn't enjoy this particular take as much as, say, the lush and devious Handmaiden. 

This brings me to Costa-Gavras's 2005 adaptation, Le Couperet, aka The Ax, which hews closely to Westlake's novel in all the ways Park's doesn't, right down to the narration. The look also differs from the latter, which has heightened touches, like the inventively-staged scenes of domestic surveillance. Costa-Gavras keeps everything grounded in reality, though he possibly loses too much of Westlake's drily comic tone through a combination of the writing and César-nominated actor Jose Garcia’s more noirish performance, akin to François Cluzet in 2006 thriller Tell No One.  

Though I disagree with this categorization, The Ax has been classified as a horror story in some quarters. If Costa-Gavras's adaptation plays like a black comedy-noir hybrid, with Garcia's Bruno Davert (below) as the regular guy in over his head, Park's film really does plunge into horror territory. 

Costa-Gavras's more literal approach does not, however, make for a dull time at the cinema. In fact, it's considered one of the Greek-French director's finest films, though it didn't make as much of an impact in the States as it did in Europe, or as much as earlier films, like 1969 Oscar winner Z with Jean-Louis Trintignant. (Costa-Gavras's son, Romain, who found fame through his provocative videos for M.I.A., has become a talented director in his own right.)

The affection between the couple in the earlier film (with Karin Viard as Marlène) is never in doubt, but there's more tension in their marriage and their children are older, whereas Park made the daughter a non-verbal, grade school prodigy, mostly I guess to emphasize the expense of cellos and lessons. With Man-su out of a job, everyone suffers–they even have to give up their Netflix subscription (how will they be able to keep up with Squid Game?!). Park also gives them two dogs, precious companions from which they have to part once Man-su's severance payment dwindles to nothing.

These added details may have made the made the film more appealing for some, but I believe the book got it right the first time, because Westlake trusts his audience more. My point isn't that directors shouldn't adapt books as they choose. They absolutely should. I just wish Park had put more faith in the author's text, and made fewer or better alterations. The narration, for instance, is no small thing, and was possibly intended to invoke or even subvert Jim Thompson's reliance on slippery, first-person narrators, not least since Westlake had adapted the author only seven years before. 

Like most Park productions, No Other Choice has its pleasures, and it's possible my anticipation was too great due to the union of author and director, but it feels like a disappointment, especially compared to 2022's dazzling Decision to Leave. Not a major one, but a disappointment, nonetheless. Fortunately, Park brings it home in fine style, and that's hardly a minor matter, because it's as key to the narrative as the audacious premise. 

Both films also boast excellent ensembles, particularly the actors who play the competitor-victims, like the two Ax standouts: German actor Ulrich Tukur (The White Ribbon) as a kindly, if despondent suit salesman with a bad combover and bespectacled Dardenne brothers regular Olivier Gourmet (The Promise, The Son) who makes the fatal mistake of commiserating with the oddly sympathetic fellow who trespasses on his property, presumably to pick up job-hunting tips.  

I can't imagine that either filmmaker believes that unemployed middle managers should start bumping off their competitors. Not that I've seen either make a statement to that effect, but I wouldn't say it's needed.

In the book, it's more obvious that Burke Devore's cruel, if practical solution is intended as satire, and that was bound to get buried in these live-action interpretations. Then again, it isn't a dream in Donald Westlake's novel. Burke never wakes up to find his slain competitors alive and well, and regardless as to which version of the story you prefer: Burke/Man-su/Bruno's solution, as horrible as it is, is also just a little…relatable. 

The late David Bordwell had a lot to say about Westlake and the movies.

After a one-day screening at the Pacific Science Center's IMAX Theater on Dec 8, No Other Choice opens for a regular run at SIFF Cinema Uptown on Thurs, Jan 1 (all screenings through Jan 4 will be in 35mm). Images from the IMDb (Lee Byung-hun, Cha Seung-won, Lee Sung-min, and José Garcia), Amazon (The Ax cover art), and World of Reel (Lee and Son Ye-jin).