Film reviews: I'm Thinking of Ending Things | Mulan

I’m Thinking of Ending Things (15) ****

Mulan (12A) **

Les Misérables (15) ****

If it wasn’t debuting on Netflix, Charlie Kaufman’s new movie I’m Thinking of Ending Things would make an intriguing double bill with Christopher Nolan’s recently released Tenet – and not just because the pathologically contrite film critic protagonist of Kaufman’s novel Antkind takes great delight in disparaging the brain-noodling convolutions both of Nolan’s films and Kaufman’s own body of work. Like Tenet, Kaufman’s latest is full of temporal shifts, head-scrambling metaphysical conceits and a formalistic self-referentiality that instructs us on how to watch it while we’re watching it; unlike Tenet it’s a surreal, low-key two-hander that attempts to blow our minds without also blowing our eardrums.

Starring Jessie Buckley and Jesse Plemons – a homophonic casting coup that’s surely not entirely coincidental – the film revolves around a couple whose relatively new relationship might be on the point of collapse as Buckley’s Lucy resignedly agrees to visit the parents of Plemons’s Jake. Lucy – who may not actually be called Lucy – is the one with the relationship doubts; she’s an artist – or maybe she’s a physicist or a poet – and the niggling commentary running through her head (to which we’re privy) has an unerring ability to echo nice-but-dull Jake’s own crippling insecurities as the weather worsens and they get closer and closer to his childhood home.

Though Kaufman’s films have always flirted with the unsettling horror of existence, I’m Thinking of Ending Things ratchets this up a good notch or two as the protagonists arrive at Jake’s parents’ creepy farm. Mum and Dad turn out to be a little bit nuts (they’re played by Toni Colette and David Thewlis, both deliriously unhinged), and this, combined with sudden slips in time and conversational riffs that repeatedly alter the facts of Lucy and Jake’s relationship quickly undermine Lucy’s ability to discern what’s real and what’s not.

What’s going on? At first it feels like we’ve entered The Twilight Zone or The Shining, then a Midwestern version of Alain Resnais’ Last Year in Marienbad, with Lucy – or the woman we’ve come to know as Lucy – finding herself having conversations with suddenly aged and ailing versions of Jake’s parents. Subtle shifts in the performances of Buckley and Plemons keep us supremely off balance and though the film appears to be working towards some kind of meditation on the complex psychological overlaps of coupledom and how profoundly relationships can alter who we are (or who we think we are), it goes in a much wilder and darker direction, one that, despite being based on a 2016 novel by Canadian writer Iain Reid, is pure Kaufman in its wry, sly descent into solipsistic sadness and madness.

Disney’s controversial decision to bypass struggling cinemas and launch its much-hyped live-action remake of Mulan on Disney+ (for a premium fee on top of the streaming service’s monthly subscription charge) makes perfect business sense given how dreary it is. Ditching the songs and the Eddie Murphy-voiced dragon for a supposedly grittier style, what we get is a fairly humourless, platitude-heavy female empowerment movie that follows the general plot beats of the original but attempts to transform itself into Star Wars by making Mulan’s fighting skills dependent on Force-like powers. Yifei Liu is fine in the titular role of the talented girl who disguises herself as a boy to take her crippled father’s place in the Emperor’s army, but the great Gong Li is wasted as a sorceress hoping to coerce her into joining forces to topple the patriarchal power structures that have kept both of them down. Stylistically, New Zealand director Niki Caro (Whale Rider) borrows liberally from the wuxia films that briefly enraptured international arthouse audiences in the wake of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon’s success (there are visual and casting nods to the likes of Hero, House of Flying Daggers and Curse of the Golden Flower), but the action isn’t so much balletic as epically generic: lots of sweeping camera moves, but no understanding of how to use them to advance the story.

Not to be confused with the honking musical adaptation of Victor Hugo’s 1862 door-stopper of a novel, Oscar-nominated French crime drama Les Misérables instead honours the spirit of Hugo’s socially conscious prose by taking its edict about the way unjust societal structures condemn those they trap and transposing it to the Parisian suburb of Montfermeil in the immediate aftermath of France’s 2018 World Cup triumph. In doing so, debut feature director Ladj Ly uses these bitterly ironic allusions to examine the way police brutality exacerbates an already dire situation for the young immigrant residents growing up in a system that, historically, has hothoused criminality. The cops are our first entry point into this world and the film zeroes in, Training Day-style, on Ruiz (Damien Bonnard), a new transfer to Paris’s street crimes unit. But if the film initially comes on as a hard-edged police procedural, Ly literally starts widening the perspective by having a local kid with a drone accidentally capture footage of an escalating situation between the cops and a group of teenagers that ends with a kid being shot in the face with a non-lethal Flash-Ball gun. What follows as tension mounts and chaos erupts has elements of blistering French urban dramas such as La Haine and Dheepan, but it also tips its hat to Lord of the Flies, Home Alone, teens-on-the-rampage cult classic Over the Edge and even The Lion King as the kids orchestrate a violent push-back that exposes the circular savagery of a system in which their own futures are repeatedly sold out by the adults who are supposed to be safeguarding them. ■

I’m Thinking of Ending Things is available on Netflix, Mulan is available via Disney+ and Les Misérables is screening in selected cinemas

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Film reviews: I'm Thinking of Ending Things | Mulan | Les Misérables