Film reviews: Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom | Falling | Host | Murder Me, Monster

Viola Davies in Ma Rainey's Black Bottom

Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (15) ****

Falling (15) ***

Host (15) ****

Viggo Mortensen and Lance Henriksen in Falling

Murder Me, Monster (N/A) **

Lost at Christmas (12A) *

Stage-to-screen adaptations rarely transcend their theatrical roots, but when done well they can utilise cinema's most powerful weapon, the close-up, to showcase screen acting at its finest. That was the case with Denzel Washington's 2016 adaptation of August Wilson's Pulitzer-winning play Fences, and it's very much the case with Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, a tight adaptation of another Wilson play, this time produced by Washington and starring Fences Oscar-winner Viola Davis and the late Chadwick Boseman as jazz and blues musicians in 1920s Chicago.

Though the premature passing of Boseman in the summer adds an elegiac quality to Wilson's complex exploration of the early days of the recording industry, the film reconfirms what an electrifying actor the Black Panther star truly was. Cast as Levee, an innovative horn player alive to all the ways music might reach people at the dawning of this new era, he tears through Wilson's loquacious dialogue, turning monologues into the verbal equivalent of virtuosic solos that sound like they're being extemporised on the spot. But it’s very much Davis's film too. As the titular Ma Rainey, a real-life musical pioneer known as “Mother of the Blues,” she's a forceful presence, playing her at first as a prototypical diva, barking out unreasonable-seeming demands during the 1927 recording session that resulted in the title song. But as the film progresses, Davis lets us see the battles she's really waging: the one against her own obsolescence as styles start to change, and the one against the insidious might of the white-controlled entertainment industry that will soon appropriate black music for its own very profitable ends.

That's the overarching theme of Wilson's play and the film reinforces this with a gut-punching finale that eschews any need for didacticism. The film’s director, George C Wolfe, a theatre veteran, is also confident enough in the power of his source material not to feel any great need to open the play up. His actors' faces are the only cinematic landscapes this film needs.

Written and directed by and co-starring Viggo Mortensen, Falling sees the Lord of the Rings star making a solid debut as a filmmaker with a hard-hitting drama about Alzheimer’s. Mortensen co-stars as John, the grown-up son of Lance Henriksen's Willis, a brute-of-a-man whose deteriorating mental acuity is now testing what remaining compassion John, his husband Eric (Terry Chen) and John's sister Sarah (Laura Linney) have left. Though Mortensen relies too much on flashbacks to guide us through the intricacies of Willis’s relationship with his kids, the film doesn't go for easy emotional pay-offs and the present day scenes have real power, with Henriksen’s harsh, angry performance gradually revealing the pain of a man whose constant rage masks the terror of a life lived in fear of what he’s been unable to understand or control.

Conceived, produced and released (on horror streaming channel Shudder) during lockdown earlier this year, British supernatural horror phenomenon Host arrives on demand and in cinemas on a wave of justifiable hype. Following a group of university friends participating in a drunken seance over Zoom to alleviate the boredom of lockdown, the film, directed and co-written by Rob Savage, smartly mimics the now ubiquitous aesthetics (and limitations) of the virtual meeting and social networking platform to fun and freaky effect. Like The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity before it, it also transcends its potentially gimmicky premise with genuine scares that reflect a new way of interacting with the world.

There’s more horror in Murder Me, Monster, though after going off like a rocket with an unsettling opening scene, this wilfully weird Argentinean effort from writer/director Alejandro Fadel turns into a slow-burning metaphysical police procedural revolving around a rural cop’s investigation into a spate of beheadings that may or may not be the work of the husband of the woman he’s having an affair with. Fadel puts an intriguing spin on the old Manhunter notion of cop and killer being so alike their connection takes on a sickening intimacy, but his lurch into obfuscation is less convincing. An array of Freudian imagery (and one very literal monster) suggest the film is exploring some kind of deep-rooted fear of female sexuality, but it’s mostly baffling.

The first turkey of the season arrives in the form of Lost at Christmas, an amateurish Scottish rom-com about a pair newly dumped strangers stranded together in the Highlands. Lead actors Natalie Clark and Kenny Boyle can’t do much with a script that requires the former to be a deranged Christmas-loving kook unaware that her musician boyfriend has a wife and child, and the latter a romantic sap still pinning his hopes on marrying his high-school sweetheart three years on from his last failed proposal. When their characters’ respective moments of truth arrive, they find themselves stuck in Fort William on Christmas Eve, desperate to get home to Glasgow. Mirthless mishaps involving a stolen sports car, wintry weather and Sanjeev Kohli (cast as the proprietor of the hotel they’re forced to take refuge in) duly follow, but writer/director Ryan Hendricks doesn’t have the filmmaking chops to pull off the bittersweet tone he seems to be going for and all his swooping drone shots of snow-covered landscapes can’t disguise the film’s low-rent tartan-tat feel.

Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom is on select release in cinemas from 4 December and on Netflix from 18 December; Falling is on select release, VOD and in virtual cinemas via modernfilms.com; Host is available on select release and digital download, Murder Me, Monster is available on VOD and in virtual cinemas via anti-worldsreleasing.co.uk; Lost at Christmas is on select release from 4 December and on VOD from 7 December.

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Film reviews: Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom | Falling | Host | Murder Me, Monster | Lost at Christmas