Film reviews: The Boy and the Heron | Silent Night
The Boy and the Heron (12A) ****
Silent Night (n/a) ***
Japanese animation legend Hayao Miyazaki supposedly retired a decade ago with The Wind Rises – a perfectly respectable swansong, even if it didn’t quite capture the dazzling weirdness of classic Studio Ghibli fare like his Oscar-winning Spirited Away. Happily, The Boy and the Heron – his latest and, yes, purportedly last film (he’s 82) – is a richer, stranger, more fitting career-capper, a wildly imaginative fairytale about a young boy sucked into a parallel world after his pregnant step-mother goes missing on the grounds of their family’s estate.
Set in Japan towards the end of World War Two, the film begins with the heart-wrenching sight of the boy, whose name is Hirato, losing his birth mother in a hospital fire during an air raid. His own helplessness torturing him daily, Hirato’s distress is compounded by his father deciding not just to remarry, but to marry Hirato’s aunt, who looks just like his mother and is pregnant with his father’s child.
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Hide AdUnderstandably messed up, Hirato’s sullenness is in danger of hardening into a lifetime of bitterness, at which point he starts being tormented by the titular Heron, a creepy familiar who goads and mocks him and, after his aunt disappears, guides him towards an enchanted tower in their vast garden. Slipping into a dream-like world powered by his subconscious, Hirato soon finds his missing aunt imprisoned within an alternate kingdom imprinted with all he’s experienced in his short life.
Cutting loose from the exhaustingly-plotted narratives of most animation, what follows is a little more free-form, magical and disturbing. Among the many visual wonders are an army of soul-eating parakeets and Hirato’s mother emerging phoenix-like from the ashes of his memories to guide him through a universe in which doorways back to reality are fraught with the dangers of a future tethered to his own loss and pain. It all builds to a remarkable philosophical ending in which Miyazaki’s dislike of sentimentality is evident in the choices he forces his young protagonist to make about the type of person he wants to be and the type of world he wants to inhabit. Released in dubbed and subtitled versions.
A new John Woo film – and Christmas-themed to boot – Silent Night sees the Hong Kong action auteur back on something like his old giddy form, 20 years on from the career nadir of his last Hollywood effort, the aptly named Paycheck. Amusingly, this new film’s title is also apt: not only is it set during the festive season, its protagonist (Joel Kinnaman) is mute, having had his vocal cords shot to pieces by the same gang-bangers who’ve accidentally killed his toddler son in a Christmas drive-by. We see this terrible event happen in the high-octane opening and Woo holds true to his protagonist’s new predicament by shooting the rest of the film wordlessly. That’s right, he’s made a silent movie, or at least, a dialogue-free movie, restricting himself to images (and a few text message exchanges) to convey the story.
Not that said story is all that difficult to grasp. From the moment Kinnaman’s Brian Godlock embarks on a year-long quest to avenge his son (marking 24 December on his calendar as their day of reckoning), it builds towards its violent conclusion with typical efficiency. True, there are some needlessly redundant elements that tarnish the purity of the exercise. But with even the once elegantly simple John Wick movies becoming bogged down with dense mythology, there’s something to be said for the dig-two-graves (or really multiple graves) simplicity of this film’s revenge plot. Woo’s ability to choreograph mayhem in beautifully bloody fashion, meanwhile, can still be a thrill.
The Boy and the Heron is in cinemas from 26 December; Silent Night streams on Sky Cinema from 23 December.