Film reviews: The Whale | A Knock at the Cabin | Puss in Boots: The Last Wish

Brendan Fraser may have been nominated for an Oscar for his portrayal of the morbidly obese writing teacher in The Whale, but in the end director Darren Aronofsky doesn’t offer us much beyond the body horror spectacle of his central performance, writes Alistair Harkness

The Whale (18) **

Knock at the Cabin (15) ***

EO (15) ***

Puss in Boots: The Last Wish (PG) ***

After Pi, Requiem for a Dream, The Wrestler and Black Swan, Darren Aronofsky takes his appetite for corporeal punishment to new levels with The Whale, a grim tale of compulsive self-loathing rendered as an Oscar-baiting redemption story. Brendan Fraser takes the lead as Charlie, a morbidly obese gay shut-in eating himself to death in response to the grief he feels over the unexpected death of his partner and the family he lost when he came out. Estranged from his ex-wife and teenage daughter, he lives alone, teaching college writing classes online, a gig that allows him to stay hidden from the world (he disables his webcam during Zoom classes) while feeding his excessive junk food addiction with daily take-out orders.

That Charlie is a guy whose heart has literally and figuratively been broken by years of self-abuse, shame and guilt is made clear in the opening scenes: masturbating to gay porn, he has a seizure and has to be rescued by a door-stepping missionary, whom he coaxes into reading an extract from a student essay on Moby Dick that calms him down enough to prevent a full cardiac arrest. The significance of the essay will be revealed much later, though Charlie reads it again and again, treating it as an emotional crutch, as vital to his ability to get through each day as the actual walking-frame he needs to get around his cramped apartment.

For the duration of the movie Fraser is buried beneath the sweaty folds and distended bulges of a 300-pound prosthetic suit, a physical transformation that all but guaranteed his Oscar nomination before the film even came out. He brings what dignity he can to the role; you can read the sadness in his eyes as a sympathetic reflection of someone trapped by the extremity of their situation. But there’s a whiff of freak-show leeriness to his presentation too – and the additional use of Charlie’s sexuality as a catalyst for his tragic situation is another well-worn Oscar trope.

Aronofsky also revels a little too much in Charlie’s zoo or aquarium-like existence, deploying a boxy aspect ratio to accentuate the already tight confines of his apartment, and providing him with a parade of curious visitors and caretakers, among them his best friend Liz (Hong Chau, also Oscar nominated); Thomas (Ty Simpkins), the aforementioned missionary, and eventually Charlie’s daughter, Ellie (Stranger Things star Sadie Sink), whose unhappy life Charlie desperately wants to fix by sacrificing his own.

Chau adds some spark here, but the subplots involving Simpkins' and Sink’s characters feel contrived. Aronofosky’s decision to embrace the film’s stage origins (it’s based on screenwriter Samuel D Hunter’s play of the same name) doesn’t help matters either – the stripped down aesthetic only adding to the suspicion that there’s not much more to this than the body horror spectacle of its central performance.

M Night Shyamalan’s Knock at the Cabin begins in exquisitely creepy fashion with a little girl called Wen (Kristen Cue) happily playing in the woods as a stranger approaches. The stranger is polite but looks intimidating (he’s played by Dave Bautista) and Wen is savvy enough not to trust him, an instinct that will soon prove correct when the stranger and three friends force their way into the cabin Wen’s dads (Jonathan Groff and Ben Aldridge) have rented for their vacation.

This being a Shyamalan film, what follows isn’t a standard home invasion thriller. Adapted from Paul Tremblay’s best-seller A Cabin at the End of the World, it’s a twisty armageddon-themed horror with Bautista and his cohorts (played by Rupert Grint, Nikki Amuka-Bird and Abby Quinn) an intriguing spin on the four horsemen of the apocalypse. Shyamalan remains great at using his camera to switch perspectives and destabilise what we think we know of a story and though he doesn’t quite find a way to resolve the ambiguity of the premise without resorting to literalness in the hokey finale, this and last year’s Old suggest he’s very much back on form.

Donkeys are currently having quite the moment in arthouse films, featuring in Triangle of Sadness, The Banshees of Inisherin and now EO, a surreal updating of Robert Bresson’s Au Hasard Balthazar designed to provide a reflective snap-shot of modern-day Europe by following the travails of the titular donkey as it changes ownership after being cut loose from the circus. Directed by veteran Polish filmmaker Jerzy Skolimowski, the film deploys impressionistic flourishes, point-of-view shots and even suggests EO has a romantic yearning for his former trainer. Mostly, though, this passive protagonist functions as a placid barometer of human civility. Isabelle Huppert co-stars.

Donkey doesn’t feature in Shrek spin-off Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, but given this belated sequel to 2011’s original Puss in Boots sets up a future return to Far Far Away, don’t rule out his re-appearance at some point. This film, though, finds its Antonio Banderas-voiced feline swashbuckler reckoning with mortality after using up eight of his nine lives. The plot thus finds him on a quest to find a wishing star in the hope of restoring the lives he’s recklessly frittered away, a quest complicated by other fairytale characters intent on securing the wish for themselves. In the tradition of Shrek, the film has fun deconstructing fairytale lore, though what really distinguishes it is the animation, which has a more painterly and pleasingly hand-crafted feel. Florence Pugh, Olivia Colman and Salma Hayek Pinault are among new and returning voice cast.

Film reviews: The Whale | A Knock at the Cabin | Puss in Boots: The Last Wish | EO