... you can learn from:
Christine (2016)
George: We all have these different versions
of ourselves competing to be the real us.
This
brilliant and disturbing movie, featuring what remains probably still the best work by actor Rebecca Hall, is turning ten in a couple of months -- but that's not why we're here! We're here because it's the birthday of this film's brilliant (and possibly disturbed) director
Antonio Campos, of whom I am a big ol' fan. This movie alone would've made that the case but he's also gifted us with the movies
Simon Killer and
Afterschool as well as the true-crime series
The Staircase... I only saw
Afterschool recently when
Vinegar Syndrome put it out on blu-ray and if you can get past the Ezra Miller of it you'll discover a harrowing little thing that claws at some of the same lurid media-adjacent impulses that both
Christine and
The Staircase do -- you can see that fascination threading through all of his best work, actually. Hell...
... it's not impossible to believe that the same man who made
Christine also directed a whole bunch of
The Punisher episodes. As well as the uneven Pentecostal theatrics in
The Devil All the Time -- Hary Melling pouring a jar of spiders on himself to delight a bunch of churchgoers fits right in among all of this work. That Campos produced
Martha Marcy May Marlene also makes so very much sense, and one supposes that he would have brought the same level of enchantment with humanity's pathologies to the canned
Batman spin-off series
Arkham, a woulda-been perfect fit. None of his characters are calm in the head, but man can Campos ever laser in on the ineffable sloppiness of our worst instincts. He's not someone I've seen people make a case for as an auteur with the same fascinations bubbling up over and over again, yet it's very much there -- anyway he's a very underrated filmmaker and you seek his all of his work out if you haven't already.
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