insanity | the m0vie blog

New Escapist Column! On M. Night Shyamalan’s Fascination with Faith…

Posted on February 14, 2023 by Darren

We’re launching a new column at The Escapist, called Out of Focus. It will publish every Wednesday, and the plan is to use it to look at some film and television that would maybe fall outside the remit of In the Frame, more marginal titles or objects of cult interest. This week, with the release of Knock at the Cabin, it seemed wothing taking a look at the films of M. Night Shyamalan.

Shyamalan is a filmmaker with a unique perspective, and many of his films circle around the same sets of themes concerned with family and horror. However, Shyamalan is also a director fascinated by faith and belief. He’s often horrified by characters who hold firmly to seemingly irrational beliefs. More than that, though, Shyamalan’s films often mine a sense of dread and horror from something even more fundamental: the fear that, against all odds, these irrational understandings of the universe might be correct.

You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.

Filed under: Movies | Tagged: agnosticism, Atheism, belief, faith, fear, horror, insanity, knock at the cabin, m. nigth shyamalan, rationality, uncertainty | Leave a comment »

New Escapist Column! On the “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness” as a Parable About the Dangers of Rejecting Reality…

Posted on May 6, 2022 by Darren

I published a new In the Frame piece at The Escapist this evening. With the release of Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, it seemed like a good opportunity to talk about the film.

Despite its title, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness seems refreshingly wary of the multiverse as a concept, understanding that the collapse of reality is not necessarily a good thing. Indeed, despite the title, the film is largely about the importance of embracing and accepting one’s original reality, and a cautionary tale about the dangers of retreating into fantasy. In particular, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness is a horror story about the lengths that people will go to preserve their fantasies – and the consequences of those actions.

You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.

Filed under: Movies | Tagged: america, doctor strange, doctor strange in the multiverse of madness, fantasy, in the frame, insanity, reality, the escapist | Leave a comment »

New Escapist Column! On the Tenets of TENET…

Posted on May 24, 2021 by Darren

I published a new In the Frame piece at The Escapist this evening. With TENET now on streaming, it seemed like a good time to dive into the film’s position within Christopher Nolan’s filmography.

Most discussions of Nolan’s filmography focus on the director’s obsession with time, and TENET makes sense in that context. However, the film also ties into more existential anxieties that simmer through Nolan’s body of work, in particular the question of reality actually is and how best to respond to a world that can fundamentally chaotic, hostile and unknowable. TENET deals this this theme, confronting its audience and its characters with a reality that appears to be unraveling.

You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.

Filed under: On Second Thought | Tagged: chaos, Christopher Nolan, faith, fate, in the frame, insanity, logic, meaning, reality, TENET, time, time travel | Leave a comment »

209. Shutter Island – Summer of Scorsese (#156)

Posted on November 21, 2020 by Darren

Hosted by Andrew Quinn, Jay Coyle and Darren Mooney, with special guest Kurt North, The 250 is a (mostly) weekly trip through some of the best (and worst) movies ever made, as voted for by Internet Movie Database Users. New episodes are released every Saturday at 6pm GMT.

This time, continuing our Summer of Scorsese season, Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island.

Martin Scorsese is one of the defining directors in American cinema, with a host of massively successful (and cult) hits that have shaped and defined cinema across generations: Who’s That Knocking at My Door?, Boxcar Bertha, Cape Fear, Casino, The Aviator, The Departed, Silence. The Summer of Scorsese season offers a trip through his filmography via the IMDb‘s 250.

Federal Marshall Teddy Daniels makes a trip across Boston Harbour to visit the psychiatric institution on Shutter Island, investigating the mysterious disappearance of one of the patients. However, as Teddy probes deeper and deeper into the workings of the facility, it becomes very clear that things are not as they appear.

At time of recording, it was ranked 156th on the Internet Movie Database‘s list of the best movies of all-time.

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Filed under: The 250 | Tagged: b-movie, ben kingsley, boston, conspiracy theories, dream, Inception, insanity, jason coyle, jay coyle, kurt north, Leonardo diCaprio, madness, mark ruffalo, martin scorsese, Movie, nightmare, nostalgia, reality, Shutter Island, the holocaust | Leave a comment »

“There’s Nobody Left But You”: The Existential Horror at the Heart of White Heat…

Posted on July 7, 2020 by Darren

Last weekend, on the podcast I co-host called The 250, we discussed James Cagney’s 1949 gangster classic White Heat, with the wonderful Carl Sweeney from The Movie Palace Podcast. I’ve been thinking a lot about the film since, and so had some thoughts I just wanted to jot down.

White Heat is a gangster film, starring James Cagney.

It’s frequently discussed in relation to The Public Enemy, which makes sense. Both White Heat and The Public Enemy are mid-century gangster films starring James Cagney. It also merits comparison to The Roaring Twenties, another gangster film starring James Cagney and directed by Raoul Walsh. There’s a tendency to lump these sorts of films together, to examine them as part of a greater whole. It certainly makes sense in this context. After all, a huge part of the appeal of White Heat at time of release derived from seeing James Cagney playing a gangster once again.

However, there’s something altogether stranger about White Heat. It isn’t a film that fits particularly comfortably into the gangster genre, despite the obvious trappings. James Cagney plays the role of Cody Jarrett, the leader of a vicious gang introduced conducting a train robbery and who go on to plot a chemical plant raid at the climax. There is all manner of betrayal and violence, backstabbing and revenging. There are cops in dogged pursuit of the criminals, while Cody demonstrates that nobody should underestimate him.

Still, there’s something simmering beneath the surface of White Heat. As much as the film follows the structures and conventions of a crime film, it plays more like a melancholy monster movie. It is a funereal salute to a mythic figure retreating into history, a horror story about an outdated evil lurking in the shadows, trying to navigate a world that no longer has a place for it.

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Filed under: On Second Thought | Tagged: atom bomb, atomic, atomic age, atomic noir, crime, Gangster, horror, insanity, james cagney, logic, mad, monster, morality, nightmare, nuclear, white heat | 4 Comments »

Maniac (Review)

Posted on September 20, 2018 by Darren

Maniac is Inception meets Cloud Atlas, filtered through a prism of eighties retrofuturism.

That is to say that Maniac will not be for everybody. Indeed, there will be very many people for whom Maniac will simply not work, seeming too weird, too strange and too esoteric. Indeed, it often seems like Maniac is being weird for the sake of being weird, often populating even fairly standard character- or dialogue- driven scenes with small uncanny elements like a foul-mouthed purple robotic koala or a mostly-unseen alien ambassador with a “beautiful blue exoskeleton.” These elements often exist for their own sake. Even when they serve as symbolism, they are often deliberately obtuse.

No Stone unturned.

However, the surreal and contradictory imagery that populates Maniac is a large part of what makes the series so interesting. The bizarre dream-like imagery is very much at the core of Maniac, a bizarre fantasia where everything might possibly be a stand-in for something else or might simply have been plucked half-formed from the imagination with no deeper meaning. Maybe the beautiful alluring alien represents the hawk that a young boy took into his room; maybe the alien represents the predator brother that a young man wants to protect. Maybe sometimes a beautiful blue alien is just a beautiful blue alien.

Maniac is sure to be a polarising experience. Marmite for the television era. Indeed, based on early reviews, it already is. However, it is also a brilliant piece of work; inventive, demented, committed, affecting. This kooky cocktail won’t click with every viewer, but it’ll resonate deeply with those drawn in.

Taking the matter in hand.

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Filed under: Television | Tagged: broken, Cary Fukunaga, Cloud Atlas, Emma Stone, film, Inception, insanity, jonah hill, maniac, Mental Health, netflix, reality, Television, trump | Leave a comment »

The X-Files – Folie à Deux (Review)

Posted on June 26, 2015 by Darren

This May and June, we’re taking a trip back in time to review the fifth season of The X-Files and the second season of Millennium.

Folie à Deux is the last stand-alone episode of the fifth season, and the last stand-alone episode to be produced in Vancouver. It is also a pretty essential episode before The X-Files: Fight the Future, reinforcing just how essential Mulder and Scully are to one another shortly before the movie threatens to break them up for good.

Folie à Deux is also one of Vince Gilligan’s most underrated scripts from the show’s entire run, a thoughtful examination of the relationship between Mulder and Scully that provides a clever counterpoint to his script of Bad Blood. If Bad Blood was essentially a story about how Mulder and Scully see the universe differently, then Folie à Deux represents an attempt to heal that rift, perhaps suggesting that Mulder and Scully have come to share their own unique form of madness.