On "Task"

The latest crime miniseries from Brad Inglesby, best known for "Mare of Easttown," is "Task," about a law enforcement task force investigating a series of violent robberies in rural Pennsylvania.  The narrative is split about evenly between the two men who embody the two sides of the investigation.  FBI Agent Tom Brandis (Mark Ruffalo) is charged with heading up the task force by his superior Kathleen McGinty (Marth Plimpton).  This is a ragtag group that includes a city cop, Aleah Clinton (Thuso Mbedu), a state trooper, Lizzie Stover (Alison Oliver), and a county detective, Anthony Grasso (Fabien Frankel).  Brandis is a widower, and we also look in on his complicated home life, involving his grown daughters, Emily (Silvia Dionicio) and Sara (Phoebe Fox).

Then there's Robbie Prendergast (Tom Pelphrey), who has been committing the robberies with his friend Cliff (Raul Castillo), specifically targeting trap houses run by a local motorcycle gang, the Dark Hearts.  Robbie has a grudge against Dark Hearts leader Jayson Wilkes (Sam Keeley) and his mentor Perry Dorazo (Jamie McShane), who don't take kindly to their drug running operations being disrupted.  Robbie's home life is also complicated, as he's currently living with his adult niece Maeve (Emilia Jones), who is looking after Robbie's young kids for him, but wants out as soon as possible.  For most of the series, the law enforcement and criminal characters don't interact, each pursuing separate goals and dealing with several smaller subplots.  Robbie's past and grudge against Jayson is dissected over multiple episodes.  Meanwhile, the task force soon discovers they have a mole in their midst.

Directed by Jeremiah Zagar and Salli Richardson Whitfield, "Task" is one of the best crime miniseries I've seen in a while.  It doesn't particularly strive for authenticity regarding law enforcement procedures, but rather it's aiming for a more genuine picture of the wider community.  This is a fairly rare thing in mainstream media.  Like "Mare of Easttown," most of the characters speak with Delco accents, nobody is very well off, and broken families are a major theme.  The cast is full of familiar names, and it's no wonder, because the material is fantastic and the characters are unusually nuanced and well written.  Tom Pelphrey and Mark Ruffalo give excellent performances as struggling fathers, but Emilia Jones is the one who really impressed me.  I've seen her in several other projects before this, including as the lead in "CODA," but "Task" is where she really got my attention, playing a young woman trying to hold her disintegrating family together, to her own detriment. 

What I value most about "Task" from a more meta standpoint is that it's not afraid to be a character drama about real people, and specifically real people who are not good at what they're supposed to be doing.  Robbie is a terrible criminal who botches a robbery so badly in the first episode that he instigates a manhunt.  Tom isn't a very good FBI agent either, and two of his team are downright incompetent at times.  However, these are all interesting, realistic people whose actions  do follow a sound internal logic when you get to know them.  Several of the storylines unfold like Greek tragedies or episodes of "The Wire," where wider systemic issues or personal flaws are what doom the characters.  I'll warn here that "Task" is a bleak story, featuring many deeply damaged people, and several of the deaths that occur are upsetting.  However, the ending is a hopeful one.  

I was initially hesitant about watching "Task," because I haven't had much interest in terrible stories about terrible people lately.  And that's not what "Task" is at all.  Yes, it's about crime and criminals, and there are scenes of violence.  However, its outlook is very humane and sympathetic to nearly everyone involved in the story on both sides.  And I find that a very valuable thing.  

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At Last, "The Long Walk"

An adaptation of Stephen King's "The Long Walk" likely would have been more effective a few decades ago, when the spectres of past wars loomed larger in the American collective memory.  However, the film that finally did get made is one that could have only been made now, by director Francis Lawrence, after helming four "Hunger Games" movies that proved that there was an audience for movies about dystopian death games featuring children.  However, none of the "Hunger Games" movies are anything close to as dark and violent and emotionally wrenching as "The Long Walk."  

Set in a dystopian United States suffering deep poverty in the wake of a major war, we watch fifty young men and older teenagers participate in a yearly endurance contest where they walk until only one is left.  If they fall below the speed of three miles per hour too many times, they are eliminated permanently.  Contestants include Ray Garraty (Cooper Hoffman), our major protagonist, Pete McVries (David Jonsson), who he becomes friends with, the troublemaker Gary Barkovitch (Charlie Plummer), unflappable Billy Stebbins (Garrett Wareing), and others played by Tut Nyot, Joshua Odjick, Ben Wang, and Jordan Gonzalez.  Overseeing their progress and providing encouragement via megaphone is the Major (Mark Hamill), a grizzled representative of the totalitarian government.

This audience for this kind of movie is  limited, naturally, so "The Long Walk" is a fairly low budget affair.  There are no particularly showy effects sequences and the crowds of onlookers from the Stephen King story are largely absent.  However, this allows "The Long Walk" a rare amount of freedom to be as graphic and vulgar and as unapologetically existential as it should be.  The deaths are very explicit and realistically brutal.  The walkers interact the way we expect a group of teenage boys to interact, conversing with constant profanity, crude humor, and slights against each other's masculinity.  We watch them deal with every physical challenge, including how to urinate and defecate during the contest.  But perhaps what's most surprising is that much of the movie is built on conversations that Ray and Pete have about their lives, the state of the world, and how to survive their ordeal both mentally and spiritually.  The pace of the film is never slow, but it is very deliberate, with a lot of long, lingering shots, and resulting in a mood that is often more meditative than I was expecting.      

It's strange to have to point out that "The Long Walk" is as much of a character drama as it is an action or horror picture, but this is probably the best major film about male camaraderie we've had in years.  Despite being competitors, most of the kids in "The Long Walk" almost immediately band together to help and support each other, with only a few outliers.  The deaths are horrible every time, and we see the boys risk their lives again and again to save each other, or try to stave off the inevitable.  There's a particular timelessness to this version of the story, where the characters don't talk like modern American teenagers, but the behavior feels universal and very immediate.  There are echoes of older war movies, naturally, since Stephen King originally wrote "The Long Walk" in the Vietnam War era, but the messages about young men dealing with violence and resistance and futility are still painfully relevant right now.      

Those familiar with the original King story will notice that there are some changes, some small and some large.  Some are just to make the story more filmable - slowing down the pace of the walkers, cutting down on the body horror, and reducing the number of participants.  Some are far more substantive.  Ray Garraty is given much more material, including a new character arc that might raise some eyebrows.  However, as someone who has been waiting for this adaptation for a couple of decades now, I'm happy to report that none of the changes in any way tone down the content of the original story, and the adaptation is ultimately true to King's work in all the ways that matter.    

Finally, the cast is excellent and the best reason to see the film.  Hoffman and Jonsson are fantastic as the leads, but many of the most memorable kids are the ones in the minor roles.  Judy Greer appears briefly as Garraty's mother, and adds so much.  The earnestness of the characters  and relative lack of satirical elements may feel old fashioned at times, but the performances are anything but.  "The Long Walk" joins that very short list of projects that escaped development hell after far too long, and it turns out that it was worth the wait.

  

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Digging Into "The Lowdown"

From FX and Sterlin Harjo, the co-creator of "Reservation Dogs," comes "The Lowdown," a comedic crime series about a Tulsa investigative reporter loosely based on Lee Roy Chapman.  It is highly entertaining, and easily the best new show I've seen all year.

Ethan Hawke plays our hero, a scruffy writer and bookstore proprietor named Lee Raybon, who is always low on funds and habitually pushing his luck.  However, his most defining trait is that he styles himself a "Truthstorian," who is doggedly committed to uncovering the truth.  His latest article, about the powerful and influential Washberg family, appears to have led to the suicide of Dale Washberg (Tim Blake Nelson), but Lee thinks it was murder.  Suspects include Dale's widow Betty Jo (Jeanne Tripplehorn), his brother and gubernatorial candidate Donald Washberg (Kyle McLachlan), and some other suspicious characters played by Tracy Letts, Paul Sparks, and Scott Shepherd.  Among Lee's allies are a sympathetic private investigator named Marty (Keith David), an antiquities dealer named Ray (Michael Hitchcock), a reliable employee, Samantha (Kaniehtiio Horn), an unreliable employee, Waylon (Cody Lightning), and Lee's thirteen year-old daughter Francis (Ryan Kiera Arnstrong).

"The Lowdown" has the air of a throwback for a lot of reasons, as it belongs in both the neo-western and crime fiction genres, and centers around a man with the nearly extinct profession of independent writer for a long-form print publication.  More than that, it's about a self-aggrandizing, barely functional dreamer with a lofty moral code, who seems to be patterning himself off of the pulp heroes of the Jim Thompson paperbacks that he cherishes.  Ethan Hawke plays Lee Raybon with relish, a charming scarecrow of a man who is always sticking his nose where it doesn't belong, and always making excuses for his utter inability to be a reliable father, employer, friend, or partner.  He consorts with a parade of eccentrics, who all grumble about his flightiness, but clearly enjoy his company.  As someone who avoided Ethan Hawk movies in my youth after finding him insufferable in "Reality Bites," Lee Rayburn strikes me as a natural extension of the pretentious young slacker he played in that movie, if he were from Oklahoma and got a lot funnier and more undignified with time.

And "The Lowdown" being set in and around Tulsa is a big part of the show's appeal.  The city is portrayed as an eclectic melting pot with major Native-American and African-American populations.  As Lee digs into the death of Dale Washberg, he keeps coming across old issues of stolen land, ugly bigotry, and those in power having too many secrets.  Eventually a Native street artist named Chutto (Mato Wayuhi) and his grandfather Arthur (Graham Greene) are caught up in the mystery, and Lee has to acknowledge his own privilege as a white man carelessly blundering into other people's business more than once.  The culture clashes are often played for laughs, but the show does quietly make a point of keeping several minority characters at the forefront, and forcing the hero to weigh his own need to tell the truth against what is best for the community he values and depends on.  

I like that "The Lowdown" isn't in a big hurry to solve its central mystery.  Several episodes have an appealing hangout vibe, where a guest star or two drops in for some shenanigans.  Peter Dinklage's episode is a fun one, for instance.  I especially appreciate the looseness of the show's format, where there's room for humorous digressions, a romance or two, and even opportunities for Lee to learn to be a better father. Lee's life is complicated, and keeping on top of everything means constantly switching gears from one situation to the next.  We're constantly hearing snippets of people telling stories and enjoying stories that we'll never have the full context for.  It's a good sign when minor characters keep surprising you with new dimensions every time they reappear, and you wish that there was time to get to know all of them better.  Even some of the villains come off as surprisingly well-rounded and relatable.  

It's interesting timing that "The Lowdown" premiered pretty close to the release of "One Battle After Another," which doesn't really share much in the way of genre or subject matter, but has a very  similar vibe.  You have a constantly floundering white guy, playing at being much cooler than he actually is, chasing after a romanticized ideal of heroism.  Both ultimately discover that they are at their best when they're part of a multi-racial community fighting against a common enemy, and supporting the next generation.  "The Lowdown" may not have the feature film fireworks of "One Battle After Another," but I'd argue it gets its points across just as well, and is definitely just as entertaining.  

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"A Big Bold Beautiful" Bust

Negative reviews are harder for me to write than positive or mixed ones, because I don't like dwelling on disappointments.  However, I think it's important to examine why certain projects don't work onscreen, just as it's important to examine the ones that do.  Our case in point today is Kogonada's "A Big Bold Beautiful Journey," which is a fantasy fable where two people follow the instructions of a magic GPS to go on an impossible existential road trip into each other's psyches.  And I'm the kind of movie watcher who's usually very receptive to heartwarming nonsense like this.  

Colin Farrell and Margot Robbie play David and Sarah, two very attractive people who each separately rent cars from a strange rental service being run by cryptic, mysterious people played by Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Kevin Kline.  They attend a wedding together, feel an initial spark, and are ready to leave it at that.  However, the rental car's magic GPS voiced by Jodie Turner-Smith asks David if he wants to go on a "big, bold, beautiful journey," which leads the pair to a series of magical doors that send them to the past, to impossible liminal places, and of course, inevitably, to each other.

I've liked director Kogonada's previous films, "Columbus" and "After Yang," but those were very small scale, meditative art house films, designed for very limited audiences.  "A Big Bold Beautiful Journey" is aiming for a bigger, broader audience, but retains the same sort of slow-paced, melancholy atmosphere and deeply introspective storytelling.  There are attempts to jazz up the proceedings with a few brief action sequences, a musical number, and plenty of picturesque cinematography, but in the end the narrative is a gloomy slog that isn't entertaining.  David and Sarah are supposed to fall in love, confront their pasts, and heal their wounded hearts so they can go on to live happily ever after together as better human beings.  However, neither of them come off as particularly genuine or interesting human beings, and it's tough to care about what happens to them.

Colin Farrell and Margot Robbie are lovely, winning performers who have no chemistry together onscreen.  They also frequently feel adrift when trying to navigate scenes where they're supposed to be revisiting episodes from their pasts.  There are a few discrete sections that I liked, late in the film, where David and Sarah are forced to confront their exes to discuss their failed relationships, and later have an honest heart-to-heart about their personality flaws.  These actually feel substantive and push the characters towards new emotional territory.  However, most of the time the film feels meandering and far too self-serious.  The magical GPS and rental car employees are clearly fantasy creatures, but seem wary of being too whimsical.  The few attempts at abrasive humor aren't funny, and I was surprised that the pushy GPS never became an actual character, who might have lightened up the mood a bit.

This magical realist premise might seem like a challenge, but I can think of several similar films that figured out how to make it work.  "All of Us Strangers" and "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" also had love stories that unfolded in metaphysically dubious circumstances.  The Ben Stiller version of "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" was less successful, but still managed to generate a kind of propulsive emotional momentum that's utterly missing from "A Big Bold Beautiful Journey."  With movies like this, you have to wholly embrace being in a fantasy story, and "A Big Bold Beautiful Journey" displays far too much trepidation to have any fun with itself.  I suspect that Kogonada was trying to ensure that this wouldn't be mistaken for a children's fantasy film, and ended up undercutting himself.

And on that note, one interesting aspect of the film is that it appears to be taking a lot of inspiration from Hayao Miyazaki and Makoto Shinkai anime, specifically the way that some of the fantasy and transitional elements are handled.  Note that "A Big Bold Beautiful Journey" is longtime Ghibli composer Joe Hisaishi's first score for a Hollywood movie, which adds to the effect. There are multiple scenes that I felt would have worked better in animation, and I can't help wondering what  "A Big Bold Beautiful Journey" would have looked like as an anime.  Or with non-movie star leads and more go-for-broke fantasy sequences.  Or with a director a little more seasoned and a little less closed-in.

The best thing that I can say about "A Big Bold Beautiful Journey" is that it's big and beautiful.  Let's work on being a little more bold next time.

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A Trip To "11.22.63"

Before we get started, I'd like to point out that this Hulu produced miniseries, one of the earliest original titles to premiere on the platform, is no longer on Hulu, but is currently streaming on Tubi.  How's that for a sign of the times?  

2025 was been a banner year for Stephen King projects, so I thought I'd catch up on one that I'd missed - the adaptation of King's time travel novel "11/22/63."  Students of American history will recognize that this was the date when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas.  "11.22.63." follows the attempts of a man named Jake Epping (James Franco) to stop the assassination after he discovers a way to go back in time to the 1960s.  

So, we have a popular "What if?" scenario being treated with a rare degree of seriousness, but this is still a genre show that requires some genre conventions.  There are a lot of narrative shortcuts in play, such as much of the research being handed to Jake from the start by another, older time traveler named Al (Chris Cooper), who failed at the same mission.  There's also the idea that the past resists being changed by pushing back against major disruptions in any way that it can.  This means that one of the major villains of the piece is an unseen force creating literal deus ex machina plot twists every time the heroes get too close to accomplishing certain goals.  A major new character was also created for the show, Bill Turcotte (George McKay), a young man who becomes Jake's ally in the past and gives him somebody to explain things to.   

The major criticism of the show compared to the novel that I've seen is that it plays up the melodrama while being much less detailed in its examination of the Kennedy assasination.  Initially Jake has to confirm a lot of information, such as whether Lee Harvey Oswald (Daniel Webber) was set up, whether he acted alone, and whether there was a conspiracy behind the assassination.  However, the focus quickly shifts to interpersonal conflicts.  The show wisely spends a good deal of time showing Jake's difficulties adjusting to life in the 1960s, and his romance with a librarian named Sadie (Sarah Gadon), who is in a troubled marriage.  The pacing is good, however, and there's no issue with filling eight episodes, or coming to a satisfying conclusion.

"11.22.63." is at its best in its earliest episodes, where it's setting up the rules of the universe and following Jake's initial exploration of life in the '60s.  This is also where we have the most involvement from Chris Cooper, who is easily the best actor in the ensemble.  I like that the series immediately creates a sense of paranoia and discomfort about living out of one's time, even if Jake is well suited to his new life and finds certain aspects of the past better than 2016.  While any supernatural elements are kept fairly low-key, and "11.22.63." avoids the tropes of many other Stephen King adaptations, it's still got enough of an unnerving sensibility that it feels of a piece with the rest of King's work.   

James Franco has retreated from the spotlight since certain allegations came to light in 2019, and I'd forgotten how ubiquitous he was for a few years in the 2000s and 2010s.  While I'm fairly cool on his performance here, he does fine in "11.22.63.," and the vague resemblance to James Dean certainly helps thematically.  He manages to balance Jake Epping being an intelligent schoolteacher with also being a dramatic hothead who is prone to impulsive decisions.  However, I was more impressed with Sarah Gadon, who doesn't usually get roles this prominent, and certainly makes the most of it. 

Of all the Stephen King event miniseries, this is definitely one of the better ones.  I recommend giving it a look, especially if you're apprehensive of King's usual horror stories.  However, history buffs may want to  stick to the book.        

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The News is Worse

I was working on a post for the beginning of January titled "The Posts I Didn't Write This Year," hoping to sum up the industry news that had happened over the previous months that I hadn't written anything about for the blog.  I generally like to give big news stories some time and distance before I say anything, because I am not a journalist, but a third-rate commentator, and throwing in my barely-informed two cents is a lot less helpful than pointing people toward the actual discourse being conducted by smarter people.  Also, frankly, it takes me longer than most to get a handle on what is actually going on.

However, I do have an interest in keeping track of how the media landscape and technology are changing and transforming with the times, especially where the news is concerned.  And in the past few months, things have gotten very bad very quickly.  I kept delaying the post as more kept happening, and having to rejigger the analysis.  I'm at the point where if I don't post something now, I'm just going to keep rewriting the post forever, beyond any shred of topicality.    

So, I wrote a post, roughly a year ago, titled "The News is Bad," where I talked about the rightward shift of CNN and the Washington Post curbing political opinions.  At the time of writing, former CNN contributor Don Lemon and other members of the media were just arrested for reporting on a protest in a church in Minneapolis.  How did we get here?  Well, here's a quick rundown of the biggest media-related items from the past five months:

After the death of Charlie Kirk in September, "Jimmy Kimmel Live" was suspended for a week over the host's innocuous comments about the MAGA response, and Nexstar and Sinclair stations further preempted the program for a few additional days.  This was part of an ongoing campaign by extremists to turn Kirk into a martyr figure, and use his death as an excuse to silence his critics and target his perceived enemies.  The backlash against Kimmel's suspension was swift and the financial fallout to the broadcasters was apparently significant enough to stave off any similar censorship attempts.

Things really ramped up in October, when David Ellison appointed right-wing news commentator Bari Weiss, who has no journalism experience, as the editor-in chief of CBS News.  There was a showdown in December over her attempt to pull a "60 Minutes" segment called "Inside CECOT," which quickly leaked, and was finally aired a month later.  Ratings have dropped for all CBS News shows, as Trump has sought to use the organization as a propaganda outlet, and Weiss was recently caught encouraging staffers to quit.  As for Ellison, he's currently trying to buy Warner Brothers, despite a deal already in place for an acquisition by Netflix.  The Trump administration has signalled that they're willing to help him.     

The major American newspapers continue to be in pretty dire straits.  The Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post is undergoing massive layoffs, and the DOJ seized documents from a Post reporter's home a few weeks ago.  The Trump administration has continually been hostile to the press, threatening editors and reporters over any perceived negative coverage.  The chilling effect on reporting has been apparent across the board, especially with the recent coverage of the extrajudicial ICE killings in Minnesota, where the White House pushed a false narrative that blamed the victims for their deaths.  

Over on the platform formerly known as Twitter, owned by Elon Musk, the Grok AI was found to be generating lewd pictures of real minors in December, and no meaningful action was taken to curb this.  What's worse, despite some hand-wringing and threats, almost no major private or governmental organizations did anything in response.  There have been some signs of a user exodus, but this seems to have been spurred mostly by content creators trying to protect their work from being fed into the AI grist mill.    

Tik-Tok passed into the hands of Trump-friendly new owners this month, and immediately started censoring topics and banned a prominent Palestinian reporter.  This deal was so that Tik-Tok wouldn't be banned in the US outright.  A Kafkaesque new terms of service agreement has users looking for a replacement, but none have emerged yet.  

Finally, due to the Trump administration clawing back funding, The Corporation for Public Broadcasting is officially shutting down.  So far, this is affecting weekend news broadcasts and access for rural stations.  And if you haven't heard yet, production of "Sesame Street" is moving from HBO to Netflix starting this year.      

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"Dangerous Animals," "Together," and "Him"

This is a post where I want to spotlight three of last year's summer horror movies.  They are getting awkwardly bundled together, because I didn't have enough titles for a ranking post the way I did back in 2024 - I really don't have anything to say about the "I Know What You Did Last Summer" legasequel or the last "Conjuring" movie.  On the other hand, trying to pair these leftover titles up thematically with other movies kept falling apart, so I'm just going to write bullet reviews for all three now, before they get any staler.  Some minor spoilers ahead.  

Let's start with "Dangerous Animals," which is a horror movie starring Hassie Harrison and Josh Heuston as Zephyr and Moses, a nice young couple who end up on a boat with a maniac.  The maniac is a man named Tucker, played by Jai Courtney, who likes feeding people to sharks and filming the results.  "Dangerous Animals" is a co-production of Shudder and the Australian Kismet Films, and directed by an Aussie, Sean Byrne.  This means that it's set on the coast of Australia and Jai Courtney gets to use his native Australian accent.  And Jai Courtney with an Australian accent is so much better at acting than when he's trying to sound American.  He's properly menacing in this movie!  There's even nuance!

So, despite what the poster would have you believe, this isn't so much a shark movie as a serial killer movie that also involves some shark attacks.  And it's good enough that I don't think anybody will mind too much about the confusion.  As a survival thriller it's a lot of fun, with plenty of twists and turns and fairly smart heroes to root for.  The tension is terrific.  People also get eaten by sharks.  However, the main events in psycho killer movies are always inevitably the psycho killers, and Jai Courtney acquits himself very well in the role.  This was a pleasant surprise, and I'll look forward to Courtney's future endeavors.  Well, as long as he's not trying to sound anything but Australian.   

On to "Together," the body horror movie starring Alison Brie and Dave Franco, and directed by another Australian, Michael Shanks.  Brie and Franco play Millie and Tim, a couple in a long term relationship who have decided to move to a rural community together, but are now having doubts about their further commitment.  While hiking in the woods nearby, they encounter a mysterious cave that causes their body parts to start sticking to each other whenever they get physically close.  This is also the movie that got pulled from Chinese distribution after digital alternations were made to one of the minor characters to change a gay couple into a straight one.

"Together" has a couple of interesting visual concepts, which are executed very well.  However, the material around the big effects-heavy sequences is half-baked, with a central metaphor that doesn't really work.  The relationship anxiety taking on a physical manifestation is a good idea, but it doesn't quite sync with the way Millie and Tim's relationship is progressing, and the challenges they face.  Nothing about their issues seem to be about losing individuality or autonomy, which this brand of body horror would suggest.  Also, the worldbuilding is very haphazard, with a cult in play, seemingly at random.  I feel some patience and encouragement is appropriate because this is a small film being helmed by a first timer, but "Together" really fell apart by the end.

Finally, a few words on "Him," which put out a fantastic trailer a few months ago.  This is the horror movie set in the world of professional football, directed by Justin Tipping.  An up-and-comer named Cam Cade, played by Tyriq Withers, attends a weeklong training event hosted by the current reigning champion, Isaiah White, played by Marlon Wayans.  However, Isaiah's methods are extreme, and his behavior is concerning.  Also, since Cam suffered a traumatic injury, he's been seeing visions of demonic and disturbing figures.  Isaiah's incredible success as a player couldn't possibly be because of supernatural forces, now could it?

I seem to like "Him" more than the average viewer.  I suspect that it's because I'm not put off by artsy, esoteric horror like "Berberian Sound Studio" and "Infinity Pool" that don't have a whole lot of coherent story, but do have a lot of surreal, abstracted, disturbing imagery and sound design.  "Him" is trying very hard - perhaps too hard - to be as showy and stylized as possible, with very aggressive visuals that convey a lot of intensity.  At times it's aping music videos and  NFL commercials, while pulling out a ton of visual tricks - pulsing lights, X-ray vision, Kubrickian symmetrical compositions, religious and folk horror imagery, and more.  The trouble is that very little of this is scary or compelling.  The performances are good and the concepts are interesting, but the skill level in the execution isn't there yet.  

"Him" gets frustratingly close to being something special - close enough that I hope everyone involved with this movie gets more chances in the future to try again.

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