Film Reviews

Written and directed by Jon Watts with co-writer Christopher Ford back in 2014, Clown has been in the offing for some time now. Originally conceived in 2010 as a fake trailer for a forthcoming feature attraction fictively produced by contemporary horror genre guru Eli Roth, Watts’ first feature length production is a mixed bag. Blending various elements of body horror with the basic thematic structure of a domestic comedy, Clown is more silly than it is scary.

In 1973, Augusto Pinochet seized power in Chile and demoted the previous civilian rule to replace it with a military dictatorship. Colonia Dignidad, commanded by Paul Schäfer and other allies of Pinochet, served as a prison for political detainees under his regime, despite the bastille being concealed by the veneer of a farming commune. With a historical premise as intriguing as this, it’s unfortunate how much Colonia’s (also known as The Colony) filmic portrayal falters more than it succeeds.

From up-and-coming director Pedro Morelli and first-time screenwriter Matt Hansen, Zoom is a fascinating fantasy drama about artistic identity. Tracking the lives of three central protagonists, Morelli miraculously creates a strange, circuitous world wherein everything is connected. Despite seemingly existing within the confines of each other’s imaginative works of fiction, comic book artist Emma Boyle (Alison Pill), movie director Edward Deacon (Gael García Bernal), and aspiring novelist Michelle (Mariana Ximenes) soon bleed into each other’s codependent realities.

For Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky, the artist was inextricably joined to his society, both its benefits and its ills. Tarkovsky defined these colloquies between society and an individual artist as “dialectics of personality.” In other words, individual development was indefinably caught-up within personal and distant interactions with a society.