Psycho-Sexual Thrillers (pt. II)
Lili’s Pick: Piercing
Lanie’s Pick: Frank & Lola
What I’ve come to better understand through this exploration of film is that artists, critics, and buffoons (like myself) all have very different ideas about genre, and about how these genres should be characterized. This week’s batch of films made me question what constitutes a film of psycho-sexual nature, given the ever-evolving expectations of both sexual empowerment and psychopathic tendencies. What makes a psycho-sexual thriller? Is it simply the story of a lurid love affair? What puts the psycho in psycho-sexual, and to what degree of “thrill” are we meant to feel discomfort, rather than pleasure? Our last convergence of films in this genre proved that this landscape can be tricky to navigate, and at the risk of sounding kink-shame-y, not every desire is worth further investigating. Tonight’s films, while promising to be decently lecherous, neither shocked nor awed this audience—though this is not due to a lack of effort. Piercing, based on Ryu Murakami’s novel, with its distinct aesthetic and symmetrical style, was far more deliberate with its lasciviousness. There’s no way for me to say this without sounding insane, but there’s a really lovely tenderness to this film about a man with murderous urges and a woman who’s willing to indulge him—a genuine optimism is placed alongside the atrocities they commit, which I found both unnerving and sweet. Christopher Abbott and Mia Wasikowski were both brilliantly deranged, making me wish they were given a more concrete ending. The same goes for Frank & Lola, a film that was soooooo close to being good. I may be wearing Michael Shannon-tinted glasses but this movie had some really compelling moments. Regardless of the age difference, Michael Shannon’s Frank and Imogen Poots’ Lola felt a bit mismatched, and this was partly due to the lack of time spent getting to know either character. I would’ve loved a little more attention detail when delving into Lola’s evident sexual depravity, because I’m a pervert who gets a sick kick out of character development. Instead we were just meant to not trust Lola I guess, being that the film is largely from Frank’s perspective, but somehow I knew nothing exceptionally dark was taking place in her storyline. Maybe it’s because I’m a woman, maybe it’s because I’ve seen female desire manipulated and muddied through the opposite sex’s inarticulate expressions over and over and over again, but I never got the impression that Lola was some evil mastermind, nor did I assume she was ever more in control of the situation than she let on. The irony, though, is that in the end she was the one in control. For a character with heaps of intrigue but only hints of agency, she did have the last word. Idk. I didn’t love it but I certainly didn’t hate it. Whenever a film teases murder as a selling point, but chooses not to follow through, I’m only ever disappointed if that instance of a point of no return isn’t matched by something else equally twisted. And Frank & Lola never really gave us that. There were some disturbing, even anxiety-inducing moments here, but they were always truncated by reasonable explanations, as if Velma from Scooby Doo were there to say “Oh Scoob, there’s no such thing as monsters.” At least it had the added bonus of Michael Shannon delivering mundane, casual phrases like “Yeah, that’d be cool” in his signature, steely, “I might murder you” tone. That, if anything, makes this film worth the watch.
