By M. Faust
(Image above: Aaron Taylor-Johnson in ‘Fuze’)

The title of Fuze doesn’t become clear until the movie’s end credits. If you recognize the word, you‘ll have a bit of a head’s up to where this twisty thriller is going, though that shouldn’t make it any the less enjoyable.

The film opens with an aerial shot of a big city. I was surprised to learn that what I was looking at was London, because none of the usual landmarks are visible. This is the new London, a city home to an increasing number of immigrants. Like Toronto, it is being taken over by utilitarian skyscrapers lacking any visual character.

One more new building is going up in the middle of a neighborhood largely inhabited by Afghans, or at least it is until a bulldozer uncovers what appears to be an unexploded bomb left over from World War II. The neighborhood is quickly evacuated as the army calls in Major Will Tranter (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), a bomb disposal specialist.

But wait, who are these guys (including Theo James and Sam Worthington) who hid from the police during the evacuation? It’s a team of thieves, who use the panic to break into a local bank. How could they have anticipated this window of opportunity? And why bother with this dinky local bank?

All will made clear, and while such questions may occur to you, they don’t interrupt the steady pulse of the film as it intercuts among these threads and the efforts of the local police (led by Gugu Mbatha-Raw) to keep the public safe and out of the way. The first half of Fuze is a small marvel of pacing, carrying us breathlessly along while laying the groundwork for where the rest of the movie plans to go. Need I tell you that everything is not as it seems? Or that there will be betrayals and double-crosses? Of course not — you’ve been to the movies before and know just what kind of territory you’re in.

Fuze was directed by the very able David Mackenzie, whose career seemed to drop under the radar after his early critical success Young Adam (2003). He’s been working steadily since, with the occasional small hits like 2016’s Hell or High Water and last year’s Relay to demonstrate the growing mastery of his craft. While the second half of the movie is a bit harder to follow given the heavily accented dialogue and a few characters who don’t sufficiently stand apart, for the most part Fuze is a masterclass in pulling an audience in and moving them along. At its best it reminded me of the original The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974), and that is high praise.

As a cinematic auteur, Mackenzie doesn’t seem to have a personal vision that he values above his material. The same can’t be said of David Lowery, at least not with his bewildering new film Mother Mary. Anne Hathaway has the title role of a pop star who, preparing for a comeback after a period of reclusion, seeks out Sam Anselm (Michaela Coel), the costumer who helped establish her persona early in her career. But Sam bears unresolved grudges over the way their partnership ended, and will not easily be wooed back into the fold.

Almost all of the film takes place between these two in Sam’s design studio, a cavernous converted barn on the grounds of her British country estate. (She is apparently a very successful designer, now going through what she calls her “Miss Havisham period”.) This makes it feel like a stage play, with Lowrey and his crew working to maintain visual interest in the face of conversation that takes its sweet time getting wherever it is that it’s going.

The film’s prime asset is Coel, whose singular visage is the focus of the first half of the movie. Lowery consistently underlights her, accentuating the almost otherworldly contours of her face. But he overdoes it by having her deliver all her dialogue in halting, portentous tones that drag Sam’s mystery well past the breaking point.

While there is clearly much about these two that we don’t understand, we go along with the story assuming that we will be filled in. No such luck. By the time Mother Mary (the religious allusion of the title, like so many other seemingly meaningful aspects, goes unexplained) turned into some kind of a ghost story, I had lost hope for it. Lowery, whose last film was the equally impenetrable The Green Knight, is clearly invested in this material (he also wrote it) and offers it up with all the self-confidence of Stanley Kubrick. I only wish I could share in his self-satisfaction.

You don’t have to pay a lot of attention to industry news to know that horror movies have dominated the box office in recent years, ever since superhero movies finally ran their course. The apparently bottomless appetite of the theater-going audience for violent and gruesome material has bled over into other genres. At least, I assume that was the thinking behind Over Your Dead Body, starring Jason Segel and Samara Weaving as a not-very-happily married couple who spend a weekend at a secluded cabin where each is planning to kill the other.

I’m not giving away anything here that isn’t in the film’s publicity. Perhaps recalling The War of the Roses (1989), with Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner as an equally murderous couple, you may wonder how this new film can sustain that premise over 100+ minutes. The answer is that it doesn’t. What starts out as a black comic look at modern marriage adds a few more characters (among them Juliette Lewis in a role that could only she could have played) to turn into a general free-for-all combining gore with slapstick comedy. (When this combination was new back in the 1980s we called it “splatstick.”) Adapted from a Norwegian film released in the US as The Trip (you can see it on Netflix) by former SNL writer Jorma Taccone, Over Your Dead Body devotes its not inconsiderable energies to cataloguing how many different household objects can be used to commit mayhem upon the human body. As the plot runs dry, the violence increases, to the point where the filmmakers might have re-used the tagline “Who Will Survive, and What Will Be Left of Them?” first used in 1974 to entice audiences into The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.