MOVIE REVIEW: THE ENDLESS and LATE SPRING

 

I WATCHED A SURPRISINGLY ENGAGING AND ENTERTAINING science fiction movie the other night, 2017's The Endless.* These days, most Sci-Fi movies disappoint, what with the spaciness of real life making the genre’s movies usually pale by comparison. But this one is a bit different. Written and directed by two young filmmakers, Justin Benson and Aaron Moorehead, the two also star in the movie along with a cast of memorable and intriguing characters. The basic plot details two brothers, Justin and Aaron, who receive a mysterious package one morning containing an old videocam tape. Playing it, they are shown scenes from their past, a past they have spent years trying to forget, for in their youth they were members of a flying-saucer cult, living in a remote compound in the Arizona wilderness.

 

Justin, the elder brother, had managed to escape together with his younger, more indoctrinated brother, Aaron. Eventually the two ended up living in a distant city, lonely and struggling to make a living at low wage jobs, so unsuited they were to life beyond the cult and its bizarre ethos. The brothers see the videotape as an invitation from the cult and decide to return for a visit to find answers to questions about their childhood experiences there.

Suffice it to say, the movie builds slowly but inexorably as Justin and Aaron begin to unravel a growing number of mysteries they encounter among the cult’s members, and in the surrounding landscape. Early on, one member is overheard discussing the novels of H.P. Lovecraft, so that gives you a clue as to what’s ahead. I won’t give any more details other than to say the movie is worth a watch. One thing I will say is that it's a sign of a successful movie (or book) when characters develop or change in significant ways from when you first meet them, and I think that's the case here, where individuals are more clearly understood, and their humanity expressed by the movie's end. But man, that is one Groundhog Day I would NOT want to be stuck in! 

[As an aside, Benson and Moorehead produced a 2013 movie, Resolution, set in the same location, several years earlier, where we meet some characters from The Endless and are given a taste of the underlying mystery that is more fully developed and explained in the later movie. It's also a fun watch. Ed.]

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*And for a completely different and richly rewarding film experience: Yasujiro Ozu’s 1949 Late Spring is a lush, meditative exploration of the relationship between Shukichi and Noriko Somiya—a father and daughter, living in a suburb of post-war Tokyo. The plot centres around whether Noriko will marry and leave her widowed father, something she has no desire to do, but something that is nevertheless deemed necessary by Noriko’s meddlesome Aunt Masa. Osu explores the generation gap between Shukichi, a soft-spoken and somewhat absent-minded professor, and his daughter, the modern-oriented, yet at the same time tradition-bound, Noriko.

Osu frames each scene of his black and white film carefully to give the viewer settings that are always intimate, even framing a large, public pagoda garden scene in such a way as to give the impression one is viewing a private, backyard garden. As well, scenes from the Somiya household are equally focused and crafted to create rooms of intimacy and contemplation. Life’s drama plays out there in subtle eddies and follows its course whereby joys and sorrows and wry comedies are developed, engaged with, and finally set aside to make room for future ones.