SXSW 2024 Film Review: Festival Dispatch

CAPSULE REVIEWS FROM THIS YEAR’S SXSW FILM FESTIVAL

Welcome to my dispatch from this year’s SXSW. Like always, I won’t be writing full reviews of everything I see at the festival, but this year is filled with big headliners and gnarly midnighters: the latest Alex Garland, an indie horror director’s frightening sophomore feature, a new Doug Liman remake of a beloved cult classic, and Hunter Schafer’s debut in a leading role. Here are the capsule reviews for Civil War, Oddity, Road House, and Cuckoo.

Civil War

Alex Garland’s Civil War is a movie that touts its “apoliticism” as a feature and not a bug, but the question now is if that’s something we can even afford today and if it’s even possible. And through the depiction of a fictional American civil war? It’s easy to be seduced by its parade of dopamine hits, but Civil War is a right hand presenting a love letter to journalists while the left conceals a rancid, noncommittal cowardice. Of course, art now being so deathly terrified of taking a stand on anything, so allergic to having a real take, is par for the course, but there’s something particularly nasty about bending over backwards to stay ”apolitical” while co-opting politically charged imagery: government complicity in airstrikes against civilians, pockets of fomenting armed resistance, journalists under fire. Civil War refuses to engage with what’s on its own screen, way too content to farm nods from its audience and nothing more. C-

Oddity

Damian McCarthy’s Oddity is the scariest movie out of SXSW this year, combining the familiar and unfamiliar in a melange of murder mystery, cursed object horror, and dreadful atmosphere. Following up the director’s 2020 debut, Caveat, Oddity follows a blind medium (Carolyn Bracken) as she uncovers the truth behind her twin sister’s death with the unlikely help of a mysterious wooden effigy. McCarthy’s deft remixing of subgenres - with well-earned jump scares and edge-of-your-seat suspense - is modest in its construction, riding the rails of its classic horror structure, but there’s something remarkable about the way the film organizes its familiar threads into a horrifying crescendo. B+

Road House

There’s nothing more emblematic of studio-mandated IP junk-diving than Doug Liman’s soulless, lethargic Road House remake. Never even attempting to replicate the B-movie charisma of its predecessor, nu-Road House finds an offputtingly charmless Jake Gyllenhaal - slotted in the Patrick Swayze role of a reluctant bouncer with a heart of gold - in a tiresome beat ‘em up. Saddling its protagonist with a grim, updated backstory, Liman’s reconfiguration is as misguided as it gets. Even the action stinks. Boasted as a “revolutionary” new approach to action, Road House combines computer-generated compositing with practical choreography to supposedly deliver convincingly hard blows, but it mostly comes off as ugly and nauseating. Laden with reboot clichés and pancake-flat storytelling, Road House is just another piece of “content” for the streaming mill. C-

Cuckoo

Cuckoo is a shining example of one of my favorite subgenres: nasty, sicko-mode creature features that belie a peculiar sweetness. Centered around a broken family’s visit to the German Alps, Cuckoo stars Hunter Schafer as Gretchen, a young woman plagued by mysterious noises and frightening visions in her uneasy new environment. Swinging for the fences with way too many different horror hats on, director Tilman Singer’s sophomore feature is a largely incoherent affair, but Schafer’s scream queen turn and Dan Stevens’ commitment to his loony antagonist role is worth the price of admission alone. B