The Plant from the Canaries

The canary, a songbird of the finch family, occupies an eminent place in avian symbolism, not least for its melodious birdsong, which in turn underscores a certain fragility and innocence to be cut short by the creature’s death — by noxious gases — in the proverbial coal mine. Its spot amid literary allusion is therefore one of precarity: an ornamental design borne out of whim and equally vulnerable to its dictates. Much like the bird, 30-something Min-ji (Jung Hyeon-su) exists in a state of uneasy equilibrium. An expat from Korea living in Berlin, the protagonist of Ruan Lan-Xi’s The Plant from the Canaries meanders through life abroad with dainty and precarious steps. Though conversant in German, she prefers the English modality, lingua franca for the rarefied cosmopolitan. “May” is her preferred name, not the clumsy phonetics of hanguk. Sporting a pixie cut, she wanders in and out of parks, apartments, and the cinema, mildly affable and always slightly embarrassed.

This embarrassment comes, we learn, with a floundering sense of openness. We first meet her as she queues at a popular noodle establishment, having bumped into an acquaintance and her partner while waiting for her own boyfriend to show up. When he does, it’s not good news: he’s decided to move out of their apartment, effectively bringing their relationship to a close. The therapeutic fallout from this is comically relegated to one brief shot of May at her shrink’s place — “I’ll see you next time?” — while most of the work she does, in picking up the pieces, is done in and around the city’s natural and urban landscapes. Small talk litters the air, sometimes precipitating one-night stands offscreen, other times fizzling into pauses and awkward silences. While the constraints of newfound singlehood weigh down on her, there’s also a silver lining to be found in the autumnal light of Europe: a shot at personal re-invention.

Running at a slim 66 minutes, Ruan’s debut will almost certainly invite comparisons with the conversational naturalism of Éric Rohmer and Hong Sang-soo, the latter an even more recognizable shorthand for contemporary artistic melancholy. Barring its foreign setting, little of The Plant from the Canaries hasn’t been circumscribed under a pastiche of Hong’s auteurist signature, even an amusing zoom shot in which May, having run into an ex who ghosted her, fantasizes possibly of escaping this encounter and achieves it through the camera. Her friendship with a slightly older woman (Daria Wichmann), likely the only other constant in her life, offers a serene counterpoint to the alienating mannerisms demanded of her and likely any other foreigner. Working as a theater freelancer and therefore accustomed to the varieties of societal performance, May is all too self-conscious; that is, until time goes by and the city’s symphony (a light, instrumental score by Moondog) loosens things up. The titular plant, whether a rare offering by the birds or an equally precious archipelago species, reflects her state of mind: dislocated yet resilient, youth and beauty must go on. — MORRIS YANG

The Fin

Aquatic and crispy shades of green, ochre, and blue dominate Park Sye-young’s apocalyptic The Fin. The title serves a double-entendre, referring not only to the end days (a play on the French word for end, fin) but also the titular malformation in the dried-out landscape of the future: fish fins.

In a future where water has become scarce, government propaganda emphasizes how an unclean face becomes symbolic of a patriotic citizen.​ Meanwhile, the poisoned world gives rise to ironic mermaid mutants, known as Omegas. People go to great lengths to conceal their transformations; it’s a dirty secret hidden by foot wraps, self-mutilation and prosthetics, as Omegas not only face the threat of expulsion but also exploitation, as they are pushed to the edges of cities to do grueling work to uphold the thin veneer of civilization. One Omega, though, ventures back into the world of the humans. He’s been tasked by a friend with returning his remains to his daughter.​

The Fin begins from the perspective of Sujin, a newly trained government employee. In Park Sye-young’s imagined apocalypse of saturated colors and neon, Korea has been united. People work toward an imagined future where water has been restored. The illusion of this goal is built, on the surface, around personal sacrifice, but that idea unravels under the weight of both fantasy and oppression. The Omegas become scapegoats for the real villains that have corrupted our world, while people spend their days tirelessly working and briefly indulging in the empty pleasures of former fishing shops and fake Ocean landscapes.

Not unlike his previous features, The Fifth Thoracic Vertebra and Base Station, Park Sye-young uses limitations to emphasize the cracks in contemporary life. The film’s landscapes are crafted by real-world locations transformed through context and through filmmaking. Here, highly saturated colors create a dappled effect of rot and decay; an ironically waterlogged vision of inhospitable hues and textures. Like the killer mold in The Fifth Thoracic Vertebra, this film seems infected with the invasive green algae that strangles our fresh-bodied waters — eerily beautiful but ultimately deadly.​

Part of a new generation of young filmmakers who place the environment at the forefront of their work, Park weaves climate anxieties with a whole range of other pressing contemporary anxieties, from housing to immigration. Through his allegorical filmmaking, we see how the planet’s increasingly inhospitable surface disproportionately targets the poor and most vulnerable. The climate crisis becomes not only a thematic backbone to his work but an aesthetic one, as the film’s visuals and sparse style all seem borne out of deep consideration for the consequences of the brutal destruction of our natural world. 

Indeed, transformation remains at the fore of the film. Obviously, through the fish-like mutations that grip sections of the population, but less obviously via the journey of Sujin. Through her, we navigate this new world, but we’re hit by waves of discomfort and uncertainty. Propaganda is everywhere, some of it glowing and smiling, but a lot of it pervasive and subconscious. Little cracks in the surface of the illusions start to weigh on her and, exasperated by further confrontations and interactions with Mia, the daughter who inherits her father’s fin remains, Sujin’s faith in the government’s fascist fantasy of liberation, sacrifice, and purity wavers.

What makes a revolution? That transformative question hangs at the edges of The Fin. While Park’s film doesn’t offer a full cathartic release, it signals brief flashes of hope. We aren’t doomed to uphold the same values and ideas that lead us down the path to destruction. At the very least, the film turns its back on the values of fascism, a fantasy uniting force that does nothing for community or healing, but instead only pushes further down the road toward the end of the world. — JUSTINE SMITH

Two Seasons, Two Strangers

Isolationism breeds a variety of affects that spur those involved toward indelibly discrete action. In many, Sho Miyake’s latest, Two Seasons, Two Strangers, courses the transformation of those actions into a certain ephemera: one desperate to cling to a crystallized form, which might render the mirror image necessary to confront this isolation and subside the bristling tensions that mount — perhaps a work of art, perhaps a consideration of love, perhaps a shared experience. Now, this isolation isn’t so much an enforced quarantine as it is an enigmatic estrangement, communication and community blurred as their aspirational qualities become lost and incalculable. Suddenly, the world is too unpredictable, and so inwards one escapes. Miyake sets this exploration against a structural gambit: a bifurcated parallel narrative, similar in manner to what we’ve seen in Hong Sang-soo or Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s filmography, though here the opening segment is a mise en abyme, in the form of the produced screenplay of our protagonist, Shim Eun-kyung’s Li, whose own misadventures in the film’s latter half echo the exploration for an unnamable openness that her screenplay seeks to both excavate and lament.

Miyake adapts Yoshiharu Tsuge’s Mr. Ben and His Igloo and A View of the Seaside, two manga with narratives that are repurposed to both fit within the same thematic confine. Miyake’s opening segment adapts A View of the Seaside, interpolating its unrequited yearning into Tsuge’s Mr. Ben and His Igloo, the story of a Manga artist lost simultaneously in his head and the countryside, exhibiting the ways in which our art projects the unattainable desires that rumble the nervous bellies of isolated individuals, those always just an arm’s reach from their wants. Miyake understands that these wants are unattainable because they have no intentions, they fill up the emptiness to excuse a vacancy. This is the thread that runs through both mangas. Much like the opening sequence’s characters (played with delicate melancholy by Yuumi Kawai and Mansaku Takada) as they discuss the peace to be found in a loitering without end, they also reach for one another in some quietly desperate attempt to cover up the listlessness which provoked this random encounter, one destined to end in the very estrangement that brought them together. It’s a beautiful, cyclical logic of escapism bearing a formal acuity that stages these strangers’ meeting against a landscape whose current remains incessant. Miyake’s cinematography is clearly both a nod to the beautiful illustrations of the source material and a recognition of how innately its imagery and the comparative scale of its compositional work perform to elicit this generous insight. The waves will keep crashing against the tide, subsuming those who stand in the way; the sun will always keep setting, stealing the light that illuminates those faces before you. It’s unfortunate, then, that this initial half, this affecting recontextualization, is far more alluring, articulate, and formally expressive than what is to follow.

A protracted static medium-wide climaxes the opening half: our two young characters express their conceptions of depression, boredom, and the possible methods to avoid or address these maladies. Behind them the sun sets, dusk into night, a stunning landscape swallowed up by the encroaching shadows. But this is also the film’s emotional climax, the entire second half a more direct and flattened exploration of the woes Shim’s diegetic screenwriter broods over. Abruptly making a trip to the countryside she writes, and therefore also fantasizes about, unable to find lodging and caught in writer’s block, she stumbles upon an intimate Inn, where she’ll need to make close acquaintance with its keeper, Benzo, whose accommodations are haphazard and ill prepared. The development of their relationship coincides with more explicit pronouncements regarding the shape of their sadness, encumbering the lush introductory text with a thudding literalism, which, while understandably tacit to the structural integrity of characterization across the work, also attenuates the complication coursing through the overarching dynamics. Miyake enforces a slight, pointed rendition of his themes in the adaptive process: a progression of reductionism. As it ends, the too simple reconciliation of creation-as-spirit envelops the emotional contradictions that gently unfurled prior, stifling resonance in favor of a clarity whose tidiness is dishonest to the logic of both characters and their narrative confines. Though, perhaps, as the title’s own literalism suggests, these unambiguous faculties could be the make-up of a stark realism constructed from the remnants of its escape. The simplicity could be just another gesture toward the inescapable circumstances our characters will continuously shamble through, like a willow tree’s always bowed branches as they sway in the wind. As a facilitated narrative, however, the edifice and its lingering attributes can neither stave off disappointment, nor provoke greater curiosity. — ZACHARY GOLDKIND

Together

In Michael Shanks’ body-horror-comedy Together, the recently-engaged but longtime-dating couple of Millie and Tim (played by real-life spouses and frequent creative collaborators Alison Brie and Dave Franco) find themselves stranded in a mysterious, underground chamber after being caught in the rain while hiking in the woods. The chamber, which looks as though it’s taken decorating tips from the Bhutanese cave at the beginning of The Empty Man, has a murky pool of water at its center, and after Tim drinks from it (ignoring Millie’s concerns), he finds himself forcefully drawn to the woman he’d previously demonstrated reluctance to commit to. As in literally. When they awake, still on the floor of the chamber, Tim finds a sticky film has developed on his leg, effectively functioning as industrial-grade super glue, briefly adhering his skin to Millie’s. And things don’t exactly get better once he violently rips himself free of her and they climb free, returning home. Despite claiming, in a heated exchange, that he feels like a prisoner in their own home with no real sense of identity or autonomy in the relationship, Tim develops an uncontrollable physical compulsion to be near his new fiancée, which manifests itself in some alarming ways: things like being guided, as if by an invisible hand, to be close to her even when she’s at work, or how, when he’s asleep, he unwittingly sucks the hair from her head down his throat (it all a bit like the psychic bond between E.T. and Elliott, only with less whimsy). The one-time commitment phobe has been struck by an insidious case of codependency; he’s being tormented by a metaphor.

What Together is doing here isn’t exactly subtle, although in fairness to Shanks and the film, it’s hard to say that subtlety was ever the objective. Early scenes are larded with dialogue solely for the benefit of the audience that paints a portrait of an atrophying relationship. Gigging musician Tim has long dreamed of being a rockstar, but, now 35, his “taking the plunge” and moving upstate with Millie seems to be an acknowledgement that his career is going nowhere and he’s clinging to her as a lifeline (she at least has the stability of being an in-demand grade school teacher). We’re told that the couple haven’t had sex in forever, with Millie falling into a practiced habit of propositioning Tim and anticipating him politely rebuffing her with some variation on how tired he is and saying “maybe tomorrow.” The film gradually doles out a traumatic backstory for Tim that dovetails with the themes of the film while also explaining his recent disinterest in intimacy, but the routines and rhythms may strike a nerve with anyone who’s been in a relationship that’s shifted into a gear where you start to feel more like roommates than lovers. Even that recent engagement comes with a rather damning asterisk: tired of waiting for Tim to take the lead after all this time, Millie instead proposes to him in front of all their friends at their going-away party, and he’s so dumbstruck (either by the inversion of traditional gender roles or that he’d never contemplated marrying her) that he leaves her hanging, still on bended knee, for a small eternity before eventually mumbling “yes.”

Body-horror is a rather pliable subgenre when it comes to social commentary — one need only look back to last year’s Best Picture-nominated The Substance to identify a recent example that permeated the zeitgeist — and Shanks has devised a skin-crawling (literally) scenario to explore fears of losing one’s individualism and, indeed, the entire sense of the self by committing to another person, which is represented here as two bodies physically merging together. At first, Millie is relegated to a concerned maternal surrogate. She tends to Tim’s emotional and physical wounds while becoming increasingly exasperated by his newfound clinginess, which even lends the film a Freudian bent as Tim desires, on the most primal of levels, to be physically inside of her. However, after an impromptu, rather painful, tryst in a school toilet, the sickness passes to Millie as well, and soon they’re functioning almost as living magnets. Tim and Millie’s attempts to quarantine one another at opposite ends of the house fail as their bodies override their willpower, contorting themselves into inhuman permutations (accompanied by considerable “cracking and snapping” foley effects), dragging them by their fingertips toward one another before bloodlessly grafting their arms together. Needless to say, separating from one another in the morning isn’t quite so bloodless, as it requires several belts of whiskey, muscle relaxers, and a Sawzall (it should be addressed that while the electric saw moment is prominently featured in the film’s marketing, gorehounds will probably be disappointed with how much is elided in the sequence, presumably as a budgetary concession).

For all of the DIY surgery and rubbery conjoined prosthetics — there’s a subplot in the film about a couple of missing hikers with echoes of our main characters which belatedly provides the requisite, creature-feature jump scare — what’s likely to be triggering for some viewers is how it presents the fairly commonplace ebbs and flows (and the anxieties that come with them) of cohabitation and fidelity as something abnormal. In the film, sharing your life with someone and sacrificing some amount of personal freedom to do it is literally akin to an alien presence invading the body and robbing one of their self-governance and even personhood. Sounds hyperbolic, sure, but, then, there’s a reason even many happy couples keep separate checking accounts and bathrooms. The film seems to be cheekily arguing that you can only go so far as two individuals and that true equilibrium can only be achieved when you tear down the barriers you put up between yourself and your partner and embrace functioning as a single cohesive unit. Essentially, learn to stop worrying and love combining your record collections and quiet nights at home watching the same junky reality shows.

Together is so message-first in its approach there’s never any shortage of symbolism to note as everything tends to be laid directly on the surface. It’s the sort of film where characters quote Plato in everyday conversation simply so we can get an ominous callback to it later on, or it sets up its tongue-in-cheek climatic needle drop so far in advance that you’re going to kick yourself when you finally hear it. However, it’s somewhat more academic qualities threaten to stifle its effectiveness as a genre film. Together has its squeamish moments, but it’s not particularly thrilling on the whole, and everything other than the Brie-Franco dynamic (both actors admirably commit to the punishing pratfalls required of the scenario) feels rather anemic by comparison. The film can’t decide whether the mythology of the chamber — we’re eventually told it was once a “new age” chapel that collapsed into the ground — is entirely irrelevant or hugely consequential, which leads to late exposition dumps — including the old standby of the incriminating home video playing on the off chance one of our heroes wanders into what is ostensibly an empty house — from the secondary antagonist hiding in plain sight who delivers off-brand Clive Barker lines like “the ultimate intimacy in divine flesh.” Even more frustrating, the film seems to be working backwards from the revelation in its final shot; waving off both the psychological implications — which feels very much the point of the entire film — as well as the practical realities for a cute “gotcha.” Together wants you to think very much about what this all means but, at the same time, not very deeply about it. — ANDREW DIGNAN