Quick notes on some entries in this year’s Seattle International Film Festival, which opens tomorrow. I’ll have a piece with some capsule reviews on Friday.
The Night of the 12th (Dominick Moll, 2022). The director made promising early noise with With a Friend Like Harry… and Lemming, so it is a relief to see him back in criminal suspense mode. The film is a policier about a murdered teenager, and it tells you at the top that this is an example of an unsolved case, so expectations of a French small-town Zodiac are not unfounded.
The Eight Mountains (Felix van Groeningen, Charlotte Vandermeersch, 2022). The filmmakers previously worked on The Broken Circle Breakdown, an oddball Belgian item; this one tracks male friendship over many years, most of them spent in the Italian mountainside.
Chile ’76 (Manuela Martelli, 2022). A strong performance by Aline Kuppenheim carries a tense movie set during the Pinochet terror. She plays a well-to-do woman drawn into anti-government intrigue when she answers a priest’s call to help a young man with a bullet in his leg. Heckuva score by Maria Portugal, from whom I assume we will hear more, soundtrack-wise.
To the North (Mihai Mincan, 2022). Is it really based on a true story? Slightly hard to tell from the film itself, but the center of it is a Romanian youth who stows away on a cargo ship for North America, not realizing that the captain has a tendency to throw unwanted passengers overboard. A Filipino worker chooses to help. This is an extremely useful set-up for suspense, as you might imagine.
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