Short Takes

THE FALL Something like a pain-fueled, R-rated Princess Bride, The Fall straddles the intertwined worlds of storytelling and story. One half is a child’s-eye-view tour of the convalescent wing of a Los Angeles hospital, set during the infancy of the film industry. Heartbroken-to-the-brink-of-suicide stuntman Roy (Lee Pace) finds himself fabricating a tale about a band of brethren brigands to entertain a recuperating 9-year-old girl (Catinca Untaru, so adorable that I vacillated between feeling saccharine-sick and wanting to adopt her). The other half of the film involves the girl’s visualization of this improvised bedtime story, as the multinational, one-dimensional bandits sally forth in billowing slo-mo on an epic journey to topple a tyrannical governor. As Roy’s depression deepens, the story darkens accordingly. Director Tarsem, a commercial-shoot hired gun whose first and last feature until now was 2000’s The Cell, grabbed vistas for his bloviated pictorialist fantasia on cross-continental on-location shoots, pulling together a supersaturated, border-blurring National Geographic travelogue of steppes, deserts and Ottoman extravagance. (The director’s Indian origins gives the movie’s references to Orientalism an interesting twist.) If the human details are often problematic, the IMAX-grade bombast, ceremonial camera and Jodorowsky-esque eclecticism still combine for a singular spectacle. —Nick Pinkerton (Opens Friday at Green Hills)THE STRANGERS Lean, mean and unrelenting, writer-director Bryan Bertino’s chamber horror piece strips the genre down to the slimmest of elements: two uneasy people, a dark house full of creaks and shadows, and faceless tormentors whose eerie white masks pierce the darkness like bad moons. And for the most part, Bertino’s confident, insinuating cat-and-mouse direction invigorates yet another trapped-in-a-cabin shocker, still several cuts above the generic torture porn peddled by the previews. Using a true-crime come-on straight out of the ancient rube-fleecer The Town That Dreaded Sundown, Bertino leads with an ominous eenie-meenie-minie-mo montage of random rural homes, before settling on one: the romantic hideaway where lovers Scott Speedman and Liv Tyler are playing out their unplanned break-up. Already on edge, they’re interrupted in a clumsy tryst by a knock at the door—the first contact by prankish marauders whose funny games quickly turn nasty. For at least the first hour, first-time director Bertino eschews worn-out shock cuts and sonic hotfoots for long takes and unnerving deep focus, placing the prey and the creepy-crawling predators in the same charged, confining space to terrifying effect. Too bad Bertino’s script reasserts the movie’s essential schlockiness with the usual improbable behavior and cheapjack nihilism, culminating in a truly shoddy final scare—a gotcha so desperate you wonder if Bertino the director forgot he was making the millionth dumb psycho thriller all along, and suddenly remembered. —Jim Ridley (Opens Friday)