Mucho Mucho Amor
School boards all over the country seem determined to turn our educational system into a Joseph Conrad novel. If you’re just looking for something to stream so you can take a break from the insanity, or if you’ve given up on humanity entirely and are looking for some form of digital otherspace to occupy, hopefully I can help. Please wear a mask. Think of other folks, I beg of you.
As always, below is our list of recommended streaming titles for the week. Look back at past issues of the Scene for more recommendations: March 26, April 2, April 9, April 16, April 23, April 30, May 7, May 14, May 21, May 28, June 4, June 11, June 18, June 25, July 2, July 9, July 16.
Psycho Granny
Psycho Granny on Hulu
Look, if the title alone isn’t enough for you, I don’t know what to say. Maybe you’re the kind of person who is burned out on the world and its myriad cruelties; it’s possible that a murder mystery isn’t where you need to be right now, and that’s understandable. But if you’re not at least intrigued by a film called Psycho Granny, then I just feel sad for you. Director Rebekah McKendry (she did that video introduction for Amityville II at the Belcourt’s 12 Hours of Terror last year) has a gift for creative mayhem and clever setups that distinguish this film from Lifetime’s array of women-in-jeopardy films (see also: A Deadly Adoption and May director Lucky McKee’s Kindred Spirits). And in star Robin Riker (Alligator, Get a Life), McKendry and her crew have a neutron star of ice-cold wit giving a dynamite performance that reads as both subversively camp and deeply unsettling. Some folks have never wanted to serve a meal to a full table and tell each and every person how they’ve failed as a human being, and that’s sad. Psycho Granny delivers that and more.
Mucho Mucho Amor on Netflix
Mucho Mucho Amor is a fascinating look at late, beloved Puerto Rican astrologer and icon Walter Mercado, whose force of will and genial, unconventional personality helped shape millions of lives for decades on Spanish-language television. To use modern terminology, Mercado was nonbinary and asexual. And if global culture during his reign sought to dismiss him or use gay jokes at his expense (it did), he kept going with a deliriously flamboyant style (contrast points: Siegfried and Roy, Liberace) and a lot of kindness. To non-Spanish speakers, watching this film is a testament to how important it is to never stop experiencing and learning about new things. There’s a traditional show-biz documentary formula to Amor’s structure: rise; financial/legal crisis; measured rise again; triumph; devastating text coda. But with such a fascinating subject, you accept it and move on. If nothing else, the outfits are going to instill strong feelings in you, and I implore anyone with a sense for fabric and jewelry, for sparkle and shape, to get into this film, because Walter Mercado was a sartorial icon who is more than worthy of your attention.
Palm Springs on Hulu
Palm Springs has a Groundhog Day foundation with millennial-anxiety accents and knows how to layer in some genuinely surprising developments. It also benefits from uncertain times by claiming at-home (and drive-in) space without the theatrical battle that likely would have seen it swept aside by one of the in-limbo tentpoles gunning for prime summer box office. Andy Samberg (charmingly acerbic) and Cristin Milioti (delivering a truly complex performance that haunts) are our amiable stars, working through all sorts of issues in a desert-paradise time loop. Too often, the plot can get in the way of the story, but there are a lot of interesting flourishes (sexplorations, unexpected fauna) that allow us to understand facets of the human mind that most comedies don’t delve into. (Relevant point to today’s quarantine audience: How big is ennui as a motivating factor in the decisions that you make?) Also, the cast is game to get weird with it — seriously, I could watch a whole movie of an entire wedding party dancing to Patrick Cowley’s spaced-out Frisco Disco. In theaters, this kind of brainy weirdo comedy nearly always underperforms. But in the arena of the streaming world, it breaks through and offers you a psychic daiquiri. Good enough.
Sea Fever on Hulu
An uncompromising movie about the ethics of quarantine as well as a confrontation with a goopy, drippy, betentacled, bioluminescent sea sphincter, Sea Fever is a great Irish tale of the sea. It’s got a lot on its plate, and keeps all its juggling materials in the air, and its refusal to play out as expected from scene to scene is a captivating choice. Writer-director Neasa Hardiman knows the vast majority of audiences have seen the foundational texts of this kind of Infiltrating Creature Horror, so the zigs and zags we’re given hit hard. Maritime tragedy and misfortune are commonplace enough that there are countless shanties and dirges of the sadness that humanity finds on the sea, so the addition of advanced cellular biology and mechanical engineering meshes quite well with the established setting. Hermione Corfield (as the redheaded doctoral candidate Siobhán) is an intriguing presence, and her adherence to scientific protocols allows her to be a signifier of certainty and propriety. Or rather, you know how the original Ghostbusters is so caught up in its libertarian fantasies and demonizing the character from the EPA that it made the weakening and destruction of that agency all too easy over the intervening decades? Sea Fever is the opposite of that. As enjoyable as the 1989 Leviathan, but very much rooted in The Now.
Lake of Death
Lake of Death on Shudder
Lake of Death is a new take on one of the seminal Norwegian horror texts — 1942’s De Dødes Tjern, made into the 1958 film Lake of the Dead, which is sadly not streaming anywhere but I am absolutely dying to see. This atmospheric psycho-thriller delivers exquisite design and photography and a truly immersive dreamscape stuffed to the gills with family secrets, surprise trapdoors, old legends, dreams of slime and slasher archetypes filtered through contemporary “youth” society. Podcaster Bernhard (Jakob Schøyen Andersen, looking like Thomas Kretschmann in The Stendhal Syndrome) makes a good impression, and star Iben Akerlie is quite good as the troubled somnambulist Lillian, with a very delicate role and a lot of emotional heavy lifting to do to make the whole film work. American editor Bob Murawski (The Other Side of the Wind, the first Spider-Man trilogy) keeps that flow lush and tense, and it’s a good entry for domestic viewers to discover Norwegian horror. It’s always fascinating when horror archetypes cross-pollinate with other traditions, and adapter/director Nini Bull Robsahm has a gift for balancing uncertain spaces with universal tropes — she lets the physical space of the lake house interact with the frayed edges of Lillian’s experience.
