Movie Review: Elle is a cat-and-mouse revenge game
French film Elle has been called a "rape revenge comedy".
Odd but not inaccurate.
At the very start of the movie, Michele (Huppert) is brutally raped at home in the afternoon.
Before you have time to digest the horror of what is happening, Michele is alone, bleeding, and picking herself up off her kitchen floor.
She calmly takes a bath. She orders sushi on the phone, asking: "What is a holiday roll?"
It is a silly question, designed to make you laugh.
There are moments like this throughout the film.
Michele goes about her life - nagging her mother for keeping a toy boy, pleading with her loser son to dump his abusive girlfriend, keeping up with her regular midday trysts with a friend's husband.
But she experiences flashbacks to the rape, and her attacker starts sending her stalker-ish text messages.
Who is he? Michele plays a game of cat and mouse with several men in her life whom she suspects, trying to tease out her attacker.
Dutch auteur Verhoeven, who directed RoboCop and Total Recall, has a knack for mixing the uncomfortable with the entertaining.
There is a deft balancing of moods here, and Huppert is chillingly superb.
Her Michele refuses sympathy from friends and family - and the audience.
You will flinch, you will laugh, you will be mightily disturbed, but not in the way you would expect from a "rape movie".
Rating: 4/5
MOVIE: Elle
STARRING: Isabelle Huppert, Laurent Lafitte, Anne Consigny, Charles Berling
DIRECTOR: Paul Verhoeven
THE SKINNY: The owner of a successful video-game company is raped in her own home. The attacker sends her cryptic messages, and she embarks on a quest to find him.
RATING: M18
Elle is showing exclusively at The Projector.
Now showing
RESIDENT EVIL: THE FINAL CHAPTER (NC16)
The Resident Evil movies work for me for one reason: Milla Jovovich.
This is her sixth outing as zombie killer Alice yet she looks the same as she did in the first Resident Evil flick back in 2002.
Over the years, she has turned Alice into an empathetic anti-hero and you cannot help but feel for her, one who has gone through so much and has been left for dead so many times.
For those who did not follow the series, you can easily pick up the plot in the prologue.
But plots are not crucial in the Resident Evil movies.
It is all about how Jovovich kicks butt, how her kill count gets higher, how the undead creatures get wackier, and how the villains get crazier.
"I have been doing this my whole life," says Alice to a ragtag group of survivors of the zombie apocalypse.
That statement mirrors Jovovich's career. She has made the billion-dollar franchise her own.
The franchise is meant to be fun B-horror/action, and it has certainly achieved that.
- JOANNE SOH
Rating: 3/5
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Patrick Wilson plays architect and amateur crime writer Walter Stackhouse, who lives with his unstable wife, Clara (Jessica Biel).
His desire to be rid of Clara escalates when he meets the sexy and bohemian Ellie (Haley Bennett).
Walter also develops an interest in the murder of a woman who, he suspects, has been killed by her husband. Things get complicated when Clara goes missing.
Set in the 1960s, this drama is lovely to look at. The production design is sophisticated, and the cast cannot be more gorgeous.
But the plot is convoluted, and the characters are bland.
Such a waste of talent.
- JOANNE SOH
Rating: 2/5
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Rotten Tomatoes Rating: 71%
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Rotten Tomatoes Rating: 59%
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