The Media Tourist

Sarah Paulson is a monster mom in this wickedly inventive, twisty-turny horror thriller

Run
Starring Sarah Paulson & Kiera Allen
Directed by Aneesh Chaganty
PG-13
Nov. 20 on Hulu

Sarah Paulson has carved quite a niche for herself as a scream queen on the dark underside of nine seasons of the FX anthology franchise American Horror Story, and then, more recently, in Netflix’s Ratched, the backstory of the sadistic nurse who’d years later torment the psychiatric patients in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

Now she’s pitch-perfectly cast as a most malicious mother in this taut, terrifying little gem of a horror-thriller about a homeschooled teen and her helicopter mom from hell.

Run pairs Paulson with newcomer Kiera Allen as her daughter, Chloe, who figures out just how dire and dangerous things are, but then finds it hard to get away—because she’s in a wheelchair.

The movie opens with Paulson’s character, Diane, at a hospital, eyeing her newborn baby. Then it zooms ahead 17 years, introducing us to now-teenage Chloe, and her routine of daily injections, meds and inhalers to treat her asthma, diabetes, arrhythmic heart, paralyzed legs and other conditions.

Chloe’s been raised in almost total isolation by Diane, who smothers her with attention, watches her like a hawk, prepares all her meals, administers her therapy and maintains her strict homeschooling schedule.

But Diane’s been doing other things, too, secretive things, unnatural things—sinister things. 

Chloe is spunky, bright and smart—and she’s waiting anxiously to hear back from Seattle’s University of Washington, where she’s applied for admission after she completes her senior coursework. Hopeful for a new chapter in her life, she perks up every day when she hears the mailman pull up in their driveway.

Diane, however, never lets Chloe check the mail—or have a computer in her room or get an iPhone. And when Chloe begins to suspect her mom has been giving her medicine that isn’t what her doctor prescribed, it worries—then later terrifies—her.

“I’ve got you,” Diane tells Chloe, burying her in a hug that gives us the creeps—and makes Chloe want to flee.

But, of course, that’s something not so easy for someone in a wheelchair.

Director Aneesh Chaganty’s only previous feature, Searching, was another modest but extremely effective thriller, about a father who breaks into his daughter’s laptop when she goes missing, desperately looking for clues in her online footprints. He’s an impressively economical filmmaker who’s all about streamlining; he knows how to make every shot, every scene, every edit and every second of screen time count. In Run, everything clicks and ticks like devilish clockwork to draw the knot of suspense and dread tighter and tighter as it goes.

Paulson is frightfully fit for the part as Diane, a mother whose “love” has clearly crossed the line from protective to possessive and poisonous. Her dark eyes are perfect for hiding an abyss of ill intentions, and there’s a disturbing, dark void behind Diane’s wan smile. There’s never any specific mention of Munchausen by proxy, a psychological disorder that involves the abuse of someone by their caregiver. But the condition has repeatedly made for a juicy pop-cultural cocktail of crime, medical mystery and genuine horror, as depicted recently on TV in HBO’s Sharp Objects and Hulu’s The Act.   

As Chloe, Allen makes a powerful debut in her first feature film. She more than holds her own with Paulson, a veteran of nearly 70 TV and movie roles. The young actress—who was studying creative writing at Columbia University when she got the part—uses a wheelchair in real life, giving Chloe a calm, resourceful authenticity that makes it easy to root for her in her ever-deepening dilemma, sometimes inch by excruciating inch.

Wheelchairs are confining, by their very nature. Setting Run inside a house, for most of the film, adds to the aura of confinement, claustrophobia and challenging spatial parameters; to Chloe, looking down a narrow staircase from the second floor can like peering into a chasm of the Grand Canyon. Chaganty, who also co-wrote the original screenplay, creates a pressure-cooker atmosphere, a sense that something has to eventually bust loose, blow up—or break out.

The movie is full of edge-of-your-seat, wickedly inventive, twisty-turn, shock-ya surprises, compounded by the irony of a protagonist not being able to do what the title suggests—and the situation clearly warrants. One scene features Chloe McGyver-ing her way across a frozen rooftop with extension cords, a blanket and a screwdriver. Another involves her sneaking out of a movie theater outing with her mom to attempt a frantic, furtive trip to the local pharmacy, across the street.

Run may make you recall a couple of famous films and actors, notably Jimmy Stewart in Hitchcock’s Rear Window and James Caan in Misery. Stewart’s character witnesses and then solves a murder, all while recovering from a broken leg in his wheelchair. And Caan, as a famous novelist, escapes from the clutches of a psycho fan, turning the tables on her—also from his wheelchair. (A minor character is Run is even named “Kathy Bates,” a wink-wink nod to the actress who won an Oscar for playing Caan’s tormentor.)

Those guys didn’t let wheelchairs keep them from doing what they had to do, and neither does Chloe.

The wheelchair element makes Run even more breathless fun as a fright-night delight, but its real fear factor comes from the powerhouse female duo that duels it out in its house of horrors. Paulson is a formidable, five-star scream queen, now as a monster masquerading as a mom. But young Allen proves herself a most capable co-star—and a sensational opponent.  

Jimmy Stewart and James Caan would be proud.

Carrie Coon & Jude Law star in searing domestic drama

The Nest
Starring Jude Law & Carrie Coon
Directed by Sean Dirkin
Rated R
On Demand Nov. 17, 2020

What’s something that couples argue about?

If you said “money,” you’d assuredly have the No.1 answer on Family Feud—and you’d also hit the bullseye for this searing domestic drama, about a marriage that begins to fall apart when the husband’s dreams of financial wealth fail to match his reality.

Set in the apex of the go-go 1980s, Jude Law is Rory O’Hara, a dashing London entrepreneur who came to America and made a million dollars trading commodities. His wife, Allison, (Carrie Coon), trains horses and gives riding lessons. Rory has a 10-year-old son (Charlie Shotwell), and he dotes on Allison’s teenage daughter (Oona Roche) like she’s his own.

Everything seems like a picture-perfect snapshot of an upper-middle-class blended American family—until Rory abruptly tells Allison one morning, “I think we need to move. There’s an opportunity.”

We can sense that Allison has heard this before—and we also sense the trouble that might be brewing in paradise. “This will be our fourth move in ten years,” she reminds him. “The money’s fine—right? Right???”

The family packs up—Allison’s favorite horse and all—and follows Rory, again, this time back to the United Kingdom. He’s already gone before them, with a get-rich scheme that he’s confident will make him a fortune. When they arrive, he greets them at the gateway of their new home, a sprawling country manor with cavernous wings and entire floors of empty rooms that they’ll never use, a massive table so huge and heavy it can’t even be moved, secret doors and passageways, and a scandalous superstar history.

“Led Zeppelin stayed here!” Rory excitedly tells his kids.

But Allison isn’t so excited, especially when she finds out that bills aren’t getting paid, Rory hasn’t been truthful about his new job and there’s a lot more money going out than coming in. There’s not near enough to feather this nest. Plus, their daughter starts rebelling, and their son is being bullied at school.

Director and writer Sean Dirkin, whose previous film was the marvelously twisty Martha Martha May Marlene (2011), creates a handsome, super-stylish portrait of a malignant marriage and its descent onto a battlefield of scorching verbal warfare, bitterness, resentment, scorn and emotional volatility. Ugly rarely looks so elegant.  

Law makes everything he does imminently more watchable, from movies (The Talented Mr. Ripley, King Arthur: The Legend of the Sword, Vox Lux and the Sherlock Holmes franchise) to TV (The Young Pope, The Third Day). His Rory is superb, a consummate B.S. artist who became addicted to easy wealth and fast money and now can’t let it go—even after his wife, his boss (Michael Culkin), an old buddy (Adeel Akhtar) and even a cabdriver all call his bluff. Coon builds on her notable appearances on TV’s Fargo and The Leftovers and in movies, including Widows and Gone Girl, to score an absolute knockout as Allison, her meatiest role yet. Just seeing her face, as she listens at a ritzy party to what she now realizes are Rory’s lies, is like watching a master class in acting; you can practically feel the life draining from her, behind her smile, with every breath.

And the story is very much a product of its time and place. Rory, a native Englishman, wants to come “home” a conquering hero, having learned the ropes of rampant American capitalism in the era of wildcat, corporate-raiding deregulations and free-market Reaganonomics. “You know you’ve succeeded when you get tired of America,” marvels a London coworker. Now Rory wants to show his fellow Brits some good ol’ slick American king-making.

But this emperor has no clothes.

As the power dynamic in their relationship surely shifts, Allison becomes more assertive, more emboldened, more assuredly in charge. The “crap” she’s been shoveling, dealing with Rory’s lies and his non-starter enterprises, becomes more than a metaphor when she takes a job offered by a local farmer, just as another scene puts her, literally, in the driver’s seat while her husband has to hoof it home.  

And their house becomes a character itself, a symbol of the big empty shell of the high life that Rory and Allison have bought into but can’t afford to actually buy. Its massive Kubrickian hallways seem to swallow the family into its bottomless maw, losing them in its shadows, its secrets and its echoes of the past. In another movie, it could very well be haunted. When Allison discovers her beautiful, beloved horse, Richmond, has taken ill, it parallels the state of her ailing marriage.  

A richly detailed, slow-burn churn, with tension and turbulence always just below its surface, The Nest seems like it could have been a devilishly good miniseries, like Ozark, its characters and storylines longing to be stretched and extended—because it feels more like a sweeping, tragic, trans-American saga than a quick, over-and-out snapshot.

“You’re embarrassing,” Rory tells Allison.

“You’re exhausting,” she spits back.

And Law and Coon are both exceptional, as a couple whose caustic love curdles before our eyes in the year’s most majestically cinematic family feud.

Glenn Close & Amy Adams pan for Oscar gold in edgy ‘Hillbilly Elegy’

Hillbilly Elegy
Starring Amy Adams, Glenn Close & Gabriel Basso
Directed by Ron Howard
R
Available Nov. 24 on Netflix

Hollywood’s year-end awards race heads for the hills with director Ron Howard’s gritty adaptation of author J.D. Vance’s 2016 best-seller, featuring two top actresses digging deep for Oscar gold.

Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir: A Memoir of a Family and a Culture in Crisis recounted his hardscrabble youth in the Ohio Rust Belt and his family’s roots in rural Kentucky, where he’d often return for childhood visits. More than just a tad controversial, it drew fire from some critics, who lambasted Vance for his moralizing and his broad stereotyping of the region.

Howard sidesteps most of Vance’s musings on socioeconomics, politics and the mire of systemic working-class poverty, focusing instead on the “memoir” of the story—a powerfully personally odyssey of how Vance overcame the odds, in a world of brawling, abusive, working-class kin, and got out, got an education and earned a law degree from Yale. And Howard also focuses—wisely—on the substantial talents of his all-star leads, Amy Adams as Vance’s drug-addled mom, Bev, and Glenn Close as his flinty, defiant grandmother, Mamaw.

It’s a wild, wooly, clan-takerous melodrama with a high-class Hollywood pedigree. 

With a total 13 total Oscar nominations (but no wins) between them, Adams and Close claw ferociously into their roles, as if nominations 14 and 15 may be in there somewhere—in the trashy trail of Bev’s needles and pills, Mamaw’s puffs of cigarette smoke, and the constant din of almost everyone yelling, screaming and scolding.  

“Perch…and swivel!” says Mamaw, giving her upturned middle finger to someone as a parting gesture.

The movie whipsaws, in flashbacks and flash-forwards, between J.D. as a child and young teen (played by Owen Asztalos) and now-young-adult J.D. (Gabriel Basso)returning to Ohio from Yale, years later, to help clean up a mess with his druggie mom, who’s graduated from opiates to heroin.

As the two women who shaped him, Mamaw and Bev are J.D.’s hillbilly yin and yang, practically elemental forces of creation as well as destruction. They’re nurturers, but also capable of catastrophic wrath and ruin—as in one memorable scene when Bev, in a fit of fury, threatens to crash the vehicle she’s driving, with young J.D. in it, ending both of their lives.

The film suggests that both Bev and Mamaw are broken—crushed—because the American dream that once cradled them has instead crumbled around them, leaving them frustrated, cheated, angry and foraging for shards of hope.

J.D. finally goes to live with his Mamaw after Bev’s spiral of self-destruction hits rock bottom. Life with his grandmother isn’t exactly a breeze, but Mamaw shapes up J.D. with strict rules, tough love and a work ethic that points the way to his high school education and beyond.

Bev and Mamaw aren’t glamorous roles—indeed, you’ll have to search hard to find movies where Close or Adams look scragglier or act scrappier than they do here. Close (who disguised herself as a man for Albert Knobbs and vamped it up as a Disney villainesses in Cruella) disappears almost completely into her character, close to being unrecognizable beneath a tent of baggy clothing and matronly makeup. Adams has played a princess, a scientist, a scam artist, Lois Lane, a Julia Child wannabe and a number of other wide-ranging roles, but this is her first full-on junkie, digging in a motel toilet for a flushed-away needle.  

And both actresses dominate the movie so completely with their ferocious performances that they eclipse Vance—and almost everything else—in his own story. Bennett (a young standout in The Girl on the Train, Thank You for Your Service and Swallow), however, makes a nice, soft counter impression as J.D.’s sister, Lindsey, giving a natural, nuanced performance as she goes about holding down a job, raising her kids and trying to hold her life together.

But the movie can be a bumpy, unpleasant ride. Watching the toxic malfunctions of J.D.’s situation, a parade of Southern culture on the skids, often just isn’t very pretty, or very enjoyable. And the theatrics of Adams and Close are sometimes so hyper-dramatic, they underline in bold type what we already can clearly see: a mountainous ash heap of awful parenting, a megadose of painful addiction and a tawdry, torn backdrop for a wrenching coming-of-age survivor’s tale.  

What made Vance’s book such a hot—and hotly debated—topic was how he melded his personal story to a bold manifesto about America itself, and raised some hard questions about some complex issues. Howard—who shot for the moon in Apollo 13, reached for the stars in Solo: A Star Wars Story and won a directing Oscar for A Beautiful Mind—sticks to a much more straight-line tale about Vance, his scruffy family and his tumultuous tug of war with himself about how to reconcile who he is with how he got there—and the two women who formed the pillars of his life, for better and for worse.

It’s not the Hatfields and the McCoys, but this feisty, all-star family feud sets its own brawling benchmark for hillbillies in Hollywood, especially as it barrels into this year’s gold-plated Oscars season like a backfiring truckload of rowdy, backwoods relatives.

“Family is the only thing that means a godd*mn,” proclaims Mamaw.

If you say so, Mamaw—but it certainly doesn’t hurt to pack the truck with a best-selling book, Ron Howard, Amy Adams and Glenn Close!