(Couch university has met twice already! In case you missed it,  we overthought Barbie and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel; it was Succession, Black Mirror, Killing Eve and Next Door.)

A Haunting in Venice (2023)

Type of movie: Spooky whodunit.

Hard sell: Like Knives Out but without the humour.

Branagh’s bender: This is the third Agatha Christie adaptation done by Kenneth Branagh, after Murder on the Orient Express (2017) and Death on the Nile (2022).

A séance transpires in a haunted Venetian palazzo--once an orphanage wracked by the plague, now a lavish private home--featuring (among others) a famous medium, a leading novelist, a grieving mother and the world’s greatest detective, all of whom are subsequently and by chance locked inside the mansion due to a window-rattling thunderstorm, whereafter a death occurs that is more (or at least as) curious as the one that had assembled them all there in the first place, and voilà: the whodunit--compellingly confused by questions of the medium’s authenticity and doubts surrounding the final minutes of the suicide victim whose ghost she is attempting to reach--is very, very, very much afoot.

We may credit Agatha Christie, upon whose novel Hallowe’en Party (1969) the movie is based, with the character and plot beats, which arrange themselves pleasingly according to the traditions of the formula: the clues are just conspicuous enough (say, if all this guy needs is a nap, why’d they lock him in a soundproof room?) to empower the viewer with feelings of case-cracking confidence, yet are threaded too delicately into too many intersecting subplots to sacrifice any of the tension incumbent to the genre’s pervading question.

So far, so good. Chuck in some severe camera angles and a creepy bespectacled kid and, hey, we’ve got a pretty good movie, ideal for the (duh) Halloween season. For your buck, expect: the reproduction of Christie’s puzzle pieces in a credibly spooky and not-badly acted environment (although--god love her--Tiny Fey’s old-timey American accent seems more like a win for her agent than for the dramatic arts), with extra kudos to the sound effects squad for exquisitely creaked floorboards and ear-caressingly slo-mo-smashed teacups.

That’s it, though. Directorially, the movie takes a steadfast-and-serious line and avoids having any fun whatsoever, despite existing in an environment that begs so hard for fun that the avoidance itself manifests, for the viewer, as a sort of hunger that will continue to go unsatisfied until you go watch Knives Out (2019). I mean, it’s a murder mystery in a haunted house during a thunderstorm where everybody has a motive: that’s the plot of a board game, isn’t it?

But the movie insists on its pretension that these characters are serious dramatic figures. At one point, the plot freshly underway, Fey stops on the spooky spiral staircase and looks back at the detective: “I knew you were in there somewhere. All it took was a corpse and look at you: Hercule Poirot all over again.” Her delivery attempts to eradicate the campness natural in those sentences, but the seriousness she offers instead doesn’t fully land because it relies on character development that there just isn’t time for. If we were inside a Poirot biopic then maybe, but this is a Christie whodunit necessarily packed credits-to-credits with uncuttable information: the motivations of every suspect; the details of every (supposed) murder; the complications of every relationship; the conspicuous clues; etc. Add a few red herrings and we’re officially out of space, yet Kenneth Branagh’s face is still attempting to transmit Shakespearean levels of depth in what is essentially a game of cocktail-hour Cluedo, and the whole project--despite being totally watchable, don’t misunderstand me--fizzles just a little as a result.

The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar (+3 others) (2023)

Type of movie: Not a movie. Four short films by Wes Anderson (totalling some 90 minutes), all adaptations of Roald Dahl short stories.

Gender balance: No balance. Just men.

Schtick alert: The films testify to the usual Wes Anderson aesthetic, so haters and lovers (respectively): be warned.

Nothing is fresh about Wes Anderson anymore, but--one must nevertheless concede--Wes Andersonianism still feels fresh when you find it casually on Netflix, simply because, well, who else is doing stuff like 20-minute adaptations of Roald Dahl short stories at a no-prisoners level of artsiness (square aspect ratio! smash the fourth wall!) while managing to get major actors (your Cumberbatches, your Fienneses) for every part?

For some reason, nobody is except Wes Anderson. Regardless, and before mounting any details or critiques, one may already suggest that finding big-budget artsy short films in mainstream places is, for the sake of variation in cinematic fare, its own win.

Anyway, to the films themselves: The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar; Poison; The Rat Catcher; and The Swan. All bleed with the Anderson aesthetic (hereafter “the Aesthetic”) that everybody knows and some people still love: deadpan deliveries from A-listers, a symmetrical and overtly stylised mise en scène, complexity via story-within-storyism rather than actor performance, etc. Even more than in other Anderson films, these shorts are narration-dominated: in each, a fast-talking narrator narrates while simultaneously being a character in the scene, which manifests for the viewer somewhat as a distraction (in the sense that the story is being told twice, the one telling overlaying the other) but which also generates the fourth-wall tension that will eventually provide humour, should you find any of it humorous (I did). This confused approach to narration graces the absurd when still another narrative layer is added: the shorts occasionally cut to a cluttered living room in which Dahl himself (Fiennes) ur-narrates from the same script as the in situ narrator.

Phew.

Is any of that actually very clever? Possibly not. It remains frustrating when a film fronts an irreducible-because-grand rhetoric over story (here: what is narration? what hides in the cracks between dimensions? what is life?) and doubly so when an intelligent and absorbing artist like Anderson does this again and again and again. In The Royal Tenenbaums (2001) we exist inside the chapters of a book being narrated; in The Life Aquatic (2004) an on-screen filmmaker makes a film we watch; in Asteroid City (2023) play actors enact a play we see; etc.

In these short films the Aesthetic is once again toted out and, despite my growing tired of it, is put to effective use. You do end up wondering about genre: is this drama, televised audiobook, or even--so directly is the viewer acknowledged--mockumentary? As in earlier Andersons, when the pace is turned up, the deadpan schtick reliably creates humour when we cross between these parallel lines of narration.

All that’s left, then, is the (mere) question of what is actually being narrated, and Dahl--familiar from Anderson’s The Fantastic Mr Fox (2009)--remains a good fit. Possibly this is because his prose is so shorn of details: characters are usually described via the (often vile) things that they do or have done, such as the rat catcher’s colourful rat-ending methods. These dramatise naturally, i.e. they carry their literary weight in visuals rather than in philosophicals, leaving plenty of breathing room for all the narrative trickery we continue to let Anderson indulge in.

Fair Play (2023)

Type of movie: Relationship drama (but serious; not, I repeat not, comedic). Think Marriage Story (2019) as, loosely, a genre-sharer.

Zeitgeist watch: If you were to reduce the film to one thing, that thing would be a study of #MeToo-era toxic masculinity.

Hey, isn’t that…? Lest it bother you too: you know her from Bridgerton (2020-2022) and him from Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018).

Young, hot people doing it in a public bathroom. An engagement ring slipping from a pocket onto the floor. Laughter, hesitation, ebullience. She says yes.

So begin our duo of protagonists in Fair Play, which is to say: happily. But--fear not--the spiralling begins immediately afterwards: at the workplace they share, she gets a promotion he was expecting and becomes his boss. Over the rest of the movie, his initial wave of almost-legitimate disappointment at this news festers into a compellingly subtle depiction of toxic masculinity before, it must be said, erupting into more of a raging depiction of toxic masculinity.

All of the movie’s tension, as you might expect, comes from the frictions within the lovers’ relationship: as his complex-yet-not-complex emotional breakdown intensifies, she--and viewers alongside her--discover by degrees its ultimate depths. This how-low-will-it-go tension is juiced effectively by having them share a workplace, a throat-slashy New York financial house where office romances are on an HR-needs-to-know basis; when she becomes his boss, it actually does become unethical for HR not to know about their engagement. One more source of tension is that, for a time at least, the idea is preserved that she might have some faults as well; however, this question is resolved (a little too soon) to prepare for an ending that rejects any ambiguity surrounding its final message. Which is: women aren’t going to take any more shit.

That decision to reject ambiguity is itself the main disappointment--if there is any--of the film. Writing a male character so treacherous yet intelligent (not emotionally intelligent; god, not emotionally intelligent) is its main accomplishment, but it takes the popular hard line of disallowing him even the raggediest cat-vomited morsel of redemption: where, early on, charitable viewers can forgive him for at least part of his reaction, by the end menfolk have collectively been thrown into a very hot crematorium. This is kind of fun to watch, of course, but it also means that curtainfall is the moment when you feel like we’ve finally arrived to the articulation of the problem, which is--cue the klaxon--masculinity is in crisis! This is no longer news, however, which is why I hope we start seeing (and soon) more movies using that problem as a starting point rather than an ending one.