I get emails pretty much daily asking me if I want to review this film or that. Most of the time, I ignore those emails. Periodically, I glance at them and then ignore them. When you’ve read thousands of press releases, it becomes harder and harder to care.
But the press release for Doomsdays caught my eye. Specifically, a quote from Indiewire: “Think Wes Anderson crossed with Michael Haneke.” I’m sure a lot of work went into crafting the rest of that press release, but you know what? It was all a waste. All it needed was that quote. Because your reaction to that quote tells you everything you need to know. Does that sound amazing? Yes, it does. Well alright, you should see the movie. Does it sound dumb? You’re dumb.
And Doomsdays is great.
Doomsdays
Director: Eddie Mullens
Release Date: June 5, 2015
Rating: NR
Doomsdays wears its Wes Anderson influences on its sleeve. The meticulous, often symmetrical compositions and indie score serve as a reminder that there is a filmmaker out there who many people call an auteur. But it’s reductive to just think about this film in terms of Wes Anderson. It’s Haneke’s Wes Anderson, for sure, but who I really kept coming back to was neither of those directors; it was Christian Mungiu, director of one of my favorite films of all time: 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days. But it didn’t remind me of that film so much as his follow-up, Beyond the Hills. What struck me about Beyond the Hills was how real it all felt. The reality came primarily from the use of extreme long takes (Mungiu knows how to do a gosh damn long take) and the moments that would take place within them. There’s a particular moment where a bunch of characters build a cross and then tie another character to that cross. The whole thing happens in one shot. And as I watched it, I thought, “They only did this once, right? It’s way too freaking complicated. The lumber costs alone would make multiple takes impractical.”
Turns out they averaged upwards of 40 takes of each shot, because they didn’t get enough rehearsal time and so the first few (dozen) takes were his rehearsal. But even so, it was the feeling that this wasn’t just a shot that was done over and over and over again that sold it. The moment felt natural, real, and horrific.
Every extra action in a long take requires setup. A character takes off their jacket, their tie, their shoes. Each of these things must be put back into place before the take can be redone. It’s complicated, and it requires a lot of time. But it’s those little moments that make it feel real. Because you’re not thinking about that work that went into setting up the scene. You’re just thinking about the scene itself. It feels real. Even if they had to do 16 takes to get it right.
By contrast, I’m reasonably sure that every single shot in Doomsdays was done precisely once. The opening shot, a car pulls up, two people get out. They go to their door, see that someone has broken in. They go inside. And then a window shatters, and two people come out. One of them runs up to the car, pulls out a knife, and jams it into the tire. It deflates. They run off.
Doomsdays is a low-budget film. They raised just $22,000 on Kickstarter. But in the opening shot, they shatter a window and stab a tire. And that’s just the start. This is a film with dozens of locations, and the protagonists damage nearly every single one. And I spent most of the time thinking about how horribly wrong everything could have gone while being consistently impressed with just how much mayhem they committed on what must have been, again, a very low budget. Because it’s the kind of film that only gets made on a low budget, because the audience is, by design, rather small.
Dirty Fred and Bruho wander through rural-ish towns and break into homes. They stay there for a day or two, raid the fridge, liquor storage, and medicine cabinet, and then go off to the next place. They have no real home and no destination. They walk everywhere, because Bruho hates cars. (Hence puncturing that tire in the opening shot.) There are character arcs (though much of the actual arcing takes place in back half of the movie and feels occasionally rushed), but there’s not much of a narrative arc. They get some more companions and things happen and escalate, but it all feels relatively inconsequential. The ultimate life decisions (one of which feels far more genuine than the other) should be momentous, but they aren’t. They’re just things that happen.
This isn’t a bad thing, to be clear. It’s just a reminder that this is a film with a very particular audience. It’s a film for people who are okay with occasionally rough performances, because beyond those rough performances are moments of brilliance. In Cannibal Holocaust, there’s a moment where one of the characters shoots a pig. He actually did that. And then, just for a second, he breaks character, clearly affected by it. But the shot isn’t over. He still has to monologue. But they only had the one pig, so that’s the take that ended up in the film. Doomsdays doesn’t have anything quite so obvious, but I expect there were moments where director Eddie Mullens thought, “Well… it is what it is.” Each shot builds to something. The longer the take, the more likely something destructive is to happen within it. At the end of 45 seconds, someone throws a brick through a window. And you know what? That may well have been some random person’s window.
The imperfections actually serve to make the whole thing feel more real. Not realistic, per se, but more like a series of events that actually took place. They broke that window (and that other window (and that other one)), they destroyed that car, and they broke all those glasses and vases and whatever else got in their way. I saw them happen with my own eyes, not in real life, but in a real document of those actions. It’s a meticulously composed documentary about rebels without a cause. And it’s absolutely fascinating.
