jürgen fauth’s muckworld

A thriller about the horrors of parenthood, Joshua takes its cues from the tradition of The Omen, Rosemary’s Baby, and Poltergeist. In a spacious apartment overlooking Central Park, a family celebrates the arrival of their second child. Brad and Abby Cairn (Sam Rockwell and Vera Farmiga) are squabbling with her mother-in-law (Celia Weston) while Uncle Ned (Dallas Roberts) plays a piano duet with nine-year-old Joshua (Jacob Cogan). But when Ned launches into “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star,” Joshua throws up all over the fancy Fifth Avenue carpet. Projectile vomiting: check.

You see, Joshua prefers the melancholy music of Béla Bartók, and unlike his scruffy, affable dad, he wears his hair in a neat part. To his mother’s distress, he is fond of embalming his teddy bear, and at night he creeps around corners and pops up behind the closing doors of the stainless-steel refrigerator. Spooky children staring down darkened hallways and pressing their noses against TV screens showing static: check.

To build its oppressive atmosphere of dread, Joshua, directed by George Ratliff and written by Ratliff and David Gilbert, relies on borrowed imagery, but snappy dialogue and memorable acting help to update genre cliches to the present. The film offers apt observations about the fears and anxieties of upper-class parents circa 2007, and especially Farmiga (wasted in The Departed) puts a contemporary face on the fearful mother beset by a screaming baby, meddling in-laws, ever-present construction noise, and the alarmingly intelligent first child who appears to threaten her entire adult existence.

I’ll gladly confess that Joshua had me in its grip for most of its running time. The film provides an involving experience while it lasts, but the payoff is less than satisfying. Without spoiling it, all I can say is that Joshua doesn’t resolve so much as simply end, and the story does not hold up to much retrospection. What must have looked like a clever idea on paper turns brittle on screen, and our willing suspension of disbelief goes unrewarded. Little Joshua will never haunt our dreams like Damien or the lost child from Don’t Look Now.

Joshua. George Ratliff, 2007. **

Joshua is slated for release on July 6. Here’s the trailer:

Yet another Tribeca dud, Taxidermia is one of the most unpleasant movies I’ve ever sat through. György Pálfi (Hukkle) directed this Hungarian Grand Guignol grotesquery that riffs on exactly three ideas: pig fucking, speed eating, and self-taxidermy. Based on short stories by Lajos Parti Nagy, the movie presents the fable-like history of a freakish family. In the first section, a harelipped country pervert who can shoot fire from his dick is looking for ever-new kicks in well-lubricated glory holes and Hans Christian Andersen tales that turn into their porno versions. Imaginative camera work and extreme close-ups create an intense physicality, but they don’t lead to a place you want to follow: by the end of the segment, butchery, adultery, and shocking acts of bestiality and necrophilia sent waves of nervous giggles through the audience. The walk-outs started.

The remainder of the movie tells the stories of the pig-fucking pervert’s offspring. His son, born with a curly tail (ha ha!), becomes one of the Eastern Bloc’s most successful “sport eaters,” an obese guy in a wrestling leotard wolfing down chunky soups and Russian horse sausage from troughs. Between rounds, the competitors power-barf and chat about the groupies in the audience. Like an SNL sketch that stretches its conceit well past the breaking point, Taxidermia milks the “sport eating” joke for more than its worth: there’s the cross-swallow, the hollowed out red star filled with caviar, the threat of lock jaw. It’s as if Pálfi had decided to take the “mint leaf” sequence from Monty Python’s Meaning of Life and turn it into a feature film. There seems to be some satirical intent, but it’s not pointed enough to sting.

The third section is the most repulsive: close-ups of taxidermy in progress were never on my must-see list, and the skinning, gutting, and sawing is made worse by the fact that the pervert’s ghoulish grandson is operating on himself. And I haven’t even told you about the gutted fetus, to be filed under “sights that cannot be unseen.” Not every movie has to be a pleasant experience, but Taxidermia struck me as a pointless gross-out, inventive but without sufficient character or story to support its grotesque excesses.

Taxidermia. György Pálfi, 2006. *

• Filmbrain finds Taxidermia “a fascinating treatise on excess, desire, and the politics of the body.”
• The trailer: