Writer-director Philippe Lesage follows up The Demons with another coming-of-age saga that fixates on the relatable, if grim, blues of self-awakening. Primarily following the teenaged Guillaume (Théodore Pellerin) and his college-aged sister, Charlotte (Noée Abita), Genesis charts how both are shaped by their experiences with sexual desire, subtly observing their behavior and, occasionally, the darker side of affection.

Guillaume commands much of the film’s attention. From the first shot, in which he stands on a desk in his all-boys boarding school and leads his mates in a barroom shanty, it’s obvious that Guillaume is a charismatic class clown who knows how to force all eyes onto himself. Yet the teen can also be withdrawn and introverted, and his relationships with his friends and teachers are constantly in flux. His puckish behavior is often celebrated by classmates and even some teachers, like the sardonic Perrier (Paul Ahmarani), who in one class invites Guillaume to do his impersonation of him, which the teen performs with hilarious specificity and to the initial delight and then discomfort of the professor.

Wounded by the boy’s exposure of his flaws, Perrier subsequently singles out Guillaume for harassment, berating him without cause and even screaming at the kid over the slightest perceived transgression. Guillaume’s peers are less extreme, but the same kids who applaud his classroom antics are also quick to ignore him inside their shared dorms or in social situations, content to simply use him for amusement during class time.

Guillaume’s awkward relationship to others at the boarding school is exacerbated by his closeted sexuality, which isolates him from the heteronormative activities of his friends. In one scene, Lesage films the boy in slow motion as he wanders through a house party surrounded by boys and girls kissing, trying to fit in by cautiously snaking his arm around a girl, who casually shrugs him off as he keeps walking. Like much of Genesis, the moment is at once thematically obvious and beautifully moving, with the sudden swell of morose pop transforming the scene into a lyrically intense expression of the boy’s sentimental education. The impeccable blocking places the other kids in every square inch of the room save for a pocket of dead space around Guillaume, poignantly emphasizing his loneliness.

Charlotte, by contrast, seems to have an easier time of things. More carefree and confident than her brother, she’s at first hampered only by her inane boyfriend, Maxime (Pier-Luc Funk), who broaches the subject of an open relationship with a forced sense of casual suggestion, only to later sobbingly backtrack after she kicks him to the curb. Charlotte ends up with the older Theo (Maxime Dumontier), whose charming demeanor and respectfulness suggests actual maturity. When Lesage films Charlotte in a club using the same slow-mo style that he did for Guillaume’s glum traipse through the house party, the tone is considerably brighter, with the young woman free and ebullient about her contentment.

Soon, however, Charlotte must also contend with the fallout of various sexual stresses. Lesage grapples with matters that are all too common to darker coming-of-age stories, and he captures the film’s most harrowing scenes in single takes. Yet if the filmmaker doesn’t shy away from plainly depicting such horrors as sexual violation, he avoids wallowing in the misery he piles onto his characters. Guillaume and especially Charlotte suffer, but Lesage pulls focus onto the aftershocks of trauma rather than the traumatic events themselves. Sometimes Genesis even ducks reinforcing the bleakest of expectations, as in a scene of Guillaume baring his soul to his classmates that ends in a surprisingly warm fashion.

Indeed, the bright colors and sedate direction of Genesis isn’t an ironic contrast for the difficult content within but a cue for the perseverance of hope in trying times. That optimism is borne out in the final act, which shifts focus to Felix (Édouard Tremblay-Grenier), the protagonist of The Demons, now a cheery teen attending what appears to be a bible camp. As he plays guitar with counselors and plays around in camp, he gravitates toward Beatrice (Émilie Bierre), a young girl who’s clearly as interested in him as he is in her. Compared to the more vicious heartbreak facing Charlotte and Guillaume, Felix and Beatrice’s budding feelings are presented innocently and sweetly. Their first flirtations end the film on a hopeful note that suggests that not all stories of young self-discovery need be solemn, and that we submit ourselves to the perils of affection because of its outweighing graces.

Cast: Théodore Pellerin, Noée Abita, Édouard Tremblay-Grenier, Maxime Dumontier, Jules Roy Scicotte, Pier-Luc Funk, Paul Ahmarani, Antoine Marchand-Gagnon, Émilie Bierre Director: Philippe Lesage Screenwriter: Philippe Lesage Running Time: 130 min Rating: NR Year: 2019

With Bone Tomahawk, Brawl in Cell Block 99, and now Dragged Across Concrete, writer-director S. Craig Zahler has refined a highly particular style of pulp that runs both hot and cold. The tone is communicated up front by the films’ titles, which are garish and plainspoken, as if to say that operatically bad shit happens as a matter of course.

That’s the attitude that Zahler’s characters adopt as well, as they tend to face atrocity with the air of people who derive their strength from low expectations. Violence erupts in Zahler’s films with an offhand suddenness that’s often authentically shocking, which is heightened by a variety of formalist contradictions. Zahler pays intricate attention to deliberately crummy, vague, “universal” settings, and invests stereotypical characters with behavioral curlicues that render them just human enough so that their deaths sting. Zahler’s scenarios are deliberately absurd, yet he pumps them up with all sorts of odd, nearly docudramatic details, and this mixture of the banal and the hyper-specific imbues his films with an element of the uncanny.

Following a bruiser as he killed his way toward the inner sanctum of a surreally hellish prison, Brawl in Cell Block 99 was pointedly unpolitical—implying, in a macho manner typical of revenge films—that politics are a luxury for those who’re insulated from the “real world” of killed-or-be-killed. Which is to say that this apolitical texture is actually reactionary, suggesting, via omission, the essential futility of liberal humanist ideals. Dragged Across Concrete renders this idea much more explicit. The film’s theme is articulated when the poor and multiple sclerosis-plagued Melanie Ridgeman (Laurie Holden) says that she’s as liberal as an ex-cop can be, and that she never thought she was racist until she moved into her current neighborhood, which is low-income and rife with juvenile delinquents of color, who’re shown, in a reductive scene, to harass Melanie’s daughter.

The various cops and criminals of Dragged Across Concrete, white as well as of color, take the fraudulence of liberal beliefs as a given, writing them off as fantasies indulged by a populace that’s prosperous enough to evade their ramifications. (This theme is in the air right now, also driving Jordan Peele’s Us.) The film’s plot kicks into gear when Melanie’s husband, Detective Brett Ridgeman (Mel Gibson), and his partner, Anthony Lurasetti (Vince Vaughn), are suspended for exerting excessive force while arresting a Hispanic drug dealer, which a civilian films on a phone. Zahler acknowledges the detectives’ cruelty, while, per the dictates of the crime genre, also allowing us to revel in their bitterness and power.

This have-it-both-ways quality is another of Zahler’s provocations, as he’s explicitly saying that we come to these sorts of films to see the rough and cathartic exertion of force, and in spite of whether we think that force jibes with our real-world ideals. Zahler is right. The cruelty of his films, which is laced with a biting wit, has a way of clearing pop-cultural air that’s often inhabited by preachy think pieces and well-meaning Oscar bait, or even by genre films that nevertheless feel the need to solicit approval via a redemptive theme. Zahler heads for the gutter instead, asking us to empathize with characters who refute our idealisms.

After subduing the drug dealer, Ridgeman torments the dealer’s sexual partner, Rosalinda (Liannet Borrego), by showering her with cold water and forcing her to stand in a bedroom in her underwear while they question her. This footage isn’t filmed by other parties, so the extent of Ridgeman and Tony’s vigilante tactics are unknown by the public, prompting us to wonder what else they’ve gotten away with over the years. Yet they feel cheated for being suspended—feelings which their superior, Lt. Calvert (Don Johnson), casually shares. Such scenes elucidate the thorny specificity of Zahler’s vision while deliberately screwing with our moral compass. Ridgeman and Tony’s treatment of Rosalinda is disgusting and Zahler sensitively dramatizes her humiliation. So are the racist jokes the cops exchange with Calvert, though the actors’ performances and Zahler’s dialogue and staging are kinetically snappy. Zahler recreates that discombobulating split in sympathies you may have when someone you like says they voted for Trump, or rues the days of comparatively less fettered police brutality.

Yet there’s also a sense that Zahler is outside of Ridgeman and Tony’s self-pity; one suspects that politics mostly matter to the filmmaker in terms of aesthetic. If he’s nostalgic for the good old days, presumably before our culture grew so “politically correct,” that nostalgia is primarily directed toward genre films. Zahler is fighting for art’s right to be offensive and disreputable, voicing sentiments that are shared by many people in this country which cannot, and should not, be aired without scrutiny. He grooves on straight talk, however nasty, fashioning crime thrillers that force even liberal audiences to confront their inner fascists.

Zahler particularly appears to miss the days when violent Mel Gibson vehicles were relevant, and he concocts a role for Gibson that weds the actor’s own prejudices and controversies with his masochistic “Mad Mel” persona—two sides that were always closely intertwined anyway. Gibson rises to the occasion with a tightly coiled performance that’s so unapologetically closed-off that it’s deeply and disturbingly poignant, bringing to mind the conflicted range of emotions that’s elicited by John Wayne’s performance in The Searchers. Ridgeman’s feelings of being put out to pasture are aligned with Gibson’s stint in movie jail after recordings of his abusive rants at his wife were released. It’s no accidental coincidence that recordings destroy Ridgeman not once but twice over the course of Dragged Across Concrete.

Ridgeman is the film’s central avatar of rage—an embodiment of working-class American discontent that Zahler reveals to be shared by characters of varying colors, genders, and social statuses, most notably Henry (Tory Kittles), an African-American ex-con with limited options, with whom Ridgeman forges an uneasy alliance. Tellingly, given the aversion of Dragged Across Concrete to left-wing politeness, their emotional epiphany springs from their mutual willingness to call one another, and to each be called, the n-word.

Zahler takes a standard action-movie scenario—in which crooked cops try to rob drug dealers—and stretches it out to an epic, ultraviolent, and comic study of the petty, often working-class-centric nonsense that stymies people on a daily basis. When Henry rousts his mother’s john out of the house, Zahler lingers on the man as he fumbles with the locks on the door. Following Ridgeman and Tony as they tail a requisitely heartless Eurotrash killer, Vogelmann (Thomas Kretschmann), Zahler fashions an elaborate and ingenious set piece that alternates between two cars’ worth of men talking strategy. When a struggling mother, Kelly (Jennifer Carpenter), returns to work at a bank after a prolonged maternal leave, Zahler devotes a lengthy, weirdly touching and funny moment to the speech her verbose boss, Mr. Edmington (Fred Melamed), gives for the occasion. And this scene only intensifies the pain of what follows, which Zahler foreshadows with a masterful composition where we see a van of killers pass Kelly in the reflection of a window as she checks her make-up.

Dragged Across Concrete is a lurid ode to detail—to the professionalism that Zahler questionably admires in Ridgeman and Tony. (His lack of sentimentality, in the tradition of pulp writing, is ironically quite sentimental.) The film’s settings, like those of Brawl in Cell Block 99, are drab and anonymous, though Zahler shoots them with an exhilaratingly pared-down sense of purpose, with sharp physical details that complement the unexpected narrative flourishes. These backdrops suggest every place and no place at once, and are rendered with hard lighting and symmetrical framing that recalls the glory days of John Carpenter. The film’s dialogue is terse, intelligent, yet often somehow un-showy, suggesting the flip and funny things people often say while at work, which are rarely captured in cinema. These qualities cohabitate with a deliberately nasty vision of America—a union that Zahler embraces for its intense and suggestive social tension. He’s already a master of the pulp film, and with Dragged Across Concrete he doubles down on its best and worst elements.

Cast: Mel Gibson, Vince Vaughn, Tory Kittles, Jennifer Carpenter, Michael Jai White, Laurie Holden, Don Johnson, Udo Kier, Thomas Kretschmann, Liannet Borrego, Justine Warrington, Fred Melamed Director: S. Craig Zahler Screenwriter: S. Craig Zahler Distributor: Summit Entertainment Running Time: 162 min Rating: R Year: 2018

In Get Out, Jordan Peele smartly and unnervingly used the lens of horror to refract black anxieties about living in white America. The film’s central terror, “the sunken place,” a sort of limbo within the self, was a metaphor that encompassed issues of identity, consciousness, and the autonomy of one’s own black body. Peele’s follow-up, Us, suggests a more elegant C.H.U.D. for the Trump era. Even though it’s not as tidily satisfying as Get Out, the new film is both darker and more ambitious, and broader in its themes.

Us opens in 1986 with a little girl, Adelaide (Madison Curry), wandering an amusement park in Santa Cruz, California. She drifts away from her distracted father and takes refuge during a storm in a hall of mirrors, whose signage invites her to “Find Yourself”—and she does, literally encountering her doppelgänger. In the present, Adelaide Wilson (now played by Lupita Nyong’o) revisits the same area with her husband, Gabe (Winston Duke), and their teenage daughter (Shahadi Wright Nelson) and prepubescent son (Evan Alex). A trip to the beach reawakens her fears of her shadow self, and that very night, her lookalike—also now grown—and red-clad lookalike family invade the Wilsons’ home and terrorize them.

These invaders are glass-darkly versions of the Wilsons, rawly animalistic semi-clones seeking vengeance for the cursed opposite-but-equal lives they’ve been forced to lead: Every time the Wilsons had a hot, tasty meal, their counterparts ate raw, bloody rabbit, and every time the Wilsons bore loving, well-enough-adjusted children, their counterparts birthed psychotics.

Peele’s script adopts an idea that Michel de Montaigne expressed in the title of his essay “Le profit de l’un est dommage de l’autre” (which loosely translates to “The Profit of One Is Harm to the Other”)—not just that capitalism has its winners and losers but that every gain a person makes directly correlates to another’s loss. The Wilsons are conspicuously upper-middle class—they have a summer house, a sweet car, even a boat—and their crimson-suited doubles represent a there-but-for-the-grace-of-god-go-I reckoning with a version of what their lives might have been like. This seems to play on the fears of some economically ascendant African-Americans: What do I owe to the community? Have I left others behind? Have I gotten soft?

As in Get Out, this film’s African-American characters come under assault not in the inner cities of the white imagination, but in supposedly safer upper-class suburban spaces. But Us also moves past such racial themes. (Warning: Spoilers ahead.) The shadow vengeance meted upon the Wilsons is in fact a plague, and it’s one that touches every family in Peele’s film. It’s a plot point that the filmmaker introduces with the unexpected—and quite violent—deaths of the Wilsons’ closest friends: the bourgie, boozy, and very white Tylers, including a mother, played by Elisabeth Moss, who sips rosé at the beach before it hits “vodka o’clock.”

In Us, Peele is less concerned with blackness than he is economics, as the howling, homicidal doubles that torment the Wilsons represent an avenging under class. “What are you people?” Gabe asks when the terror begins. “We’re Americans!” his wife’s double hisses. It’s tempting to read these Americans as the embittered Trump base, rising up to destroy the false idyll that was the comfort—for some, at least—of the American status quo.

The film’s screenplay is carefully constructed, so much so that the punchline to a seemingly throwaway knock-knock joke is retroactively understood as a clever foreshadowing of horrific things to come. Drawing on his comedy background, Peele has an uncanny ability to insert laughs into moments of high dread, relieving the tension without diffusing it. And that tension can be overbearing; Peele’s filmmaking is sophisticated, crafting eerie atmospheres and maximizing suspense as his camera moves with the gracefulness of Adelaide the one-time ballet star, glimpses of whom the viewer occasionally sees in flashbacks.

The most striking visuals come near the end, as long-deferred exposition introduces a nightmarish sci-fi subterranean clone town consisting of tunnels that resemble hospital corridors. There, doubles were compelled to mimic the movements of their surface-dwelling counterparts. These damned bodies without their own souls then come up for air to kill and then hold each other’s hands, inspired by Hands Across America, a commercial for which opens Us. (And on the shelf next to the TV showing it is a VHS copy of C.H.U.D..) In the ‘80s, this collective action, we’re told, was meant to raise hunger awareness, and that’s what it does in the present as well, though in a different way. The nationwide mole people, come to eradicate their oppressors, are certainly hungry, not just physically but emotionally and spiritually—for the comforts and pleasures and basic necessities they’ve so long been denied.

Cast: Lupita Nyong’o, Winston Duke, Shahadi Wright Joseph, Evan Alex, Elisabeth Moss, Tim Heidecker, Anna Diop, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Cali Sheldon, Noelle Sheldon Director: Jordan Peele Screenwriter: Jordan Peele Distributor: Universal Pictures Running Time: 116 min Rating: R Year: 2019