u/btschicka

It's Wilde's third film after Booksmart overperformed and Don't Worry Darling had a complicated run. The cast is Rogen, Norton, Cruz, Wilde. R rated, 107 minutes, sex comedy angle. Sundance bidding wars don't always translate but the fact that Netflix and Apple were in it before A24 took it is at least worth watching.

Directed by Kenji Tanigaki who's spent most of his career as a stunt coordinator and fight choreographer. Cast is Xie Miao, Joe Taslim, Yayan Ruhian, Jeeja Yanin, Brian Le. That's a genuinely unusual lineup and it premiered at TIFF Midnight Madness which is where The Raid also premiered. Make of that what you will.

Xie Miao was doing wire-fu with Jet Li in the 90s as a child actor and basically disappeared from Western radar. Taslim went from The Raid to Sub-Zero in Mortal Kombat and is now leading this. Yayan Ruhian and Jeeja Yanin are in supporting roles which either means the film is stacked or they got five minutes each. Genuinely don't know which.

The original Kane Pixels series worked because of its constraints ie. cheap software, no budget, dread generated entirely through spatial logic and sound design. Parsons has talked about keeping the core rule intact: the rooms don't change, they just keep going. Your brain tries to map it and fails. That's the horror.

Curious whether anyone else is thinking about this tension - between the grammar of found footage / liminal horror and the grammar of theatrical A24 filmmaking.