Rick’s Reel Recommendations | 3 Films on Screens

FILM COLUMN | ISSUE EIGHT | SCREENS

Written by Ricky Lai (he/him) | @rickthelai on IG & Letterboxd | Columnist

1. Millie Lies Low (Michelle Savill, 2021)

As everybody’s third or fourth choice for a Commonwealth nation — including ourselves, judging from how many of us move to Australia — it’s perhaps not as much a mystery where all the self-diagnosed ‘imposter syndrome’ in New Zealand comes from, especially if you’re competing with your colleagues for the best opportunities. The economy doesn’t trickle down, but resentment very much does; if only passive-aggression was a currency we could exchange for a plane ticket somehow. Millie Lies Low, a cringe-comedy hybrid of Ingrid Goes West (lying through the screen) and After Hours (a humiliating odyssey through the city), seems concerned about what parts of ourselves we’ll be taking with us, if and when we leave. By all means, architecture graduate Millie (Ana Scotney) should be stoked to leave Wellington for New York after her final project earns her a prestigious internship, but this is no such success story, and a panic attack that compels her off the plane leaves her stranded in Pōneke again. With her friends and family believing she’s off to a new and lucrative life overseas, Millie can’t bring herself to confess that she bungled an opportunity her peers would kill for and spends the next days faking a social media presence while scraping together any money for the next possible flight. Millie isn’t new to pretending to be somebody she isn’t, and by drifting invisibly through other people’s walls, she eavesdrops in on what the people in her life are (and aren’t) saying behind her back. What we learn is that Millie is no saint, though you’d have to argue with a wall whether the last few, excruciatingly painful scenes of Millie Lies Low are what she deserves for her inauthenticity. Maybe she could use the shock, anyways, and if there is a light at the end of the tunnel, it is far closer to home than she thinks; not in the shoes, career, bed or pyjamas of somebody else.

1. Speaking Parts (Atom Egoyan, 1989)

Societal and technological developments succeed so radically that it’s tempting to infer from the past that we’ve known about these successions all along. ‘Prescient’ or ‘ahead of its time’ can be equipped to describe anything from Paddy Chayefsky to old episodes of The Simpsons, so allow me to make an equally lofty swing for the perverted labyrinth of screens in the slow-burning psychological thriller Speaking Parts. As far as I’m concerned, the only thing in this film out of step with our present world is the neon signage. Egoyan’s uncanny masterwork flickers between a web of characters in a hotel – custodians and guests alike – who communicate, flirt and share secrets with one another through different kinds of screens. Some mediums are familiar, and others forecast Egoyan’s vision of the future. Rented VHS cassettes, film cameras, phone sex, video chat, and “digital memorials”: a proto-Internet database for the deceased where the push of a button replays treasured videotape footage of their moments living. So elusive are these people’s motives, bathed in neon-glow colours and analogue scan lines, that the story threatens to simply slip between your fingers. But you can still recognise what is so creepy about it, because this film’s vision of a new kind of intimacy is parallel to our own; plugged into the grid and coping through the barrier. I am reminded of a fellow Canadian grotesque, Videodrome (1983) by the one and only David Cronenberg, about a live-broadcast snuff channel, which ends with a neo-fascistic announcement of the ‘new flesh’, as our selves merged with an ever-expanding cloud of signals and data. Double-bill these movies together, perhaps! In the pursuit of modernity, you could even watch them simultaneously on two screens, side by side! Get to know everything!

1. In Order Not to Be Here (Deborah Stratman, 2002)

Backrooms cemented the fascination around ‘liminal spaces’ as a key theme of pop culture in the 2020s, but how’s this for an early, horror-adjacent study of suburban design? In Order Not to Be Here begins with surveillance footage from a helicopter; a fugitive surrendering between crosshairs. Shortly after an unsettling title card, mistyped on purpose (‘IT IS NOT NECESSARY TO BE SOMPEPLACE ELSE IN ORDER NOT TO BE HERE’), the film stifles into a quiet, thrumming montage of empty indoor and outdoor white-collar spaces at night. This is when everybody is asleep – or rather, when everybody should be asleep. You can sometimes hear a distant police siren, or the hum of an air conditioning unit, or the benign murmur of unseen power lines. Open curtains on a house feel menacing because we are the ones looking into the windows. A grid of windows glowing purple, yellow and green next to a vacant parking lot – oh, that’s a McDonald’s playroom. We then watch from high above, suddenly, as a stranger fleeing the police attempts to disappear into the night, then fails, because we can still see him through the thermal camera. (For a similar, harrowing film built from real combat pilot footage, seek Éleonore Weber’s There Will Be No More Night.) Everything in this film can be recognised, but we have to wonder exactly why it is being shown to us, and whether being familiar necessarily means being safe.