The House of Leaves
An intermediate read that bends all means of book writing. The longer you read, the less you expect.
Parasite
4.5★ Parasite feels like the cinematic equivalent of realizing the floor beneath you has been slowly tilting for the last two hours and only noticing when everything starts sliding. What impressed me most isn’t the social commentary (which is excellent and about as subtle as a brick through a window), but how absurdly precise every frame feels. Bong Joon-ho directs with the confidence of someone who already knows exactly where you’ll be looking before you do. The house itself becomes a chessboard, every staircase a loaded gun. The first half is almost mischievous. It’s funny in that “this definitely won’t end well” kind of way. Then somewhere along the line the movie quietly changes genres three separate times without asking permission. I also love how nobody is reduced to a cartoon. Everyone is exploiting someone, everyone is trapped by something, and everyone is just sympathetic enough to make the inevitable collision hurt. By the end, I wasn’t rooting for a person so much as I was bracing for impact. My only reason for not giving it the full five stars is that the ending’s emotional aftermath hit me more intellectually than spiritually. I admired it immediately, but it took a while to haunt me. Still, this is one of those movies that makes most thrillers feel like they’re playing checkers with missing pieces. Every time I think back on it, another detail clicks into place like a lock turning. The smell motif alone deserves its own film studies course.
Longlegs
4★ Longlegs feels like finding a VHS tape in your attic that absolutely should not exist. For most of its runtime, I was less scared by what was happening and more unsettled by the feeling that something was fundamentally wrong with the air inside the movie. Every room feels contaminated. Every conversation sounds like it’s being overheard by something invisible standing just outside the frame. What really worked for me was the atmosphere. Osgood Perkins directs like he’s trying to recreate a nightmare from memory, where details are missing but the dread remains perfectly intact. The film is obsessed with empty spaces, silence, and the sensation that evil isn’t chasing you—it’s already waiting where you’re headed. And then there’s Nicolas Cage. I don’t even know if “performance” is the right word. He exists in the movie the way a mold stain exists on a wall. Every time he appeared, the film somehow became both more ridiculous and more terrifying. It’s a balancing act that should not work, yet somehow does. My biggest issue is that the mystery is more compelling than the answers. The first two-thirds had me completely locked in, piecing together clues and searching every corner of the frame. Once the film starts revealing its hand, some of that hypnotic uncertainty evaporates. The questions lingered with me longer than the explanations. Still, I can’t stop thinking about it. Not because it scared me while I was watching it, but because it followed me home afterward. The best horror movies leave fingerprints on your brain. Longlegs leaves a smudge. I watched it at night and spent the next hour checking dark hallways for absolutely no reason.
Vivarium
3.5★ Vivarium is what happens when a two-sentence creepypasta gets trapped in a suburban housing development and somehow stretches itself into a feature-length existential crisis. The premise is fantastic. Genuinely one of those ideas that makes you pause halfway through and think, “Yeah, if this happened to me I’d be cooked.” The endless rows of identical houses, the artificial sky, the complete absence of anything remotely human—it all taps into a very specific kind of modern horror that feels less like a nightmare and more like a panic attack generated by urban planning. What I appreciated most was how committed the movie is to its bit. It never really explains itself in a satisfying way, which I think works more often than it doesn’t. The unknown is infinitely more disturbing than a lore dump. That said, I found myself admiring the concept more than the actual experience of watching it. The movie intentionally traps the audience in the same repetitive cycle as the characters, which is effective, but also means parts of it start feeling emotionally flat. At a certain point, I understood the misery so thoroughly that I didn’t need another reminder. Jesse Eisenberg and Imogen Poots do a lot with very little, and the child might be one of the most deeply irritating beings ever put on screen. Not in a bad performance way. In a “I would immediately walk into traffic if I had to deal with this for a week” way. By the end, I wasn’t terrified or devastated. Just weirdly empty. Which, to be fair, might be exactly what the movie was aiming for. An interesting film. A memorable film. A film that made me look at suburban neighborhoods differently for about three days. Never trusting a cul-de-sac again.
