Suspense/Thriller | www.jaredmobarak.com

REVIEW: Aala Kaf Ifrit [Beauty and the Dogs] [2017]

2018/03/202020/04/11 Jared Mobarak

What law forbids a human being from seeing a doctor? Fear should never be underestimated as a means for oppression or motivation because there are few emotions more potent. This is why totalitarian regimes use it as a weapon to silence those who dare find the courage to stand up for their rights. They sow fear into the masses, using it to gather support for new laws pretending to protect citizens that actually just insulate those in the position to make them. And if a rebellion somehow proves successful, adjustment…

REVIEW: Unsane [2018]

2018/03/192020/04/11 Jared Mobarak

Your life slips away from you, you know? The tagline to Steven Soderbergh‘s Unsane reads as follows: “Is she or isn’t she?” Its context stems from Sawyer Valentini (Claire Foy) being presented as an unreliable narrator. She’s picked up her life and moved it from Boston to Pennsylvania to escape the troubles of her past—namely a stalker whose lack of boundaries instilled enough fear to make her see him in places he wasn’t. We understand this struggle is real due to a one-night stand ending with her scream after the…

REVIEW: I Kill Giants [2018]

2018/03/132020/04/11 Jared Mobarak

We’re stronger than we think. While the main creative force behind I Kill Giants is unquestionably screenwriter Joe Kelly (whose limited comic series of the same name alongside artist J.M. Ken Niimura is the basis for his script), director Anders Walter‘s Oscar-winning short Helium shows he’s hardly a stranger to its subject matter. These two found success through the delicately complex experience had when a child confronts his/her as yet abstract conception of death wherein the infinite expanse of one’s imagination can manifest a path towards understanding. Few people find…

REVIEW: Black Wake [2018]

2018/02/162020/04/11 Jared Mobarak

I’m the prophet and you’re the messenger. The amount of zombie properties flooding the market these days has created an unavoidable sense of fatigue. As a result artists have begun turning certain aspects on their heads in order to differentiate one vision from any other. Sometimes this means crossing genres, manufacturing elaborate new mythologies, or playing with aesthetic. Jeremiah Kipp‘s Black Wake attempts to do all three as it utilizes a found footage format to reveal a calamity that’s more invasion than viral apocalypse. There’s still a horde of blood-hungry…

REVIEW: Like Me [2018]

2018/02/152020/04/11 Jared Mobarak

Tell me a story. While it may do a better job at depicting the nihilistic depravity of living through social media at the detriment of “real life” than Ingrid Goes West, Robert Mockler‘s Like Me still fails to capture the psychological prison this artificial life creates beyond its surface chaos. We watch Kiya (Addison Timlin) with a voyeuristic relish much like the viewers of her YouTube page—craving insanity as though it’s all an act because it very well could be exactly that. What we watch online isn’t inherently “real.” There…

REVIEW: Looking Glass [2018]

2018/02/062020/04/11 Jared Mobarak

I just needed some air. I can’t stop going back to an old Variety report from 2016 that contained a Braxton Pope quote about producing Looking Glass as what was then to be music video director Dori Oskowitz‘s feature length debut. He spoke about how excited he was to partner with the artist in bringing a “remarkable story of voyeurism and grief to the screen.” I read that statement and wonder where it all could have gone wrong since the finished piece now directed by Tim Hunter from a script…

REVIEW: DeKalb Elementary [2017]

2018/01/292020/04/13 Jared Mobarak

We’re all gonna die today. There’s a moment in Reed Van Dyk‘s DeKalb Elementary where the young, mentally unstable white male shooter (Bo Mitchell‘s Steven Hall) exits the school in search of a suicide-by-cop scenario. He opens fire on the police—receiving bullets in return—until the courageously calm black female receptionist (Tarra Riggs‘ Cassandra Rice) asks him to come back in so as not to hurt himself. It’s a surreal exchange because you place yourself in her situation and realize you would probably start silently praying that the cops do grant…

REVIEW: Maze Runner: The Death Cure [2018]

2018/01/252020/04/13 Jared Mobarak

It’s about knowing when you’ve lost. Could you sacrifice a percentage of the population if it meant saving mankind in its entirety? What about if it merely gave you a chance at that salvation? These are the big questions we ask ourselves at the end of the world—ones that force us to face the reality of our inevitable demise. We can infer that we’ll reach this point because we made a wrong decision in the past. And if the whole reason we’re about to be lost forever is our fault,…

REVIEW: Birdland [2018]

2018/01/242020/04/13 Jared Mobarak

Crime is nature. Some filmmakers keep their endings ambiguous so the art lingers with the viewer in order to interpret the piece rather than merely consume it. Writer/director Peter Lynch looks to go one step further with his noir Birdland (co-written by Lee Gowan) by rendering the whole a mystery wherein beginnings and ends are both fluid as far as linear coherency is concerned and meticulously structured to amplify the emotional machinations of his lead Sheila Hood (Kathleen Munroe). Lynch intentionally disorients so that mood overshadows action. He focuses on…

REVIEW: The Commuter [2018]

2018/01/222020/04/13 Jared Mobarak

One little thing. If the timeline is to be believed, the fourth meet-up between director Jaume Collet-Serra and Liam Neeson entitled The Commuter was the result of the latter rather than the former. Byron Willinger and Philip de Blasi‘s story went through the hands of at least two other stewards as well as a rewrite by Ryan Engle before finally going in front of the cameras. So one could hypothesize Collet-Serra was brought in as someone familiar with the genre, tropes, and especially the lead actor to bring things home.…

REVIEW: Strawberry Flavored Plastic [2018]

2018/01/212020/04/13 Jared Mobarak

The unscratchable itch. How do you make a serial killer sympathetic? Easy answer: compromise your own morality. This is the reality that Errol Morgan (Nicholas Urda) and Ellis Archer (Andres Montejo) present themselves upon discovering the subject of their documentary isn’t the reformed ex-con guilty of a crime of passion they thought. No, Noel Rose (Aidan Bristow) is a murderer who’s gone unnoticed for decades with who knows how many victims to his name. He’s also charming, intelligent, and psychologically fascinating—traits that sell him as a feasibly effective subject as…