Suspense/Thriller | www.jaredmobarak.com

REVIEW: The Blackcoat’s Daughter [2017]

2017/03/262017/03/27 Jared Mobarak

“I look for Him in the unlikely things that happen” It maybe but a dream, yet it feels so real. Fifteen-year old Katherine (Kiernan Shipka), readying for a week’s vacation from her Jesuit boarding school, experiences one sparking a sense of foreboding. Parents will be arriving on Thursday to watch the children’s talent show before everyone—students, nuns, priests, and the headmaster himself—leaves for home. Kat has been preparing a vocal performance at the piano for this year’s engagement, but the dream has distracted her enough to grow distant and odd.…

REVIEW: Life [2017]

2017/03/232017/03/24 Jared Mobarak

“Its curiosity outweighs its fear” Calling Daniel Espinosa‘s Life an Alien retread is the easy thing to do. Both are tensely claustrophobic science fiction films with a violent extraterrestrial that’s loose and in search of the crew. But it’s also a very reductive comparison considering they are nothing alike beside genre conventions. The missions are different. The time period is different. And the creature’s motivation is as dissimilar as can be. Life also can’t help but stand apart on its own for one reason: it could actually happen tomorrow. We…

REVIEW: I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore [2017]

2017/03/142017/03/14 Jared Mobarak

“That’s how hard I threw it” There’s one specific thing differentiating actor Macon Blair‘s directorial debut I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore from the works of usual collaborator Jeremy Saulnier: comedy. Don’t tell me I’m wrong because the latter director shows his funny bone in Murder Party—I haven’t seen it. I’m not even saying Blue Ruin and Green Room aren’t without some effective humor in their own right either, just that Blair seems to have taken what he learned from those sets and infused it with his…

REVIEW: Brimstone [2017]

2017/03/092017/03/09 Jared Mobarak

“Retribution is coming” At a time when many supposedly God-fearing Christians in America blindly fear the idea of a Muslim insurgence implementing Sharia law (itself often warped by supposed Allah-fearing men to retain patriarchal control much like their Republican counterparts dictating what a woman can and can’t do with her body), it’s crucial to remember the Bible isn’t necessarily so different as far as fanatical readings go. When the word of God can be bent to the whims of man, anything is possible. Perverts can marry daughters to render covetous…

REVIEW: The Dark Below [2017]

2017/03/082017/03/16 Jared Mobarak

“Love is cold” The premise that director Douglas Schulze and co-writer Jonathan D’Ambrosio have cooked up for their film The Dark Below is a bold one. This 75-minute thriller is dialogue-free save one line at the start setting everything in motion, the story instead unfolding as a series of expressions through current duress and visually informative flashbacks while David Bateman‘s energetic score blasts you into the correct state of unease. Performances must be a bit over-the-top with sight and sound bordering on manipulative in order for it all to work,…

REVIEW: The Ninth Configuration [1980]

2017/02/20 Jared Mobarak

“You have to say, ‘Simon Says.’ Then we’ll do it.” The history behind William Peter Blatty‘s The Ninth Configuration adds a ton of insight into its ambitious yet lacking film adaptation. His original intent, for instance, was to create a comic novel. Blatty has even been quoted as saying he prefers the first version he wrote in 1966 entitled Twinkle, Twinkle, “Killer” Kane! It was only after working alongside William Friedkin on the set of The Exorcist that he chose to go back and do a rewrite. This retro-fitted evolution…

REVIEW: Drifter [2017]

2017/02/192017/02/23 Jared Mobarak

“It’s a wasteland. There are no more rules.” You can be two things inside a post-apocalyptic wasteland devoid of morality according to writer/director Chris von Hoffmann: stoic badass on a journey of vengeance or unhinged cartoon cannibal with tongue readier to lick flesh than gun is to blow a hole in someone’s head. There’s no room for anything in between whether compassionate souls trying to survive amongst malicious wild cards or cautious, anxiety-ridden kids in way over their heads. Either way you’re going to die—not in an esoteric “we all…

REVIEW: John Wick: Chapter 2 [2017]

2017/02/102017/02/11 Jared Mobarak

“Are you here for the Pope?” The team behind John Wick achieved success with a formula that distilled the prototypical action film down to its main points of entertainment while leaving the fat on the cutting room floor. This is why we moved back and forth through time for some scenes (the result playing out while the road there is experienced in montage) and why the economy of script successfully conveyed a hyper-real state of danger and malice from all involved. We don’t need elaboration on what we just saw…

REVIEW: Split [2017]

2017/01/192017/02/22 Jared Mobarak

“In the sun we find our purpose” It doesn’t get better than The Village where M. Night Shyamalan is concerned. That film was a perfect confluence of his screenwriting and directing capabilities, a tale of love and protection through drastic measures as metaphor for the struggles of parenthood steeped in heavy emotion and guilt without regret. A marketing campaign billing it “horror” ruined any chance for success with audiences unwilling to look past the auteur’s penchant for twists. Its target demographic is perhaps still unaware of how much they’d enjoy…

REVIEW: Die Hard [1988]

2016/12/312017/11/30 Jared Mobarak

“Make fists with your toes” It’s become such an action classic with numerous sequels, copycats, and homages and yet Die Hard as we know it almost never was—by choice. Novelist Roderick Thorp wrote Nothing Lasts Forever, his follow-up to The Detective, thirteen years after the original because he saw The Towering Inferno and dreamt up an idea of one man in a skyscraper hunted by terrorists. It starred his NYPD Detective Joe Leland, now aged and retired, visiting his daughter’s office building in Los Angeles on Christmas Eve where he…

REVIEW: فروشنده [Forushande] [The Salesman] [2016]

2016/12/302017/02/14 Jared Mobarak

“For once it looks like we’re in luck” There’s this notion that tragedy won’t happen to us. It’s for people who don’t live their lives correctly—some karmic retribution paying for mistakes made along the way. We like to believe we’re different whether such a belief is deserved or not. So when something does occur, only a seething anger results. Anger at your hard work to stay moral and good proving to be for naught; anger about thoughts of revenge seeming impossible considering acting upon them would simply lower you onto…