UK Film Review Forum

(Release Info London schedule; February 21st, 2020, Curzon Soho, London W1D 99 Shaftesbury Avenue, London, W1D 5DY, 6:45 pm) https://film.list.co.uk/listing/1425630-vivarium/ "Vivarium" Gemma (Imogen Poots), and Tom (Jesse Eisenberg), a young couple, are in search of the perfect starter home. When their mysterious local estate agent (Mark Quigley) informs them of a new housing development, somewhere between suburban 'Ireland' and 'The Twilight Zone, the enigmatically named 'Yonder', they ignore their initial reservations and decide to check it out. In a quiet neighborhood, he leads them to house number 9 and disappears. Soon, they realize that they're in an infinite space filled with identical houses, and that any attempt to escape will lead them right back to number 9. But this cautious couple should have listened to their instincts, quickly finding themselves unable to escape the seemingly endless maze of picture-perfect streets. As the weeks pass, they're forced to accept that they're trapped inside this manufactured utopia. Then, one day, a surprise package is about to arrive at their doorstep with a baby boy (Senan Jennings) inside. Invoking both the mind-bending weirdness of a classic Tom discovers that the soil of 'Yonder' is made from a seemingly artificial substance. He starts to dig a hole. He becomes obsessed. Digging makes him feel as if he has a purpose, but the hole just gets deeper and deeper. Tom hears noises at the bottom of the hole. He digs further. Tom’s physical and mental health deteriorates further. Tom attempts to harm the boy, but Gemma intervenes. Gemma attempts to understand the couple’s predicament by engaging with the boy. She discovers that he's incapable of imagining things. Tom’s emotional distance pushes her closer to the boy. One day the boy vanishes, only to reappear with a strange text book. Gemma asks the boy who gave him the book. To show her, the boy takes on a disturbing physical form. Time has passed. Gemma and Tom have grown weaker. The boy (Eanna Hardwicke) has grown into an adult. Gemma and Tom reunite in their fear of him. The boy leaves the house every day and Gemma and Tom do not know where he goes. While digging, Tom finds a withered corpse in a body bag. Tom weakens to the point of death. Gemma begs the boy to help. The boy provides them with a body bag. Tom dies and is flung into the hole. A vengeful Gemma attempts to kill the boy. He escapes into a bizarre, subterranean corridor. Gemma follows and tumbles through parallel homes where other young couples live lives of similar despair. Gemma is spat back out into number nine. After a final act of verbal defiance, Gemma dies. The boy buries her in the hole with Tom and leaves 'Yonder'. He becomes an estate agent, replacing Martin (Jonathan Aris). The idea of owning your own home has become like a faery tale. Insidious advertising promises ideal living, a fantasy version of reality that we strive towards. It's the bait that leads many into a trap. Once ensnared we work our whole lives to pay off debts. The social contract is a strange and invisible agreement that we flutter towards like moths to a flame. Natural areas are destroyed to make way for rows of identical houses, mazes for an atomised society to live out their days. We eat processed food wrapped in plastic. Media competes with parents to set strange new agendas in the minds of children. The dream of owning a home can soon turn into a nightmare. Consumerism is consuming us. "Vivarium" is fed on these ideas. It amplifies and the ordinary through a sci-fi lens. It's a surreal and twisted tale that's darkly humorous, sad, frightening and weirdly satisfying. "Vivarium" is a surrealistic, dark, but humorous film that lures us into a unique space and captivating experience. It's an eerie portrait of domestic life that poses questions of class and gender roles, even as it sucks the audience into it's hellish suburban maze. The nightmarish jaunt up the property ladder is as thrillingly provocative as it's wickedly enjoyable. Audiences get a kick out of it and it lingers in the mind.

(Release Info London schedule; February 15th, 2020, Curzon Soho, 99 Shaftesbury Ave, Soho, London W1D 5DY, United Kingdom, 9:00 PM) https://www.curzoncinemas.com/soho/film-info/greed "Greed" "Greed" tells the story of self-made 'British' billionaire Sir Richard McCreadie (Steve Coogan), whose retail empire is in crisis. For 30 years he has ruled the world of retail fashion, bringing the high street to the catwalk and the catwalk to the high street, but after a damaging public inquiry, his image is tarnished. To save his reputation, he decides to bounce back with a highly publicized and extravagant party celebrating his '60th' birthday on 'The Greek Island Of Mykonos'. A satire on the grotesque inequality of wealth in the fashion industry, the film sees McCreadie’s rise and fall through the eyes of his biographer, Nick (David Mitchell). The film opens in Mykonos, Greece, where Richard McCreadie is building a wooden 'Roman Amphitheatre' for the amusement of his guests, who are flying in from all over the world. McCreadie’s party is always intended to be 'Roman'-themed. It’s actually quite similar to the kind of parties that people like Philip Green have always thrown. These ostentatious displays of wealth. In fact, in a way, you might say that someone like Philip Green is being more honest than other people who try to present themselves as a more touchy-feely version of capitalism, the Richard Branson, approach to capitalism. Having a woolly jumper and a beard makes him seem very friendly, but, really, it’s the same thing, just different clothes. So the decadence of 'The Roman Empire' seems to be a good metaphor for the decadence of 'The Modern Age'. And that parallel is drawn unwittingly by the character of Richard McCreadie. As the party draws nearer, McCreadie and his son Finn (Asa Butterfield) trade quotes from the 2000 Ridley Scott film "Gladiator", about a Roman general who wreaks his revenge on the corrupt emperor who sold him into slavery. It’s a very good metaphor, because it’s celebrating the idea of someone who can only measure success in a very macho, aggressive, testosterone-fuelled way. It’s a very Donald Trump-like rationale, really, it’s a very unambiguous, unsophisticated, but very popular way of thinking about success. This also explains the reasoning for McCreadie hosting what he thinks is the most extravagant party of the season. One theme of the film is the gap between the lives of the women making clothes for McCreadie’s brands and the lifestyle that can be bought by the billions of profits from their labor. So it has to be a lavish party, and we feel that a 'Roman'-themed party, with McCreadie cast as a 'Roman Emperor', As the guests start filing in for the festivities, we see that McCreadie is suddenly concerned by the arrival of some Syrian refugees in the coastline where his 'Roman Amphitheatre' is being built. In fact, McCreadie is not concerned at all by their plight. Instead, he worries that the great and good will have their evening spoiled by the temporary camp that’s been set up next door. McCreadie’s frantic obsession with pandering to his celebrity guests offered a rich seam of satire. One of the themes of the film is the way business billionaires like McCreadie use celebrities to try to make themselves glamorous, and part of the narrative of the film is that he's trying to get these celebrities, who’ve always come to his parties in the past, to come to his latest party. Because, having had his businesses investigated, and, having been criticized in the press, he’s trying to restore his reputation, so he thinks that getting all these celebrities to come along will restore his image and his brand. Which means part of the narrative is; is that strategy going to work? And will it help him reinvent himself as king of the high street? One aspect of the world of fashion that McCreadie embodies is the way it uses celebrity and fame to make their world seem glamorous, hence the use of celebrities to endorse lines of fashion in their shops. People can buy a £10 dress and somehow feel connected to Kate Moss or Beyoncé. It’s a way of making your business grow. And equally connected to that's the fact that rich people like to be seen with glamorous people, so the party is really a kind of marketing exercise, in the hope that McCreadie’s brand will become successful again, which is a way a lot of big businesses work these days. Let’s face it, celebrities, by their very nature, have plenty of money, but they’re quite happy to get paid to add a little glamor to clothes being made by people with very little money. They’ll still fly off to a free party on someone’s yacht, even though they’ve got $50m in the bank. The people we've in the film understand that's not a very positive image of someone like Richard McCreadie, they’re people who are happy to make fun of themselves and don’t mind sending themselves up. Aside from the bona fide celebrities, there's also a joke about the use of star lookalikes to pad out the A-list guest quota. The party on Mykonos is very surreal. It's surreal anyway to be doing a night shoot with a bunch of people wearing togas, in the sand. But it's also surreal because as well as the actors we've these amazingly fun guest cameos, people like Stephen Fry, Fatboy Slim and Pixie Lott. The film comes up with the character of Richard 'Greedy' McCreadie, a self-made man whose reputation takes a dramatic tumble just as he prepares to celebrate his '60th' birthday with a highly publicized toga party in Greece. Richard McCreadie is a complex character. It's a film about a larger-than-life businessman. He's someone who ostensibly seems quite odious, you've to mitigate that, you've to make the character funny, then that sugars the pill somewhat. So the audience is entertained by him while being repelled by him at the same time. He has his flaws, but he also has some good qualities as well. The film has this underlying message, which is a satire on the way that inequality has grown and grown over the last 30 years, in a way that McCreadie has definitely benefitted from. It's a film about Richard McCreadie’s career, and the ways in which he's a man of his times, from his dodgy, cheap beginnings in the ’80s with the whole rise of free-market 'Thatcherism' and globalization, without any great skills; just a determination to get rich. The film engages with that career right from the very moment his empire is starting to crumble. He has these overly white teeth made, which is a predilection of the super rich, they think that they look great with a permanent tan and ridiculously white teeth. They think, because they’re surrounded by 'yes' men, it makes them look really cool. But it just makes them look like a dick, and that’s funny. McCreadie wears well-tailored clothes, but they aren't too cool, just a bit unselfconsciously nouveau riche. There’s a sort of swagger to the way he walks. There’s a certain 'Estuary English' quality that he has, but he’s not too much of a barrow boy. He’s more of a public schoolboy who’s tried to rough himself up a bit because it makes him feel a bit 'Jack The Lad'. He likes to feel a bit street smart. And he's quite street smart; he’s a wheeler-dealer. Needless to say, Richard McCreadie is also a very funny man, and he wields his sharp tongue like a razor. He certainly has a certain amount of wit. Someone like, for example, Philip Green does have a certain amount of wit, in his own bombastic way. You could say, if you’re being kind, that he has a certain kind of charisma that allows him a certain licence, for a certain period, to behave in a way that most people would consider unacceptable. Because there’s certainly an arrogance there, which is exposed at 'The Select Committee' meetings. The film uses the likes of Philip Green to raise the subject of this kind of exploitative slave labor that makes people rich. People involved in this world, they sleep like babies. It doesn’t bother them. Richard McCreadie is like that, the only kind of success he knows is material success. There’s a spiritual bone in his body. Richard McCreadie isn’t necessarily the bad guy, he’s just a larger-than-life example of what everyone does, which is making clothes as cheaply as possible and selling them for as much as possible, and one way to do that's to make the clothes in Cambodia or Bangladesh. It just struck us as a rich and quite simple way of looking at what's quite a complex subject, because you’re seeing it through the eyes of a billionaire who’s very hands on and who has built his business through the ’80s, ’90s and into the ’00s. In a way, Richard McCreadie represents that kind of era; how the markets work, how the world has changed, how capitalism has changed, how globalization has changed the world, and so on. McCreadie is someone who could bring together quite large, different strands of how the world has changed in the last 30 years; he’s a man of his time. And one of the attractions is that you could draw together various different strands, whether it’s women workers in Sri Lanka, or dodgy business deals, or leveraged takeovers on 'The British High Street', from the point of view of one fictional character. He's quite a colourful character for the big screen. As preparations get underway for Richard McCreadie’s party, "Greed" tells us the backstory of the billionaire entrepreneur, and does so through the character of Nick (David Mitchell), a journalist who's writing McCreadie’s biography. Nick is a kind of everyman, and he represents ‘us’, whether that’s ‘us’ in the audience or even ‘us’ as in the people who are making the film. He’s someone who's sympathetic. He's a sort of whoring himself around and has to write the adulatory biography of a terrible man. Nick is someone who isn’t morally strong. He’s not the good guy taking down the bad guy, he’s just trying to write the story of Richard McCreadie, and he’s in an ambiguous position. He’s on McCreadie’s side, and he’s being paid by him, but at the same time he doesn’t always approve of his character or his business methods. So he’s in the same position as the audience, and he sort of draws us through the story. It's clever that he’s written not as a nasty man, but as someone who’s as morally ambiguous as we all are. We can sit in judgement on this economic system, but we also have to participate in it, and Nick taking the money to write the book is an example of that. You can see why he does it and you don’t dislike him for doing it, but he dislikes himself for doing it. So that’s a good, morally ambiguous way in, rather than seeing the film through the eyes of a virtue-signalling, perfect person. He's a person who's really quite ethical but who has his morality compromised and feels bad about it. He represents a certain kind of complicity. He feels a little bit out of it and he tries to be witty, but he’s also a bit of a nerd. So that’s what he contributes vocally, but mainly he’s watching and absorbing and becoming troubled by it, because throughout the film he sees it all. So the acting challenge is to have a good reactive face without overdoing it, but also without just looking vacant. Margaret (Shirley Henderson) is McCreadie’s mother. A lot of that character is really just Margaret coming in and inventing stuff, but it's a lot of reading around the careers of successful men, especially successful men in the retail fashion business, and it seems that, often, a strong mother is a factor that connected them. Margaret as a tougher, matriarchal version of Richard, someone who's all family, about getting on, about making money. Richard is made in her image, in a way. Samantha (Isla Fisher) is McCreadie’s ex-wife. Like the mother, Samantha, the ex-wife, is also strong, at least as strong as, if not stronger than, the Richard character. Samantha and Richard are divorced, but we’re one of those couples that probably should have stayed married. We've a great relationship. Partly because they're cut from the same cloth, so to speak. Samantha is very blasé about her wealth. She’s the kind of person who’s proud of being greedy, who sees nothing wrong with being able to exploit a system and enjoys very much the spoils of luxury. She’s essentially a deeply unlikable character. It seems that not all wives of billionaires live in the shadow of their husband’s success; some of them have thriving careers of their own and bring in a hefty fortune themselves. She's the kind of girl who likes to sit on a beach on a private island, Samantha’s also someone who’s very bright, who enjoys the sport of making money, who’s interested in numbers and being rich. So that makes her a much more interesting character than just being the trophy wife. She's more interested in the exterior and how she appears than she's with what’s going on inside. She’s great company, she’s funny and she’s provocative; in the very best way. It’s very interesting, because it’s not like she’s the long-suffering ex-wife. She loves Richard, even though they’ve broken up, and he loves her. That’s a very human quality. Samantha is a very believable, real character, and actually, on a personal level, really quite likeable. That’s one thing we've noticed when we've interacted with super-rich people; they can be great fun. But just because someone’s fun, it doesn’t mean they’re not nefarious or even wicked. Presenting a more human side to McCreadie’s empire is Amanda (Dinita Gohil). She’s basically his 'PA', his right-hand woman, and she’s involved in the party planning. She uses to work for McCreadie back in one of his shops, so she started off in retail and has found herself working in the hospitality side of things for this big party that he’s having. Amanda is really hard-working, and, initially, she seems quite unassuming, but she surprises us, because, actually there’s a lot more that’s gone on in her life than we initially realized. This involves the revelation that Amanda has family involved in the overseas rag trade. We find out that Amanda’s mother used to work in a sweatshop in Bangladesh, and that there was a fire there, much like, for example, 'The Rana Plaza' fire, which was a particularly devastating fire that happened in Bangladesh in 2013, at a garment factory there. One aspect of this film that's always going to be technically challenging is how to somehow bring all these different strands together. We've to look at Richard’s early school days, then his early business career, then how he amassed a fortune and then how he avoided paying tax on that fortune, and how he managed to buy huge businesses when he didn’t have that much cash himself. The first mechanism to hold it together is a big party to salvage his reputation. The film goes backwards and forwards to look at all these different aspects of McCreadie’s career. The film needs a character that draws these strands together. A connection between the women who are making clothes for McCreadie’s business empire in Sri Lanka, who are getting paid $4 a day, and the lavish party that McCreadie, who’s made his billions from those clothes, is throwing in Mykonos. So the main character that does that's Amanda, because her mother was a worker in Sri Lanka and her uncle works in the garment trade in Leicester. She uses to work for McCreadie’s retail empire, and now she works for the company that’s putting on the party. She crosses all the different strands of the film. She's most difficult character in the film. Although "Greed" begins with a somewhat light, irreverent tone the film takes a darker turn in the final third, when Richard McCreadie suddenly starts to become accountable to the people around him. There’s a morality tale aspect to it, in a way that hasn’t happened, well, so far, in reality. It’s wish fulfilment: you reap what you sow, what goes around comes around, call it what you like. It’s surprising, it’s shocking, it’s nasty, but you don’t see it coming and you didn’t know it's going to happen before it happened. The origins of "Greed" is briefly diverted to the subject of Philip Green, once the billionaire owner of 'The Arcadia Group', owners of 'Top Shop', 'Miss Selfridge', 'Dorothy Perkins' and many more, who had been called before a 'Parliamentary Select Committee' about the collapse of one of it's biggest brands; 'The British High Street Fixture BHS'. There are similarities between Richard McCreadie and Philip Green, "Greed" should not be seen as a thinly veiled attack on one specific individual. In general, the subject of the film is inequality, the way in which free market fundamentalism has worked over the last 30 years. We’ve seen films before in the area, so it’s not as though we're thinking of this as a new area. What's slightly unusual, though, is that, despite the seriousness of the subject matter, the film uses humour to get his message across. Comedy is always a tricky term. It's entertaining, and there are funny bits in it. But when we're trying to persuade people to give us money for a film and we've to give them an idea of the film, the references we give them are films like "The Big Short", which has comedy actors in it but is not a comedy at all, and other films about business, you could say it’s like a jokey version of 'Citizen Kane', looking back on someone’s career, or 'The Social Network'. All our reference points are about how to deal with complex business issues through films that take a certain character as a central point. There's never a reference to comedy films we thought it's going to be like. Prices are constantly driven down and the only way to change that's to make rules and regulations that make a fairer system. People are just trying to get by, trying to survive, and yet they’re seeing the profits from their labor being siphoned off into billionaires’ bank accounts, where it gets parked in offshore tax havens while they've their lavish parties. Even people in the fashion industry would like the system to change, but, for now, they all work within the system. And they've to, because that’s how the system works. There’s a definite point of view, and it’s provocative. Some people will love it, some people will hate it, a few people will be provoked into thinking about stuff that they ordinarily wouldn’t think about. You believe in karma? Some people don’t reap what they sow. That’s the important thing about injustice in the world: some people behave terribly, and appallingly, and they get away with it because they’ve got good 'PR'. The thing is, success breeds success. It doesn’t matter how much of a bastard you are, if you’ve got lots of money you can make it seem like you’re not a bastard, even though you're. You can control how the argument is framed, and everything that goes to make you seem great and have great branding. 'PR' helps accentuate all the positive stuff you do, and turn the volume down on all the terrible stuff you do. There are a lot of people like that out there. People who are quite visible, but who manage their own image very well, because they've good 'PR'. They've a support network of people around them who can present them in exactly the way they want to be presented. It’s about the human cost of fashion, and we need to make more informed choices when we buy our next pair of shoes. You don’t want your shopping sprees to be moral decisions, and they shouldn’t have to be. You should be able to go shopping while knowing about the conditions that the people who made your garment are working under, how much they’re being paid, and how ethical the clothes are themselves. "Greed" isn’t just a film about the exploitation of 'Third World' labor, there are just as many victims of this ruthless brand of capitalism to be found working on the high streets of major cities, especially in 'The UK'. There are all those zero-hours contracts to think about. But we feel that there are so many other issues, even beyond the whole 'Brexit' thing, that are obfuscating more important things that need to be talked about. There are lots of issues being discussed, quite rightly. But the biggest issue confronting society is the one that is least talked about, and that's the disparity between the rich and the poor. It’s the elephant in the room. When the super-rich get together and discuss how they can solve the ills of the world, they present themselves as wanting to help mankind. But in actual fact they're partly responsible for the very injustices that they're claiming to want to help resolve. But one of the things that all these people never want to talk about, the last taboo, is taxation. No one wants to talk about that. Everyone will throw a few sovereigns at a worthy cause, for the ‘optics’. But no one will really make a commitment. These people squirrel away vast, vast reserves in offshore tax havens, and then they throw a few coins at those they regard as being needy. Everyone thinks they’re really generous people, but it’s a smokescreen. Corporations do it. Big petrol chemical companies will build a couple of schools in some African country and then say, look how nice we're, look how kind we're, then maybe throw a few coins at some environmental thing. But it’s all bullshit. People have to understand more fully the nature of the economic system they’re in can only be a good thing. Our governments in the west have become increasingly poor at making corporate power act in society’s interests, and we've been sold a line by too many governments that regulating them is impossible, that corporate power is greater than governmental power. And that’s horseshit. You only have to look at the credit crunch. The corporate power was totally enfeebled by an economic accident, and it took governmental power to save them. Governments have a nature of power that corporations don’t, and if those governments are acting democratically, they should be able to control the corporations and make them behave socially responsibly. They've that power, but only if we, as citizens, are more vigilant in who we vote for and why. It’s not going to be a quick fix or an easy change, but the more people are informed about what corporations do, and that they’re not all about the charities that they give to or any of that bullshit, what they’re doing is avoiding tax and paying a pittance to people in slum conditions, then maybe the political messages that say, we would like to change that, will gain more traction. It’s a way of looking at a lot of things that have shaped the last 30 years in a way that's wrong. Free-market capitalism and the whole ‘80s 'Wall Street' ethos of "Greed" is good. We’ve come to the stage, after 30 years of that kind of capitalism, where there are more and more people who would like to see a fairer world, a greener world. We throw away a huge amount of clothes because we can buy them again so cheaply. That era is coming to an end, and this film is definitely looking back at the end of an era. But is it the fall of the whole empire? About waste, and about whether the fashion industry is going to address these issues. The fashion industry does a lot for 'AIDS' charities and all the rest of it. But if you ask them how much they exploit people in the developing world, they’ll suddenly go all tongue-tied, because that’s their 'Achilles' heel. This film opens up a discussion about how we want to live our lives, and how much we need to consume. There have been certain successes in that area we all know plastic bags are bad now, and that plastic straws are bad. Well, let’s broaden out that discussion and talk about the voracious consumption in the clothing industry. We talk about waste, which is a good thing, environmentally, but we don’t talk about exploitation. And even if we do, it’s marginalized. Rich people are happy to talk about how green they're, but they’re not happy to talk about how much they pay their most poorly paid employees. We don’t have to accept conventional ways of thinking, perhaps we need to be more radical about how we address these things. The media always says, being radical. Oh no, that’s for lunatics. What we've to do is carry on as we're and just change things a tiny little bit, and then everything will be fine. No, that’s not good enough. You've to unleash the lions.

(Release Info London schedule; February 28th, 2020, Electric Cinema White City, Television Centre, 101 Wood Ln, White City, London W12 7FR, United Kingdom, 15:00 · 18:00 · 20:45) https://www.electriccinema.co.uk/film/downhill/film-times/all "Downhill" Barely escaping an avalanche during a family ski vacation in 'The Alps', a married couple is thrown into disarray as they're forced to reevaluate their lives and how they feel about each other. It’s the ski vacation of a lifetime for Pete (Will Ferrell) and Billie Stanton (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) and their two boys Finn (Julian Grey) and Emerson (Ammon Jacob Ford); a week in 'The Austrian Alps'. With both parents unplugged from their professional careers, 'The Stantons' are, on the surface, ready for seven days of snowy family fun. What's poised to be a delightful week of skiing and togetherness instead becomes a series of awkward and emotionally fraught moments in which Pete and Billie have to be honest with themselves and each other in ways they hadn’t expected. Early in the trip, while having lunch at a mountainside restaurant, Pete and Billie have dramatically different responses to what's, unbeknownst to them, a controlled avalanche that appears frighteningly out of control. Pete’s reaction stuns the family and throws the rest of their vacation and the couple’s marriage into chaos, as Billie reevaluates their relationship and each is forced to wrestle with their own sense of self. How well can two people really know each other? And what happens when one of them does something totally unexpected? As a long-married couple, Billie and Pete know each other inside and out, or so they thought before their trip to 'The Alps'. When disaster strikes, Pete reacts in a way Billie couldn’t have predicted or imagined. These characters, including the children, are digesting the reality of what just happened. As terrifying as the avalanche is, what Pete does is just as terrifying, if not even more so. And it happens so quickly and it’s such a disaster that it’s hard for Billie to actually fully understand what happened. She’s in shock. Pete is also in denial. Unable to accept or understand what he’s done, he tries hard to carry on with the family vacation they’d all hoped for. Pete is pathetic in his own way. When you watch the movie, you’re also kind of sympathetic to him at the same time. He makes the most egregious error he could make, and he’s so sorry, but he’s just too childish to admit it. Otherwise, it could be easy to write off Pete’s actions, abandoning his family in a moment of danger, as wholly unredeemable. Billie is a self-assured, accomplished attorney and devoted wife and mother who suddenly finds herself on unstable emotional ground. There are countless times where the film is able to tell the story just because of her reactions. It's Pete’s regrettable response and resulting shame that make the story so relatable. There are no good guys or bad guys in this movie. Maybe there are good people making bad decisions, but even then, they’re questionable decisions. Billie ultimately feels a great deal of sympathy for her husband because she understands the shame he feels for what he has done. Providing a foible to both the established relationship and emotional tension between Billie and Pete are Zach (Zach Woods) and Rosie (Zoë Chao), a carefree young couple enjoying a free-wheeling exploration of Europe that they document online with the hashtag 'NoAgenda'. The couple ends up in a pivotal role in Billie and Pete’s understanding of the avalanche and it's aftermath. They’re a couple in the euphoric phase of falling in love, where your brain is just marinating in all those love hormones. You’re just so excited and sort of disinclined to pay attention to the limitations in yourself or the other person. Zach works with Pete in real estate, though it’s debatable how close their friendship is. Pete has been following Zach and Rosie’s European adventures online, perhaps with a bit of jealousy and envy, and, unbeknownst to Billie, invites the couple to drop by their hotel for dinner. Pete kind of reels them into their predicament to give him cover. He’s using Zach and Rosie as a smokescreen or a way of blocking the conversation from Billie about what happened during the avalanche. The two couples spend an incredibly squirm-worthy evening together, as Zach and Rosie bear witness to the unbearable tension between Billie and Pete. Having Rosie and Zach observe Billie and Pete’s meltdown is a great device; we can feel the cringing and the awkwardness. It also gives a small nod that these two people, in their own way, are also headed toward an avalanche if they’re not careful, and we get clues about what Rosie wants and what Zach wants as they've private time with Billie and Pete respectively. So, it's important to show, again, the theme of the individual within the whole. Zach also has private conversations with Pete, as Rosie does with Billie, where the younger couple provides perspective for the agonized husband and wife. Pete and Zach have the relationship that so many men have, where you go out expecting to have the time of your life and by the end of the night, you’re crying into your 'Jägermeister'. Zach is a critical component to Pete’s journey. Rosie and Billie have a poignant exchange when the two women unexpectedly cross paths the day after their stressful dinner. She’s almost a stranger to Billie but when they unexpectedly meet on the same ski lift, Rosie says, 'hey, what your husband did was messed up and you've every right to be angry'. Rosie is an outsider looking in at a situation and offering an honest, objective observation. Two other characters that help Billie gain perspective are Charlotte (Miranda Otto), a mysterious and outspoken woman who may or may not work at the hotel where the couple is staying, and Guglielmo (Giulio Berruti), a handsome and passionate ski instructor with whom Billie spends an afternoon on the slopes. Charlotte is the story’s most enigmatic and outrageous character. She's among the first people Pete and Billie meet when they arrive in Austria, and within seconds, she’s sharing tales of her sexual exploits. She feels she’s there to liven up the party and make people loosen up. She’s super confident about herself and doesn’t care about anyone else’s opinions at all. She has a very black and white kind of stance on things. It’s just totally different than an American point of view. She’s definitely a character that has a toe on the ground but is a little larger-than-life and lives her life differently from every other character that we meet in the story. Guglielmo is a guy that's very passionate about what he’s doing. He doesn’t think too much. He just feels a lot. His passion contrasts with Pete’s avoidance, as he helps Billie understand that sometimes we might need to feel rather than think. Billie's interaction with Guglielmo is a spontaneous, surprising relief and a tempting distraction from the anxiety and tension she is experiencing with her husband and her family. You've these characters that flow into the story of Pete and Billie in the right time in this moment in their lives where they’re figuring out if they can go down the hill together. Charlotte and Guglielmo are characters who, especially for Billie, come in at the right time with a message for her. Finn and Emerson are Billie and Pete’s twin sons. The characters have different feelings about skiing. As with Billie and Pete, the avalanche changes the vibe of the boys’ vacation. Finn and Emerson experience the close call alongside their parents and are deeply shaken by Pete’s reaction. They’re not just frightened, but confused as to why he would do that. And in fact, their father becomes a child to them. The version of the film uses the avalanche as a metaphor for the marriage. Billie and Pete can’t move on because they see the things that are happening differently.  The question is, can they sync up in their stories? They mimic life’s unpredictable nature where daily stress or even tragic circumstances can often be accompanied by comedic moments and/or relief. Billie and Pete are thrown off balance in a culture they don’t understand, frustrated by a language they don’t speak, and confused by customs and laws they’re not familiar with. They’re just these tiny, confused human beings. And then a massive, out-of-control avalanche rolls over them. The story shows us that it’s in moments of unexpected stress and imbalance that characters find their true selves and reveal the fissures in their relationships. We've both the woman’s perspective as well as the man’s and examine how this random, yet incredibly significant, incident affects them both as individuals and as a couple. Inevitably, the characters are forced to reevaluate everything they thought to be true. And as a result, the audience is left at the end of the film debating whose side they're on. From the start of "Downhill", there’s a sense of foreboding, even before 'The Stantons' come face to face with an avalanche. That feeling of uncertainty comes from a combination of camerawork, the sight of avalanche-blast cannons on the mountainside and the film’s doom-heralding score. The challenge is to combine humor, melancholy and a distinct regional feel in the music without muddling the composition. Such difficulties can be inspirational because you’re doing something you wouldn’t do instinctively. Sonic warnings also come from avalanche cannons scattered throughout the peaks. Though they appear ominous, they’re designed to blast away accumulated snow, creating intentional slides on empty slopes to diminish the risk of spontaneous avalanches on active ski runs. Anytime you see an actual avalanche on the mountain, that whole mountain range is changed and replaced from the one that's there. It adds a whole other layer of, oh gosh, this scenario that kicks off the emotional journey for this family is actually something that's happening 30 miles down the road. All of those elements adds poignancy that you couldn’t help but feel. For example, Charlotte dresses almost entirely in white, from her fur-trimmed ski suit to her glamorous casual wear. The color plays into other character's’ clothes. There’s a scene with Billie and Pete, sort of a pivotal scene in the hallway, and Billie’s wearing this white scarf. The intention there's to show this impending avalanche of feelings is sort of choking her, to put it bluntly. Another little signature is putting the characters in a white environment even when they’re inside. We've the apartment with the sofa, chair and carpet. That's really to put Billie in the snow even though she’s actually in a physical interior. It’s this thing again of being trapped in a blind environment where you haven’t got depth perception and those kinds of things. It’s just white all around her, so even when she’s inside, she’s still in the snow. The design concept aims to keep Billie and Pete in the eye of the storm, no matter where they're. The theme is that Billie and Pete are still trying to weather this large avalanche. Multiple things happen along the way, but it really is about two people spiraling and trying to figure out how they can navigate their way back to each other. Even when Billie and Pete are safe from avalanche danger, they’re still surrounded by a cold and snowy landscape. The scenery and the landscape are so stunning that people could think that they’re fake. Beyond the starkness of white, the film leanes on a muted palette for Billie and Pete, both in their ski wear and the dark grays and blues that round out their apartment, as a way of expressing the mood of their trip. While the locals take to the slopes in bright, flashy outfits, 'The Stantons' look is a little less lively. The point is that even within the sphere of wonderful enjoyment, 'The Stanton' family seems to be this slightly neutral-toned whole, because maybe they’re not enjoying the holiday as much as everybody else is, and that’s significant for the film. "Downhill" is a distinctly American take on an original story by Swedish director Ruben Östlund. It's inspired by the 2014 'Swedish' film "Force Majeure". It's a classic dinner party kind of question; what would you do if you're faced with this sort of event? How would you react? What appeals about the story is the idea that a person can be viewing their life through a certain lens, and what happens when that lens is taken off, what’s different? And is, in fact, anything different? How can a subtle shift in perspective, if facing an avalanche can be subtle, have such profound emotional effects. It’s a very big crisis, and it’s a big actual event that happens in the film. There’s a long-standing tradition in every art form of taking a work of art that you admire and interpreting it in a different context. It’s the film version of a cover song. You take a movie that you love, that has a very particular  sensibility and showing how you can riff on it. The intention is to take the ideas that the original movie had and explore them in a new context. It's a character-driven ballet between comedy and drama.