(Reviews of A Story of Bones; In a Violent Nature; and A Place Called Silence)
A STORY OF BONES.
There's a sad irony in the fact that Les Invalides has featured so prominently in all its golden-cupola'd glory during a first week of Olympic competition that ends with the release in UK cinemas of A Story of Bones. The grave that Napoleon Bonaparte vacated on St Helena is impeccably maintained. But, as Joseph Curran and Dominic Aubrey de Vere reveal in this though-provoking and poignant documentary, the same cannot be said of the last resting place of the thousands of Africans who had been deposited on the South Atlantic island after being liberated from the slave trade by British ships.
The first human remains were found in 2006, when work started on a link road to the proposed airport at Rupert's Bay. As an old travelogue notes, this had been the area inhabited by slaves and lepers and it yielded more bones in 2008. These were moved to the Pipe Store beside the prison while it was decided what to do with them and this is when Annina van Neel arrived from Namibia to become the chief environmental officer on the airport project.
She was dismayed that this forgotten burial site was not being treated with due respect, given its historical and human significance in relation to the transatlantic slave trade. But, now married to an islander and raising a son, Van Neel had other problems to contend with, as wind shift issues prevented the £285 million airport from opening on time in 2016 and the lifeline provided by the Royal Mail Ships that were about to be retired had to be extended.
Over three centuries, Britain had enslaved and trafficked some 3,415,500 Africans across the `Middle Passage' to the Americas. In 1807, however, Britain had made the trade illegal and Royal Naval vessels were instructed to intercept the slaving boats of other colonial powers. Between the 1840 and 1860s, 22,000 slaves were rescued and, while many died in transit, the survivors were taken to a colony in Rupert's Valley on St Helena, where they lived in appalling conditions. These `Liberated Africans' were never allowed to return home, with many being taken to British plantations in the Caribbean. An estimated 543 remained, however, and subsisted on the margins of island society.
A British dig in 2008 established that up to 10,000 African had been buried in mass graves. As part of the airport project, £90,000 was allocated for their reinternment. But the bones remained at Jamestown prison and Van Neel became determined to not only ensure they had a decent burial, but that the significance of their presence on St Helena was suitably recognised so that locals and the tourists who were expected to come once the flight corridor was opened could appreciate the sombre realities of the past.
Saint FM radio host Tammy Williams wants something done, as does Cruyff Buckley, a former airport construction worker who is running for office on the island. In addition to holding public meetings to discuss the descendancy connection to the slaves, Van Heel also contacts UNESCO to ask why St Helena is not listed as being on the Middle Passage route. She visits the archive and unearths recordings about the bones found during the building of the island's power station and worker Brian Leo tells her how they were buried in a mass grave in St Paul's cemetery, with a blessing from the bishop, but little historico-cultural reverence.
Buckley makes it on to the council presided over by governor Lisa Honan and promises to push the case. But things move slowly on St Helena and, in 2018 - as the RMS service ends and the first flights land - Van Neel reaches out to preservationist Peggy King Jorde, who had led the campaign to honour the African American burial site unearthed during building work in Manhattan.
Meanwhile, Buckley is appointed to the Liberated Africans Advisory Committee. But he leaves the first meeting in fury at the intransigence of the UK government and Councillor Jeffrey Ellick and others begin to question how much say Saints have over their own lives. King Jorde echoes this when she visits and is dismayed by the peripheral positioning of the grave at St Paul's and the fact that artefacts found in exhumations were going to be sent to the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool without being exhibited on St Helena.
Van Neel is deeply touched by a hair braid kept in a small box by the archivists and she renews her commitment to preserving the Rupert's Valley burial ground. Locals adopt the skeleton poses for a photographic exhibition and Williams takes a DNA test to show she has the same Central West African ancestry as the liberated slaves. King Jorde reminds the locals that their stories are connected and that they need to fight to ensure that the slave burial ground is treated as sensitively as Napoleon's, even though the land has been earmarked for development that the government will tell them is vital for the betterment of life.
Leaving Basil Read (the company behind the airport build), Van Neel joins the National Trust and the LAAC. But six months pass and nothing happens, with some complaining that she should butt out because she's not a Saint. She also despairs at the lack of interest from London after the airport fails to spark a tourist boom and many feel they were duped into investing in related businesses that are now struggling to stay afloat.
Keen to learn about the Black experience in the United States, Van Neel visits King Jorde in New York. They tour the cottonfields and visit memorials and museums, and attend a meeting offering support for the St Helena burial project because it's more relevant than ever in Trumpist America, where bigots have become emboldened in the face of the Black Lives Matter campaign. Energised by the trip, Van Neel returns to help draft a proposal that goes before new governor, Philip Rushbrook, and the council. Promises are made, but nothing happens and Van Neel senses that the UK is simply hoping she loses hope so that they can forget the matter (in the time-honoured tradition). Nevertheless, she and her son lay white stones to mark the burial site and she meets with a carpenter to order individual coffins.
Closing captions inform us that, a year after the bicentenary of Napoleon's death was celebrated across St Helena in May 2021, the 325 from the Pipe Store was buried in a mass grave in Rupert's Valley, with the LAAC's acquiescence. No tribal rituals were observed and no members of the African Diaspora were invited. This happened in August 2022. Boris Johnson was Prime Minister. But it could have been a British government of any political shade, as the attitude has been identical over 150+ years. We should all be ashamed.
A fascinating story is somewhat marred in the telling in this heartfelt, but frustrating documentary. Over eager to latch on to their protagonist and her milieu, the co-directors fail to establish the historical context. Consequently, they keep having to double back on themselves to make sense of the increasingly sensitive situations in which the estimable Annina van Neel finds herself after heading to St Helena for a working adventure. Rather than have her explain things in voiceover, captions break up the flow of the action, while too many marginal characters are identified on screen only to play no further part in proceedings. By contrast, the likes of Tammy Williams and Cryuff Buckley play a prominent role without the viewers receiving any background information.
Editor James Scott pieces together some evocative montages to convey a sense of daily life on St Helena. But, presuming too much foreknowledge, the debuting Curran and De Vere opt not to explore the ethnic make-up of the community or the dynamic of its relationship with Britain (and co-dependencies, Ascension and Tristan da Cunha). As a result, it's difficult to appreciate who does what on the island and how they can help Van Neel's cause. The council election segment is a case in point, as we learn little of the policies on which the candidates are standing and who voted for them and why.
Similarly, nothing is said about the genesis of the photographic exhibition, which would have been a splendid way of reinforcing the connection between the Liberated Africans and the latterday Saints. The trip to America is similarly fudged, as Curran and De Vere fail to explain the significance of the feast that Van Neel attends, the status of her fellow guests, or how they can help her prevail. A bit more on Van Neel's dealings with the British representatives might also have been instructive, especially if they had refused to see her.
Her efforts are entirely laudable and each visit to the Pipe Store to the change the flowers on the step and re-light the candle feels more poignant. But the jumbled assembly means that the clash between tradition and progress is never really examined, as RMS sailings are stopped, Covid strikes, and Westminster intervenes with the kind of post-colonial high-handedness that only makes Van Neel's case more irrefutable - especially when considered against the pomp and circumstance under which the remains of Richard III were interned after they were discovered beneath a Leicester car park.
IN A VIOLENT NATURE
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Critics have been falling over themselves to proclaim Chris Nash's In a Violent Nature as a landmark in the slasher sub-genre. All the familiar tropes are there. But the Canadian feature debutant resets them in a back-to-basics affair that rescues the format from its found footage rut.
While staying at a woodland cabin in Ontario, a group of friends find a locket hanging from the remains of an old fire tower. Troy (Liam Leone) decides to steal it and prompts Johnny (Ry Barrett) to dig his way out of the soil and stomp off to exact his revenge. Passing the rotting carcass of a fox caught in a trap, he calls at his old home and mooches around. He spots a necklace that he mistakes for the locket and hears his father's voice in his head. Confused, he chases Chuck (Timothy Paul McCarthy) - the occupier who had been arguing with the ranger (Reece Presley) about his poaching proclivities - and slaughters him when he gets snared in his own trap.
With flies buzzing loudly around him, Johnny plods through the woods and follows the sound of a vehicle. By the time he arrives at the cabin, Troy, girlfriend Kris (Andrea Pavlovic), outsider Colt (Cameron Love), Aurora (Charlotte Creaghan), Evan (Alexander Oliver), and Brodie (Lea Rose Sebastianis) are sat around the campfire listening to Ehren (Sam Roulston) relate the story of the `White Pine Massacre'. Decades earlier, the developmentally delayed son of the local store owner had been lured to the top of the fire tower by some lumberjacks from the logging camp promising him a bag of toys. Scared by one of the men wearing a fire, the child had plunged to his death. However, the loggers were bumped off over the next few weeks and the camp was abandoned without the killer ever being identified. Years later, a second spree also ended without the culprit being caught.
Pleased with the reaction to his story, Ehren goes for a smoke behind the cabin, where he is beheaded by Johnny with a drawknife. Failing to find the locket, he peers through the window to see Troy and Kris arguing before bedtime. Lugging Ehren's body behind him, Johnny heads into town, where he breaks into the ranger's office to steal a pair of log-dragging hooks, an axe, and the fire hood that had been part of a historic crimes display. Trudging back towards the cabin, he spies Brodie and Aurora on the jetty across the lake.
They had arranged to do yoga, but Brodie insists on having a swim. Wading silently into the water, Johnny pulls her under and, apart from a couple of brief yelps on the surface, Brodie is powerless to resist. Aurora fares no better when Johnny finds her exercises nearby. Realising her only option is to leap off the cliff, Aurora stops in her tracks and gasps as the log hook is thrust through her abdomen. As he head slumps forward, Johnny catches it on the hook and pulls it out through the dead girl's spine before pushing her cadaver over the edge.
As he wanders back to the cabin, Johnny hears Colt, Troy, and Evan arguing over their missing friends and which car to use. Evan's keys are tossed into the woods and land at Johnny's feet. He is intrigued by the toy car hanging on the keyring and removes his mask to run the wheels over his thigh, as he crouches against a tree stump. When Evan comes to find his keys, Johnny inflicts a wound on his leg and uses the car horn to lure Troy outside, as Evan crawls away in terror. Troy shoots Johnny with a rifle and tries to support Evan as they go for help. However, the bullets only stun Johnny and he quickly catches up with them.
Returning on a quad bike from having found Ehren's body at the ranger station, Colt and Kris flee on seeing the carnage and Johnny eyeing them. That night, the ranger explains how Johnny's father had hiked his prices to fleece the loggers and they had been trying to teach him a lesson by taunting his son. He also warns Kris that the locket Troy had given her belonged to Johnny's mother and that he will only return to his grave once he reclaims it.
Knowing from a past encounter that the bullets he fires at Johnny will only delay him, the ranger urges Colt to bind his feet and hands. However, he's too scared and Johnny pounces on them when the ranger tries to pass the rifle to Colt so he can cover him while he ties some knots. The trippers escape, leaving Johnny to drag the lawman to a log splitter in a nearby shack, where he proceeds to sever an arm before decapitating the bleeding corpse.
Running into the woods, Kris and Colt decide to lure Johnny into one of the poacher's traps. However, in trying to distract him, Colt gets too close to Johnny, who savagely hacks at him with the axe. Despite being terrified, Kris has the sense to leave the locket dangling from a gas canister before taking to her heels. Her foot gets caught in a trap, but she uses a twig to lever it open and limps through the woods until she reaches the road. Much to her relief, she is picked up by a woman (Lauren-Marie Taylor) who realises she needs to get to hospital.
When Kris fibs that she was attacked by an animal, the driver goes into a lengthy story about her game warden brother being mauled by a rampaging bear. He had claimed the creature had `henhouse syndrome', as it just kept killing irrationally before disappearing back into the woods. Concerned that Kris is losing consciousness, the woman insists on applying a tourniquet. Peering fixedly into woods, Kris remains terrified that Johnny will creep up behind them. As the camera roves through the trees, however, it alights upon the orange plastic canister and notes that the locket has gone before the screen plunges into darkness.
Shot in long, Academy ratio takes by Pierce Derks and dotted with astute jump cuts by editor Alex Jacobs, this almost has the feel of a nouvelle vague slasher. But the influence of Andrei Tarkovsky and Gus Van Sant is also evident, as Nash rewards genre afionados with abundant knowing references to standards like Sean S. Cunningham's Friday the 13th (1980), John Carpenter's Halloween (1978), and Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), while also citing horrors from closer to home, including George Mihalka's My Bloody Valentine (1981), in which the killer sported a miner's gas mask.
Mostly keeping the camera in the wake of the stalking predator, Nash reduces the imperilled septet to bit players, as their dialogue is mostly heard from Johnny's perspective. The notable exception is the fireside tale, which is filmed with an encircling shot that is one of Nash's few stylistic missteps, as it lasts too long and forms a protective ring around the campers that precludes any gnawing suspense.
Another blip sees the ranger accede to Cort's refusal to bind the stunned Johnny's feet, as he's in charge and should have ordered Kris to grab the rope rather than allow himself to be caught off guard by handing over the rifle. This is sloppy scripting, but Nash atones with the riveting coda, in which the woman who gives Kris a ride chatters away about rogue bears on killing jags while her passenger is too traumatised to mention what she's endured and the danger they might still face when they pull over to staunch her bleeding. It's a bold gambit, made all the more fascinating by the extreme close-up of Andrea Pavlovic's intensely anxious face.
Although there's no score to ramp up the scares, Nash makes plentiful use of diegetic music. But pre-eminence is given to Michelle Hwu and Tim Atkins's exceptional sound mix, which utilises the rhythmic stomp of Ry Barrett's feet to generate suspense in the same way that John Williams did with the `dun dun' beat in Steven Spielberg's Jaws (1975). That game-changing chiller eschewed graphic blood-letting, but Nash can't resist a bit of splatter, although he might have shown a little more imagination than having two beheadings, especially when he could really have gone to town with the thunderous log splitter. Nevertheless, the brutal intricacy of the draw hook disembowelling should keep the gorehounds happy.
Notwithstanding the deconstructivist motives, this is rather pedestrian, even simplistic in narrative terms. But the stylistic strategies behind the inspired insouciance of the slaying largely pay off to suggest that Nash is going to be well worth watching in the future.
A PLACE CALLED SILENCE.
Billed as Boon-lip Quah when he made his Malaysian feature bow with Sheep Without a Shepherd (2019), Sam Quah adopted a different first name for A Place Called Silence (2022). He has now remade this girls' school chiller after the male lead in the original became caught up in a #MeToo scandal that prevented the film from being widely distributed. Relocating the action to Taiwan and drenching it in relentless rain, Quah has striven to produce an atmospheric treatise on the perils of bullying. But this is less a hard-hitting work of social critique than a barnstorming blend of melodrama, fantasy, lampoon, and schlock.
At Jing Mu High School, Angie and her clique make life hell for Tong (Shengdi Wang), who has not uttered a word since she was small. One night after class, she has to suffer the indignity of having her mouth and hair glued after being mock-crucified in an attic room. Tong's mother, Li Han (Janine Chun-Ning Chang), is a cleaner at the school, while Angie's father, An Huaimin, is the headmaster. Consequently, no one ever gets punished for the bullying, from which the rest of the staff try to distance themselves.
Angie is desperate to know what Tong has done with a mobile phone, but she has more things to worry about after friends Gao, Zhong, and Huang go missing after they meet up at the old castle near the school. They are attacked by a figure shrouded in a black waterproof, similar to the one Li wears when she goes to the roof garden to pick kumquats from the patch her husband had planted.
Next day, Li asks the Head if Tong can return to the special needs class, as she is struggling in the main year group. When he refuses, she threatens to expose Angie's bullying and he quickly accedes to her request. As she leaves for home, Li is stopped by Zhong's anxious mother at the school gates because her daughter has disappeared without a trace. Detective Dai has come to investigate with a couple of klutzy sidekicks. But they find no clues and Li protects the timid Tong from questioning, as Angie mentions the planned rendezvous at the castle. But she also explains that she had missed school that day because she had fallen in the lake while lighting a candle during a paper boat ceremony to remember the victims of the previous year's tsunami.
Arriving home, Li finds landlady Mrs Wu collecting donations for the tsunami charity. She doesn't want to get involved, however, as she is more interested in the fact that school handyman Zaifu Lin (Wang Chuanjun) is moving into the building. He is wearing a black gillet bearing the logo of the tsunami charity and this is seen again when the figure in the raincoat traps Angie on an abandoned bus, where she had gone for a quiet smoke.
Organising a rehearsal by the school drum corps for a major charity event, the Head keeps calling Angie's phone. He takes his seat and the performance begins. Tong looks up at the glass cupola above the hall to see Li and Lin cleaning the glass (which has been leaking) and scuttles away just before the Head pulls a cord on the stage to unleash a glitter shower. Instead, Angie's corpse falls down wrapped in plastic, with her phone ringing beneath her staring eyes.
All hell breaks loose, with girls running hither and thither. When calm is restored, the Head tells Dai that Lin has not been the same since losing his daughter, Huijun, in the tsunami. He regrets allowing senior teacher Mr Feng to talk him into giving Lin a job, as he has received numerous complaints from girls of the same age that he has been staring at them and trying to take their picture.
Meanwhile, Li returns home to find Tong's wristwatch in a puddle near the door. She imagines Lin dragging her daughter to his room and the watch falling off in the struggle. Clambering out of the window, Li hurts her hand on a nail, as she tries to lower herself on to Lin's ledge, so she can snoop around inside. She manages to hide under the bed, when Lin comes home and she's grateful to Mrs Wu distracting him, so that she can make her getaway. As she emerges on to the street, however, she's confronted by the cops and taken to the station for to watch some CCTV footage.
This reminds Li that Lin had been eager to throw away some bin bags before driving off with Mrs Lu and she dashes back to the building just as the dumpster is being collected. She spots a figure in a black raincoat and charges after them down a narrow alley. The fugitive is hit by a car and Dai recognises him as his own unruly son, Wu Wang, who is forever getting into trouble for filming the neighbours through their windows.
He has recorded a video of Tong being attacked (just as Li had imagined) and this convinces her that Lin is up to no good. But Wu also has images of Li beating Tong for disobeying her orders. She protests that she was trying to protect her vulnerable daughter by making her understand the risks she faces from strangers. Dai considers Li's actions to be borderline abuse, but he admits that he has also been a bad father, as Wu is out of control and is placed in a cell after refusing to co-operate with the enquiry.
When Mr Yang from the school reports to the station, Li notices that he has an key on his keyring similar to one that Feng carries. He explains that it's for the old recreation room that the charity had used before the tsunami. Stealing the keys and Yang's car, Li drives out to the site on the outskirts of town. In her absence, Dai searches her apartment and finds a notebook full of jottings from the calls Li has with her work-away husband. He also finds a mobile phone that only seems to call a single number and is unsurprised when Li answers, as she drives towards the recreation room.
Meanwhile, Mrs Wu is curious to know why Lin has avoided a police roadblock, while they are running errands. Learning from a phone call that Lin is dangerous, she turns on the van radio to allay Lin's suspicions, only for a news bulletin to declare him the prime suspect in Angie's murder and the disappearance of her friends. She is left bound and gagged in the back of the van, as Lin arrives at the recreation block, shortly after Li has discovered the bodies of the missing girls in a shallow grave in the flowerbed.
As Lin enters the building, he flashes back to happier times with his developmentally delayed daughter and we see how Angie had bullied Huijun with a crown of thorny roses on her birthday. Taking her on to the cupola roof, the girls had threatened to throw the wounded dove that Huijun had been nursing off the roof. Instead, they push her around and bounce her off the cupola glass until Tong appears in an effort to defend her classmate. She calls the cops on her phone, but is prevented from intervening by Li, who has followed her daughter and tries to pull her away from the scene. Tong is so upset that Li goes back on to the roof to remonstrate with Angie, but arrives in time only to see Huijun fall through the glass to her death. The bullies run away, leaving behind the phone on which they had been filming their antics and it's picked up by Tong (which is why Angie had glued her so that she would reveal its whereabouts).
The phone had been left in Lin's locker and he had exacted his revenge on the perpetrators, as a consequence. However, he had also discovered that Feng had been giving a religion lesson on the stage and had withheld the fact that he had looked up to see Angie and her friends grouped around the shattered cupola. Indeed, he had helped the Head hide the rooftop CCTV footage and spread the rumour that Huijun had killed herself. Hence, Lin abducting him after his retirement from the school and chaining him to a chair in the rec room for abusing the trust that Lin had placed in him as the head of the tsunami charity.
Before Lin can inflict further torture on the old man, however, he is attacked by Li, who is convinced that he had mistakenly included Tong in the bullies and had kidnapped her as punishment. She stabs him in the side and he gloats that he had buried Tong in the kumquat patch because Li deserves to know how it feels to lose a child. He overpowers her and carries Feng to the van, only to discover that Mrs Wu has escaped. She helps Lin to her feet and is terrified in the passenger seat when she goes hurtling after the van in Yang's car. Mrs Wu tries to grab the wheel, causing the vehicle to bounce off the barriers on a winding road. So, Li beans her with the lump hammer on the front seat and flips the car after crashing into the back of the van.
Lin had called for an ambulance as he sped away and Dai had pinpointed their position on the road. But, before he can arrive, Li smashes Lin's head through the side window and jams mirror glass into his neck in an effort to get him to tell her where Tong is. He pushes her away and tries to drive off, but Dai stops him with a bullet and the camera alights on the religious tome that has fallen on the floor, in which Lin had hidden an origami crane.
Days pass and Lin runs the gamut of angry locals when he leaves hospital and is taken to the police station. He is quizzed about Tong and insists that she's on the roof with the kumquats. A flashback shows Li being abused by her violent husband, who had been about to turn his attention to Tong when she had confronted him with a bush knife. Desperate to avoid jail so that she can continue to protect the now non-verbal Tong, Li had hauled the corpse on to the roof and buried it under the kumquats. Subsequently, she had feigned weekly phone calls from her travelling spouse and had ensured that everyone knew that he grows the best fruit.
While an excavation takes place on the roof, doltish cop Wen unfolds some origami cranes in an evidence bag and discovers that they form part of a drawing that Tong had been making before she disappeared. He rushes up to the roof in time to see Lin jump to his death, although he imagines that he lands in water because he had promised to take Huijun boating. The body of Li's husband is found and she is charged with his murder.
Dai is about to close the case when he gets new information from Wu's camera. He visits Li in her cell, where a TV news report details the Head's punishment for covering up Angie's misdeeds. Much to Li's dismay, he shows her his son's footage of Tong stabbing her father after he had tried to corner her. Seconds later, Li had rushed in brandishing her own blade, but had realised that she had to act quickly in order to protect her daughter. She had buried her spouse and told Tong never to speak of the matter again - advice she had taken literally by opting to fall silent.
Li explains that Tong's stepfather had initially doted on her, but had become a monster. She pleads with Dai to let her take the blame because she believes that Lin had known Tong had befriended Huijun and had helped her get away from the school and the beatings her mother had given her. Sympathetic to Li's plea, Dai pretends that she had jumped him, broken the camera, and ripped the film. As he leaves Li with the consolation of being a good mother, a flashback shows Tong leaving the phone in Lin's locker and smiling quietly to herself the next time that Angie had insulted her, as she knows she will shortly be getting her just desserts. Indeed, she looks on as Lin eradicates her foes and we flash back again to see how happy she and Huijun had been together before Angie started picking on them. Lin had given her a signal through the cupola just before Angie's corpse had dropped and he had hidden her in a crate with Huijun's dove to be driven far away so that she can start a new life. As Tong lifts the lid to see a blue sky above her, we see Lin and Huijun sitting in a boat on a placid lake with the clouds reflecting idyllically in the water. No one can hurt them anymore.
There are so many plot strands floating around here that it's to Quah's credit that he manages to tie them so neatly. Of course, he's had a trial run and it would be intriguing to see the Malaysian version to make comparisons. Regardless of their plausibility, Quah cheerfully dots proceedings with twists and revelations, with Wu's voyeuristic archive proving highly useful in getting the plot out of tight corners. Flashbacks also do a good deal of heavy lifting, as Quah seeks to circumvent linearity and spring surprises. In fact, there's next to no suspense and precious little horror. But the momentum carries viewers forward, as they desperately strive to keep track of who everybody is and how they are connected.
The broad comic caricatures don't come off, especially as Wen and his sidekick are sidelined almost as soon as they have been introduced. But Quah isn't aiming for finesse here, as the action rattles along and the clichés slot into place. He's well served by Wang Chuanjun as the fiercely protective and ruthlessly resourceful mother (although we never learn why she stopped being an accountant and took a cleaning job) and by Wang Chuanjun, as the serial killer who was a guitar-strumming superdad before his switch was flipped. The photography, production design, editing, and score are all admirable (although credits for the crafts are as hard to come by as casting details). But the weightier themes of abused power, religious hypocrisy, charitable corruption, police incompetence, and extreme parenting are rather overwhelmed by the tricksy structure and the emphasis placed on entertainment over enlightenment.
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