After The Rain

Do you know of this movie, ‘Wait Until Dark’? A 1967 film with Audrey Hepburn as a blind woman who is attacked in her own home. She waits until it’s dark, then breaks all the lamps so that the attacker, like her, will not be able to see. Hepburn was nominated for an Oscar for this role.
And do you know the story of ’The Sitter’, a short film, on which the 1979 ‘When a Stranger Calls’ is based? It is a suspenseful retelling of the classic urban legend of ’The Babysitter and the Man Upstairs’. A babysitter is menaced by mysterious and frightening phone calls telling her to “check the children’. When she seeks help from the police, they finally reveal the calls are coming from inside the house!

Now, ’The Invisible Man’.

When James Wan’s partner in crime, Leigh Whannell, on such blockbuster body-horror franchises like ’Saw’ and ‘Insidious’, decides to update James Whale’s 1933 film based on H.G. Well’s novel, the stage is set for a brand of horror that mixes the unreal with the very real fear of having no where to hide and no one to help you. Whannell made his name as both a writer and actor, fully clued to the open secret of all great horror films – the scariest things are those that you don’t see.

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In show business, a most talented artiste will still need the perfect platform to shine. With a combination of factors, including a big dose of luck, this can happen. And we have seen this happen. How an artiste sparkle, and how a movie for example, can move from good to great to becoming a classic. What if a writer writes a meaty role with a talented artiste in mind? Of course the execution and many other elements that make a movie a movie will influence the final outcome. But the chances of seeing magic on screen is much higher.

Meryl Streep in ’The Devil Wears Prada’ is a classic case in point. Anne Hathaway and Emily Blunt (who would have thought?) along with Stanley Tucci are all good. But sometimes a movie just needs a dame. Someone like Streep to play Miranda Priestly, a character widely believed to be Vouge’s editor Anna Wintour. A pillar of strength, that serves both as the friction and resolution, the very reason to watch, to follow and to savour the unraveling of the story of a woman in the acme of her power, who is also human, who is also vulnerable.

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I remember there was a night when I was training as a cadet soldier. I thought I could not go on. It was an endless exercise of search and destroy in the mountains of Kaoshiung in Taiwan. Out of the blue, a fellow cadet started to sing. His voice floated through the stillness, penetrated the cold and filled the forest with a melody that was both fitting and out of place. I did not wonder if the cadet would be punished for singing. I longed for home, more. But I also felt a strange peace.

Something brutal can be seen for what it is. Or with poetic irony. Something painful can be bitter. Or bittersweet. We can paint adversity in dark shades. Or bright, even colourful. Sometimes hell can be more hellish, seen through the eyes of an artiste. Watching 1917, the movie that is pulling the rug from under the favourites in this awards season, I see poetry, even beauty in the ravages of war. And it doesn’t make it any less cruel, any less inhuman.

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