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By A.O. Scott

• Sept. 13, 2012

“The Master,” Paul Thomas Anderson’s imposing, confounding and altogether amazing new film, is partly concerned with the life and work of one Lancaster Dodd, leader of a therapeutic, quasi-religious cult known as the Cause. Dodd’s “process,” a stew of Freud, hypnosis and carnival sideshow mumbo-jumbo, is based on a kind of mental time travel. The subject is led, by a series of pointed, painful questions, on a search for past trauma — earlier in life, before birth, in a previous existence — that can be identified as the source of negative emotion and destructive behavior in the present.

At a certain point Dodd modifies his theory, suggesting that instead of “remembering” our prenatal past, our minds “imagine” it. This shift leads to some consternation among his followers (notably a wealthy benefactor played by Laura Dern), and it may also fuel the audience’s skepticism about this charismatic mountebank, brought to life by Philip Seymour Hoffman with the flair and precision of a great concert pianist.

More showman than shaman — he holds his followers in thrall with jokes, dinner-table toasts and bawdy songs — Dodd is so adept at the performance of sincerity that he may long ago have fooled himself into believing the bizarre doctrines he seems to pull out of thin air. “The Master,” meanwhile, is rigorously agnostic about his methods and intentions, refusing the temptations of satire and gazing fondly at Dodd’s follies even as it notes the brutal way he and his acolytes deal with doubters and heretics. This semi-sympathetic stance makes sense, since the film, a glorious and haunting symphony of color, emotion and sound, is very much its own Cause.

Our minds sometimes play tricks on us, substituting invention for memory. Movies turn this lapse into a principle, manufacturing collective fantasies that are often more vivid, more real, than what actually happened. “The Master,” unfolding in the anxious, movie-saturated years just after World War II, is not a work of history in the literal or even the conventionally literary sense. The strange and complicated story it has to tell exists beyond the reach of doubt or verification. The cumulative artifice on display is beautiful — camera movements that elicit an involuntary gasp, passages in Jonny Greenwood’s score that raise the hair on the back of your neck, feats of acting that defy comprehension — but all of it has been marshaled in the pursuit of a new kind of cinematic truth. This is a movie that defies understanding even as it compels reverent, astonished belief.

Lancaster Dodd bears a clear resemblance to L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology , and there are strong echoes of Hubbard’s Dianetics in the theory and practice of the Cause, but viewers of “The Master” hoping for insight into the prehistory of Tom Cruise’s love life will be disappointed. Hubbard’s rise is the kernel of this film much in the way that the career of the early-20th-century California oil tycoon Edward L. Doheny was the seed from which Mr. Anderson (assisted by Upton Sinclair’s muckraking novel “Oil!”) coaxed the lurid blossom that was “There Will Be Blood.” The stiff, theatrical pseudo-realism of period drama is the last thing on this director’s mind.

In “The Master” the production designers Jack Fisk and David Crank have produced a sensuous, richly detailed and absolutely plausible vision of 1950, and the cinematographer, Mihai Malaimare Jr., takes advantage of the density and sheen of the 70-millimeter format to approximate the lush visual grandeur of mid-50s melodrama. The specters of Eisenhower-era auteurs like George Stevens, Max Ophuls, Nicholas Ray and Douglas Sirk hover just outside the frame, along with the ghosts of the spiritual seekers, sexual adventurers and shellshocked veterans who dotted the American landscape at the dawn of the atomic age.

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Kenneth Turan Reviews 'The Master'

Paul Thomas Anderson can be placed in the top tier of American film directors — on the reputation of films such as There Will Be Blood , Boogie Nights , and his latest, The Master . Film critic Kenneth Turan has this review.

Copyright © 2012 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

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Summary In the years after WWII, an American intellectual creates a religion. When he meets a troubled drifter, he invites the man to help him spread the new faith. As their congregation increases, the drifter begins to question the religion he once accepted and the mentor who gave his life direction.

Directed By : Paul Thomas Anderson

Written By : Paul Thomas Anderson

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Freddie quell, philip seymour hoffman, lancaster dodd, jesse plemons, price carson, v.a. doctor, mike howard, rorschach doctor, sarah shoshana david, bruce goodchild, v.a. doctor, interview, matt hering, v.a. patient, dan anderson, andrew koponen, jeffrey w. jenkins, patrick wilder, ryan curtis, jay laurence, abraxas adams, portrait customer, kevin hudnell, hunter craig, ryder craig, critic reviews.

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FILM REVIEW: A bold, challenging, brilliantly acted drama gives Joaquin Phoenix his best role to date.

By Todd McCarthy

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Joaquin Phoenix (left) undergoes an intense interrogation at the hands of Philip Seymour Hoffman, the charismatic leader of a mysterious personal-improvement organization.

Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master is masterful for sure, as well as enthralling and perplexing. But an argument that will endure is whether it adds up to the sum of its many brilliant parts.

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The writer-director’s first film since 2007’s There Will Be Blood is an unsettling character study of a disturbed Navy veteran, a selective portrait of post-World War II America and a cinephile’s sandbox. One thing it is not is an exposé of Scientology, though nearly all of the characters are involved in a controversial cult. Its commercial career looks to follow the usual course of the director’s work, with his intense fan base and mostly strong critical support making Master a must-see for serious audiences and wider acceptance dependent on the extent of awards recognition. Even so, this will be a tougher sell to Joe Public than Anderson’s other work.

In a film overflowing with qualities but also brimming with puzzlements, two things stand out: the extraordinary command of cinematic technique, which alone is nearly enough to keep a connoisseur on the edge of their seat the entire time, and the tremendous portrayals by Joaquin Phoenix and Philip Seymour Hoffman of entirely antithetical men, one an unlettered drifter without a clue, the other an intellectual charlatan who claims to have all the answers.

The first 20 minutes are spent observing sailor Freddie Quell (Phoenix). Appearing to be sex-obsessed and a bit loony as he pleasures himself on a Pacific beach, he is diagnosed with a “nervous condition” upon his discharge at the end of WWII, whereupon he turns up as a photographer at a snazzy department store. He’s got enough charm to seduce a beautiful model he’s shooting but is so hair-triggered that he assaults a male customer and is fired. This entire interlude is one of the most beautifully directed scenes anyone could ever wish to see.

Freddie scrams to San Francisco and sneaks aboard a ship on which a party hosted by the dazzlingly articulate Lancaster Dodd (Hoffman) is under way. Dodd recognizes at once that Freddie is a scoundrel but welcomes the stowaway nonetheless, no doubt for the challenge of curing him as setting people straight is the goal of his quasi-mystical organization, The Cause. “You’re aberrated,” declares Dodd. “You’ve strayed from the proper path.”

Thus follow intense “recording” sessions in which Dodd interrogates his subject to flush out truthful answers on the most sensitive of topics. Presumably this is akin to Scientology’s auditing process, and in dramatic terms the scenes are terrifically effective, both for the visceral impact of the exchanges and their revelatory nature. Later, Dodd expounds on his belief that man is not an animal and that, with proper training, people can be purged of “all negative impulses.”

The latter premise is sorely tested by Freddie, who’s like an obedient puppy with rabies. When Dodd’s son Val (Jesse Plemons) confides of his father that, “He’s making all this up as he goes along,” Freddie loses it, attacking cops in a maniacal rage and prompting Dodd’s ever-watchful wife (Amy Adams) to warn, “He’ll be our undoing.”

A convincing dynamic leaks from the film once the two men see each other for what they are: Freddie realizes Dodd is a fraud, and the older man understands the younger can only hurt The Cause; as constructed, that should be the end of things. But the film moves forward, to not-uninteresting but less persuasive effect, toward a finale that seems unworthy of so much that has come before.

As for the Scientology angle, certain aspects of The Cause invite comparison to L. Ron Hubbard and his creation: the processing sequences, the living on a boat, the allusions to time travel and so on. Still, if Anderson really had wanted to mine the early days of Scientology, he could have had a much juicier film, what with the sexual shenanigans, legal scrapes and boldface lies that are part of the organization’s past. If anything, Scientology gets off easy.

Phoenix has never shown anything near the power, mystery and dangerous unpredictability he serves up as the emotionally inchoate Freddie. Just being around this guy will cause unease in many viewers, so it’s impressive that he and Anderson have been able to build such a complex work around such a derelict figure.

By contrast, Lancaster Dodd, no matter how dedicated to flimflammery, is at heart generous. He likes to share his house, hospitality and beliefs, even if he is a philosophical snake oil salesman. Hoffman is brilliantly focused, deliciously enunciating Dodd’s many theories, at all times believable as a man capable of inspiring a faithful following.

In the one female part of any size, Adams at first appears restricted by the subordinate status of obedient wife. But she notices everything and always steps in when needed with crucial contributions (including a most unexpected stress-reducing husband-wife sex interlude). Adams underplays it all to strong effect.

Visually, Master is bracing, resplendent, almost hypersensitizing thanks to the 70mm celluloid used so skillfully by Anderson and cinematographer Mihai Malaimare Jr. (This marks the first time the director has worked with a director of photography other than Robert Elswit, who was busy with The Bourne Legacy .) As the film is not an epic in the usual sense of grand locations and does not employ a widescreen format, it’s a bit surprising that it is the first American dramatic feature shot in its virtual entirety in 70mm since Ron Howard’s Far and Away in 1992. Because of the great format’s essential disuse, The Weinstein Co. has been finding it difficult to secure properly equipped cinemas to present Master to the director’s specifications.

Jonny Greenwood, whose score for There Will Be Blood proved so effective, provides eerie music with a life of its own that Anderson allows to whoosh through scenes in an unorthodox way. Like everything else about the film, it is highly particular and bracingly outside the norm.

Opens: Sept. 21 (The Weinstein Co.) Venues: Venice, Toronto film festivals Rated R, 137 minutes

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Movie Review: The Master (2012)

• Aaron Leggo
• Movie Reviews
• 8 responses
• --> October 3, 2012

The student.

Once thought to be a sort of incendiary indictment of Scientology, Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master turns out to have much more on its mind and is far less easily described. Often dipping into non-narrative space and at times seemingly impenetrable, Anderson’s sixth feature is focused on the post-war journey of drifter, loner, and spiritually alienated alcoholic Freddie Quell (a grotesquely transformed Joaquin Phoenix, whose shape and movement suggests a decrepit human pretzel). We first meet Freddie just as World War II is wrapping up. Freddie’s days in the Navy are over and now it’ll be time for him to move on, find a job, and search out some meaning in his life. The job part is relatively easy, but grasping some semblance of meaning ends up a messy, meandering endeavor. A lost soul trying to find his place in the universe sounds like the makings of an uplifting tale, but Anderson steers The Master in a completely different direction, showing us a man incapable of achieving his goals or even barely articulating them. Freddie’s journey is unsettling, uncomfortable, and unnerving, and the movie that surrounds him follows suit.

Taking its time to mull over the details of Freddie’s current existence, The Master moves slowly, though crisply. Character interactions crackle and conflict is always just one violent emotional outburst away from boiling to the surface. Psychological instability runs like a fault line through the entire movie, constantly threatening to split the onscreen world apart and cause irreparable damage. It’s dangerous, but perhaps hardly a threat to Freddie, who is so severely wrecked that it may simply be too late for him. Such is the unique strangeness of Anderson’s movie; where the lead character is locked in a quest he can’t complete, clawing for meaning that is beyond his reach. Hope proves elusive for Freddie and it never feels like Anderson is helping the character along or aiding him in any way. Freddie goes where he goes and we’re just here to watch the guy’s journey unfold. Or unravel.

Potential rescue from his wayward lifestyle arrives when Freddie stows away on a ship and meets self-professed writer, doctor, nuclear physicist, and theoretical philosopher Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman), whose mysterious movement known as The Cause quickly attracts Freddie. Dodd’s methods are suspect and his theory that ailments can be solved through a special brand of hypnosis that supposedly allows believers to tap into previous lives and experiences is clearly rooted in crackpot territory, but that doesn’t stop Freddie, desperate for a connection, from joining the group.

As Freddie is pulled deeper into the Cause’s network, we are left to observe and form our own judgments regarding the validity of the movement. Anderson allows us to peek behind the curtain, but it’s up to us to make sense of what we see. This approach is quite fascinating, because it provides us with a fly-on-the-wall perspective that insists we engage more with our own thoughts than with the characters on screen. Connecting to Freddie and Dodd and even Dodd’s dedicated, surefooted wife Peggy (Amy Adams) is nearly impossible, considering how alienating their experiences are, but they’re such intriguing characters that watching them becomes a sort of perverse pleasure.

Anderson smartly avoids turning these people into walking punch lines and the actors elevate their characters by making them utterly believable, no matter how nutty they become in their confusion and conviction. The Master is often viewable as a very dark comedy and the movie is filled with deeply, disturbingly funny moments, but the potential laughs are never intended as cheap pot-shots aimed at cults and charismatic leaders. The characters fill the situations with the utmost sincerity and the humor that permeates the picture comes honestly through them. Even with often very comical performances by Phoenix and Hoffman, Freddie and Dodd are never reduced to cardboard cut-out simplicities. Their outbursts feel genuine, regardless of how ridiculously hilarious they may be.

The master.

Dodd has a few good explosions when challenged at times, but Freddie is like a grenade with the pin ready to be pulled at any second. With the slightest provocation, he explodes into a rage and takes it out on some individual who dares anger him with so much as a bad word about himself or The Cause or Dodd. Freddie’s fury further fulfills his status as an unlikable protagonist, since the people that he attacks are almost always far easier and more sensible to sympathize with. And I thought Daniel Plainview, Anderson’s last harrowing lead from “ There Will Be Blood ,” was a tough nut to crack. Freddie is a whole other breed of destructive force. He probably wouldn’t drink your milkshake, but he’d certainly toss it in your face and try to choke you with the straw.

Phoenix makes Freddie an almost unrecognizable being at times. Hunched over, his hands pushed to the back of his hips to rest, spewing lines, between manic laughter, through a distorted corner of his mouth, the performance stretches to every corner of his body and still fully inhabits his mind. It’s a wildly unhinged metamorphosis that engages through its sheer monstrous qualities and precise attention to detail.

Like the lost soul at its dark, chewy center, The Master drifts and pulls us along with it. The movie marks another awesome achievement for Anderson and makes a strong companion piece to “There Will Be Blood,” feeling as much a part of a pair as Anderson’s earlier pictures “ Boogie Nights ” and “ Magnolia ” do. But even then, The Master stands on its own as Anderson’s most challenging effort to date. It’s an uncompromising picture that dares to suggest a lack of change that practically negates what we just watched. It’s also a chilly portrait of an awfully hopeless man, and yes, a skeptical look at philosophical fallacies dressed up as faith-dependent religion. It’s a lot of things, not just one thing; none of them easily accessible, all of them fascinatingly robust. Anderson continues to amaze with yet another grand effort. Someone get this man a milkshake.

Tagged: cult , drifter , physicist , religion

You and I both know the truth. You just don't admit it.

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'Movie Review: The Master (2012)' have 8 comments

October 3, 2012 @ 11:36 am Kris

So who wins the trophy this year: Paul Thomas Anderson or Steven Spielberg?

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November 6, 2012 @ 7:30 pm OhSwami

Of the two, Spielberg has the better shot at a nom.

October 3, 2012 @ 12:12 pm Unrooliest

Another master stroke from PTA.

October 3, 2012 @ 12:53 pm Neo101

Don’t be fooled by this review. The Master wants so badly to be taken seriously but in reality it is nothing more than quasi-intellectual bullshit that drones on and on. The ending couldn’t come fast enough.

October 3, 2012 @ 1:10 pm Weeds

There Will Be Blood is still Anderson’s top pic.

October 3, 2012 @ 2:22 pm Lolly

If Joaquin Phoenix didn’t tell the Academy to piss off he would probably garner a nomination. He puts forth a fantastic performance, completely losing himself in the role.

November 6, 2012 @ 7:28 pm OhSwami

He’ll still get a nod.

October 3, 2012 @ 8:28 pm CheckRequest

Powerful although not as good as There Will Be Blood.

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The Best Films of the 2010s: The Master

This feature is a part of a series on the best films of the 2010s, resulting from our ranked top 25, which you can read here . This is #10. 

It is odd to be asked to write about “ The Master ” in 2019. Primarily because the movie features one of the actor Joaquin Phoenix’s most searing, uninhibited, and revelatory performances. A performance from which he borrows, or at least echoes, or recalls maybe, extensively in this year’s “ Joker .”

In “The Master,” Freddie Quell is first seen in the Navy, near and at the end of World War II; his actions and his small but vivid patches of dialogue (as when he describes the best way of getting rid of crab lice) suggest an infantilized sexuality and a near-constant state/pursuit of inebriation. Arthur Fleck of “Joker” has no enthusiasm for drink—he’s already on a bunch of ineffectual meds in any case—and his infantilization extends not so much to the realm of sexuality as to idealized romance.

But both are marginalized people—guys who, in a less enlightened age, many of us might call “losers.” Phoenix gives both men a peculiar, often contorted, physicality. Freddie often hunches his back while putting one or both hands on hips. He’s kind of crablike, especially when he stands on a beach and as masturbates, or feigns masturbation, into the incoming ocean tide. Fleck is more extended, like he’s trying to stretch himself out of his body.

But both characters display their spinal curvatures in disturbing ways. Both show little compunction about putting unfamiliar substances into their mouths. Freddie takes a swig of Lysol, Arthur licks white face makeup off a brush. Freddie freaks out an army psychologist with his answers to a Rorschach test, Arthur alienates his social worker with his complaints that she doesn’t really listen to him.

I’m comfortable admitting these characters are not-so-secret sharers despite the fact that I feel entirely differently about “The Master” than I do about “Joker.” And this essay is not the vehicle in which to contemplate/complain that one of these performances occurs in a box-office-record-breaker while the other, the portrayal of Freddie Quell here, is in a film that made a mere $16 million in the U.S. But that is an interesting factoid, in any event.

Kent Jones ’ essay on “The Master” in the September/October 2012 issue of Film Comment  remains, to my mind, definitive. In it, he writes of Anderson and Phoenix’s creation: “Phoenix’s Freddie seems like genuinely damaged goods. He and his director feel their way into this man-in-a-bind from the inside out, and they establish his estrangement from others in those opening scenes through awkward smiles and out-of-sync body language alone. A lot is made of Phoenix’s wiry physique and misshapen upper lip, which seems to direct the tilt of his head up and away from whoever he happens to be talking to through a clenched mouth as he feigns an air of skepticism which covers an urge to run. He handles objects with the fragile tentativeness of a child, and his gait is so furiously deliberate and imbalanced that he seems to be avoiding spastic convulsions. This is a performance with a difference, the behavioral creation of an actor and a director with a fierce devotion to the ragged, the unkempt, the authorless.”

Unlike Arthur Fleck, though, ragged and unkempt Freddie finds a savior, or at least a shepherd.

We are with Freddie alone, and very uncomfortably, for the first 20 minutes of the movie: his drunkenness, his drooling sexual humor, his “nervous condition,” his rages, his lying, his desperation, his “nervous condition.” We are with him as he runs across a field chased by those who would possibly kill him, and have maybe not good but definitely coherent reason to, and then we are behind him as he advances toward a pier. Festive music and an array of out-of-focus lights ahead greet him; a steamboat on which there’s a party comes into focus and goes out again. The Alethia is the party boat. Freddie’s salvation and curse are aboard it. We see him from afar, from Freddie’s perspective, doing a silly dance to the silly faux Latin music, in a black jacket and white shirt, fingers pointing upward as he bops. He is Lancaster Dodd.

Freddie wakes up on that boat. His “rescue” has a near-fairy tale quality to it. “You’re safe. You’re at sea,” a woman tells him as her rouses from his slumber. He is then ushered to the quarters of the title character, Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s Dodd, who upbraids Freddie for abusing alcohol and then asks him to recreate the concoction he made for Dodd the blacked-out night before.

“I do many many things,” Dodd tells Freddie. The character is based on L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology. Perhaps “inspired by” is the more apt term, despite the fact that writer/director Anderson seeds the scenario with a substantial amount of esoteric Hubbard lore. Hoffman, in one of his final screen performances, plays Dodd with a contained strength that masks, sometimes barely, a hopeless and virulent insecurity, one that is fiercely guarded against by Amy Adams’ Peggy, Dodd’s wife. Even as he lies, cheats, commits fraud, damages property, he hangs on to the notion that he is doing good, that he is innovating, that he is contributing to human progress.

One could say that, after Dodd takes on Freddie as a “guinea pig and protegé,” Freddie becomes an enforcing id on Dodd’s behalf. And yet Dodd needs no such thing, as we see when he ends an argument with a skeptic by sputtering “Pig. Fuck.” The relationship of the two characters is more complex in its intertwined nuances and conundrums. “Man is not an animal” is one of the Dodd adages that Freddie hears repeated on first coming into the fold. “Do you often think of how inconsequential you are?” asks Dodd of Freddie during their first round of “processing.” (Freddie answers “yes.”) When Freddie spontaneously destroys the toilet in the jail cell next to Dodd after they’ve both been arrested (and as he does this he wrestles free of his shirt as if it’s a straitjacket, and pops out his right shoulder blade as if trying to dislocate it), Dodd, calmly but almost truculently, notes, “Your fear of capture and imprisonment is an implant from millions of years ago. This battle has been with you from before you know.” And he believes it. And he’s not wrong. This is mere minutes after Dodd’s son waves off Freddie’s concern that he hasn’t been properly following his father’s teaching: “He’s just making it up as he goes along.”

The scene of the two men, side by side, one on a feral rampage, the other trying to illuminate him with an outlandish line of quasi-philosophical sci-fi nonsense that he himself may actually believe, culminating with schoolyard-like taunts—“Who likes you except for me?”—is terrifying and awe-inspiring not just for its blatant content, but for all it implies about human desire and human loneliness and the elaborate, peculiar, destructive mechanisms we construct to cope with them.

This is a movie of unusual density: in all of its two hour and 17 minute length, there’s not a word uttered or gesture made that lacks for numinosity, for presence. Its details become more illuminating and more mysterious, simultaneously, on every repeat viewing. (The movie now also offers the pleasures of seeing early glimpses of now-more prominent talents, including Jesse Plemons , Rami Malek , and Jillian Bell .) And it is not just the particulars of the dialogue and the action. The mural and the chandelier behind Freddie and hometown sweetheart Doris, for instance, and its evocations of courtly love, stuck out on my most recent engagement with the picture.

There’s a sense in which “The Master” paints itself into a corner because there can be no satisfying or just resolution to the Freddie/Dodd intertwining. Perhaps that is the reason why, in the movie’s final quarter, it shifts from dream to reality and back again who knows how many times—but the point, finally, is that in the movie’s circumscribed world there’s no effective difference.

When Dodd sings “Slow Boat To China” to Freddie near the movie’s end, it is emblematic of both the strangeness and the acuity of Anderson’s concept. “If we meet again in the next life, you will be my sworn enemy, and I will show you no mercy,” he says before he begins the not-quite-standard, a 1948-penned Frank Loesser song that’s both inconsequential and evocative. “All to myself, alone,” Dodd sings, in tune, with a slight lilt in his voice and a grave look on his face. There’s no “explanation” for what is going on here nor, I think, any proper or correct interpretation—it’s a scene that calls, critically, for what Susan Sontag called “an erotics of art.”

Which is not to say that there is no “meaning” to the scene. In these two characters, one “inconsequential,” one “not,” flow currents of cultural history feed directly into the present moment, in ways that grow more terrifying by the day.

Glenn Kenny

Glenn Kenny was the chief film critic of Premiere magazine for almost half of its existence. He has written for a host of other publications and resides in Brooklyn. Read his answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire here .

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By Peter Travers

Peter Travers

I believe in the church of Paul Thomas Anderson . Hollywood films give you zilch to believe in, tying up their narratives with a tidy bow so you won’t leave confused and angry. Anderson refuses to do the thinking for you. His films mess with your head until you take them in and take them on. No wonder Anderson infuriates lazy audiences. What a roll call: Hard Eight , Boogie Nights , Magnolia , Punch-Drunk Love , There Will Be Blood .

The Master , the sixth film from the 42-year-old writer-director, affirms his position as the foremost filmmaking talent of his generation. Anderson is a rock star, the artist who knows no limits. Fierce and ferociously funny, The Master is a great movie, the best of the year so far, and a new American classic. No way is it the kind of cinematic medicine you choke down like broccoli. Written, directed, acted, shot, edited and scored with a bracing vibrancy that restores your faith in film as an art form, The Master is nirvana for movie lovers. Anderson mixes sounds and images into a dark, dazzling music that is all his own.

As the fictional story of Lancaster Dodd ( Philip Seymour Hoffman , never finer), a 1950s cult leader who mentors disturbed World War II Navy vet Freddie Quell ( Joaquin Phoenix in the performance of his career), The Master doesn’t flinch at taking on the business of religion. Scientology? You be the judge. The names have been changed to ward off fanatical unrest. No matter. It’s the human element that bleeds onscreen. Acting doesn’t get better or go deeper than the performances delivered by Hoffman and Phoenix.

Hoffman’s Master is the founder of a movement called the Cause, much like L. Ron Hubbard founded the church of Scientology as an outgrowth of his book Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health . Both interrogate potential converts at length to help them relive traumatic events from their past and maybe past lives so they can clear their souls of toxicity. What Scientology calls “auditing,” the Cause calls “processing” and the outside world calls brainwashing morphs into scenes of nearly unbearable tension in the hands of Anderson, who admits to using the beginnings of Scientology as a “backdrop” for the film.

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Anderson doesn’t shy away from the sins committed in the name of faith, but he also sees the attraction of finding a ready-made family in a religious movement. The search to belong and the price you pay for the privilege echo through Anderson’s work, and it’s the soul of The Master .

You can feel the ache inside Freddie from the moment Anderson intros him in the South Pacific dry-humping a babe his Navy buddies have built out of sand. Freddie’s diagnosed “nervous condition” escalates when he takes a job as a photographer in a department store, where he screws a model with scary intensity and beats the crap out of a hapless customer.

Time out to honor the astonishing look of The Master . Projected in the large-frame 70mm process Anderson favors, the film engulfs you. High praise to genius cinematographer Mihai Malaimare Jr. ( Youth Without Youth , Tetro and Twixt ), whose visual poetry is matched by Jonny Greenwood’s haunting, hypnotic score. For their enthralling work alone, you’d follow The Master anywhere.

Freddie stows away on the yacht carrying the Master to New York and featuring the shipboard wedding of Dodd’s daughter Susan (Jillian Bell). Dodd’s wife, Peggy (a quietly devastating Amy Adams), sniffs trouble from the moment she eyeballs creepy Freddie. Dodd (rhymes with God) sees the danger too, but he likes the cocktails Freddie whips up with potentially lethal paint thinner. He also rises to the challenge that boozy, mercurial, violence-prone Freddie presents as a convert.

Hoffman can lift his resonant voice to command attention or lower it to a velvet whisper, both equally mesmerizing. But it’s what the guru tries to conceal – his secret smile, his sudden wrath, the connection he feels with Freddie’s feral heart – that make his portrayal monumental. Hoffman excelled in four of Anderson’s previous films, but his tour de force here as a do-gooder-turned-silky-charlatan tops them all.

Phoenix completes this out-of-the-box love story by embodying Freddie as a raw, exposed nerve. The son of an institutionalized mother, Freddie forms a relationship with Dodd that seesaws from devotion to rabid doubt. He has the same reactions to the much younger girl (Madisen Beaty) he left behind. Then there are Freddie’s twisted sexual fantasies, notably Dodd dancing among naked female disciples. Freddie freaks out when Dodd’s son Val (Jesse Plemons) casually mentions that Dad is “making all this up as he goes along.” His animal-like breakdown in a jail cell makes Robert De Niro’s raging bull seem mildly miffed. Phoenix wears the role like a second skin; he’s a volcano in full eruption. You can’t take your eyes off him.

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The Master moves into its final phase when Dodd, like Hubbard, shifts his operation to the English countryside. He phones an invitation to the wayward Freddie, a last chance to align the prodigal son with the Cause. “He’s past help,” Peggy sternly tells her husband. Adams deserves serious award attention for the subtle authority she brings to this so-called dutiful wife. As for the startling intimacy when Dodd, alone with Freddie, sings sweetly, “I’d love to get you/On a slow boat to China/All to myself alone” – yikes!

In its intricate dance of loyalty and betrayal, The Master stays seductively enigmatic. Is Freddie past help? Anderson proves allergic to glib answers. But he makes certain we see ourselves in the way Freddie is drawn to and repelled by institutions (God, country, love, money) that demand absolute allegiance. The emotional damage we do to appease loneliness proves a bigger theme than exposing the evils of cults. Yet the film is flush with an Anderson kind of hope. What he celebrates about humanity in The Master is an essence that’s untamable. The description sure as hell fits Anderson and his powder keg of a movie.

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Common Sense Media Review

Intense, evocative drama examines faith, compulsion.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that The Master -- a piercing drama from the director of There Will Be Blood about a charismatic leader and his wayward follower that has drawn comparisons to the story of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard -- may be disquieting for younger teens. Many agonizing scenes depict an…

Why Age 17+?

Period-accurate smoking, and lots of heavy drinking; one character even makes hi

Fairly frequent use of words including "f--k," "s--t," "goddamn," "c--t," "ass,"

Men fashion a female form, complete with breasts, out of sand; one of them prete

A man gets into fistfights, seemingly over small things. He pounds on his enemie

Kools cigarettes figure prominently.

Any Positive Content?

The relationship between a master and his acolyte is complicated, bringing up mo

Lancaster Dodd appears to truly believe that he's doing good. Freddie Quell almo

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Period-accurate smoking, and lots of heavy drinking; one character even makes his own very potent brew, which includes chemicals like paint thinner.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Fairly frequent use of words including "f--k," "s--t," "goddamn," "c--t," "ass," "loser," "p---y," "c--k," "damn," and "douche."

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Men fashion a female form, complete with breasts, out of sand; one of them pretends to have sex with her. Later, the same man pleasures himself on a public beach. A woman makes her husband climax, but the scene isn't particularly sexual; in fact, it seems tinged with anger. A couple is shown in the middle of having sex; the woman's bare breasts are exposed. Women are shown full-frontal naked at a party.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Violence & Scariness

A man gets into fistfights, seemingly over small things. He pounds on his enemies even when exhorted to stop. Screams, taunts, and insults fly. A man has a fit in a jail cell, ripping his shirt off, kicking the commode into bits, etc.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Products & Purchases

Positive messages.

The relationship between a master and his acolyte is complicated, bringing up more questions than answers.

Positive Role Models

Lancaster Dodd appears to truly believe that he's doing good. Freddie Quell almost can't help himself. He's damaged by the war, among many other things, and often acts out of loneliness and anger.

Parents need to know that The Master -- a piercing drama from the director of There Will Be Blood about a charismatic leader and his wayward follower that has drawn comparisons to the story of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard -- may be disquieting for younger teens. Many agonizing scenes depict an alcoholic making his own brand of near-poisonous hooch and drinking it, as well as simmering with rage and beating people up, masturbating (genitals aren't shown), having sex (breasts are visible), and more. There's also full-frontal female nudity at a party, period-accurate smoking, and strong language, including "s--t" and "f--k." To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

Where to Watch

Videos and photos.

Parent and Kid Reviews

• Parents say (6)
• Kids say (5)

Based on 6 parent reviews

Long, boring creepy movie with a lot of sex and drinking.

The master – is in need of a master, what's the story.

Lancaster Dodd, M.D. and Ph.D. ( Philip Seymour Hoffman ), is a thinker, author, and philosopher. He believes he has the answer for self-fulfillment, and his first book, The Cause , has caused a sensation in some circles. Now he has followers who want to listen to him speak about how to gain control of their lives. But one night, a World War II veteran named Freddie Quell ( Joaquin Phoenix ) stows away on Dodd's boat, blitzed out drunk from the potent hooch he concocts (paint thinner is an ingredient) and on the lam from migrant workers convinced that he poisoned one of them. Freddie is a mess: He sees genitalia in everything, including cards flashed during a Rorschach administered by the military. He's prone to moments of deep melancholy and blistering rage. Dodd's wife ( Amy Adams ) isn't sure that Freddie can stick to the Cause, which is particularly troubling, considering that her husband is under scrutiny by vocal skeptics and an increasingly disenchanted flock.

Is It Any Good?

The Master is masterful, indeed. What's it like to be a lost soul who finds someone who says you can be saved, only to discover that he may not hold the answer, after all (and maybe never did) -- and that even if he did, you don't have the blind faith, for better or worse, to believe that he can? It's these wrenching depths that the film plumbs, and we're left bereft, befuddled, and, like Quell, enraged. What to do? Who to become? It's precisely because viewers will leave the film with weighty, even troubling, questions like these that The Master is a must-see.

The details of Dodd's cult fascinate (especially given its rumored resemblance to Scientology), and director Paul Thomas Anderson feeds us substantial scenes showing the Cause's central practice: lengthy sessions called "processing" in which the same questions are asked over and over until they no longer elicit emotional reactions, and memories are deliberated until they no longer have power. We see the lure of the Cause -- the expiation of emotions that comes with profuse confessions, the community of belonging, the yearning to be, finally, unencumbered. The movie's two leads -- Hoffman, especially, and Phoenix, whose face is etched with Quell's pain -- are perfectly modulated, as is the strong supporting cast, and the direction stays controlled even as the film explodes. Though we never quite understand why Dodd is so compelled by Quell, why he feels the need to "save" him -- which may be the movie's biggest flaw -- we're transfixed and disturbed. Even the stillness is absorbing.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about the movie's messages. Is it saying anything about faith and belief? If so, what? Who do you think it's meant to appeal to?

Is the Cause a cult? If yes, why do you think so? What separates a cult from a more mainstream religion?

Why do you think Freddie could find Lancaster Dodd's brand of religion appealing? What is it about?

Movie Details

• In theaters : September 14, 2012
• On DVD or streaming : February 26, 2013
• Cast : Amy Adams , Joaquin Phoenix , Philip Seymour Hoffman
• Director : Paul Thomas Anderson
• Inclusion Information : Female actors
• Studio : Weinstein Co.
• Genre : Drama
• Run time : 136 minutes
• MPAA rating : R
• MPAA explanation : sexual content, graphic nudity and language
• Last updated : May 9, 2024

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Review by Brian Eggert September 27, 2012

Meditative about its themes, Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master does not lead to an overarching epiphany but demands persistent investigation throughout and long afterward to determine what it has to say about religion and mankind’s omnipresent need to fill the emptiness of belief. The film is not, as some have anticipated, a cathartic muckraking exposé on The Church of Scientology; instead, it uses Scientology as a metaphor for the maddening command of faith and illusion of control powering every religion. Akin to Anderson’s masterpiece There Will Be Blood from 2007, this portrait of America cuts deep, its blows concealed by the guise of bold filmmaking and unconventional narrative, further amplified by Anderson’s majestic treatment and profound character depth, the centerpiece of which are performances by Joaquin Phoenix and Philip Seymour Hoffman. For all its grandiosity, the film’s turns will no doubt confound general audiences; nevertheless, every frame reverberates with the call of an important work of art that remains a challenge to encapsulate.

As the film opens, aptly named Freddie Quell (Phoenix), a World War II sailor with a volatile look of unrest behind his eyes, writhes in his skin when the war ends. On a Pacific beach, during a celebration with his fellow sailors, the men shape a female figure out of sand; Freddie clownishly pantomimes copulation to everyone’s delight, and then goes off to masturbate into the ocean. He and others are told their post-traumatic stress disorder may result in uneasy integration back into society; none more so than Freddie, whose face is crooked, cracked and contorted in Phoenix’s uncanny portrayal, as though all signs of civilization have been scraped off by the war. A series of mental exams follow Freddie’s stay in a Navy hospital; he responds to Rorschach inkblots by seeing all manner of genitalia and chuckling about it. Much like the opening shot of ocean water churning in the wake of a ship—an important visual that appears later in the film as well—Freddie is in flux, erratic and childlike, and bound to an inarticulate frenzy ever numbed, or perhaps augmented, when he mixes cocktails with everything from photographic chemicals to torpedo engine fuel. He is the unadulterated human beast that must be suppressed.

But, as suggested, the first and greatest misconception about The Master is that Anderson tells the story of Scientology. Of course, Dodd and Scientology creator L. Ron Hubbard bear many similarities, the latter having conceived Dianetics and the precepts of Scientology in the 1950s. The Cause and Scientology do function on many of the same grounds. Early on, Freddie undergoes psychological “processing” where, in a method akin to Scientology’s “auditing,” the subject’s past lives are explored to overcome the lingering trauma they may have endured in another life. He’s forced to answer a series of questions without blinking: “Do your past failures bother you?” or “Have you ever had sex with a family member?” Never mind why he shouldn’t blink—Freddie responds through laughter and discomfort, but he wants to pass Dodd’s test, whatever the purpose may be. The exercise seems hopeless until there’s a breakthrough when he recollects his lovelorn interlude with a teenage girl from his past. Anderson’s camera is achingly close in these scenes, the actors and emotions huge on the screen before us.

Under Dodd, who’s almost always referred to as “master,” The Cause operates somewhere between Freudian psychotherapy, hypnosis, and parlor trickery. Like a dog, Freddie follows without question and without much thought, wasted and only half-present most of the time. Perhaps it’s because The Cause’s strictures are so vague that Freddie has no precise rules to question. When Dodd’s methods are challenged by a guest at a New York City dinner party, The Master responds with aggressive disdain. He will not be doubted by dissenters. By this time, Freddie has become Dodd’s loyal hound and attacks the skeptic at his home that evening. Indeed, Dodd has a devoted group of followers: His wife and resolute deputy Peggy (Amy Adams), his daughter Elizabeth (Ambyr Childers), his son-in-law Clark (Rami Malek), and countless friends follow Dodd’s writings, convinced The Cause will end war, heal “certain forms of leukemia,” and open up their consciousness to humanity’s trillion (with a “T”) year history. Dodd’s son Val (Jesse Plemons) seems to be the only person near him who understands, “He’s making all this up as he goes along”.

Nevertheless, Dodd’s authority demands nothing short of absolute obedience, and his control can only be exercised on those who will be controlled. Later in the film, Laura Dern’s follower and contributor Helen Sullivan questions Dodd’s new views published in his second book, which suggests instead of remembering past lives, they “imagine” them; rather than provide an explanation, he spurns her for questioning his doctrine. In this sense, The Master is not, as the title suggests, and about one man, but rather the relationship between two types of people, those with a desire to control others and those who desire to be free of control. As the film progresses and the relationship continues with the Master testing his guinea pig over and over, in time, we realize these are two halves of the same whole—yin and yang, order and chaos, acolyte and teacher, conman and patsy, huckster and shill, unrepentant masculinity and the gentleman pretense, pet and owner. Freddie farts and then laughs about it; Dodd just smiles and calls him a “Silly animal.” In Freudian terms, they are id and superego. But Dodd also admires Freddie because he sees that which The Cause seeks to expel, the basic animal drives written into our DNA that Dodd himself must deny. The film’s final swan song implies Dodd may even envy Freddie’s lack of inhibition. Meanwhile, Peggy, the hardened power behind the throne, represents the ego that attempts to stabilize the id and superego pairing. As the prototypical 1950s wife, she must control Dodd’s manifest animal drives. One scene shows her gratifying her husband in the washroom as if tightening a pesky loose screw.

To be sure, in the end, Dodd needs Freddie more than the reverse, resulting in a profound commentary on how religious shepherds require sheep; otherwise, they’re just fanatics preaching to themselves. The more sheep, the more merit that is placed on their words. Except, as we see in Dodd’s Salt Flats motorcycle experiment where The Master picks a point and rides to it, when it’s Freddie’s turn, he just rides off into an anti-climactic disappearance, having seen through Dodd’s charade. He would choose to stay if The Cause would have him, if only for a feeling of acceptance; although, unlike many other religions, this cult demands unquestionable conformity, and Freddie cannot stop being an animal. But he’s content on his own just the same. Herein resides Anderson’s broad-in-scope anti-religious themes, just under the surface where god-fearing American audiences may not see them. His depiction of religion, just as it was in There Will Be Blood   with Paul Dano’s charlatan and zealot Eli Sunday, takes the form of a duplicitous figurehead in whom all revelations are false. The character is so distinct and larger-than-life that audiences might overlook the film’s commentary in favor of the power behind the storytelling.

We can at least be certain that Anderson has supplied moviegoers with possibly the two best performances in recent memory. Phoenix and Hoffman, who competed in 2005 for the Academy Award for Best Actor in their respective Walk the Line and Capote (Hoffman won) performances, will surely be competing against each other again. Phoenix is less a performance than a sheer embodiment. At times, we cringe at the level of commitment exhibited; the actor wrestles three policemen to the ground and later crashes his body against a prison cell bunk, and all of it looks painful. But then, so does keeping that fractured expression on his face. In Phoenix’s eyes, Freddie’s unhinged nature burns with an otherness that makes us see him as Dodd does, as a base creature impossible to grasp or control, but also carrying a pain embedded incomprehensibly deep. Phoenix is wonderfully unpredictable, whereas by contrast, Hoffman must feel shrewd and deliberate, following their id and superego design. Hoffman is at his best when playing these impossibly large characters, and this is perhaps his biggest role yet in terms of his character’s outward identity and portentous personality. When the two performers are together in the frame, at times, we can only sit back in awe of the caliber of acting before us.

A film that defies complete understanding as it commands our fascination, finally The Master is a complicated tale and a beautifully made motion picture. Although perhaps not as obviously and viscerally scathing as There Will Be Blood (the director’s magnum opus), the film is some kind of masterpiece. There are moments where the visual textures and unbelievable performances leave us to percolate in Anderson’s world, and for that instant, we forget all else as sweeping camera movements pull us along, and Greenwood’s score sends goosebumps down our arms. To compare the richness of the filmmaking to another Kubrick film, it reminds one of Barry Lyndon , where the intentional pacing and elusive characters require much digestion and even several viewings to completely fathom and appreciate, while the splendors of the production itself do their part to constantly distract us from its greater meaning. And like that film, this one will grow with time, as Anderson does not engage a straightforward exploration of his picture’s themes but rather a contemplation of them that leads us to question what we’ve seen and what it suggests. Films such as this cannot be dismissed. They demand to be seen again and again until we figure them out, if such a thing is possible.

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Master, The (United States, 2012)

The Master is one of the most technically impressive films of 2012. It is the work of an artist; every shot is carefully composed. The set design, which recreates post-World War II America, is impeccable. The acting of the leads, Joaquin Phoenix and Philip Seymour Hoffman, is without peer. The cinematography, the purview of Mihai Malaimare Jr., represents the first time 65mm has been used since Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet . Yet, for all of The Master 's laudable elements, it falls short of greatness for one simple reason: the storytelling is unspectacular. The slowly paced narrative is less engaging than one might suppose from the premise and the characters, although providing Phoenix and Hoffman with plenty of opportunities to display their talent, are not deeply drawn.

It has been widely reported, and even acknowledged by Paul Thomas Anderson, that L. Ron Hubbard was an inspiration for the character of Lancaster Dodd (played by Hoffman). This has led to speculation that The Master is an expose of Scientology. While there are similarities between the real-life religion and the fictitious cult of The Master , the movie is not about the development of Hubbard's organization. In fact, the film isn't really about Hubbard/Dodd at all. Instead, it focuses on Freddie Quell (Phoenix), a G.I. who has been psychologically damaged by his participation in World War II and returns home without prospects or plans for a future. He becomes enmeshed in Dodd's group of fanatical followers when he drunkenly stumbles aboard the boat where "The Master" is marrying his daughter, Elizabeth (Ambyr Childrs), to true believer Clark (Remi Malek). Freddie quickly rises through the ranks, becoming Dodd's right-hand man, but his problems - alcoholism and a hair-trigger temper - are not resolved by Dodd's pseudo-psychology. He remains a deeply disturbed individual and Dodd's inability to "cure" him causes several of those in The Master's inner circle, including his wife (Amy Adams), to question whether Freddie should be cast out.

Much of The Master is about the dynamic between Freddie and Lancaster, which turns out to be a one-way street. Lancaster's influence on the psychologically tortured ex-GI is profound and pernicious. However, Freddie's sole impact on Lancaster is to represent a failure of The Master's "process" and, as such, someone best discarded. Many of the one-on-one scenes with Hoffman and Phoenix crackle with energy. These two are so compelling when sharing the screen that the movie suffers when one or the other is missing. The jail cell sequence represents the pinnacle of these scenes, but there are numerous others that could be cited as examples.

Anderson's intent is a condemnation of cults in particular and perhaps religion in general. He illustrates the flawed and crumbling foundation upon which "The Cause" is built. The final scene drives home a message: people are better off when freed from the compulsion of following a charismatic leader. Martha Marcy May Marlene said something similar, albeit with a different sort of character and a great deal more tension and narrative momentum. If Scientologists are displeased with The Master , there is a reason: any connection to Hubbard, however tangential, spins certain lines of dialogue to sound like denunciations. At one time, a character accuses Lancaster of "making all this up as he goes along," a charge often leveled at Hubbard during the formative years of Scientology.

The Master is about character interaction, not character development. Lancaster remains a cipher. We learn little about his past and don't get a real sense of whether he even believes everything he says. We see his powers of persuasion, his ability to charm like a snake oil salesman, and his occasional bursts of rage. There are times when he appears to be his wife's puppet and other occasions when he overrides and dismisses her. We understand Freddie better, because he is given a back story, but his personality is immutable. However, that's part of Anderson's intent - to show forcefully how Lancaster's "processing" fails. Freddie's point-of-view provides our portal into the story. Fantasy sequences and dreams intermix with reality and, at times, we're not certain what's real and what isn't. It's easy enough to figure out in the case of the "nude party" but not so clear-cut when it comes to Freddie's (second) visit to the home of his ex-girlfriend.

There's little doubt Philip Seymour Hoffman will get Oscar consideration for his performance here. It's the kind of showy role that often catches the Academy's attention. He's very good as Lancaster but this is neither the most challenging nor the most powerful performance of his career. Hoffman has become a little like Meryl Streep - he's so good in everything he does that it's sometimes difficult to discern the truly great portrayals from those that are "merely" very good.

The true acting standout is Joaquin Phoenix, who has risen like his namesake from the ashes of a curious phase/hoax/whatever. To portray Freddie, he has undergone a physical transformation almost as complete as Christian Bale's in The Machinist . Gaunt, sick-looking, with stooped shoulders and a shambling gait, Phoenix buries himself in Freddie's persona and there's never a moment when we disbelieve him. The tendency with a performance like this is to go over-the-top but Phoenix is contained and the scenes in which Freddie loses control are forceful but never cartoonish.

Amy Adams probably won't get much mention in discussing The Master 's acting; her performance is low-key and her character exists in the shadows, but her interpretation of Mary Sue Dodd is creepy. Outwardly a submissive wife (who is pregnant throughout much of the movie), there's more to Mary Sue than meets the eye and we occasionally wonder if she's the puppeteer manipulating Lancaster's strings. There are two disturbing scenes featuring her: one in which she reads from a pornographic story and relishes the profanity she spews and another in which she vigorously masturbates Lancaster. Adams plays these scenes (and others) with an intensity that is almost disturbing.

The Master progresses without forging an emotional link between the audience and anyone or anything on screen. Anderson's style, while visually and intellectually engaging, is clinical and distancing. It is, at times, reminiscent of how Terrence Malick makes films. Despite this - or perhaps because of it - the film leaves an indelible imprint, a haunting afterimage that is hard to shake. Some will undoubtedly label this as a masterpiece and the Oscar buzz at the time of its release (not necessarily the same thing as in January) is deafening. Although it's impossible to deny The Master 's artistry, my preference when it comes to great movies is for the story to be as rich and satisfying as all the other elements, and that's not the experience I had with this film. It's overlong and a little sluggish and the electricity generated when Hoffman and Phoenix interact does not carry through the rest of the production. There's much of value here, but this is at heart an art film, and is more likely to confound and bore mainstream viewers than enthrall them.

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• What Is Cinema?

Preying on Weakness

P__aul Thomas Anderson’s__ tense, insinuating The Master focuses less on Philip Seymour Hoffman’s L. Ron Hubbard–like self-help guru, Lancaster Dodd, than on Joaquin Phoenix’s sailor, Freddie Quell, his unofficial enforcer. Shattered by war and haunted by the teen girlfriend he left behind, photographer Freddie stumbles onto Dodd’s boat one night in 1950. The stowaway signs on for inculcation in the numbing pseudo-scientific practices with which Dodd seeks to rid followers of traumatic memories he says are millennia old.

The result is a co-dependency and a battle of wills between secret sharers: both men have hair-trigger tempers, and Freddie is a drunk whose homemade moonshine is nectar to his mentor. It’s suggested, too, that in his randiness Freddie is mirrored by Dodd, who on one occasion sings and prances to “A-roving” before a bevy of naked women, though it’s his steely wife (Amy Adams) who supplies hand relief.

Freddie isn’t heroic but resists Dodd even as The Cause, as it’s called, grows in wealth and influence. As he did in There Will Be Blood, Anderson punctuates the drama with violence as the question emerges: Will Freddie succumb to Dodd’s control or cut the Gordian knot? In his finest performance, Phoenix makes emotional disarray much more appealing than cold rationality based on sub-Freudian mumbo jumbo.

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The Master Review

16 Nov 2012

136 minutes

Master, The

For a film called The Master, it takes an awful long time for ‘The Master’ to appear. Indeed, it takes nearly half an hour before we meet Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman), and it is even longer before we find out his name, which is revealed, almost quite shockingly, during a rare interaction with the authorities of the outside world. The plot is negligible, and for a film that has been so much mooted as being ‘about’ Scientology, it says very little about this particular sect’s methods and motivations except that, though they may be bogus and a tad illegal, for some people The Cause might actually work.

This is because Paul Thomas Anderson’s sixth film is a novelistic work of fiction, something critics seem to be having a hard time grasping in these days of comic book adaptations and remakes. It has real-life correlations, definitely, but this is no roman à clef, and there is nothing more to this film than one man’s imagination. It draws from many areas, from Melvin And Howard by Jonathan Demme (still by far the biggest directorial influence on PTA’s work), from the palette of old Hollywood (Elia Kazan’s love story Splendor In The Grass springs to mind), and from the lives of Depression-era author John Steinbeck and Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard. But the result is an impressionistic patchwork that ebbs and flows, reaching a breaking point rather than a climax in the usual sense.

And like any good book, if you like it, it is a place to revisit. Contrary to popular belief, there’s no ‘need’ to see it twice. There are no hidden meanings here, nothing to “get”, other than perhaps that there is no real master at all, just two sides of the same coin, each looking to the other for the answers. To Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix), Lancaster Dodd is literally The Man, with his smart suits and sophistry. But to Lancaster Dodd, Freddie Quell is a thing of savage purity, a man with no aim or conscience and nowhere to be except now. This is what drives the movie, the tension between yin and yang, between ego and super-ego, a symbiosis that has been rather simplistically compared to the father-son relationships that run through all PTA’s movies, beginning with his debut, Hard Eight, in 1996.

That reading is certainly there, and there are definitely echoes of Boogie Nights and Magnolia with, respectively, their surrogate and broken families, but this time there is a stand-off, since both men are, in a curious way, quite equal. Hoffman shows a whole new side to his talents here, being funny, charming and surprisingly light on his feet as Dodd. Phoenix is a little less of a revelation, since Freddie is not a million miles from his 2005 portrayal of Johnny Cash, but that’s not to say his performance is in any way predictable. In fact, it is quite the opposite: tender when it should seem shocking and vice versa, creating a genuinely unreadable and, for that reason, most unlikely hero.

Because, at its core, The Master is really about Freddie and the strange, secret romance that holds the key to his violence and his acting out, something he cannot fathom, much less articulate. This is the true motor of the story and what gives The Master its deceptively subtle power: if there is a third wheel here, it is not Dodd’s tough, business-like wife Peggy (Amy Adams) but the girl at the back of Freddie’s mind, the unfinished business he left behind, not simply because she was too young for him but because her affections overwhelmed and overloaded a very rusty, inexperienced heart.

After the rigours of There Will Be Blood, The Master seems positively light at times, and the ending will disappoint those hoping for a similar last-reel crescendo. But like that stark, intimate epic, it is another film for and of its time, touching on themes of recession, demobilisation and survival in its story of two men trying to make sense of post-war life, one creating a new kind of order, the other simply surfing. America’s withdrawal from Iraq gives it an unintended topicality, since The Master isn’t an allegory, just a very poetic, lyrically shot and seductively scored film about how that country dusted itself down from World War II. In Dodd and Freddie we have two archetypes of the national spirit back then: one is ambitious and entrepreneurial, the other just wants to work and get laid.

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What Is The Master Really About?: Five Interpretations

A little more than a week into its wide release, Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master has already established itself as that rare beast, a popular film with a lot on its mind — one that bears and maybe even demands repeated viewings. (Critics Stephanie Zacharek and Dana Stevens each have thoughts on whether or not a movie should need to be seen more than once. Our own David Edelstein shares his own thoughts here .) And each of these viewings can yield new and varying interpretations. So, what is The Master about? Here are five potential avenues of thought. ( Naturally, there are spoilers ahead. You are forewarned. )

The search for a family and stability. Several times, we see a shot of Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix) lying down next to a sand sculpture of a woman. Admittedly, it’s a sand sculpture that he humps in the film’s opening minutes, but the tender way that he later cuddles up to it suggests that what he’s after isn’t really sex but warmth, contact, family, comfort. When the V.A. doctor asks him about a “vision” that he had, Freddie describes it thusly: “I had a dream. My mother, my father, and me. Sitting around a table. Drinking … ” Then he mumbles something that sounds like either “laughing” or “loving.” At any rate, that’s his vision — a happy family. Anderson dissolves from this scene to Freddie’s new job as a photographer — shooting pictures of happy housewives, happy children, happy husbands. He longs to be a part of this world, but, not unlike a filmmaker, he can only photograph it: Before he fights with the man he’s photographing at the department store, Freddie asks him, “Is this for your wife?” (Meanwhile, somewhere in the background, we hear a baby screaming.) Then, he pushes the lights in on the man, trying to crowd him out, and starts to beat him.

Freddie’s search for a family leads him to Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and his wife Peggy (Amy Adams). In the remarkable shot where he discovers Dodd’s yacht, the camera constantly racks focus between a cold Freddie staggering on the dock in the foreground and the happy, warm party on the yacht, with Lancaster and Peggy dancing in the distance: It’s as if the camera (and by extension Freddie) is constantly trying to place them all in the same shot, and failing. Indeed, Anderson keeps these characters separated visually throughout the film. We almost never see them alone together in the same shot. Almost.

In the bizarre, final, cryptic scene in London, when the three are briefly reunited, Peggy first expresses a kind of maternal interest in Freddie (“You look sick. Freddie, you don’t look healthy”) before rejecting him altogether (“What did you hope would happen by coming here today?” To which he responds, tellingly, “I had a dream.”). In fact, this final scene might actually be the only time when we finally see all three of these characters — Peggy, Lancaster, and Freddie — alone together in the same shot. At the end of the scene, Lancaster sings “(I’d Like to Get You On) A Slow Boat to China” to Freddie. And yes, it’s eerie and perhaps more than a little homoerotic, but it also feels like a twisted version of a lullaby — the most domestic and familial of actions turned into something terrifying and strange — making it clear once and for all that Freddie’s dream of becoming a family with Lancaster and Peggy Dodd is an impossibility. And freeing him, ironically, to try and form a new family — perhaps with Winn, the girl he’s met in the final scenes of the film, right before we see him lying next to the female sand sculpture, suggesting that his search goes on.

The politics of cults, and the cults of politics. Although Harvey Weinstein introduced the New York premiere of The Master with a swipe at Mitt Romney, Paul Thomas Anderson has never been a particularly political filmmaker. Except when he has been: There Will Be Blood might be a timeless meditation on will, power, ambition, and duplicity, but it’s also a startling depiction of the collusion and conflict between capitalism and spirituality in early twentieth century America, with particular resonances for the time in which it was made, when the U.S. was waging two wars in distant lands — one for oil, and another against a group of religious extremists it had collaborated with decades earlier. Not unlike Stanley Kubrick before him, Anderson seems to have an amazing ability to build in contemporary echoes into his films without making them feel overtly topical.

Thus, The Master , even though it’s only tangentially about L. Ron Hubbard and Scientology, depicts the humiliating yet symbiotic relationship between causes and followers in the modern era, when belief systems are no longer governing frameworks but just software to be renewed and replaced. You can see it in the Master’s irritated response to Helen Sullivan (Laura Dern) who, upon reading his new book, inquires about a major difference she’s noticed: “I did note that on page 13, there’s a change. You’ve changed the processing platform question from ‘Can you recall?’ to ‘Can you imagine?’” Meanwhile, Freddie, who never really understands the Master’s methods and has just had to listen to another B.S. sermon from Dodd, beats up a longtime believer who dares to question the Master’s rambling text. Maybe this is the way Freddie deals with his doubts, by doubling down on his obedience to the Master.  

True, this is a kind of willful mutability that’s characteristic of cults, but it’s also one of the dynamics of modern politics, where belonging to the team (and defending it) is a lot more important than what the team actually stands for. (Just read any of this year’s election headlines to see political team players defend policies and beliefs they don’t really subscribe to — be they on the Left or the Right.) Freddie is, ultimately, symbolic of the common man who joins a cause not because he believes in it, but because it will have him.

Doubles. It has probably not escaped the notice of many viewers that, although Lancaster Dodd and Freddie Quell seem like psychological and physical opposites (one is garrulous, confident, and rotund, the other terse, nervous, and alarmingly thin), the film also often presents them in symmetrical shots and situations: Witness the way Anderson films them when they’re in jail, yelling at each other as if each is inside the other’s mind. And let’s also not forget that both men are alchemists of a kind — one has the ability to turn things like torpedo fuel into a delicious beverage , the other has the ability to turn anything around him into a nonsensical spiritual aphorism. These men may somehow be conjoined — Dodd is, after all, the only one who seems to be able to regularly drink Freddie’s moonshine concoctions and survive. (It also helps, of course, that the women around them look the same — Doris, the girl Freddie loved back home before the war, bears an uncanny resemblance to Peggy Dodd.)

If the processing/auditing that the Master encourages is designed to shed oneself of the negative emotions and troubles of our past lives, consider the possibility that Freddie might actually be, at least on a metaphoric level, one of Lancaster Dodd’s past lives. (Which makes the oft-stated question in the film of where they might have met a more haunting one.) If Dodd constantly leaves his troubles behind, Freddie appears to be made up entirely of troubles — the family that abandoned him, the girl back home who didn’t wait for him, the war that broke him. (In an earlier version of the script, Freddie’s alcohol problem was matched by an obsessive need to get more and more tattoos, and his initial hospitalization at the V.A. was due to a rather symbolically loaded ailment — a burst appendix.) Like the negative energy of New Yorkers that collects in the sewers of the city in Ghostbusters II , Freddie is, in many ways, the return of the repressed for Lancaster Dodd — a Frankenstein’s Monster of troubled memories, rejections, and unspoken spiritual longings.

Post-war ennui. This is, of course, right there in the second shot of the film: Freddie Quell, Navy man, lifting his head above the edge of a boat, looking quizzically out at the world. We hear a lot about the Greatest Generation in the media, but it’s also a fact that many of the men who fought in WWII came home to a world that was rapidly changing and that no longer held the certainties (if they ever even existed) of the war. (“Understandably, there will be people on the outside who do not understand your condition.”) While we do see, over the course of the film, a brief glimpse of Freddie’s life before the war, it’s telling that we never see the war itself, marking it as a kind of defining absence.

What did the war do to Freddie, and what about it connects him to Dodd? Is it worth noting that the cult of personality Dodd has created is, in miniature, a reflection of the political cults of personality — those of Hitler, Mussolini, and Hirohito — that the Allies defeated in WWII? Such things are never stated outright in the film, and we certainly never see “the enemy” in the brief scenes that show Freddie’s Navy stint. But we do see an enemy around us later in the film — the skeptics, the authorities, the doubters who question and challenge Dodd’s power. This is, after all, the age of McCarthyism, of paranoia and fear. Maybe Anderson is suggesting that people like Freddie came out of the war needing both the solace of family life and an enemy to combat?

Acting! In interviews, Anderson has suggested that The Master followed an even looser development process than his previous scripts, with him instinctually putting a variety of elements together just to see how they would work out. (Versions of the script that were leaked during the film’s shooting were quite different from the finished product.) So, consider the possibility then that, on some basic level, The Master may actually be less about its ostensible story and more about its surfaces. It’s about putting the needy, nervous angularity of Joaquin Phoenix’s performance next to the avuncular, comfy generosity of Philip Seymour Hoffman’s, and seeing what develops, what ecosystems of character are formed in the back-and-forth between these figures.

In his excellent analysis of the film for The New Yorker ’s website, Richard Brody correctly notes that many of the cult’s therapy sessions look like method acting exercises. Similarly, it’s perhaps notable that Phoenix’s performance seems to represent the tormented, physical acting styles of the latter half of the twentieth century (the Brandos, the Deans, the Clifts) whereas Hoffman’s acting seems to hearken back to the controlled, elusive manner of the previous half (many have described his turn as “Wellesian”). In these acting styles, we see a miniature version of the journey of American society during this period — and, specifically, American maleness. And before you suggest that this is a stretch, remember that this is a director who in Boogie Nights used different porn acting styles to tell the story of late-seventies-early-eighties American social upheaval.

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It can be didactic rather than truly suspenseful, but Master is an impressively well-crafted horror outing with a lot on its mind.

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In remake of 'The Killer,' action master John Woo brings gravity and beauty to assassin story

Electrifying nathalie emmanuel dominates peacock thriller as hired gun with a heart..

Director John Woo finds a place for his trademark bird imagery in “The Killer,” starring Nathalie Emmanuel as an assassin with a crisis of conscience.

Universal Pictures

We’re still in the opening title credits of John Woo’s “The Killer” when we see a flock of birds fluttering across the screen.

In an abandoned church.

Why, there’s even a shot of a single bird, captured in slow motion.

From that opening salvo, the 77-year-old Woo is serving notice that the English-language (with a side helping of French) reimagining of his greatly influential 1989 action classic isn’t going to stray all that far from the original, at least in style and signature imagery. Though the story isn’t as dense and not as bleak as the bloody chaos of the original, “The Killer” is a callback to Woo’s Hong Kong movies such as the brilliant “A Better Tomorrow,” as well as his earlier American films from the 1990s and early 2000s, e.g., “Broken Arrow,” “Face/Off” and “Mission: Impossible 2.”

Woo’s work has been a major inspiration to generations of filmmakers such as Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez, and it’s a thrill to see the elder statesman delivering a kinetic and explosive thriller with amazing stunt work, whether it’s an extended chase scene or an extended shootout that reaches its penultimate moment with the heroine executing a breathtaking move that’s equal parts Simone Biles and John Wick.

“The Killer” is not to be confused with David Fincher’s masterful film of the same name from 2023, though both films begin with a legendary assassin failing to complete the job for the first time in their career, which leads to an existential crisis and the hunter becoming the hunted.

Nathalie Emmanuel (“Game of Thrones,” the “Fast and Furious” franchise) has the role created by Chow Yun-fat in Woo’s 1989 film and is an absolutely electric and screen-commanding force here as Zee, an assassin so deadly and mysterious some believe she’s proof that the legend of “The Queen of the Dead” is no legend at all. (She’s like a female Keyser Söze, only with far more style and fashion sense.)

British actor Sam Worthington does a pretty fair job of corralling an Irish accent as Finn, the obligatory mentor who recognized something special in Zee when she was young and desperate, and turned her into a killing machine. As brutal as their business is, Finn has a soft spot for Zee, referring to her as his “Cushlamacree,” which means “vein of my heart” and is akin to calling someone “sweetheart.”

Every time Finn hands Zee an assignment, she has one question:

“Do they deserve this death?”

“I wouldn’t ask you if they didn’t,” comes the reply.

In an expertly filmed sequence set inside a Parisian club, Zee uses a Samurai sword to take out a number of henchmen, and at one point uses one of their guns to take out a victim. That shot also blinds a singer named Jenn (Diana Silvers) and after Zee ascertains that Jenn remembers nothing of the killing, she decides she’ll take in Jenn and protect her from the people who want her dead.

On a parallel track but soon to cross paths with Zee, many times, is Inspector Sey (Omar Sy), a crusading cop who can’t be bribed or intimidated (unlike many of his colleagues). We also get familiar archetypes, including an arrogant and seemingly untouchable Saudi prince (Said Taghmaoui) and a powerful gangster known as “The Godfather of Paris” (Eric Cantona), and there’s a whole big thing about a stolen heroin shipment with a street value of 300 million Euros — but that’s just the impetus for a series of stylishly rendered action sequences.

Inspector Sey (Omar Sy), a crusading cop, keeps crossing paths with the assassin.

When Woo slows down the proceedings, he still holds our attention with nifty split screens and cool wipe transition shots. Even something as rote as a police officer interrogating a suspect features smooth camerawork that makes full use of the room and incorporates a two-way mirror. It’s just a beautifully made film, even when the proceedings turn ugly to the extreme. There’s even a dollop of humor here and there, as when one character says to an associate, “That’s just the Viagra talking.”

“The Killer” is not subtle in its religious symbolism or its theme of redemption. The score by Mauro Fiore is not shy about hammering home the action scenes, and the needle drop of the Grass Roots’ “Let’s Live for Today” pretty much announces the worldview of Zee and Inspector Sey, who go from shooting at one another to striking up something of an alliance due to a common enemy. In lesser hands those touches might be heavy-handed, but thanks to a legendary director at the top of his game, this is easily one of the best action movies of the year.

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• Masters Of The Universe: Further News & Info

The beloved Mattel franchise Masters of the Universe is returning to the big screen for the first time since 1987, and there are already a ton of exciting updates about the new live-action movie. Debuting in 1982 with the eponymous cartoon and best-selling toy line, the sword-and-sorcery franchise follows Prince Adam (a.k.a. He-Man) who defends the planet of Eternia from the dastardly Skeletor and his minions. Though the series was designed to sell toys, Masters of the Universe grew to become one of the most popular media franchises of the 1980s.

Besides the 130-episode cartoon series that ran from 1983-1985, He-Man and his allies branched out into various comic books, video games, and even feature films. The 1987 Masters of the Universe film starred Rocky IV 's Dolf Lundgren as the heavily muscled He-Man, but was something of a notorious flop that was nothing like the popular show. However, with '80s nostalgia at an all-time high, and filmmaking technology finally strong enough to bring Eternia to life properly, another live-action Masters of the Universe movie is on the way. With many details still unknown, the latest news regarding Masters of the Universe is in high demand.

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Another Cast Member Joins the Live-Action Masters Of The Universe

Months after the upcoming live-action adaptation cast its He-Man, the latest news confirms another major casting for Masters of the Universe . The Mattel Films property has tapped Riverdale alum Camila Mendes to play the role of Teela , a powerful sorceress from the world of Eternia. Though little is known about Mendes' latest take on the character, Teela is known for being the always vigilant Captain of the Royal Guard and is the one who trained Prince Adam (He-Man) in combat. Mendes joins co-star Nicholas Galitzine who has been cast as He-Man.

He-Man Returns In 2026

Though it is quite a ways off, the Masters of the Universe live-action movie is scheduled to be released on June 5, 2026 by Amazon/MGM. The film is expecting a theatrical debut, but details are still fuzzy this far removed from the release date. The premiere could always shift in the intervening years , and various project delays or speed-ups could necessitate a shifting of the currently established release date. Nevertheless, the release date is a good sign that Masters of the Universe is finally returning to the big screen after nearly 40 years.

Shows starring He-Man include:

Netflix's Masters of the Universe: Revolution premiered on January 25, 2024.

Nicholas Galitzine Stars As He-Man

Though most of the ensemble has yet to be filled, the starring role of Prince Adam/He-Man has found its actor in the upcoming live-action Masters of the Universe film. Rising star Nicholas Galitzine will pull double duty as Prince Adam and his superhero alter-ego He-Man in the new film, and it offers the young actor his first big break into the mainstream. Joining Galitzine is Riverdale alumn Camile Mendes who will play Prince Adam's Royal Guard Captain and personal sorceress, Teela. The role of Skeletor, He-Man's arch-nemesis, hasn't been cast yet, but it will likely need an established star.

The confirmed cast of Masters of the Universe includes:

Will It Be He-Man's Origin Story?

it stands to reason that Masters of the Universe will be an origin story that will more-or-less recreate what was seen in the cartoons and comics

Though Netflix's controversial He-Man show attempted to expand the franchise, the live-action Masters of the Universe movie will be the biggest exposure the series has gotten in decades. Because of that pressure, the details around the movie's plot need to be perfect to not only please long-time fans but make the movie entertaining for newcomers as well. While the development of the Netflix movie yielded quite a few story details, it's safe to say that those are all gone since the streamer canceled its plans and shipped the IP off to Amazon.

However, it stands to reason that Masters of the Universe will be an origin story that will more-or-less recreate what was seen in the cartoons and comics. As an infant, Prince Adam was sent from Enternia to Earth where he lost connection with his magic sword. However, when he reached adulthood, Adam found the sword and was returned to Eternia. Fighting as He-Man, Prince Adam must then protect the kingdom from evil-doers like Skeletor . While amendments to the main story are possible, those details will likely remain intact.

Masters of the Universe

Masters of the Universe is a live-action movie that reboots the popular He-Man franchise. Decades after Dolph Lundgren starred in the first live-action Masters of the Universe movie, Kyle Allen takes on the role of He-Man. The film is directed by Adam and Aaron Nee and is also a Netflix original film.

Masters Of The Universe: Further News & Info

• Unlucky Masters Of The Universe Movie Finally Eyeing New Home After Netflix Cancellation
• Masters Of The Universe Movie Cancelled At Netflix After Millions Spent On Development
• Live-Action Masters Of The Universe Movie Sets Summer 2026 Release Date
• Live-Action Masters Of The Universe Movie Finds Its He-Man Star

• Upcoming Releases

Grimy thriller Strange Darling puts the ‘ick’ in sick

In director J.T. Mollner's horror thriller Strange Darling, starring Willa Fitzgerald, a relentless predator tracks an injured woman through the Oregon wilderness. Allyson Riggs/VVS

Strange Darling

Written and directed by J.T. Mollner

Starring Willa Fitzgerald, Kyle Gallner and Barbara Hershey

Classification 14A; 96 minutes

Opens in select theatres Aug. 23

The words written in bright red lettering greet audiences of J.T. Mollner’s Strange Darling : “Shot entirely on 35 mm film.” It’s a statement that positions the movie as the latest entry in a recent slew of genre flicks that aspire to land somewhere between arthouse and grindhouse . In Strange Darling , it’s filmmaking that is preoccupied with the performance of auteurist grandeur rather than the basics of good scriptwriting.

Strange Darling follows the self-congratulatory declaration of its celluloid status with a visually symmetrical, slow-motion scene of star Willa Fitzgerald – bloodied and clearly in distress – running away from some unseen threat while the film’s soundtrack plays a maudlin rendition of the Everly Brothers’ heartbreak ballad Love Hurts . It’s the kind of sardonic and deeply on-the-nose trope we’ve seen play out what feels like endless times before in the genre filmmaking of the past several years.

If that weren’t enough to make audiences realize exactly the type of movie they just sat down to watch, they are then confronted with the film’s title card: Strange Darling: A Thriller in Six Chapters. With this sequence of self-satisfied frames, so begins Mollner’s colour-saturated and deeply unsubtle world.

Guiding us through the story in non-chronological order, Strange Darling introduces us to its main character, a young woman referred to as The Lady, with a series of indelicate unveilings. When her story begins, we meet her and a man christened by the film as The Demon (Kyle Gallner) as they drink and smoke in his car under the dim neon lights of a cheap hotel. The pair are engaged in a choreography of language and power, both assumed and real, as they circle their intentions to spend the night together. The Lady clearly and confidently shares her sexual desires, while The Demon is eager yet unsure. It’s a doubly staged act of gendered possibilities as the camera’s gaze roves across the several weapons in The Demon’s nearby reach.

Strange Darling shapes much of its narrative by staging these kinds of assumptions, all winkingly fed to us by Mollner’s script and camera work: this woman’s power is fleeting, she will inevitably come to be victimized by this man in some way, someone will come to her aid, and so on. The problem is, once you figure out the writer-director’s angle on the confluence of gender and genre expectations, he doesn’t offer up much else.

Not all films starring women require a female director or writer at the helm, but Mollner’s clunky, eye-roll inducing dialogue in Strange Darling will make you wish there was one here. Characters utter lines that are darkly cryptic enough to maintain the film’s attempted arty veneer, but convey the same predictable and underwritten themes ad nauseum.

Fitzgerald gives a strong performance, especially considering the lack of depth her character is afforded, but her impact is drowned out by the film’s truly rancid attempt at upending the gendered inferences that Mollner has staged her character within. There is a way to twist and maybe even delightfully squirm at a story’s overturning of gendered assumptions, and how a female villain like The Lady might exploit these expectations to her benefit, but Mollner’s execution is deeply flawed, resulting in what feels like an exercise in working out male anxieties in a post-#MeToo landscape.

It may not have been the director’s intent to bait his audience with such a bad faith rendering of his main character, but it is certainly the impact, and not even beloved character actor Giovanni Ribisi’s novel cinematography (yes, you read right) can redeem Strange Darling ’s deeply seeded “ick.”

Enamoured with the masculinist impulses of cinema past (think Tarantino and Kubrick), movies such as Mollner’s are exemplary of a recent trend in horror filmmaking that has cemented its hold over the last decade or so, with writer-directors like Ti West and Oz Perkins leading the pack with cinephilic films concerned firstly with deeply referential aesthetics.

What could have once been a novel take on genre filmmaking borne of the 21st century is now so overdone that its predictability mirrors those less narratively ambitious stories that movies such as Strange Darling are trying to invert with a distanced yet smug postmodern irony. Mollner’s film, while not the worst offender of the bunch, continues the trend of moviemaking that is aestheticized, some might argue, to the point of self-flagellating autofetishism.

Perhaps, instead of filmmakers continuing this almost compulsive drive to announce themselves as the enfant terrible of arthouse horror they could just … make a great slasher flick?

Special to The Globe and Mail

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Catching Dust Review: A Tense & Unpredictable Domestic Violence Thriller

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• Erin Moriarty plays a woman longing for freedom from a controlling husband in Catching Dust . When the pair get unexpected visitors, dark truths are revealed.
• Erin Moriarty and Jai Courtney shine as complex characters in a Western thriller that challenges existing expectations.
• Director Stuart Gatt expertly navigates themes of loneliness and resentment with bold storytelling risks.

Catching Dust is a tense and tightly crafted thriller that keeps the viewer on bated breath. In it, an abused woman trapped by a controlling husband in a remote desert landscape seeks a path to freedom through unexpected visitors. The film addresses domestic violence, spousal conflict, and hidden agendas with a layered methodology that yields surprising and uncomfortable truths . The wide open, barren exterior is beautifully juxtaposed against tight spaces, forcing a volatile collision with sophisticated characters searching for any semblance of happiness. A wild climax and equally fascinating ending may be far-fetched, but Catching Dust certainly deserves credit for being unpredictable.

Set in West Texas on an abandoned commune, Geena Rayburne ( Erin Moriarty of The Boys ) sketches drawings in an old trailer. She hurriedly hides her artwork when the bearded, muscular, and cowboy-hat clad Clyde ( Jai Courtney of Black Site ) comes barreling through the door with an armful of dead rabbits. Geena, in a deep Southern drawl, tries to suggestively greet her husband but is casually dismissed. An uninterested Clyde wants to wash up before she makes supper. Geena timidly asks Clyde if she can accompany him to town on his next trip for supplies. He responds negatively, and we quickly pick up on the violent and claustrophobic nature of this relationship.

Unexpected Visitors Unearth Difficult Truths

Catching Dust

Erin Moriarty stars in Catching Dust, a drama film from writer-director Stuart Gatt. Geena (Moriarty) is an artist looking to make it big, hoping to leave behind her desert home and controlling/abusive partner, Clyde. Before she's able to leave, a new couple from New York City move in next door, hoping to escape exactly what Geena wants to head towards. What starts off as a friendly meeting of neighbors devolves into a clash of egos - with disastrous results.

• Surprising and unexpected narrative with complex themes of loneliness and resentment.
• Everyone is excellent playing complicated and enigmatic characters, especially Erin Moriarty and Jai Courtney.
• Stuart Gatt announces himself as a thoughtful director with a keen eye.
• Soapy and salacious turns make things a bit melodramatic and unlikable.

Geena gets a big shock several days later. A truck pulls up out of nowhere towing a fancy, off-the-grid home. A confused Andy (Ryan Corr) gets out to view the endless vista of dirt and cacti. Amaya (Dina Shihabi), his stunned wife, wants to leave immediately. This can't be the place they were looking for. Andy walks to the adjacent trailer's door to get some answers. Geena hides before mustering the courage to answer. She hadn't seen other people for over a year.

Writer/director Stuart Gatt cleverly stokes interest and unease at the same time. Andy and Amaya are wealthy New Yorkers supposedly looking for quality time together. The desperately lonely Geena is intoxicated with a breath of fresh air that's totally foreign to everything she's ever known. Clyde, on the other hand, is apoplectic at returning home to find random strangers intruding on his perceived property. Clyde's gruff, aggressive demeanor gives Andy pause, but doesn't phase the tough and belligerent Amaya. She's not remotely afraid of Clyde. This is public land. Who is he to tell them to leave?

Erin Moriarty & Catching Dust Director Dive Deep Into Their Western Slow-Burn

Erin Moriarty & Stuart Gatt discuss the tension and emotion in their new crime drama, Catching Dust, and even touched on her show, The Boys.

Erin Moriarty & Jai Courtney Master a Complicated, Cruel Relationship

Clyde's vise grip noose around Geena's life becomes threatened when the newcomers offer what he can't . Drum roll please: Andy is an art teacher who specializes in abstract expressionism. Geena is crippled by the low esteem that Clyde has fostered. He cursed her artistic endeavors as a foolish waste of time. Geena's first fling of a paintbrush under Andy's tutelage is akin to sunlight breaking through a dark cloud. She's able to see herself in a different way that's unrestrained and bold. This makes her prison — and Clyde — that much more unbearable.

Moriarty and Courtney's characters don't fit into a neat box of domestic violence . Yes, he's physically violent towards her. That's awful and deplorable. The film condemns his actions without pause. But Geena is not a punching bag. She lets Clyde know that his behavior is unacceptable. He feels shame for hurting her. The ties that bind them are both shackles and lace. Geena aches to be freed from a man that she can't let go of on a subconscious level. There's a comfort between them that can't be discounted. The couple have a traumatic bond that was once based on genuine love .

Every Western Coming to Tubi in August 2024

Tubi has several exciting Westerns to offer in August. Here is a list with complete entries.

Soapy and Salacious Twists Detract from an Ambitious & Thoughtful Film

Gatt's script could have played it safe and had the characters stick to the set-up's expectations. His intriguing second act opens a new can of worms that reshapes any easy ideas about the ensemble. No one is what they seem. The characters each have a different stripe under the skin. Catching Dust doesn't depict a simple black and white world . Shades of gray lead to ugly developments that flip notions of good and bad. This is where Gatt truly takes risks and explores a path that some may take exception to.

Twists aplenty shine a revealing light into the dark corners of these fascinating characters. The people we put on pedestals are just as flawed and corruptible. For better or (probably) worse, Gatt treads into soap opera territory when you least expect it . This hard turn has a salacious, out of left-field swing that can be criticized. Unsavory bits rise to the top of the stew to purposely sour the audience's view of previously likable characters.

Catching Dust literally takes place between two trailers on a dusty road in the middle of nowhere. But there's never a point when the setting becomes dull. Gatt captures loneliness, resentment, and anger in stark, desolate hues. He shines with superb casting and as a director with a thoughtful approach to filming difficult subjects. Hollywood should take notice of his audacious debut.

Catching Dust is a production of Civilian 7 Entertainment, Edward R. Pressman Films, and Cuernos Productiones S.L., et al. It will have a concurrent theatrical and VOD release on August 23rd from Vertical. You can watch on digital platforms like YouTube, Google Play, Fandango at Home, and on Apple TV through the link below:

Watch Catching Dust

• Movie and TV Reviews

'The Crow,' 'Blink Twice,' and This Week’s Best New Releases, Reviewed and Ranked

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Look up in the sky! What do you see? That’s right; it’s a crow coming down to impart the news that we’ve rounded up all our reviews of everything you can see this week for your reading. From a new take on The Crow starring Bill Skarsgård to Zoë Kravitz ’s directorial debut to the magnificent return of a cinematic legend who hasn't made a feature in decades, we’ve got reviews of what you can see in theaters and at home, ranked by what we thought of them.

Directed by Rupert Sanders

Get your black eyeliner and plastic jelly bracelets! The emo Gen-Z melodrama of your dreams, The Crow , is here! Bill Skarsgård does what he can to save this new version of the ‘90s cult classic, but this bird never quite takes flight. Thankfully, there are plenty more films ahead. In her review , Features Editor Therese Lacson wrote "struggling through an identity crisis, The Crow is doing too much and, as a result, doesn't do enough to serve its core narrative."

The Crow (2024)

The Crow is a flawed love story that stumbles but embraces its gothic and emo roots.

• Bill Skarsgård and FKA Twigs have great romantic chemistry and Skarsgård is a convincing romantic lead.
• The dialogue is often clunky, relying more on the performance of the actors than the written lines.
• The film struggles between being a romantic tragedy and a bloody revenge film.
• The reboot includes new elements of lore and worldbuilding that bog the story down rather than uplift it.

READ OUR REVIEW

4 Blink Twice

Directed by zoë kravitz.

Channing Tatum is both sinister and charming in Zoë Kravitz’s directorial debut, Blink Twice , which sees a group of women taken to a remote island by a billionaire where not everything is what it seems. It often feels like a collage of similar movies that it then puts a new twist on, but it still marks Kravitz as one to watch with whatever she then decides to take on next. In her review , Senior Editor Taylor Gates wrote " Blink Twice might not break entirely new ground, but it does offer a slightly different perspective on the sun-soaked, well-worn path it trods."

Blink Twice

Zoë Kravitz’s debut struggles with pacing but provides some refreshing twists on the #MeToo thriller.

• The film is genuinely terrifying when it fully leans into its dark premise, diving into lesser-explored elements of patriarchal oppression.
• Ackie, Arjona, Tatum, and Davis give compelling and layered performances, with their comedic chops offering some welcomed levity.
• The cinematography is gorgeous and immersive throughout.
• The movie struggles with pacing, with the first half dragging and the ending too abrupt.
• It calls to mind a myriad of other films, never feeling wholly original.

3 Hell Hole

Directed by john adams and toby poser.

A darkly funny mashup of The Thing and Tremors , Hell Hole is a creature feature where a being big on tentacles takes over the bodies of an unsuspecting group working at a remote mining operation. It’s a scrappy offering, full of both silliness and buckets of blood, offering plenty of fun for those who can stomach it. In my review from when it premiered at this year’s SXSW , I wrote "like the metaphor that gets thrown out by a character in a key moment about an octopus fitting into a hole, it shouldn't work, but it still does in delightful fashion."

Hell Hole (2024)

Hell Hole is more than a little rough around the edges, but it's still a solid indie horror movie.

• It's a scrappy horror film that embraces its silliness while still having strong practical effects.
• The experience cuts through any hiccups to get to the meat of a madcap indie monster movie.
• It's presented in a way that is just cheeky enough to dig its away out of any holes it falls into.
• The film can drag in parts and some scenes carry on for a bit too long.

2 Strange Darling

Directed by jt mollner.

Image via Miramax

The biggest surprise of the week by far is Strange Darling , a wild ride that sees Reacher ’s Willa Fitzgerald and Kyle Gallner fall into a romance that becomes a spectacular survival horror. It’s one best entered into while knowing as little as possible, so trust us when we say it’s worth it. In her review , Gates wrote "the more the film proves that everything is not as it seems, the more Mollner and Fitzgerald prove themselves as singular talents to watch."

Strange Darling (2024)

‘Strange Darling’ smartly plays with audience expectations while making a star out of Willa Fitzgerald.

• Willa Fitzgerald gives a career-defining performance you have to see to believe.
• J.T. Mollner's script is a clever puzzle that continues to reveal unexpected layers and themes.
• Giovanni Ribisi's cinematography is stylized and immersive, giving the film an impressive visual language.

1 Close Your Eyes

Directed by víctor erice.

The best film of the week as well as one of the best films of the year thus far, Close Your Eyes , marks the magnificent return of legendary filmmaker Víctor Erice decades after his last feature. In it, a director's search for a missing actor becomes a deeply reflective experience about cinema and life. It's an exquisite, once-in-a-decade gem worth cherishing. In my rave review , I wrote "you’ll want to hold Erice’s film tight, but much like the water pouring from a shoe you turn over after wading into the fleeting moments of wonder, it reminds us how the memories of life’s beautiful mundanities can all too easily slip through our fingers."

Close Your Eyes (2023)

Víctor Erice's Close Your Eyes is yet another magnificent work of cinema that is as beautifully shot as it is breathtakingly moving.

• The film is a mystery of sorts that soon asks essential questions about life itself, journeying its way through subtly painful yet often poetic conversations.
• It's a surprising, deeply moving work that shifts from extended, patient scenes to something entirely different yet no less beautiful.
• Erice's film becomes like a snapshot of an imagined memory, leaving us wanting to hold it tight just as we too realize that it will all too easily slip through our fingers.
• Movie Reviews
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My Hero Academia: You're Next

Izuku Midoriya, a U.A. High School student who aspires to be the best hero he can be, confronts the villain who imitates the hero he once admired. Izuku Midoriya, a U.A. High School student who aspires to be the best hero he can be, confronts the villain who imitates the hero he once admired. Izuku Midoriya, a U.A. High School student who aspires to be the best hero he can be, confronts the villain who imitates the hero he once admired.

• Tensai Okamura
• Yôsuke Kuroda
• Kôhei Horikoshi
• Kaito Ishikawa
• Kenta Miyake
• 1 User review

• Shoto Todoroki

• Giulio Gandini
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• Katsuki Bakugo

• Ochaco Uraraka
• Izuku Midoriya
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• Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

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• Trivia This will be the final My Hero Academia movie, as the manga will end just after the film's release.
• Connections Spin-off from My Hero Academia (2016)

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• October 11, 2024 (United States)
• Official website
• 我的英雄學院劇場版：You're Next
• See more company credits at IMDbPro
• $16,143,971

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• Runtime 1 hour 50 minutes

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