ZooScope

Tag: Mystery

  • Annihilation. Dir. Alex Garland. Netflix. 2018.

    Annihilation. Dir. Alex Garland. Netflix. 2018.

    “It’s not destroying. It’s creating something new”.  Annihilation, by definition, is something “Completely destroyed; nothingness, non-existence”, Yet Alex Garland’s 2018 film entirely rethinks what it really means to be obliterated. Annihilation follows the perilous journey of Lena (Natalie Portman) and four other female scientists into a mysterious, expanding biome named ‘The Shimmer’, as an attempt to discover…

  • 2001: A Space Odyssey. Dir. Stanley Kubrick. Metro-Goldwyn Mayer. 1968.

    As with the majority of Stanley Kubrick’s filmography (we’ll mutually agree to exclude Fear and Desire from this conversation), 2001: A Space Odyssey has been subjected to extensive film analysis and criticism. This article will explore the implications of the film’s perpetuation of sociologically-constructed human-animal boundaries in order to articulate the commonality of violence across…

  • Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island. Dir. Jim Stenstrum. Hanna-Barbera Cartoons. 1998.

    Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island[1] is subversive both in terms of subverting what you’d expect from a typical Scooby outing (substituting criminals in masks with genuine monsters) and subverting ideas of what it truly means to be villainous. Immortal werecats Simone and Lena (fig. 1) sacrificed their souls to their cat god to exact revenge against…

  • The Grand Budapest Hotel. Dir Wes Anderson. Fox Searchlight Pictures. 2014

    “Did he just throw my cat out the window?” The Grand Budapest Hotel (Wes Anderson, 2014) uses the death of a domestic animal to drive the dark comedic elements within the film, without accentuating sinister undertones that the audience would expect to accompany the death of a beloved animal. Anderson transforms the cat into a…

  • Blue Velvet. Dir. David Lynch. De Laurentiis Entertainment Group. 1986

    Lynch has made a career out of the surreal, exploring the dark and often animalistic nature of human existence. His 1986 neo-noir mystery/psychological horror Blue Velvet centres around college student Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan), who after returning home after his father suffers a stroke, discovers a rotting human ear that leads him on an investigation…

  • Oldboy. Dir. Park Chan-wook. Show East & Tartan Films. 2003.

    Park Chan-wook’s 2003 film Oldboy is at its core a thriller, a revenge story of Oh Dae-su (played by Choi Min-sik) imprisoned in a room for 15 years without any knowledge of the reasons why, and who is then suddenly released back into the world and told by his captor to try to work out…

  • Twelve Monkeys. Dir. Terry Gilliam. Universal Pictures . 1996.

    Twelve Monkeys begins: human beings whoop and rattle in cages, buried deep underground. Wild animals roam free in the streets; in the churches, on top of this underground prison. But who dug the hole? The animals or the human… …beings? The deadly virus which forced the survivors to flee underground came from the animals. But the…

  • Enemy. Dir. Denis Villeneuve. E1 Films. 2013.

    Denis Villeneuve’s Enemy follows Adam, played by Jake Gyllenhaal, a history professor, disillusioned with life and suffering from a feeling of social malaise, and Anthony, played by Jake Gyllenhaal, a wannabe actor who regularly cheats on his pregnant wife. Adam sees Anthony as an extra in a movie and becomes obsessed with him. Anthony is eventually killed…

  • Gone Girl. Dir. David Fincher. 20th Century Fox. 2014.

    On the morning of his fifth wedding anniversary, Nick Dunne receives an unexpected phone call from his neighbour, who has spotted his indoor pet cat wandering outside the house. When Nick returns, not only does he discover that his cat has been misplaced, but his wife, Amy has disappeared too. Leaving a staged crime scene…

  • Enemy. Dir. Denis Villeneuve. E1 Films. 2013.

    Warning – Pictures of Spiders, if you hate spiders, stop reading now! Final Warning! The final scene of Enemy is the culmination of the spider motif that runs throughout the movie. Adam/Anthony has spent the whole film trying to resolve the two sides of himself, the cheat who only cares about himself and the man who tries…