WORKING CLASS GOES TO HELL (2023)
★★★★ out of ★★★★★
Intensity: 🩸🩸🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
Directed by Mladen Đorđević
Serbian writer/director Mladen Đorđević’s Working Class Goes to Hell (Serbia/Greece/Bulgaria/Montenegro/Croatia; 2023) is a riveting political horror feature that deftly balances social commentary with occult chills. A plant’s union, led by the impassive Ceca (Tamara Krcunovic), protests the evasion of legal consequences by the owners of a plant who the union members believe deliberately started a fire five years earlier that claimed the lives of family members and friends. When a man named Mija (Leon Lucev), the adult son of one of the fire’s deceased, returns to the town after several years away and with the reputation of having supernatural powers, the members take part in a ritual that they believe to be of a certain kind in the hopes of contacting deceased loved ones, when in fact, it is much darker. A mysterious man named Elijah (Momo Picuric) also arrives, and he too seems to have magical powers. The town’s citizens soon find themselves battling otherworldly forces as well as the high-living plant owners and local politicians. Đorđević infuses his film with a sense of oppression, dread, some dark comedy and plenty of satire, and the possibility of liberation from poverty and closure regarding injustices at a horrifying cost. The cast is fantastic, and Dusan Grubin’s cinematography perfectly captures the bleak proceedings. Working Class Goes to Hell is strongly recommended for fear-fare aficionados of occult goings-on and for those who enjoy social satire.
Riddle of Fire (2023)
★★★1/2 out of ★★★★★
Intensity: 🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
Directed by Weston Razooli
Writer/director Weston Razooli’s Riddle of Fire combines kids-on-bikes fantasy of the “Are ye a knight or are ye a squire? Can ye solve the Riddle of Fire?” — as presented in the film’s opening — variety with supernatural elements, to mixed results. The film, set in rural Wyoming, is a highly stylized one, and while it often gets by on charm and chutzpah, it does wander into being overly precious at times. Alice (Phoebe Ferro) and her friends Hazel (Charlie Stover) and his younger brother Jodie (Skyler Peters) — preteens who call themselves The Three Immortal Reptiles — stage a daring raid of a warehouse to open the film. Having stolen a video game console they hope to play all day, their plans are thwarted when they discover that the boys’ sick mother Julie A’Dale (Danielle Hoetmer) has set a password on the TV, and she will only give it to them if they bring her a blueberry pie. Alas, the lone local bakery is out of pies and the baker is sick, though she makes a deal with the kids so that they can use her secret recipe to bake a pie themselves. In their quest for one of the ingredients — a speckled egg — they run afoul of a local band of witches called The Enchanted Blade Gang, led by Anna-Freya (Lio Tipton), whose daughter Petal (Lorelei Olivia Mote) also possesses magical powers and is around the same age as our heroic trio. The child actors do an admirable job and their performances are a huge part of why the film works as well as it does. Their dialogue gets a bit clunky at times — Razooli’s screenplay often gives the young characters lines that are highly unlikely to come out of the mouths of youngsters — but their verve is unmistakable. Jake Mitchell’s splendid 16mm cinematography is another high point of the film. Scenes run the gamut from the fun (the aforementioned video game heist) to the fey (a dance sequence to Players’ “Baby Come Back” seems a bit cloying), and from the darker (danger from adult antagonists) to the absurd (one youngster polishes off a bottle of hooch by himself and seems to only suffer from needing to throw up a little). Viewers nostalgic for kids-having-adventures movies like The Goonies or for fantasy comedies such as The Princess Bride will be the most likely candidates for more fully going along with the whimsical tone that Riddle of Fire boasts.
Reviews by Joseph Perry
Working Class Goes to Hell and Riddle of Fire screen as part of the Midnight Madness selections during the 2023 Toronto International Film Festival, which runs September 7–17. For more information, visit https://www.tiff.net/.