Burger, Neil

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    ‘The Marsh King’s Daughter’ Review: Smoke on the Water

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    Neil Burger’s thriller aims to capture a mother pushed to protect her family from her past.In the director Neil Burger’s harrowing yet thin thriller “The Marsh King’s Daughter,” adapted from Karen Dionne’s same-titled novel, a young Helena (Brooklynn Prince) learns how her fairy tale is actually a nightmare. She lives in a woodland cabin with her stern mother, Beth (Caren Pistorius) and her huntsman father, Jacob (Ben Mendelsohn). Jacob often brands Beth’s white skin with Indigenous inspired tattoos and instructs her how to track and hunt.When a lost wanderer on a four-wheeler comes looking for directions, however, Beth flees with Helena on the vehicle to the police, leading to Jacob’s arrest. Unbeknown to the young Helena, twelve years prior, her supposedly loving father kidnapped Beth to be his bride.As an adult, Helena (Daisy Ridley) shares a daughter with her husband, Stephen (Garrett Hedlund). But Stephen is clueless to Helena’s past. That changes when Jacob escapes from prison. Helena opts to hunt Jacob before he steals her daughter (Joey Carson).This is a film superficially about trauma. Rather than mining the emotional and psychological complexities of Helena’s devastation, potentially ripe subjects, Burger hastily pushes ill-fitting thriller tropes onto a character study frame.While Mendelsohn is often adept at portraying villains, his potential to deliver menace is restricted by a one-note script. Putrid hues of greenish-yellow lighting, meant to signify jumps into the past, also underwhelm the suspense. Still, a game Ridley, along with a brief cameo by a soulful Gil Birmingham, provides the necessary stakes for Burger’s film not to idle in narrative mud.The Marsh King’s DaughterRated R for violence. Running time: 1 hour 48 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Voyagers’ Review: In Space, Everyone Can Hear You Scream

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      Emotional anarchy derails a space mission in this insipid sci-fi drama.Essentially a zero-gravity “Lord of the Flies,” Neil Burger’s “Voyagers” nevertheless plays like a CW sci-fi pilot for those who find “The 100” too unsanitary. Set aboard a sterile spaceship hurtling toward a distant planet — though any claustrophobic, closed-off environment would have served just as well — this dull dig into human nature owes more to the aesthetics of Calvin Klein than the terrors of outer space.The year is 2063, Earth is heating up, and a couple of dozen children have been trained to colonize a new world. Bred for intelligence and compliance, these docile pioneers, watched over by a sad-eyed surrogate father named Richard (Colin Farrell), begin an 86-year journey. Almost all will be dead before they reach their destination, so they have been designed to reproduce at timed intervals. Considering they’ve all grown into lissome, blandly attractive young adults, this should not be a problem.We soon learn, though, that the crew’s universally robotic affect is not simply a deficit in the cast’s acting ability, but the result of a sedative designed to suppress emotion. Figuring this out, Christopher (Tye Sheridan, all pout and pique) and his friend Zac (Fionn Whitehead, in the film’s only vivid performance), stop taking the substance and discover that they’re both hot for the same woman (Lily-Rose Depp). In short order, the noncompliance spreads and the situation on board devolves predictably into an orgy of dancing, wrestling, copulating and running down long corridors. Worse is to follow.A movie of cold light and hard surfaces, “Voyagers” owes its antiseptic glamour to the cinematographer Enrique Chediak, whose talents far outclass Burger’s underdeveloped script. Mysteries abound, including why Richard (who has been sidelined by an incident I won’t spoil) chose to accompany the voyagers, and why he wears a permanently pained expression.“I wouldn’t miss a thing,” he tells superiors before he leaves Earth, hinting at a tragic past that’s never explained. Neither is the alien that might be messing around outside the ship — or, as the increasingly maniacal Zac suggests, inside one or more of the crew.In replicating a society torn apart by lies and fear and gaslighting, “Voyagers” might feel, for some, a bit too close to home for comfort. And as the chaos and violence escalated and rival factions formed, I amused myself by pondering who might be running the ship. I concluded it was the alien.VoyagersRated PG-13 for picturesque coupling and ugly behavior. Running time: 1 hour 48 minutes. In theaters. Please consult the guidelines outlined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention before watching movies inside theaters. More