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    ‘The Welkin’ Review: A Strong Ensemble and a Story That Resonates

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    A somber yet witty play set in 18th-century England is a clever perversion of a courtroom drama that features strong performances from an ensemble cast.The final word of “The Welkin” — a soft “oh” of realization that left the theater breathless — is more of an utterance, the coo of an innocent young babe. But the speaker isn’t a child; she’s a grown woman.And she’s accused of murder.It’s England in 1759, just around the time everyone is buzzing about the arrival of Halley’s comet. This woman, Sally Poppy (played by Haley Wong), and her lover are accused of the murder and dismemberment of the young daughter of the rich family for which Sally worked. She’s set to hang, but there’s a hitch: Sally claims she’s pregnant.“The Welkin” is a kind of courtroom drama or, rather, a clever perversion of such; technically we don’t see the courtroom, just a dim, dungeonlike room nearby where a forum of 12 matrons has been convened. They’re not Sally’s final adjudicators (that job is for the men, after all), but the jury ruling on the women’s issue in this case: whether Sally’s actually pregnant.A little bit “The Crucible” and a lot bit the 2022 film “Women Talking,” in all the best ways, “The Welkin,” which opened on Wednesday at Atlantic Theater Company’s Linda Gross Theater, is a somber yet witty examination of how women labor — with housework, with children and with a society of men that doesn’t serve them — and how they negotiate their assumed responsibilities with their desires.“The Welkin” successfully depicts these women as unique individuals, representing women from different strata of society, and with different prejudices and viewpoints. Each one is memorable, from the stately outsider, Charlotte Cary (Mary McCann), a colonel’s widow in a stylish crown of a hat, to Mary Middleton (Susannah Perkins), an awkward, superstitious young woman who is worried only about getting home to her crop of leeks.Sandra Oh (center) is a standout of the ensemble cast. Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Quiz Lady’ Review: Dog in Jeopardy

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      Sandra Oh shines in this road trip buddy comedy about a pair of sisters getting on a TV quiz show to pay the ransom for their stolen dog.Jenny (Sandra Oh), a 40-something ball of chaos, is introduced in “Quiz Lady” the way you might expect of someone whose life savings are contingent on a hazardous fish bone-related lawsuit against a chain restaurant called Choochie’s: off in the distance, skittering heedlessly across the street before she’s suddenly struck by a car. Naturally, she pops right back up before having a meltdown over the mechanical entrance to the senior home where her younger sister, Anne (Awkwafina), is frustratingly watching from inside.It’s often said that comedic roles are deceptively trickier to play than dramatic ones, and Jenny is the type of character that would seem rife with potential pitfalls for an actor like Oh: an over-the-top eccentric whose humor can easily fall into caricature. Yet, “Quiz Lady,” a mostly winning comedy directed by Jessica Yu, is elevated most of all on the shoulders of Oh’s delightful and nuanced performance.When Jenny shows up at the senior home, Anne is already fed up. Their mother has run off to Macau to escape an $80,000 debt she owes Ken (Jon Park), a doggy daycare-owning gangster, and Anne naturally will be the one to take care of things. It’s the way things have been ever since Jenny, who has always lived a more free-spirited, if erratic and unstable, life, exited from their lives and left Anne to take care of their mother.Isolated and working as an office drone, Anne’s only form of solace is a Jeopardy-esque quiz show she’s watched religiously since childhood. When Ken steals Anne’s dog as collateral, Jenny, feeling the surge of her latest pipe dream of becoming a life coach, kidnaps Anne and drives her to an audition for the show in the hopes she’ll win the money to pay off the debt.Like so many road trip buddy comedies, the effectiveness of the enterprise rests, arguably more than the writing or direction itself, on the balance and chemistry between the central duo. And “Quiz Lady” in particular is predicated upon a role-reversing gamble: Typically a dramatic actress, Oh is playing the freewheeling Jenny, while her co-star, Awkwafina, who aside from her role in “The Farewell” has mostly made her name as the often cartoonish comic relief (“Crazy Rich Asians,” “The Little Mermaid”), is the serious and high-strung Anne.But the pair finds an easy harmony together, even as Oh does most of the heavy lifting. While Awkwafina’s little-sister turn often falls into uptight, one-note outbursts, Oh is a charismatic and natural counterbalance as the outsize Jenny. She knows when to reel her choices in and, most important, imbues Jenny’s kookiness with an emotional depth bubbling just underneath the surface.The funniest scene comes toward the end, when Jenny and Anne play a high-stakes game of charades on the quiz show. As they hit their stride, the sequence, punctuated by a strikingly tender moment that would have rung forced in lesser hands, floats off the comedic brilliance of Oh, at once natural and ridiculous, as her answers burst out of her via an intuition that could only exist through a lifetime of sisterhood.Quiz LadyRated R for some drug use and language. Running time: 1 hour 39 minutes. Watch on Hulu. More

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      When Motherhood Is a Horror Show

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      For the onscreen moms in “The Baby,” “Umma” and “Lamb” — and for an ascendant class of sardonic mom influencers — the source of psychological torture is motherhood itself.In the first episode of “The Baby,” a new comedic horror series on HBO Max, an infant falls into a childless woman’s arms, as if dropped there by a cosmic stork. But the special delivery is not a blessing — it’s a curse.Natasha (Michelle de Swarte), the 38-year-old chef who catches the gurgling babe, does not want children. She has watched with disgust as her friends have vanished into motherhood; now they are always droning on about their babies, going on play dates with their babies, telling Natasha to stop smoking cigarettes around their babies. The baby-from-the-sky quickly reveals himself to be a supernatural manifestation of her own dying youth. Once he starts crawling after Natasha, everyone around her ends up dead or maimed.The show is a not-quite-sendup of a genre that imbues the trials of motherhood with a paranormal charge. The mothers in several horror movies released this year are not straightforward villains (like the mother in “Carrie”) or innocent naïfs (as in “Rosemary’s Baby”), but sympathetic figures who become implicated in haunting family dysfunctions.In “Umma,” a beekeeping single mom (Sandra Oh) is possessed by the ghost of her own mother. In “Lamb,” an Icelandic farmer (Noomi Rapace) adopts a hybrid lamb-human newborn she discovers in her barn, with monstrous results. Marvel’s flirtation with horror, in the director Sam Raimi’s zombified “Doctor Strange” sequel, finds its villain in a mother, a lurching Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen), who is willing to wreak havoc across as many universes as it will take to reunite with her children.Even “The Twin,” an original film from the horror streaming service Shudder, cycles through a mess of clichés (evil twin, Scandinavian occultism, Faustian bargain) before landing on mommy psychodrama. Though these mothers often carry past domestic traumas — abuse, neglect, infant loss — their stories signal that there is something psychologically harrowing about the role of motherhood itself.Inside the World of ‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’In this mind-expanding, idiosyncratic take on the superhero film, a laundromat owner is the focus of a grand, multiversal showdown.Review: Our film critic called “Everything Everywhere All at Once” an exuberant swirl of genre anarchy.The Protagonist: Over the years, Michelle Yeoh has built her image as a combat expert. For this movie, she drew on her emotional reserves.The Villain: The actress Stephanie Hsu, who plays an all-powerful evil being, talks about how clothes convey the full range of her character.A Lovelorn Romantic: A child star in the 1980s, Ke Huy Quan returns to acting as the husband of Yeoh’s character, a role blanding action and drama.A Healing Experience: For some viewers, the movie was a way to reflect on how the effects of trauma can be passed down between generations.In pregnancy, birth and young life, the horror tropes abound. Growing another human being inside your body is a natural human process that can nevertheless feel eerie, alien and supernatural. Also, gory. When the photographer Heji Shin began taking unsentimental photographs of babies at birth, “I looked at them and I was like, This is literally ‘The Exorcist,’” she told T Magazine. Bringing life into the world also brings death viscerally close. Thousands of infants die unexpectedly in the first year of their lives. Giving birth in the United States is more than 20 times as lethal as skydiving. Even the most desired and successful of pregnancies (let alone the kind that anti-abortion laws would require be carried to term) can conjure themes of shape-shifting, disfigurement, possession and torture.The pandemic surfaced horrors of a more quotidian nature: the drudgeries of ceaseless child rearing. The veneration of motherly fortitude and sacrifice endemic to nature documentaries and Mother’s Day Instagram tributes has always disguised an American disinterest in functionally supporting mothers and other caretakers. But recently the image of the overworked American mother has assumed a darker valence, as new levels of isolation and stress have unleashed a maternal desperation that’s been described as “primal,” “Sisyphean,” and, as the writer Amil Niazi put it in The Cut last year, “like my brain is burning and so is my entire house and someone just stole the fire extinguisher.”Often a mother’s own fixation on such darker themes is written off, trivialized as old news or pathologized as postpartum depression. So it makes sense for it all to get sublimated into horror. In fact, it makes so much sense that the outcome is often a little too on the nose. Psychological frights that jumped from the screen in earlier mother-focused films, like “The Babadook” (from 2014) and “Hereditary” (2018), now seem to drift wearily through pop culture, as stories of motherhood are retold again and again through the blunt instruments of horror.When a woman notices bizarre behavior in her young son in “The Twin,” the twist is foreshadowed via the diagnosis of a shrink, who tells her that her child “is a mirror — he’s a reflection of your emotions and fears.” In “Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness,” Wanda Maximoff fashions the tension into a tagline: “I’m not a monster, I’m a mother,” she says. And in “Umma,” as Oh’s character endures a tedious possession by her abusive mother’s ghost, a kindly neighbor (Dermot Mulroney) vocalizes the old saw that grinds through the whole movie: “Oh God, I can hear myself turning into my mother.”Tania Franco Klein for The New York Times“The Baby” is clever to convert this mode into comedy, though the mood soon darkens. At first, Natasha’s antipathy toward parenthood feels refreshingly specific, with its focus on the mundane degradations that can haunt the imaginations of the happily childless. A soiled diaper escalates into a scene of body horror; a struggle to collapse a stroller ends with a severed finger. But the murderous-baby metaphor assumes more and more of motherhood’s potential pitfalls with every episode. Soon the show is also about postpartum depression and forced birth and compulsory heterosexuality and intergenerational trauma.There’s something frustrating about this relentless construction of motherhood as a horror show, and not just because mothers experience the full range of human emotions (some of which are more faithfully explored in a Hallmark movie). By breaking a taboo, the genre has created a new cliché: of the exhausted mother pushed to her psychological breaking point. Though the lack of support for mothers is a structural problem, it is reframed as a personal one, with a narrative resolution that resembles a postpartum therapy session or an invitation to collectively scream. Mothers are made to suffer, and then they are flattened into a long-suffering mother persona.On the internet, there is a cutesy horror-inspired term for this kind of mother: the mombie. This lightly ironic version of the overwhelmed mom persona is ascendant on Instagram, TikTok and e-commerce novelty sites, where the lobotomized stereotype of the mommy influencer is countered with a version of motherhood defined by bedraggled debasement. In this exaggerated burlesque performance, motherhood is analogized to prison, or the feeling of a child’s scooter wheel repeatedly hitting you in the ankle bone for all eternity.These jokes are often accompanied by sincere messages about how negative feelings about motherhood are valid, and that it’s important to speak out. But the persona can also seem curiously invested in feeling aggrieved, as if the conversion of suffering into content is itself a balm. A common joke format is to complain that men do not help, but that when they do help, they do not help correctly. If you can’t relate, perhaps it is because you are so smugly privileged that you can pay other women to perform the drudgery of motherhood for you. (A recent “Atlanta” episode actually mines great comedy-horror from this premise: When the Trinidadian nanny for a rich white boy dies suddenly, the parents are haunted by the dawning realization that she was more family to their son than they were.)I found relief from this narrative trap in “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” which unchains its overworked mother character from the limits of the domestic horror genre by vaulting her into a multiverse of thrilling supernatural possibilities. The film begins with Evelyn (Michelle Yeoh), a laundromat owner pestered by her aging father, her bumbling husband, her depressed teenage daughter and the I.R.S. Her life has devolved, as she puts it, into the endless repetition of “laundry and taxes” — until she learns that a plethora of Evelyns exist in endless multiverses, that she happens to be living the most disappointing possible version of her life, and that now she must access her untapped potential in order to save the worlds. “Everything Everywhere” accesses familiar themes of fraught mother-daughter relationships and overburdened moms, but this time the film’s whole paranormal dimension is built around Evelyn’s powerful complexity.After a numbing few weeks of watching mothers tortured onscreen, the absurdly funny “Everything Everywhere” is the one that actually made me cry. But even during this elevated viewing experience, I was reminded that I was still living in our universe. Before the previews began, the theater screened a KFC commercial where a family gathers around the table for a fried chicken dinner. We hear each of their internal monologues as they dig in: “Mmm, mac and cheese,” the son thinks. “Mmm, tenders,” thinks the father. Then we hear the mind of the mother, who is nourished only by a respite from her domestic burden: “Mmmm,” she thinks. “Silence.” More

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      in Movies

      ‘Turning Red’ Review: Beware the Red-Furred Monster

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      A 13-year-old girl becomes a red panda when she loses her cool in Domee Shi’s heartwarming but wayward coming-of-age film.A quirky Asian teenager transforms into a giant red panda whenever she gets excited … even the premise gives me pause. Which makes the task of reviewing the new Disney/Pixar film “Turning Red” (on Disney+ March 11) especially tricky. Because that’s the idea behind this sometimes heartwarming but wayward coming-of-age movie, which toes the line between truthfully representing a Chinese family, flaws and all, and indulging stereotypes.Meilin Lee (voiced by Rosalie Chiang) is a typical 13-year-old girl: she dances, has crushes on boys and has a cohort of weird but loyal besties who share her obsession with the glossy-lipped members of the boy band 4*Town. She’s also Chinese Canadian, living in Toronto in 2002, where her family maintains a temple. There she helps her loving but overbearing mother, Ming (Sandra Oh), and tries to be the perfect daughter — even when that means burying her own thoughts and desires in the process. This becomes a lot more difficult when she goes through her changes — not of the period variety, but the panda kind.The character writing and design are where “Turning Red,” directed by Domee Shi, most succeeds. Mei has the relatable swagger of the middle school cool nerd — she’s creative and confident, and also has a perfect report card. The tomboy skater girl Miriam, the deadpan Priya and the hilariously fiery Abby form a funky trifecta of gal pals who are Mei’s emotional safety net. And Ming strikes an impressive balance between dictatorial and doting, dismissing Mei’s friends and interests but also stalking her at school to ply her with steamed buns.Shi finds subtle yet effective ways to illustrate the personalities of even the ancillary characters, from the stiffly applied makeup of Mei’s grandmother (Ho-Wai Ching) to the flamboyant open-toed footwear of the gang of aunties who follow Grandma Lee around. And the animation of Mei’s hair in her panda form — how it lays flat when she’s calm or spikes upward when she’s mad — reinforces her emotional shifts.It’s no surprise that these kinds of expressions are where Shi’s direction most shines; as in her 2018 Oscar-winning Pixar short “Bao,” “Turning Red” lives and breathes on the complex emotional relationship between a mother and a child preparing to leave the nest. And also as in “Bao,” in which a mother raises a steamed bun child from birth to adulthood, here again Shi uses a culturally specific metaphor to convey her characters’ emotions.This is where “Turning Red” gets sticky: though the plot’s red panda magic is rooted in its characters’ cultural traditions (the Lees honor an ancestor who defended her family with the power of a red panda), these details aren’t enough to absolve the film of its kid-friendly version of exoticism. After all, its characters profit off Mei’s cute and foreign transformation.And when it comes down to the movie’s conflict, the antagonists are the women in Mei’s family. Or, more accurately, the suffocating cultural traditions and familial expectations that are embodied by the women. The fact that Mei’s grandmother gets the kind of shady introductory scene that you’d expect of the head honcho in a mobster flick, and that these women share the red panda affliction, means they fall into a formula of cold, emotionless Asian women. Is the film tackling the stereotype or fulfilling it? The line is too blurry to tell. By the end, a bit of understanding, empathy and a pandapocalypse reassures us that the stoic Asian dames aren’t the source of the problem but also victims, like Mei. Though I wonder what the movie would look like if the conflict wasn’t enacted solely in the form of these women.“Turning Red” offers satisfying morsels despite its messiness, like the few throwbacks to the early aughts, including Tamagotchis and pre-BTS boy band mania. (4*Town’s criminally catchy songs, written by Billie Eilish and her brother, Finneas O’Connell, are perfect reproductions of 2000s pop hits.)It’s too bad that “Turning Red” fumbles its storytelling, because at the very least it has fun when it lets its fur fly.Turning RedRated PG. Running time: 1 hour 39 minutes. Watch on Disney+. More

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      in Television

      ‘Killing Eve’ Is Back for a Final Season. Here’s Where We Left Off.

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      Season 3 ended ambiguously in 2020. We’ve recapped some of the murders and gay drama you may have forgotten about since then.When “Killing Eve” left off, in the spring of 2020, Villanelle (Jodie Comer) and Eve (Sandra Oh) had just come together on the Tower Bridge, in London — a handy symbol for the scene, as bridges often are.It was a bridge that allowed two women, whose relationship had been defined by repressed desires, to have an emotionally (and physically) vulnerable conversation. “When I try and think of my future, I just see your face over and over again,” Eve told Villanelle as they leaned over the edge of the bridge. Near the end of their heart-to-heart conversation, the two turned back-to-back — leaning into the moment and each other — and then walked in opposite directions, promising never to look back.“I’ll be yours forever,” Saoirse Ronan sang over the scene, as the two dragged their heels. A moment later, Villanelle and Eve, assassin and assassin-obsessive, broke their agreement and turned around, locking eyes in a shared expression of yearning and heartbreak.Almost two years later, we’ll finally find out whether that lingering gaze led to anything — a proper kiss with no head butts, maybe? Another murder attempt?“Killing Eve” returns on Sunday, bringing its trademark blend of blend of wit, murder, luxurious outfits and queer sexual tension back to BBC America and AMC for a fourth and final season. (The first episode airs Sunday on BBC America and Monday on AMC; the first two start streaming Sunday on AMC+.) Here’s a refresher before the premiere.What’s Eve been up to?Over the last three seasons, Eve went from being an MI6 agent with, as she puts it, “a husband, and a house, and a chicken,” to being single and homeless.Eve lost her job in the Season 2 finale after finding out that her boss, Carolyn (Fiona Shaw), set up Eve and Villanelle to murder a weapons dealer named Aaron. When Eve refused to leave Rome without Villanelle, Carolyn wished her luck and left.When Eve returned to England in Season 3, she got a job in the kitchen of a Korean restaurant. Carolyn’s son, Kenny (Sean Delaney), checked in on Eve after she drunk texted him, and he mentioned that he was investigating “the Twelve,” a shadowy organization that coordinates assassins like Villanelle to commit high-profile murders. He was doing so, he said, for the Bitter Pill, an online publication. He invited her to visit the office.Kenny wasn’t there when she went, but his phone was on his desk. Turned out, that’s because he was busy plummeting to his death from the roof. Eve soon started working for the Bitter Pill herself, looking into Kenny’s death and continuing to research the Twelve.At the same time, Eve’s obsession over Villanelle finally ended her marriage to Niko (Owen McDonnell). During the first two seasons, he had become increasingly frustrated with Eve’s split attention. By the end of Season 2, he left her after Villanelle killed his friend, co-worker and crush, Gemma (Emma Pierson).Eve and Villanelle had a plan to escape to Cuba but as with so much about their relationship, it was stymied. Laura Radford/BBC AmericaAt the beginning of Season 3 — as Niko was ignoring Eve’s calls and texts — Eve saw Villanelle on a bus and finally kissed her for the first time. (Immediately after they kissed, Eve head-butted Villanelle, who then got off the bus.)After leaving Eve, Niko moved to a farm in Poland, where one of Villanelle’s former trainers from the Twelve, Dasha (Harriet Walter), tracked him down in an attempt to drive Eve and Villanelle apart, and she steals Niko’s phone to text Eve, convincing her to visit. When Eve arrived, Dasha stabbed him in the throat with a pitchfork, but she hid so that Eve would suspect Villanelle. Niko survived, but as for his relationship with Eve — stick a fork in him — he was done.Eve continued investigating Kenny’s death, but by the end of the season she seemed to lack a greater mission. Who is she when she doesn’t have a murder (or a murderess) to obsess over?What about Villanelle?After killing plenty of people for the Twelve, Villanelle decided to work undercover for MI6 at the end of Season 2 to catch a weapons dealer named Aaron. Her handler Konstantin (Kim Bodnia) — under orders from Eve’s boss — told another hit man who worked for the Twelve that he could kill Villanelle if she killed Aaron, which, of course, she did.Villanelle killed the other assassin with Eve’s help and made it out of Season 2 alive, and at the start of Season 3, she no longer wanted to work with Konstantin or the Twelve. Soon after, Dasha showed up and talked her into working again, but Villanelle made it clear she wanted to move up the ranks of the organization.In the middle of Season 3, Villanelle returned to Russia to see her mother, Tatiana (Evgenia Dodina), who left her at an orphanage decades before but kept her brother Pyotr (Rob Feldman). While there, Villanelle met her stepfather and her two stepbrothers — the younger one loves Elton John and the older one believes the Earth is flat — and spent some quality time with the family at a local fair. But later that night, her mother asked Villanelle to leave.In true Villanelle fashion, she burned down the house, killing everyone but Pyotr and her young stepbrother, whom she gave an envelope of cash and a note encouraging him to see Elton John’s farewell tour.After killing her own mother, Villanelle struggled to complete the Twelve’s assignments. Although she received a promotion, she learned from a higher up named Hélène (Camille Cottin) that she would still be expected to murder for them. After nearly being killed on her next assignment, she decided she wanted out again: By the end of Season 3, she and Konstantin had come up with a plan to escape the Twelve’s web.Carolyn (Fiona Shaw) and Konstantin (Kim Bodnia) also have a very complicated relationship.Laura Radford/BBCAmericaAs they gathered money and passports, Villanelle invited Eve to a sultry dance hall, and as they danced, she invited Eve to come with her and Konstantin to Cuba. Eve seemed to be on board, but their escape plan was derailed when one of Konstantin’s bosses, Paul (Steve Pemberton), called him to say that he knew Konstantin had been stealing millions from the Twelve. Eve, Villanelle and Konstantin arrived at Paul’s house to find Eve’s former boss, Carolyn, there, aiming a gun at Paul.As Carolyn asked Paul questions, Konstantin admitted that he had been triple-crossing everyone by working for the Russians and the British and by taking orders from Paul. When Carolyn asked Konstantin who was behind the death of her son, he said that he had visited Kenny on Paul’s orders. (Kenny’s death, Konstantin said, was an accident.)Carolyn shot Paul and let everyone else go. Given the circumstances, Eve and Villanelle seemed oddly calm, and they left Paul’s apartment together.Well, who else lived and died?While on assignment with Dasha to kill an American man on a golf course, Villanelle abruptly changed gears, attacking Dasha with a golf club instead. Later, as Eve chased down Villanelle, she discovered Dasha — whom she believed had tried to kill Niko — lying in the grass. Dasha, who seemed close to death, confirmed Eve’s suspicions. Eve stepped on Dasha’s chest, pressing into her ribs until she heard a police siren in the distance.Konstantin, who had a heart attack toward the end of Season 3, wound up in the hospital next to Dasha, but as he left, he heard her die.Konstantin had a heart attack near the end of Season 3 but survived. Not every character was so lucky.Laura Radford/BBCAmericaAbout those finalesFor those of us who have watched “Killing Eve” from the start, the Season 3 finale may have felt somewhat familiar: Season 1 ended as Eve confessed that she thought about Villanelle all the time. Once she lured Villanelle into bed and the two leaned in for a kiss, Eve stabbed her.A similar scene played out in Season 2, which ended with a fight between Villanelle and Eve amid some Roman ruins, where Villanelle told Eve, “You’re mine” — then shot her when Eve disagreed.Although neither was injured when last we saw them, they were still toeing the complicated line between love and obsession on that bridge. This time, each seemed more willing to contemplate what her new life might look like without having to end the other’s.What would happen if Eve embraced her darker impulses? Who would Villanelle be if she weren’t a villain? And could they have a real relationship if they moved beyond the obsession and longing? More