Uncle John

Everything for the family. Uncle John is a wonderfully morbid paraphrase of Uncle Buck with John Candy, who would also do everything for his loved ones (and who one of the characters reminisces about). For the most part, the film is a serious drama with a very intense thriller atmosphere (similar to movies from Borderline Films) and comes closer to Park Chan-wook’s Stoker and William Friedkin’s Killer Joe in the exaggerated depravity of its climax, when a small death and a grand death occur in parallel. If the final dialogue over the “campfire” doesn’t strike you as funny, you should work on your cynicism. As a directorial and screenwriting debut, Uncle John is surprising with its focused narrative, which doesn’t lead viewers by the hand, doesn’t tell them everything they want to know and leaves them in a state of uncertainty for longer than is usual in more conventional thrillers. Not only is the essential information not repeated multiple times, sometimes our attention is required to even notice it, which corresponds to the style consisting of long overall shots, from which we have to pick out what is important for ourselves. In order to build tension, the film conversely cuts quickly between close-ups of faces, which don’t allow us to see much that would cause us to fear for the characters’ safety. The two-hour runtime for a low-budget film by a group of unknowns arouses caution, but it has its justification in the narrative structure, which develops two seemingly unrelated stories in parallel with a feel for realistic details. We know from the first minutes that something bad could happen, but at the same time we can’t guess when, who or what that might involve, because we logically assume that Ben, who outwardly inhabits a completely different world in terms of genre, will in some way be involved in the whole affair, which in the end is and isn’t true. It was very important for the chosen concept of two intertwined yet, in genre terms, practically incompatible stories (because, unlike a romantic film, thrillers rarely have a happy ending) that the film should also work as a family drama and an intimate relationship film, which it succeeds in doing thanks to the civil dialogue and natural actors. The result is an intoxicatingly absorbing game played with the viewers’ (unfulfilled) expectations and emotions, which are as unstable as the plot is morally adrift. It’s been a long time since I got such pleasure from how cleverly a film evoked ambivalent feelings in me. 90% (14.05.2016)

I had a pretty strange feeling while watching this movie that the authors were trying to elevate the entire premise a notch through the mysterious atmosphere based on scenes from the Bible and on the fact that they were so orthodox. The beginning gets interesting pretty quickly, when decent cinematography is supported with excerpts from the Bible and I almost felt that I might have been watching a promotional video by the Mormon Church. What you get then is a psychological massacre rather than a pure thriller, which actually through pushing too hard as regards the family creates the impression of a chamber movie, but also of boredom. Well and at the end, it takes things up a notch again. In other words, whatever happens at the rednecks’, remains at the rednecks’. (25.10.2016)