After a Years-Long Break, Film at Lincoln Center Revives Its ‘Scary Movies’ Series

Sitting toward the back of the Walter Reade Theater auditorium for the press screening of Kim Soo-jin’s “Noise,” I was reminded of how exciting, how full and engaging, going to the movies can be. Ms. Kim’s debut feature is centered on a protagonist who is deaf: Without hearing aids, Ju-young (Lee Sun-bin) experiences the world as a distant muffle of sounds — which has its benefits, given how noise can drive some people to extremes. Take Ju-young’s estranged sister, Ju-hee (Han Soo-a), who is driven beyond distraction by the creaks, booms, and thuds coming from an apartment somewhere upstairs. When Ju-hee goes missing, Ju-young attempts to track her down and, regardless of whether she’s wearing hearing aids, we hear the world through her ears. The sound design of Ms. Kim’s movie is inordinately evocative. The manner in which noises reverberate from all corners of the theater is as unnerving as it’s meant to be; fun, too. Bumps in the night are often scarier than the things causing them. Ms. Kim’s first picture capitalizes on that truth to capable effect.“Noise” is among the films featured in a series organized by Madeleine Whittle for Film at Lincoln Center, “Scary Movies XIII.” It’s been five years since its last iteration, but now the time is right, Ms. Whittle tells us. “Scary times,” she writes, “call for scary movies … few art forms can rival film’s capacity not only to unsettle, frighten, and horrify, but also to reflect those feelings back to us, inviting us to better understand our own fear by participating in somebody else’s.”Marin Ireland and Michael Abbott Jr. in ‘The Dark and the Wicked.’ Via IFC Films and ShudderIt’s long been a truism that the genre crests in momentum and popularity at moments of political and cultural turmoil. How deeply the crop of films at Lincoln Center reflect life here in 2025 will best be gleaned a few years down the pike — retrospect does wonders for historical clarity. In the meantime, we can join with Ms. Whittle in “celebrating cinema’s boundless capacity to probe the creepiest corners of the human psyche in the company of dedicated fellow thrill-seekers.”The curator opens the program with “It Ends.” Yes, you have that right. Writer and director Alexander Ullom’s debut has four characters and a single setting: the inside of a Jeep Cherokee. The automobile is going somewhere, traveling, as it does, through a dense forest of trees. Still, the turn-off our reunited college buddies seek is never forthcoming. Attempts to backtrack are futile. The gas gauge doesn’t register a lack of fuel; our friends are neither hungry nor sleepy. They are left to confront an untenable situation and each other.The French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre famously stated that “hell is—other people.” And so it proves in Mr. Ullom’s picture about a terminal drive on an infinite loop, wherein a group of Gen Zers consider their failings, their relationships, and just what they might have done to deserve this fate. A decision is made to keep the Jeep running for fear that it may not start again. When our protagonists park it in order to stretch their muscles, they have only 90 seconds to do so before being assailed by a sprinting group of shrieking people who are, it seems clear, up to no good. “The End” is a superlative debut, being a genre film that has, at its basis, a strain of Christian theology as well as the willingness to push at the parameters of self-imposed narrative constraints. The young cast — Mitchell Cole, Akira Johnson, Noah Toth, and Phinehas Yoon — sell the story with a conviction that makes believers of the rest of us. In that regard, it’s not unlike Bryan Bertino’s “The Dark and the Wicked” (2020), a picture that got lost in the shuffle during lockdown and is included here to celebrate the 10-year anniversary of the online streaming service Shudder. How good is Mr. Bertino’s film? Rifling through the New York Times’s recent list of the 100 best movies of the 21st century, I took note that “The Dark and the Wicked” didn’t make the cut. Given some of the entertainments that did, the exclusion is galling: Mr. Bertino’s picture is a film of rare merit. The story of a son and daughter dealing with aging parents in Heartland, U.S.A., and, by fiat, their own place in the cosmos is worthy of Eudora Welty or John Steinbeck. Cinematographer Tristan Nyby channels Rembrandt, Mr. Bertino has Ingmar Bergman on his mind, and, in the end, the devil is, wholly and inextricably, in the details.The program is filled out with films from France, Belgium, Australia, Sweden, Lithuania, Spain, Germany, Chile, and, needless to say, the gnarlier reaches of the human imagination. New Yorkers seeking chills in an air-conditioned environment will want to make “Scary Movies XIII” a priority.

After a Years-Long Break, Film at Lincoln Center Revives Its ‘Scary Movies’ Series

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