#77: Chloe Sevigny's wig is the best part of After The Hunt
Death By Consumption
10/21/25 - 10/27/25
I regret to inform you that this will be the last DBC for a couple weeks. Next week will be the first week I've ever missed (in 77 weeks, wow!), which I don't take lightly — I've enjoyed the consistency of this weekly little thing, when I once dreaded it. But Justin and I are off to Japan to celebrate his 40th, and who wants to write emails when they're traveling? I promise I will not ghost you, like I have with all my therapists. I will return next month, probably with an obnoxious email full of descriptions of delicious food that I ate and you didn't.
This week: I was delighted to see Julia Roberts again, I decided it's time to start stanning Dylan O'Brien, I watched an intense horror film featuring a twinky Sam Neill, I developed a deep hatred of David Harbour via Lily Allen's new album, I learned about the world of straight gooners, and I muddled through a still-confusing scifi book series.
After The Hunt (2025) — at Angelika Film Center
After The Hunt, Luca Guadagnino's new film, is an hour shorter than One Battle After Another, but felt at least twice as long. The movie drags along, full of meandering plot lines and endlessly overwritten dialogue, and feels a bit like you're actually sitting through one of the movie's many insufferable Yale philosophy classes. I'm upset!
There was so much potential with this film, and yet everything it attempts to do was done infinitely better in Tár. The only major takeaway is that Julia Roberts remains THE movie star, one of the most charming people to have ever walked this damn planet. You'd walk out of this film in the first hour, if not for the absolute magnetic pull of Julia, who keeps you planted in your seat simply for the now-rare pleasure of getting to see her act in a major movie. Where has she BEEN?! We need to get Julia on whatever cocktail is making Nicole Kidman make 25 movies and 3 TV shows a year. (What I'm saying is: maybe we need Julia Roberts to get divorced. I love her love, but I also need her to want to leave home and get on a film set more often.)
Julia plays a fucked-up Yale philosophy teacher, who is not as put-together as she seems, despite her crisp outfits. She flirts with colleague Andrew Garfield, possibly flirts with student Ayo Edebiri, and regularly gets wildly drunk, preferably while "down at the wharf." And I just have a question for you Yale people: do you really call it "the wharf"? There's a shocking amount of wharf talk in this movie, and every time a character said it I gasped. "I'll be down at the wharf," Julia Roberts says. "I'm going to throw myself into the wharf," someone threatens. I had no idea New Haven was so wharf-centric! It almost makes me rethink my hatred of everything that's ever come from Yale. Almost.
Anyway, ole wharf booze queen Julia Roberts is the most charming drunk since Liz Taylor, but unfortunately, everything else surrounding her character is a mess. I could not figure out the point of this film! This is a movie in which Julia Roberts is attacked by a group of nonbinary Yale students chanting slogans on campus, in one of the most ham-fisted Gen Z portrayals I've ever witnessed, and it's not played for laughs! Did you want to relive the #MeToo era, without anything new being added to the conversation? Neither did I! But, apparently, Luca Guadagnino did.
The movie is not a comedy (despite that nonbinary group-assault scene), but I found myself uncontrollably laughing anytime Chloë Sevigny appeared on screen. She really put on an oversized suit, slapped a Party City Ringo Starr wig on her head, and showed up on set ready to go. It's insane! (Although now that I think of it, she did look like a woman who regularly takes to the wharf.)
Luca: I still love you, but this movie was a mess. Go back to movies about yearning sad gay men — wharf lesbians might not be your thing!
Twinless (2025) — on Apple
If you're gay, you've probably already seen the 3-second clip from this movie in which Dylan O'Brien's character has graphic gay sex. But it turns out there's an entire film surrounding that moment, and an actually quite good one! Who knew!
The plot could have been a saccharine, soppy mess — Dylan O'Brien plays a man whose twin brother died, who befriends another man whose twin also died — if not for the twist. I won't spoil, of course, but it takes the film in a much more interesting, complicated, funny, and downright pulpy direction, and thankfully so. The script (the film was written and directed by costar James Sweeney, who may or may not have made an entire film just to get to have a sex scene with Dylan O'Brien, and who can blame him!) is smart, building tension gradually, and revealing the characters' motivations and deeper emotions without ever dipping too much into schlock. If it sounds like I'm speaking in vague terms, I am! It's impossible to really talk about the movie without ruining it. So, what's an emailer to do?
The highlight beyond the script was the revelation that Dylan O'Brien is... a good actor? I still think of him as "the Maze Runner guy" (also as the guy who someone on Grindr told me I looked like 10 years ago, which has really buoyed my self-esteem for a decade now), but this feels like a genuine breakthrough performance for him. He plays both twins, one gay and one straight, and while they're both played a bit like cliches — the gay twin has a lisp and the straight twin talks about an octave deeper — they feel like real, distinct people. Look, I think I speak for all of us when I say Dylan O'Brien gets a pass on doing gay voice, okay? Let the boy lisp if he wants! He's earned it.
Possession (1981) — on Criterion
I expected a fun, classic horror movie — I did not anticipate a twisted psychological drama, featuring some of the most psychotic performances I've ever seen. Possession can only be described as intense, an at times hard-to-watch movie that seems like it was made by a deranged lunatic who drove his actors to the brink of madness. Take it from me: you do not want to enjoy an edible before hitting play on this. It's not that kind of movie!
A shockingly young Sam Neill plays a twink whose wife basically hates him, which results in both of them having a 2-hour-long psychotic freakout. The movie is unclassifiable when it comes to genre: it starts as a divorce film that gets shockingly violent, before veering into a paranoid spy movie, until it suddenly becomes a supernatural thriller with a touch of body horror. It's... a lot! This isn't to suggest that it feels frenetic or disjointed, though — the plot moves smoothly along, taking us deeper and deeper into hell and madness, all of it shot absolutely beautifully in a still-divided West Berlin.
The whole movie is kooky crazy, culminating in a jaw-dropping scene in which actress Isabelle Adjani has a deeply nuts freakout while getting off the subway (she won Best Actress at Cannes for this role, and this scene is absolutely why). It's one of the most insane movie performances I've ever seen — I was legitimately worried she'd crack her head on the wall at any moment. This doesn't feel like a movie that will regularly make my Halloween rotation, but it's going to haunt me for a long time.
"West End Girl" by Lily Allen (2025) — on Spotify
This album is a seismic moment for gossipy bitches everywhere. I saw someone call Lily Allen's new album "white woman 'Lemonade'" which struck me as — at risk of activating the Beyhive — too generous to Beyoncé. "Lemonade" was great, of course, but the closest we got to hearing any real details was "Becky with the good hair;" the rest was a bunch of vague hints about Jay-Z doing something bad, probably cheating, but who really knows? And then she retreated behind her one-woman Iron Curtain, while we all tried our best to fill in the blanks.
But with "West End Girl" there are no blanks to be filled in — Lily has laid it all bare, raw and brutal, from the moment her husband David Harbour asked her for an open relationship, through the discovery that he was having an affair with someone they knew, to the bitter end. I listened to the album in one subway ride, my jaw dropping at lyric after lyric:
We had an arrangement
Be discreet and don't be blatant
There had to be payment
It had to be with strangers
But you're not a stranger, Madeline
There had to be payment?! Casually revealing your famous ex husband's alleged sex buying is a stunning bit of revenge, and that's not even the worst she does to him on this album. Beyond the brutal, raw, hilarious confessional nature of the lyrics, the music is just fun, hit after hit. It's clearly a simple production, nothing groundbreaking, but that adds to the raw nature of the sound — she reportedly recorded it in just 16 days, and you hear that in the music, for better or worse. A few hooks were lodged in my brain after just the first listen.
Beyond the music itself, dropping this right before David Harbour has to go on a press tour for the final season of Stranger Things is some truly incredibly petty work. A stunning act of revenge, one of the most electric album release strategies I've ever witnessed. I had less than zero thoughts about David Harbour before this, but now I hate him with my life. The rank is like: 1. The entire Trump administration and his enablers; 2. Andrew Cuomo; 3. David Harbour. (And hopefully after next Tuesday, we can move David Harbour up to the #2 slot.)
"The Goon Squad," by Daniel Kolitz — in Harper's
Men are NOT okay, as evidenced by literally everything happening every single day, but specifically I'm talking about everything in this article, a harrowing foray into the depths of gooning culture. If you don't know what gooning is, it's probably best if you remain ignorant (Mom, please don't click that link!), but for the rest of us this article is a hilarious and deeply depressing dive into the types of straight men who identify as gooners.
There are a lot of words in this article that I never knew existed, and probably should have never been invented in the first place, but Daniel Kolitz never gets too bogged down in the details, or parsing the insane lexicon these guys have invented, and instead tries to figure out the larger issues of who and why and how and what??? It's also, not incidentally, just a fantastically written, empathetic-yet-funny-yet-tragic piece:
Even so, it seemed beyond dispute that sixty years ago some of these gooners would have been fathers. Small-business owners. Dependable men in hats riding slow commuter trains, their mindscapes perfumed with thoughts of stocks, bonds, lawn care. Well, what could you do? Certain social systems had failed, certain historical trend lines had converged, and now we had these guys to deal with.
This is the kind of article you need to take a shower after, and possibly will make you consider unplugging your router for good. The internet was a mistake, I think we all see that pretty clearly now, and this is a fantastic summary of exactly why. Let's just go back to the Stone Age, where a dude would have to spend hours and hours sculpting a busty woman out of clay before he could goon — and then at least zillions of years later, a museum would get a nice little piece of art out of it!
Ancillary Sword, by Ann Leckie (2014) — Library ebook
The second book in the the "Imperial Radch" trilogy thankfully wasn't as difficult to get into as the first, since I was familiar with the characters and at least some of the gobbledegook language. I can't say I enjoyed it as much as the first, but I also feel like this was the wrong book series to try to read right now, when my brain is completely addled from work and last-minute trip planning, and, you know, the world falling apart.
Since the series is told from the perspective of a ship's AI, the narrative will jump from following 2 characters on a planet, to a group on a ship, to a third group of characters in a different solar system — all within a single paragraph. It's an inventive way to tell a story, and I can see why this series won basically every award there is, but the schizophrenic structure mirrored my own separated, constantly multitasking brain over the last few weeks. And, frankly, it stressed me the fuck out! Sometimes a book finds you at the exact right times, and sometimes you're just spaceships passing in the night. Oh well!