Films in the two fall flavors
This latest adaptation of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility (in theaters now) really highlights its status as the capital-R Romantic one of her core-four books.
This movie is also capital-G Gritty, though not in the “mean streets of Devonshire” sense but in the “Regency England probably did not smell great” sense. There is visible dirt on the grimy floor of the cottage the Dashwood ladies are banished to after their father dies and his weenie son (Tom Brooke) from his first marriage, egged on by his graspy wife Fanny (Stacy Martin), takes over the family estate. Widow Dashwood (Caitriona Balfe) does not like how her stepdaughter-in-law treats her and her daughters — Elinor (Daisy Edgar-Jones), Marianne (Esmé Creed-Miles) and young Margaret (Bodhi Rae Breathnach) — so Mama Dashwood takes distant cousin Mrs. Jennings’ (Fiona Shaw, who is chef’s-kiss perfect) offer of the cottage. It is small and dirty and puts Elinor very far away from Edward (George MacKay), the kind and seemingly-marriage-material brother of Fanny. But Mrs. Jennings assures the Dashwoods that her whole deal is matchmaking and she’s got the perfect (wealthy) Col. Brandon (Herbert Nordrum) for somebody, maybe Marianne. But Marianne is all starry-eyed about her own notion of romantic love, which should be full of passion!, which Austen always defines as “a handsome jerk,” who in this case is Willoughby (Frank Dillane).
In addition to the dirt and the wrinkles on clothes and the frizz in hair, this movie feels rawer than, say, the glossy 1995 adaptation, more openly emotional while still being aware of the Dashwoods’ precarious economic and social situation. This movie also has more sisterly-ness; the 1995 movie featured the then-mid-30something Emma Thompson and 20-year-old Kate Winslet as Elinor and Marianne, and they had a relationship that often felt more mother-daughter. Here, Edgar-Jones and Creed-Miles clock in at 28 and 26 respectively, making them feel more like they are both going through the turmoil of young womanhood at the same time, if in their different ways. They are both making mistakes and learning, rather than Marianne just absorbing good behavior from Elinor. Likewise, Balfe brings a little something different to her role as their mother, who is often given little to do but be “old widow.” Here she doesn’t get a love plot but this Mrs. Dashwood isn’t someone in her dotage, she’s someone learning how to be in her new circumstance. One nice moment features her trying — without much success, based on Elinor’s facial expression — to figure out how to cook after years of being cooked for. (Also, Balfe as a performer is just a joy to be with.)
The movie is a fun watch, for fans of romances and Austen fans alike. And it has me eager to revisit the book, and maybe more adaptations. If you’re looking for other Sense and Sensibilitys: Hallmark+’s 2024 Sense and Sensibility is streaming on Hallmark+ and available for rent or purchase. A BBC three-part Sense and Sensibility from 2008 is available on a variety of platforms (Amazon Prime Video, Tubi, Pluto, Peacock, Hulu/Disney+, Britbox, The Roku Channel, etc.). The 1995 Sense and Sensibility is available for rent or purchase and on Pluto TV.
Fittingly, the rest of this week’s watches rest somewhere on the spooky or thriller continuums.
Whalefall, also new in theaters last week, had so much dumb potential, based on its premise: guy gets swallowed by a whale. The Bible did it and more recently 911 did it, the original-recipe Los Angeles-based version of the goofy rescue procedural (airing on ABC, available on Hulu/Disney+). In that Season 9 episode from 2025, guest star Mark Consuelos getting stuck in a whale (while on his cell phone!) was only one of several events in the episode (though it led to this whole multi-episode arc where some characters go to space, like definitely check it out if dumb fun is your thing). Here, we take about 30 minutes to get to guy-in-whale; in this case “guy” is Jay, played by Austin Abrams, who I kept thinking of as off-brand Timothée Chalamet. Jay goes diving off the California coast looking for the remains of his dad (Josh Brolin), who suffered from an increasingly debilitating illness and died by suicide a year earlier. I don’t know if “look for remains a year later” is how the ocean works but this setup does provide the shaky scaffolding on which to hang several flashback scenes of Jay and Dad’s terrible relationship. Each incident of crummy parenting does, however, contain advice that Jay is able to apply to his attempts to get out of the whale. Along the way, he runs into other still-alive creatures that have been eaten and deals with his unresolved guilt about not seeing his dad once he got sick.
The mix of gross-out whale-stomach scenes and borderline abusive parenting is weird and not what I’m looking for in my “guy swallowed by whale” movie. The movie’s moments of dumb fun-ness or improbable whale biology really clash with the scenes of, like, a drunk Brolin’s character smashing a beer can on his head and trying to give his son a face tattoo with a knife.
For more — and better! — scary-water stuff, definitely check out Below, a six-episode series on Netflix starring Josh Hartnett. Hartnett plays Cal Penny, who lives in Newfoundland and would be a fisherman, like his forefathers, but for government regulations about commercial fishing. Instead, he fishes for chunks of icebergs, which he sells to the local vodka distillery. Cal has three adult children: son Wade (Charlie Heaton), who lives with him; daughter Mary (Ruby Stokes), who returns to the island from college in Montreal with boyfriend Noah (Kaleb Horn) for a townwide celebration, and his son Jay (Rohan Campbell), who works in oil fields out west. He is still mourning the death of his wife, their mother, and the long-ago death of his father, which happened when the family was being relocated by the government from a smaller fishing town to the slightly more populous small town he lives in now. And from which Cal and everyone he knows may be relocated again. Cal is attached to his home and to the ocean, even though, on the day his father presumably drowned while bringing the family across a bay, Cal saw a big Something in the water. That Something may be back, possibly related to changing climate and warming waters in the ocean, as local scientist Fonda (Mackenzie Davis), suspects.
Reviews frequently compare this show to Apple TV’s Widow’s Bay, and while that series is superior, this one has some similar small-town, spooky-water vibes and is plenty fun. The standout performance for me is Willow Kean, who plays Cal’s sister Ruth and whose whole person emits delightful “Not Here For Your Nonsense” vibes.
Hokum (a May theatrical release that is now available for rent or purchase and streaming on Hulu) is an old-school haunted-house/scary-witch story. Miserable jerk author Ohm Bauman (Adam Scott) is having a hard time ending his popular book trilogy. He goes to Ireland to be miserable and jerkish in a new locale while he fights this writer’s block, and to scatter his parents’ ashes near the grounds of the quaint (which in this case means “mildew-y looking”) inn where they went on their honeymoon decades ago. Upon arrival, he has a full day: scattering ashes; meeting Jerry (David Wilmot), a local who makes moonshine and grows psychotropic mushrooms; being a real butthead to bellhop Alby (Will O’Connell), and even laying on thick snark with Fiona (Florence Ordesh), a bartender who is nice to him even when he’s being the worst. Fiona is the one who tries to return the stuff he left at the bar after drunkedly returning to his room. She has a bad feeling about the headspace he’s in, and subsequently finds Ohm attempting to harm himself. When Ohm finally leaves the hospital days later, he learns that Fiona went missing the day after she saved him (which happened to be Halloween) and that the inn is preparing to close for the season. Jerry finds Ohm and is certain that Fiona is calling to him from the hotel, probably from the honeymoon suite, which is locked up tight because the owner says he captured a witch in there years earlier.
Even before Ye Olde Witch-Prison Inn, Ohm seems haunted both figuratively by his family’s past and literally by a ghostly figure. In addition, there may be at least one more uneasy spirit at the inn and there’s a lot of talk of a demonic witch who kidnaps children. All of this seemed to be both laying it on thick and resulting in an overall spookiness that felt a little thin — more like watching one not-great dude’s slide into a deeper pool of self-loathing, which is not the kind of “scary” I’m looking for in my Spooky Season movies. But about halfway through, the movie picks up, with a nice examination of grief and guilt along with some supernaturalness and good old-fashioned Mur-Der. This movie isn’t great but it’s quietly entertaining — or like, entertaining enough when you want something horror-y but not big scares or gore. And Adam Scott is naturally compelling enough that we can walk through this haunted house with him, jerkishness and all.
The documentary Clown Panic (streaming on Hulu) is an oddball scary-movie watch. It is about real events — the 2016 spate of clown sightings that I have a vague memory of from a year when a lotta other things were going on. Its interview subjects swing wildly from a reporter sent to do an early story about the clown sightings and a professional clown talking about how much the whole thing was a real bummer for his profession to the family members of both victim and perpetrator in a clown-related assault that ended with the death of one young man and the incarceration of another. And a pastor says something like “the story of the clowns is the story of modern America” which is both ridiculous and accurate. Lines are drawn to previous frenzies such as the 1980s Satanic Panic and the Salem Witch Trails. This isn’t a light lift, per se, with its pokes into issues of race, poverty, law enforcement and the 2016-ness of it all. I think in the end this documentary manages to be (mostly) respectful to the people who suffered genuine injury during this whole clown thing and to capture the absolute weirdness of it all.
It Ends(an August theatrical release, according to Wikipedia, that is now available for rent or purchase) is labeled on Apple as a thriller and there are definitely moments of suspense and even terror here, but I think the movie and the story it tells is a lot more “whatever you think it is” than that. Four friends from high school — Tyler (Mitchell Cole), Day (Akira Jackson), Fisher (Noah Toth) and James (Phinehas Yoon) — have gotten together after three of them (all but Tyler) have graduated from college. A drive to drop one of them off leads them to take a road through a forest, one that is not lit, not populated and, Tyler realizes, probably taking them past where they were supposed to turn off. He makes a U-turn, heads back and finds a wall of trees where he’s certain they turned onto the road. As they try to figure out where they are and find phone service, they see and hear movement in the trees around them that quickly turns into a horde of people maniacally running toward them. They get back in the car and speed back down the road.
After all the initial “what is happening,” they start trying to investigate the situation — nobody is hungry or particularly sleepy, which would suggest no passage of time, but the sun rises and sets and when Fisher is injured he starts to heal. They time how long it takes between when they stop the car and the screaming horde shows up. They carefully scan through the radio frequencies. Tyler starts to take quick investigative dashes into the woods. Meanwhile, the combination of fear, boredom and uncertainty leads to a variety of conversations and intragroup relationship dynamics.
This is an existential nightmare? A metaphor for life? A commentary on post-college despair and confusion? I think “sure, could be” is the right answer for all of those things. The play-on-wheels quality is well put together (the story is both claustrophobically all in the car and also in an infinite unknown) and these characters, who we don’t know a whole lot about, are nonetheless very well built in terms of understanding their actions. It’s a compelling watch.
Featured photo: Sense and Sensibility.
