Emerald Fennel’s sophomore feature is a more self-conscious indulgence than her first. The sense that we are trading in the early days of a future auteur remains but, second time around, the restraint of experience is missing. While Fennel’s penchant for a venomous turn of phrase is undiminished – Saltburn drips with the acid of her pen – the film hasn’t Promising Young Woman’s precision and focussed bite. It sprawls in languorous pacing, dives headfirst into pitfalls of its own making, and appears altogether too pleased with its, admittedly resplendent, cinematography to truly engage beyond thematic artifice.
Disney is contradiction. A vast corporate empire built on communal identity and the intangibility of dreams. Disney champions both the capitalist and liberal. It’s a conflict that comes to a head in Wish, the cinematic climax of the studio’s centenary celebrations. One hundred years of wonder, lovingly rendered in picture perfect animation. I must here raise my critical Achilles heel. Fully aware as I am of the film’s narrative faults, the resonance with which Disney, the dream, exists in my heart is strong. Those who share this potent feeling will find themselves as one with the emotional rush of Wish’s soaring exuberance. Any less easily swain may feel only the weight of marketable familiarity. It doesn’t take so much by way of over-analysis to spot the issues.
The persistent problem posed by prequels is the inherent need of each to justify its own existence outwit commercial appeal. It is a rare prequel that’s ever much more than the commodification of an original conceit. Lionsgate’s latest Hunger Games film, released almost a decade after the last, doesn’t quite reach that upper echelon. There’s too strong a feeling of superfluousness in this particular visit to Panem. Few have spent the last eight years yearning for a Coriolanus Snow origins story. The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes is, no doubt, a handsome and well acted affair but feels long at over two and a half hours.
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