Five horror movies to stream now
By ERIK PIEPENBURG
In these picks: sinister sounds, a troubled teenager and musical maniacs.
‘Undertone’
Do yourself a favor and use headphones turned high to watch this unsettling and ear-spooking supernatural thriller from Canadian writer-director Ian Tuason.
The film takes place inside a suburban home where Evy (Nina Kiri) cares for her dying, bedridden mother and hosts a podcast “about all things creepy” with Justin (an unseen and excellent Adam DiMarco), a friend in London. Evy’s grip on reality starts to unravel as she and Justin try to decipher who or what is behind 10 strange audio files they randomly received that detail a spiraling relationship between a married couple who start hearing eerie noises in their home. Each recording gets increasingly disturbing, and when it reaches time to listen to No. 10, Tuason’s masterful suspense-building will make your heart pound.
The movie is a visual and aural knockout. It’s especially impressive considering that it takes place in only a few rooms, mostly in the claustrophobic dark, and asks the viewer to spend a lot of time watching a podcaster listen. Grief lurks in the shadows, so beware. (Stream it on HBO Max.)
‘The Masturbator’s Heart’
There’s despairing and then there’s Michael Salerno’s bleak yet deeply moving and sublimely filmed slow-burn meditation on death, depression and shrouded adolescent worlds.
An excellent Ange Dargent stars as the film’s unnamed protagonist, a disconsolate teenager who spends time at home, often shirtless, watching television, eating alone and surfing the dark web. Mostly ignored by his parents, he joins a baleful online game that calls on users to complete 50 challenges in 50 days, ending in suicide.
As the conclusion of the game nears, the boy begins to erase his life, burning his family’s photos, an act that sends him to a psychologist’s office. He also cuts himself, photos of which he posts to the game portal. The only light in his life is a friendship with a teenage neighbor, a relationship with hints of queerness.
But “Heartstopper” this is not. It’s an unflinching look at teenage alienation and desolation, a combination of Bas Devos’ shattering coming-of-age tale “Violet” and Jane Schoenbrun’s doomer drama “We’re All Going to the World’s Fair,” but even more darksided. Dargent is heartbreaking. (Stream it on Amazon Prime Video.)
‘Chainsaws Were Singing’
This go-for-broke feature film from Estonian director Sander Maran is a delightfully idiotic exploitation musical that lurks at some sicko intersection of “South Park,” “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” and “Les Misérables.”
Tom (Karl-Joosep Ilves, who wrote the screenplay with Maran) comes very close to drowning himself somewhere out in the Estonian countryside when he randomly meets and quickly falls in love with Maria (Laura Niils). Their romance hits the skids when she’s kidnapped by the chainsaw-wielding Killer (Martin Ruus), who vocalizes only in song. Eager to reunite with Maria, Tom enlists the help of a passing motorist, Jaan (Janno Puusepp), and the two set off on a slapstick rescue mission littered with entrails and decapitations expertly crafted by gore effects creator Jan Andresson.
The film’s maximalism gets exhausting by the end of its 123-minute run time. But I’ve got to hand it to Maran: The man’s got an adventurous and assured sense of the absurd and a fantastical eye for the grotesque. He also composed the whimsical and warped musical numbers, many in the style of want songs. “Kill! Kill! I want to kill all day!” sings Killer, proving that even psychopaths see castles in the sky. (Stream it on Shudder.)
‘Nightborn’
I rarely flinch during a scary movie. But I couldn’t help it when a tiny hand yanked on a big hoop earring — one of several stomach-churning moments in Hanna Bergholm’s unsettling postnatal horror fable, winner of the top honor last month at the genre-centered Fantasia International Film Festival.
Rupert Grint and Seidi Haarla star as Jon and Saga, new parents who move to a stately fixer-upper in the Finnish countryside. As Bergholm explored in “Hatching,” her 2022 creature feature fairy tale, home can be both a place of comfort and a portal to the dark side. Here, terrors emerge as Jon and Saga realize that their healthy but very hairy baby breastfeeds like he’s chewing on beef jerky and cries less like mommy’s little darling and more like Satan’s spawn. Dad calls him son. Mom calls him an “it” who just “takes and takes.” They’re both right.
The film is a strong new riff on parenthood horror, even though it cycles through too many other horror genres — body, isolation, folk, fairy tale — and blurs its focus. Grint grounds the story and Haarla leaps over the top, a pairing that keeps the film from going too far off the rails. (Stream it on Shudder.)
‘Desire’
Lucero (Ludwika Paleta) and her husband, Fernando (Jose María Yazpik), live in a gorgeous home in Mexico City with their two teenage children. After 20 years of marriage, the two could use a boost in the sex department. Lucero suggests a threesome. Fernando is lukewarm.
Good thing for Lucero, Fernando has just hired Matías (Óscar Casas), a muscled 20-something Spaniard, to be a swim coach at the athletic club the couple owns. Lucero and Matías immediately set off sparks: One minute they’re swimming laps and the next she’s caressing her breasts with his baseball cap. Of course this May-December affair crash lands in a mess of twists, a few trysts and a corpse.
Director Teresa Simone and screenwriters Giulia Cardamone and Vanessa Miklos take too long to get to the good stuff in their ridiculous yet entertaining psycho-erotic thriller. (They could use lessons from Brian De Palma in how to layer sex between tension and terror.) But when they get there, boy, do they deliver. The most lurid scenes — poison! blackmail! glutes! — may stop you with a gasp or, even better, a laugh. (Stream it on Netflix.)
