The completely unanticipatable Annabelle (Wallis) double feature

I like to tell you about coincidences in my arbitrarily chosen viewing schedule. In fact, the most recent post on this blog is that kind of post. In fact, if I weren't writing about this particular coincidence, I actually had a different coincidence I could have written about instead today. (Seeing two movies this weekend in which parents do drugs with their own children.) It probably gets tiresome for you.

But I'm not sure if I ever remember watching a movie, specifically noting an actress and learning her name from that movie, then completing the double feature with another movie chosen completely randomly in which this actress also appears.

An actor maybe, but never an actress. (Kidding.)

The actress is Annabelle Wallis. I'll show you a picture of her, but not yet; if I inserted it in the body of the text at this point, it would interfere with the formatting of the two posters to your right. Yep, this is how the sausage gets made.

Wallis plays the Wall Street Journal reporter in Tag, the 2018 comedy based on a true story of adult friends who had been playing the same game of tag since they were kids. In real life, the reporter was a man, but you can forgive the casting directors if they thought someone who looks like Wallis was a better way to go with the role.

I'd already seen (and quite enjoyed) Tag, but my wife had not, and we needed something that wasn't the Ted Bundy Netflix movie to watch on Sunday night of our three-day weekend. We both want to see the Ted Bundy movie -- Extremely Wicked Shockingly Evil and Vile, which is why we're calling it "the Ted Bundy movie" -- and in fact, I started watching it by myself the other weekend before she stopped me. But we both agreed it isn't the kind of fun holiday weekend movie we were looking for. A weeknight movie for sure.

Tag was what we found when we went "spelunking" in Netflix.

One of the only people who's not famous in this cast -- famous to me, anyway -- is Wallis, who I'd actually seen once or twice before, it turns out, but never specifically noted. Here, now I have room to include a picture of her:

I liked her performance, but not enough to make a point of looking her up afterward. I did, however, do something I often do, which is try to match unknown names to known faces by guessing based on their position in the end credits. As Wallis was the only person I didn't already know, it was pretty easy in this case.

My wife peeled off to do her own thing, and I went spelunking again.

I decided to dig down into horror, and I opted for Annabelle over The Exorcist (one of my favorites, haven't seen it in nearly 20 years) and He Never Died (I like Henry Rollins). Exorcist would have won if it weren't nearly 10:45 and if the movie weren't two hours long, so Annabelle was the runner up. I figured, the Conjuring Extended Horror Universe is a pretty respectable horror franchise and I'd only seen the original Conjuring. No time like the present to correct that.

Wallis is the star of Annabelle, but you know what? I didn't recognize that for the entire length of the running time. That's because in Annabelle, Wallis looks like this:

Kind of different, right?

In fact, as I was watching I noted that Alfre Woodard and (to a far lesser extent) Tony Amendola were the only "names" in the cast, while pretty much everyone else was an unknown. A strange observation to make about a woman I had just seen in another movie.

It's a compliment of course. Wallis may be one of those rare chameleons who looks different in every role, kind of like Vincent D'Onofrio or Rebecca Ferguson. And one of these was a horror while the other was a comedy, furthering the impressiveness of it.

I only finally realized when I saw her name in the credits for the second time in the same evening.

Probably the weirdest thing about this double feature is that the lead actress's first name is the same as the title of one of the movies. I really don't have any idea, in these situations, if there's some actual causality or if it's really just a coincidence. I have to think they didn't decide to name this movie Annabelle because they had already cast a woman named Annabelle. It's Gemma Arterton starring in Gemma Bovery all over again.

If you want to tell me the choice of which second movie to watch really wasn't so random, because I had the name "Annabelle" on the brain after just seeing her name in the credits of Tag, well, you'll just have to trust me. I wouldn't try to pull a fast one on you.