Disconnect movies

I watched two movies this past weekend, and they can both be described as "disconnect movies."

What do I mean by a "disconnect movie"?

It's a movie where any two storytelling elements -- whether that's genre, tone, time period, sets, props, etc. -- create a notable contradiction with how you've seen these elements used separately on previous occasions. They create a disconnect in your mind. 

When you've seen more than 7,200 films -- that's a milestone I passed last week -- you've seen every storytelling element at some point in isolation, on the spectrum from the most anodyne children's movie to the most hardcore fusing of sex and violence you can imagine in a mainstream movie. 

It's when things from very different parts of the spectrum get mashed up into the same movie that you take notice and sort of remember it. 

So the movie I saw on Friday night was The Bluff, a new Amazon movie directed by someone with the "can't be real" name of Frank E. Flowers. I've been trying not to watch most of the junk Amazon has pushed at me early on in 2026, but this now makes two straight 2026 viewings on Amazon Prime (after Relationship Goals on Wednesday night), so I guess my resolve is cracking. 

The reason The Bluff qualifies as a disconnect movie? It's a pirate movie, but it also has the violence of a Quentin Tarantino movie. 

You never see that, do you? 

Almost every pirate movie you've ever seen was designed to be consumed by viewers younger than 15. Sure people may die, but they die bloodlessly. The reason for this is that the production costs of a typical pirate movie mean it's going to the movie theaters and it's supposed to be seen by as many people as possible, to make back as much of both the production costs and the marketing costs as possible. 

No one dies bloodlessly in The Bluff. There's a man who gets his head smashed in by a seashell. There are arms and legs coming off. There's a man being blown apart by a cannon, although at least this one is from far away. 

The reason I suspect The Bluff gets away with this is that it has only about one scene at sea, with the rest taking place in a village in the Cayman Islands. So you can probably more than halve the production cost right there, and you aren't relying on the under 15 set buying tickets. 

I liked The Bluff more than I probably should have, awarding it three stars when it's likely no better than 2.5, simply because I found it interesting to watch a pirate movie with believable gore. You just don't see it, and after more than 7,200 movies, there's nothing I like more than something I've never seen. 

Then Saturday morning, I got in a cheeky 10:30 a.m. viewing of The Testament of Ann Lee. That makes two 2025 movies, after Sirat, that I have seen in theaters despite no longer being able to rank them, which I think is a commentary both on my anticipation for those movies and on the theatrical alternatives early in 2026.

The reason The Testament of Ann Lee qualifies as a disconnect movie? It's a period piece, set in the 18th century, and yet it is also a musical. I haven't seen one of those before either, and unless they make the movie version of Hamilton, I probably won't any time soon.

(If you want more of my thoughts on either of these two movies, I expect to have reviews up of both within a few days.)

Instead of just capping this post at "here are two examples of a term I just coined," I thought I would give you ten more examples -- five good, five bad. 

Before I do, as usual, I have to set out some rules. Actually, only one this time:

1) I am excluding from my list what you would call "mashup movies." That's not to say that there won't be two different sorts of movies mashed together among my choices -- that's kind of what I'm getting at here with the term "disconnect movies" -- it's just that I don't want to spend a lot of time on the movies that exist purely to mash two unlike things together. So you won't see me talking about Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, or Pride & Prejudice & Zombies, or Cowboys & Aliens. In short, I want these movies to come by their status as disconnect movies incidentally, as part of the more laudable goal of just making entertaining movies. 

I guess there is a quick other rule, or more of a disclaimer:

2) I'm not saying these are the five best or the five worst disconnect movies. There may be better or worse examples out there. I'm just saying these are the first five good examples I thought of and the first five bad examples. I don't have unlimited time to write these posts you know. Nor, I should say, are these listed in the order that I like them or dislike them. 

Five good disconnect movies:

1) The End (2024, Joshua Oppeheimer) 
Qualifiers as a disconnect: A movie set in a post-apocalyptic bunker that is also a musical.
Thoughts: Yes, there would be a cheeky, mashup-movie style mentality in Oppenheimer's film, but it isn't really possible to consider Oppenheimer's work in the same vein as mashup artist extraordinaire Seth Graham-Smith. After all, this is the man previously known for the deadly serious documentaries The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence. When he makes a musical set in a post-apocalyptic bunker, he means it. 

2) Winnie the Pooh: Blood & Honey (2023, Rhys Frake-Waterfield)
Qualifiers as a disconnect: Beloved childhood character Winnie the Pooh, murdering people.
Thoughts: Good? Didn't I put this one in the wrong category? No; you may recall from this post that Blood & Honey haunted me in the right way, even though it has among the tawdriest and most depressing explanations for its existence: that the copyright on this material had fallen into the public domain. It earned from me a marginally positive three-star rating on Letterboxd. 

3) The People's Joker (2022, Vera Drew)
Qualifiers as a disconnect: Well-known DC characters and transgender themes. 
Thoughts: Clearly the best of the movies discussed so far, Joker could only exist as a violation of copyright laws, not a result of them lapsing. But I'm glad it does exist because this is very moving in addition to being very funny, and more than besmirching the names of these DC characters, which DC and Warner Brothers would have been worried about, it just shows the reach and impact on them on all sorts of people in overcoming their lives' challenges. 

4) Prey (2022, Dan Trachtenberg)
Qualifiers as a disconnect: Murderous aliens and comanches of the 18th century. 
Thoughts: Although this is not altogether dissimilar from the central dynamic of a movie I already excluded from discussion, Cowboys & Aliens, you can't see Trachtenberg sitting in a room and pitching it as a mashup, can you? His intentions were purer than that, and they gives us a movie without an ounce of cheek but plenty of excitement, the best in the Predator franchise to date.

5) Hamlet (2000, Michael Almereyda)
Qualifiers as a disconnect: To be or not to be, and a Blockbuster video store.
Thoughts: This may be a little bit of a cheat, or rather, a catch-all for a particular sort of trend when adapting Shakespeare: to set it in modern times with purposefully anachronistic elements. But it's still usually good, so it qualifies here. Usually; Tim Blake Nelson's O, the 2001 Othello adaptation, could go in the other list. 

Five bad disconnect movies:

1) Wild Wild West (1999, Barry Sonnenfeld)
Qualifiers as a disconnect: The old west and steampunk.
Thoughts: I have to admit, I had a harder time thinking up the bad ones, and I'm not sure how much this qualifies, because steampunk is, by definition, a sort of futuristic form of technology in a time where the steam engine was new. And in truth, the steampunk aesthetic may have been the only thing that actually worked about the movie. 

2) Colossal (2017, Nacho Vigalondo)
Qualifiers as a disconnect: Kaiju and toxicity brought on by alcoholism.
Thoughts: Rarely have I struggled with competing tones as much as I did in Colossal, in which characters can make a kaiju appear halfway across the world by standing in a particular location in their town, and also display the sort of hostility toward one another that belongs in a Cassavetes film. 

 3) Nasty Baby (2015, Sebastian Silva)
Qualfiers as a disconnect: A gay couple struggling to conceive through a surrogate, and the murder of a homeless man.
Thoughts: I suppose what I just told you qualifies as a spoiler, but Nasty Baby a) is more than ten years old, and b) does not deserve to have its bizarre plot twist hidden. 

4) The Book of Henry (2017, Colin Trevorrow)
Qualfiers as a disconnect: A brilliant young terminally ill kid plotting to murder the abusive father of his neighbor.
Thoughts: Maybe you didn't know this was the reason you were supposed to stay clear of The Book of Henry, but there it is. 

5) Hancock (2008, Peter Berg)
Qualifiers as a disconnect: A superhero comedy and ... a very weird sort of serious superhero movie about eternal beings.
Thoughts: If you saw Hancock, you know what I'm talking about here.

Well I think you can tell I pretty much ran out of steam. I started this three days ago, so I better publish it and move on with my life. 

A Nasty surprise

Warning: I'm going to spoil the hell out of Sebastian Silva's Nasty Baby. 

There was a poster for Nasty Baby I could have chosen that features just the three leads on it, looking jovial. 

But the one with the tongue sticking out is far, far more appropriate for the post I'm about to write.

I had wanted to direct my wife toward a 2016 release for Saturday night's viewing, because it's "that time of the year." However, the fact that it's "that time of the year" has recently taken on its annual status as a joke about my obsessive-compulsive year-end tendencies, which my wife only partly thinks are funny. Part of her thinks she loses me to the movies around this time of the year, my mind assuming only a single track toward the goal of seeing everything I "need" to see. (Just wait until I'm in the U.S. and want to get to the theater anywhere from three to a half-dozen times.)

So I showed how reasonable I can be by allowing her to choose the movie, irrespective of release year. I mean, I still had veto power, as the other person always does, but I agreed to open myself up to the great unwashed masses of all the movies available on our three streaming services. Twenty sixteen would need to wait for another night.

Kristen Wiig is enough of a common favorite that I imagine we are going to eventually see all of her movies, and at this point, there are only a scarce few we haven't seen. In fact, there are few enough that I can list them: Despicable Me 2, Masterminds, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (one of my great regrets that I clearly should have gotten to before now) and a couple back from her early days on SNL, like Unaccompanied Minors and Meet Bill. 

So Nasty Baby was easy enough for me to agree to. And it was easy enough for me to watch after a slow start in which I complained, after less than five minutes, that it was oddly hard to pay attention to. The movie is nothing if not low key as it charts the very mumblecore concerns of a gay New York couple (played by the director and TV on the Radio's Tunde Adebimpe) as they try to get Wiig's character pregnant, planning to share custody of the child. Since Silva's character is firing blanks, it falls to Adebimpe's to do the deed, though he is reluctant for reasons the film tries to explore.

I slowly got up to speed with the movie, an effort that is not usually required for me with mumblecore because that's a form I naturally enjoy. But I got there eventually with this one, and can say I was pretty much enjoying it when BAM! They kill someone.

What?

That's what we said too.

I mean, it wasn't like it wasn't foreshadowed. The gay couple, particularly Silva's Freddy, has several run-ins with a crazy neighbor (The Wire's Reg E. Cathey) who insists on using his leafblower at 7 a.m. and harassing Wiig's Polly in a way that's going beyond the level of "harmless," as another gay neighbor (Mark Margolis) initially interprets it to be. The movie wouldn't keep including these interactions with the neighbor if it weren't going to go somewhere with that subplot.

But killing him? I don't think so.

The last 15 minutes of the movie, then, are about covering up the fact that Freddy initially knocked over this man (known as The Bishop), causing him to develop a head wound, before stabbing him in the neck as a defensive measure when The Bishop attacks him in his house. Freddy was being a good samaritan by bringing him upstairs, you see.

When it's clear the man is probably going to die, Freddy and his husband (Mo by name) smother him with a bag, ending his struggle.

They then carry him down to the car, drive him out to the country and bury him, while three other characters who get ensnared in the situation clean up after them.

Huh?

Oh but you haven't heard the weirdest part yet. The weirdest part is that after the movie ends on a fittingly somber note, the credits begin with an up-tempo song and the strangest sight of the whole movie: the three main characters having the time of their life at a roller disco.

___________.

Speechless was what we were too. Not only did the movie do this incredibly awkward tonal shift to something it had never been about, thus entirely short-circuiting all the narrative drive of the pregnancy plot, but then it does another tonal shift that seems to say: "And then they forgot about it and moved on with their lives." That's assuming this joyous roller disco credits sequence is meant to occur after these other events, chronologically, but even if it isn't, the effect is the same for the viewer so the difference is meaningless. 

Yeah, this movie feels like Sebastian Silva sticking his tongue out at us indeed.

I get that this guy is not just a total idiot. He did this intentionally. He had a reason for screeching on the brakes once, then doing it a second time. The reason was that he wanted to provoke something in us. The reason was that he wanted us to question our genre assumptions and explode our expectations of where this movie would go.

Well, mission accomplished, Sebastian. Bravo.

The reason I don't give him any credit for such narrative anarchy is that it's cheap. Any person can make a movie that starts one way and then ends completely differently. It does not require a particular talent. It only requires a mischievous disregard for conventional viewer satisfaction, which he judged that a certain percentage of us would appreciate -- enough of a percentage for it to be worth doing. And I suppose he calculated correctly, as the film holds a frankly baffling 64 on Metacritic.

Look, sometimes this works. I can think of examples. I won't name them here. But just know, I'm not entirely opposed to the idea of it.

But this execution ... it's just head-scratching. When you are heading a film in an interesting direction -- how will a gay couple impregnate a woman when one of them can't and the other doesn't want to -- it's downright obnoxious to just stop that dead in its tracks, especially with something as anathema to the type of movie you're making as a murder. It's a complete middle finger at the notion that some of his viewers would have wanted to know how the compelling issues he was exploring would play themselves out.

And let's also talk about this murder -- it's of an older black character who is crazy. He's initially described to us as "harmless crazy," but he does indeed grab Wiig from behind at one point, making him actually dangerous. Is that what the movie really wants us to take away from it, that you should be afraid of crazy old black men on the street? I suppose it thought it had its political correctness perfectly in order by Freddy being a Latino and Mo being black and them both being gay, but something about the way that character is treated is just not right.

So at the end -- before the tasteless roller disco -- you are left trying to grapple with what this movie wants you to take away from it. It's singularly unsatisfying when a narrative thrust does not lead to logical conclusions about what you've spent the previous hour-plus watching. Yeah, that's like life -- three characters trying to make a baby together sometimes unwittingly kill a person, I'm sure. It's happened at least once, somewhere.

But there are plenty of other random sequences of incompatible events that have happened in the world, that do happen every day, and we don't see movies about those. We don't see movies about them because there is nothing useful we can glean from them. They are just shit that happened.

Nasty Baby is similar -- it happened, and it sure is shit.