In Review: 'Flora and Son,' 'It Lives Inside'

This week's films draw from familiar wells as John Carney returns to the musical formula of 'Once' and 'Begin Again' and a horror film on an Indian spirit reveals American influences.

Flora and Son
Dir. John Carney
97 min.

Some filmmakers discover they do one thing extremely well and stick with it and there’s nothing inherently wrong with that. For John Carney, it’s movies about the transformative power of music, an interest he first pursued with Once in 2007 then returned to, in one way or another, with Begin Again, Sing Street, and now Flora and Son, a pleasant but thin dramedy with one scene that alone justifies its reason for existing and confirms Carney as the best there is at his particular niche (or at least the best since Cameron Crowe). 

After being sent a YouTube link by her long-distance guitar instructor, Flora (Eve Hewson) clicks play on a live clip of Joni Mitchell performing “Both Sides Now” during a long-ago TV appearance. Flora, mostly a fan of thumping electronic music, watches for a bit then gets up to do the dishes. But the song draws her back and, by its conclusion, brings her to tears. Carney lets it play out uninterrupted and captures the moment so well, she almost certainly won’t be alone when the film reaches audiences. But a great scene doesn’t make a movie, nor does a winning performance, like the one Hewson delivers here, when they’re stuck in the middle of a film that always feels like it’s this close to being truly good instead of merely agreeable.

A thirtysomething Dubliner, Flora enters the film getting drunk in a club and fending off the advances of a man who grows more attractive the more she drinks. He then vanishes the next morning upon discovering she’s the mother of a 14-year-old kid named Max (Orén Kinlan). It is, judging from Flora’s reaction, a familiar routine, as is a subsequent conversation with a policeman who’s picked up Max for the latest in a string of minor offenses that are starting to add up to a major bad reputation. Flummoxed, and always looking for an easy solution to complicated problems, Flora thinks she’s found a fix when she plucks a battered guitar from the trash, has it repaired, and gives it to Max as a day-late birthday present. Max has no interest, but Flora does, and begins taking online guitar lessons with Jeff (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), a California musician whose easygoing manner doesn’t quite mask his artistic frustrations. Their sessions quickly transform into an ongoing flirtation / two-person support group (though Flora does pick up some skills in the process).

Though amiable and tune-filled — Carney co-wrote the film’s original songs with Gary Clark —  Flora and Son never decides on what sort of story it wants to tell. By turns, it focuses on Flora’s journey of musical discovery; Flora and Jeff’s budding romance; Max’s own musical ambitions as a rapper and beatmaker; Flora and Max’s troubled relationship; and the unreliable presence of Max’s father and Flora’s ex Ian (Jack Raynor), who’s never gotten over the time his own band played on the same bill as Snow Patrol before stalling out. Consequently, all of the story elements remain undernourished and even the cast’s soulful performances can’t help the ending feel like anything but a shrug. It’s the movie equivalent of an album with a couple of catchy tunes up front and nothing to sustain it on Side B. —Keith Phipps

Flora and Son opens in select theaters this weekend and debuts on Apple TV+ on Sept. 29.

It Lives Inside
Dir. Bishal Dutta
99 min.

From our first glimpses at Samidha (Megan Suri), who would rather you call her “Sam,” the horror film It Lives Inside establishes in shorthand the tensions that will carry it the rest of the way. In the bathroom doing her morning routine, Sam, a teenager of Indian heritage, shaves the hair off her forearms and clicks a quick selfie in the mirror, expertly flicking the screen to the most flattering filter. As her mother Poorna (Neeru Bajwa) whips together a traditional vegetarian dish (and homemade naan!) for lunch, Sam rolls her eyes at her mom’s request that she get back from school in time to make prasada for a ceremonial get-together later that night. Sam “forgets” her lunch on the way out the door. 

In blunt terms, writer-director Bishal Dutta sets up the sort of conflict that’s baked into so many stories about American children of immigrant parents: Sam wants to be a regular teenager, and Poorna doesn’t want her to abandon the traditions and values they brought with them to the country. It’s a promising idea to make assimilation the central theme of a horror film, tied to a supernatural creaturerooted in Indian mythology that cannot be dispelled through American means. (Whatever those might be, now that Zelda Rubinstein is no longer with us.) Yet Dutta doesn’t bring the garam masala where it matters, relying so heavily on warmed-over tropes and visual ideas from Hollywood films that It Lives Inside has the compromised flavor of a mall food court. 

Dutta depicts Sam as a teenager still tiptoeing into conformity, masking certain uncool traits like a lingering studiousness and a social anxiety, particularly when it comes to Russ (Gage Marsh), the handsome doofus who’s been flirting with her. One aspect of her childhood she’s rejected completely, however, is her friendship with Tamira (Mohana Krishnan), another girl of Indian origin who has lately become a weird pariah. When Sam finally confronts Tamira and asks about the blackened mason jar she’s been hauling around, a frightened, sleepless Tamira speaks of an evil spirit within the jar that needs constant feeding of raw meat, lest it escape and do unspeakable real-world harm. 

Needless to say, this malevolent genie is eventually released from the bottle and it’s up to Sam to figure out how to contain it again. The spirit is called a Pishach, a Hindu manifestation of evil, but Dutta leans conspicuously on horror blockbusters of more familiar vintage: the haunted dreamscapes of A Nightmare On Elm Street, the religious ritual and bodily contortions of The Exorcist, the specific timeline of The Ring, where a marked victim has seven days before death comes for them. The cherry-picking of influences wouldn’t be as much of a problem if Dutta had the chops to pull it off, but It Lives Inside is PG-13 hackwork, a jumble of cheap effects,bad lighting and prodding stingers on the soundtrack. It’s melting pot cinema. — Scott Tobias

It Lives Inside opens tomorrow in theaters everywhere.