![]() Nobody in charge of anything here is to be trusted. ![]() Never Rarely Sometimes Always star Sidney Flanigan is once again a standout in Only the Good Survive. Making the leap that Wright counts among his influences seems fair, but there’s a bit of Aaron and Adam Nee’s 2014 Tom Sawyer riff Band of Robbers in his work, too, plus a dose of Joseph Kahn and Adi Shankar Southern co-wrote a “gritty reimagining” Power Rangers short back in 2015, along with Kahn and James Van Der Beek, and that project’s roguish energy finds its way into Only the Good Survive’s framework. the World with films like The Long Night, Satan’s Slave, and Satanic Panic. He playfully teases out Only the Good Survive’s reveals with the kind of kinetic snap-bang editing and camera movements typically associated with Edgar Wright movies, a fusion of Hot Fuzz and Scott Pilgrim vs. (The “cult” note isn’t exactly spoilery, it’s mentioned in the synopsis.) Everything about the cult, particularly the question of whether the cult even exists, is best discovered by the viewer. Scenes cut between Mack interviewing Brea, and the events he’s interviewing her about: how she met Ry, how Ry met Erve, how Ry found the Hendersons’ coins in the first place, how Erve came up with the heist and roped in Dev as their muscle, and how all their designs brought them into conflict with a dangerous cult. He’s the film’s audience identification character, an unctuous, condescending lawman whose intentions seem good and true he wants to know what happened to Brea, Ry, Erve, and Dev, and he thinks Brea isn’t telling him everything that went down at the Hendersons’.īut Southern embeds Only the Good Survive squarely in Brea’s point of view, the source of the movie’s animated elements. We don’t know much else, and neither does Cole. We know they found something else, we know they ran like hell with the “something else,” and we know that the boys didn’t make it. ![]() Henderson (Pat Turner and Carol Hickey) looking for rare, valuable coins. The facts are straightforward: We know Brea, her boyfriend Ry (D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai), Ry’s buddy Erve (Will Ropp), and Erve’s acquaintance Dev (Darious Fraser) broke into the home of Mr. Only the Good Survive, like several other terrific movies similarly doomed to neglect in SXSW’s film programming, is best watched cold, with the barest sense of what it is based on a trim logline. More than once, Mack reminds Brea that she isn’t under arrest, and that she doesn’t have a file he just wants to understand what happened at the remote farmhouse she and her friends tried to rob, and what happened after they fled the place. It’s wise to keep perspective - perspective, after all, is central to Only the Good Survive, which opens on an animated sequence where images bleed into each other and understanding of a kind is provided in voiceover by Brea (Sidney Flanigan), who we meet sitting on the wrong side of the table in an interrogation room once her candy-coated reverie is interrupted by Sheriff Cole Mack (Frederick Weller). This is a crime.īut not as much of a crime as the one Southern unspools from the movie’s first frames to its last. Only the Good Survive, Dutch Southern’s debut feature, is one of those movies, contained by a smaller scale but no less remarkable than the big-ticket hype beasts over-pampered by the spotlight. ![]() Film festivals are so often about buzzed-up titles, either the ones discovered during or scooped up by buyers before the festivals’ run dates, that humbler titles wanting for the same advantages are drowned out in the PR rumpus. ![]()
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