cradle to the grave robbers

[Note: I wrote this almost half a year ago. I left it alone because I wanted it to be better. Looking back now, I don't know what I found wrong with it in the first place. Please enjoy the time travel to January 3 2026. Also, this discusses any and all plot details for the three movies in the subtitle.]

My spouse left me for a few days to visit family the week after Christmas, so what was I to do but watch movies? On Thursday, a second viewing of O Agente Secreto (Mendonça, 2025) with a friend. On Friday, a solo viewing of 어쩔수가없다 (No Other Choice, Chan-wook, 2025). However, I'm not here to discuss my theater viewings, but rather the three movies I watched over the three preceding days: the empty space of December 30, New Year's Eve, and the first day of 2026.

La chimera

I watched La chimera (Rohrwacher, 2023) on an appropriate day for a movie about a grave-robber stumbling between life and death: in the floating nothingness between Christmas Day and New Year's Eve. Like many, I've become a fan of Josh O'Connor this year, and you can't say "Josh O'Connor" without someone recommending La chimera. Finally, after six months of "La chimera, la chimera, la chimera," I watched it. I knew almost nothing about it except that Josh O'Connor plays a dirtied scruffy guy in a white suit. If you are unacquainted with this film, La chimera is set in 1980s Italy, and Josh O'Connor plays British grave-robber Arthur (or Arturo, to his local band of merry grave-robbers). I was amused at how similar La chimera felt in tone and style to another 1980s Italy film by an O'Connor collaborator: Call My By Your Name (Guadagnino, 2017). Both are excellent at evoking a particular place in a particular time with a particular feeling; I wish I could attend an outdoor dance party by the sea and make my lover jealous.

O'Connor's dirtied looks I noted before knowing anything about the movie turned out to be relevant to the story itself. Arthur inhabits a space between life and death the entire movie; his white suit is more like a grave shroud than clothes in need of laundering. He haunts the living, like Flora (Isabella Rossellini), and he's haunted by the dead. Arthur reminds Flora of her absent daughter Beniamina; Flora is unaware Beniamina is dead. Rohrwacher uses our expectations of '80s makeup to bamboozle us by turning a tertiary character from the beginning of the film into a long-dead Etruscan at the film's climax. The crux of La chimera is that Josh O'Connor is moved to dispense with his grave-robbing ways and the promise of a new future, but he's haunted by the loss of Beniamina and is unable to resist going back to his old ways, which ultimately leads to his death, where you can't help but feel he was headed for the entire time.

La bête

If you start La bête around 8:45pm on New Year’s Eve and then you take a long break halfway through because you're tired and you're not liking it and then you come back to it because you have nothing better to do while your spouse is out of town, the fireworks will start popping off as Lea Seydoux is screaming in despair at the very end. La bête is not explicitly about grave-robbing, but it is certainly about the past. In that vein of film tropes beloved by the weirdos, Lea Seydoux and George MacKay play a pair who meet again and again in different lives, destined to love and destined to die. However, La bête has a small twist here, because their past lives are shown to them by a future-AI (the skynet kind, not the LLM kind) who has prevented climate change but also enslaved most of humanity. For a person to become a happy worker, they are encouraged to go through a process of expunging their emotions so only happiness is left; the way to do this is to remember their past lives. This, too, is grave-robbing.

During my break in the middle of the movie, I read a few Letterboxd reviews to decide if I should keep watching (I know, I know). The reviews mentioned how Lynchian the movie was, which confused me because nothing up to the halfway point seemed very Lynch-like at all. Then, I finished the movie, and I understood. The latter half is far more Lynchian than the first. La bête uses birds as a symbol much like Lynch does in Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks. Specifically, La bête uses pigeons found indoors as an omen of death. I posted a screenshot of Gabrielle screaming at the end of La bête and made a New Year’s joke about it on Bluesky. Immediately afterwards, I got an unrelated post on my For You feed of two pigeons, kissing. I'm still working out what symbolism the universe was feeding me there.

The Last Winter

I have an itch that needs scratching every now and then. The itch is called "A Mystery And/Or Horror Story In An Isolated Very Cold Setting" as seen in The Thing (Carpenter, 1982) or Fortitude (2015-2018) or A Murder at the End of the World (2023). I'm not sure why two-thirds of the examples that come to mind so quickly are television shows; perhaps the mystery format is just mostly used in television and not in movies as often, or I need to search out more movies in this tradition. Anyways, the itch returned a few weeks ago and hadn't been scratched. As I lounged around on the couch on the very first Thursday of 2026, I stumbled on The Last Winter (2006), a horror-mystery set at an isolated Alaskan station starring Ron Perlman. A satisfying scratch.

Mid-aught American anxieties about global warming make The Last Winter a quaint time capsule and a harbinger of worse things to come. You've got your company man determined to bring in the oil rigs (Ron Perlman), your environmentalist hired to do the impact statement who thinks all that oil should be left in the dirt (James LeGros), and Zach Gilford's bare ass. The first 20 minutes are confusing as you spend most of them trying to differentiate between four similar-looking white guys with brown hair. Aughts movies are lousy with this problem; I had the same confusion watching Resident Evil (Anderson, 2002). Only Chris Evans survived that era, plus Sam Worthington if you count being big and blue. This is why all actors should be as striking to look at as Ron Perlman; you're never confusing that man with another human. Connie Britton is here as the aughts woman character who is “a lot to handle” and the men fight over her affection despite her personality having all the zing of a butter knife. That said, there’s still a lot to recommend The Last Winter. Surprisingly gruesome, pretty cool camera movements, and even an unexpected needle drop. The inclusion of home video cameras, television reports, and “man goes crazy in a journal” shots also make this movie punch above its weight. The almost-charming 2006 CGI will be blown out of the water by Avatar in three short years. However, I found myself wishing for more practical effects with that wendigo-megafauna.

Now, why am I talking about this in conjunction with La chimera and La bête? Wouldn't you know it, but The Last Winter is also about grave-robbing! No shit, the environmentalist hippie accuses the oil company man of grave-robbing. A central conceit of The Last Winter is pointing out that oil is actually the dead, decayed organic matter of extinct animals, and those megafauna are thundering mad about it. I saw some reviews referring to the ghostly spirit as a wendigo, but it's clearly meant to be the giant moose, an extinct megafauna species. Now, if you'll allow me to digress for a moment and put on my ecologist thinking cap, I want to point out that it is impossible for oil deposits to have been created through the remains of extinct megafauna species. Oil deposits are largely created from the remains of marine plankton. This oil would have been formed at least 66 million years ago; the giant moose existed no more than 2 million years ago.

Please don't take this to mean The Last Winter is bad because big moose atoms aren't in Alaskan oil. It's just funny to imagine Ron Perlman ripped to shreds by plankton ghosts.