SHADOWS AND FOG

LOOK, I’M WOODY. HOWDY, HOWDY, HOWDY.

Starring Woody Allen

Trailer

Y

A strange deviation and all the better for it, best watched drunk or half asleep. Seeing too many of Allen’s films together can start to feel like you’re trapped in a charity shop that only sells boxes of lame comedy and middle class nitpicking, so it’s a pleasure to see that he can succeed when trying something completely different. Drawing on classic horror, Kafka, expressionism and John Malkovich’s malleable face, Shadows and Fog creates a genuinely heavy atmosphere of dread and fear. It wraps a simple story of two people walking through an unnamed town at night avoiding a man who enjoys putting pressure on necks in a dreamlike quality that’s hard to dig out of your head. Donald Pleasence shows up to give the whole thing a campy Hammer feeling, whilst the amazing thing is how it manages to include many of Allen’s usual themes in a completely different setting: there’s debates on money and art and women, but they’re dressed up in the form of a parable, with rambling diatribes mouthed by John Cusack or Madonna accompanied by some of the finest cinematography of his career so far. It’s conclusions of illusion and fabrication tally with his usual themes of fakery and artifice in the lives of intellectuals and artists, but again, everything is simplified, less reliant on dialogue and the confines of his own surroundings than other similar pieces. It may not be a comprehensive stroll through the director’s own head, but it serves as a dutiful homage to his pet favourites and an interesting deviation in a career that frequently plays it repetitive. At this point it seems like Allen is one of the most consistent of the post-everything filmmakers; he takes and takes, his personality formed by the films of his childhood and the shots of his heroes. It’s also full of shadows and fog, so no one’s going to feel short-changed.