Film reviews: Eleanor the Great | Silent Night, Deadly Night | Lurker | Preparation for the Next Life

Eleanor the Great (12A) ★★★

Silent Night, Deadly Night (18) ★★★

Lurker (15) ★★★★

Preparation for the Next Life (15) ★★★

Scarlett Johansson makes a confident directorial debut with Eleanor the Great, a gently subversive comedy about an elderly woman who pretends to be a Holocaust survivor. If that sounds like a fairly risqué premise at a time when pop culture commentary thrives on pearl-clutching outrage, Johansson is admirably unfazed by the material, treating it as an intriguing entry point for a film exploring survivor’s guilt and loneliness, albeit with with humour and heart.

She’s helped immeasurably by June Squibb as the titular Eleanor, a curmudgeonly nonagenarian (Squibb was 94 during filming) who comes to live with her daughter in New York following the death of her lifelong best friend and housemate Bessie (Rita Zohar). It’s Bessie’s harrowing story of survival that Eleanor can’t stop herself from telling when she’s mistakenly invited to join a Holocaust support group at the local Jewish Community Centre (she was Bessie’s only confidant). And it’s this impromptu lie that soon starts spiralling out of control when a young journalism student called Nina (Erin Kellyman) befriends Eleanor and convinces her to let her use what she thinks is her story for a class project.

Though there’s fun to be had here watching the twenty-something Nina – who’s suffering from a bereavement of her own – gadding around New York with the irascible Eleanor like a platonic Harold and Maude, the film lurches towards a more conventionally sentimental, not entirely plausible ending involving Nina’s TV news anchor father (Chiwetel Ejiofor) that feels bolted on for the sake of some easy closure.

And yet Johansson is actually scratching at something more interesting in the way Eleanor’s deception keeps her friend’s story alive. Despite the script’s own clunky insistence that it’s about grief, it’s really about celebrating the importance of all lives, even when those lives are modest and uneventful.

Drawing more on her indie background than her mainstream one, Johansson also shoots with a pleasingly cinematic eye for detail, turning New York into a place that’s simultaneously aspirational and rooted in the realities of the current moment.

READ MORE: Film reviews: It Was Just An Accident | Cover-Up | Jay Kelly | Eternity

Silent Night, Deadly Night re-imagines the murderous Santa from the controversial 1984 slasher movie of the same name as a more creatively rendered psycho for this loose remake. Though the backstory is similar – a kid called Billy witnesses his parents being murdered by Santa and grows up to become a seasonal serial killer – now Santa/Billy (played by Rohan Campbell) has a supernatural dimension: on every day of advent he must execute someone on his naughty list or risk an innocent person dying instead. This gives the film a tongue-in-cheek edge that makes it more fun to watch than the sleazy original and, while still an acquired taste, Billy’s arrival in a small town full of locals with unusually dark secrets provides some appropriately bloody Yuletide pickings for gore-hounds.

READ MORE: Film reviews: Wake Up Dead Man | Christy | Blue Moon | Pillion

The pathology of influencer culture is explored in Lurker, a queasy portrait of the parasitic relationship between an up-and-coming pop star (Archie Madekwe) and a quiet, off-kilter wannabe (Théodore Pellerin) who insinuates himself into his entourage. Though really another riff on Scorsese’s ahead-of-its-time The King of Comedy, this time shot through with the beats of a 1990s-style psycho-thriller, debut writer/director Alex Russell is so attuned to the world he’s exploring that what transpires feels sickeningly real and relatable. Pellerin, meanwhile, gives a performance of such skin-crawling subtlety it’s often hard to watch – in a good way.

Minding the Gap director Bing Liu makes a dreamy fiction debut with Preparation for the Next Life. Charting a burgeoning, almost-romance between an undocumented Uyghur immigrant (Sebiye Behtiyar) and a PTSD-afflicted military veteran (Fred Hechinger) amid the back alleys of New York’s vast immigrant subculture, it’s a delicate depiction of the incremental opportunities available to those perpetually trapped on the margins. Though stretched-thin in places, Behtiyar and Hechinger have plausible chemistry – and Liu’s gorgeous visuals capture the paradoxical allure of a city defined by struggle.

​All films in cinemas from 12 December

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